Riaz Lalani on Gambit's fantasy sports play-to-own platform

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have riaz lalonie founder of gamut riaz welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time thanks for having me ashton very welcome let's dive into fantasy sports gaming and incorporating nfts and blockchain to really bring ownership and more exciting aspects to gaming which

0:24i feel like is just gonna be the norm moving forward let's start our conversation off by just hearing a little bit about what you and your team have have developed at gambit and then we'll dive into all things esports and fantasy gaming yeah i know that's that's great so gambit is a play to earn fantasy sports game that we developed over the past

0:46seven or eight months we just launched an alpha in april with the nba playoffs and you know when you know my background is in gaming i worked at xango for a bit as well as a sports media company called the score and you know in those experiences i built a fantasy sports game in a free-to-play world and there's some amazing elements of crypto and web 3

1:10that we thought would be tremendously valuable to the user experience if we sort of created a fantasy sports game with those crypto primitives and so that's kind of you know what kind of solidified the excuse me sorry my throat that's what solidified the core concept of gambit where you know we're applying the ideas of accessibility and ownership and so when

1:38you play gambit you're buying you know athlete tokens right so instead of you know playing a lineup where you just select a set of athletes and you have those athletes from one night you're purchasing these athlete tokens and we have this athlete marketplace that allows you to facilitate buying and selling of these athlete tokens so you can you know as a casual player you can

1:58buy an athlete let's say a rookie that you think is going to be really valuable in the future and hold that hold that athlete until at some point the future you want to sell them but really there's another way to play which is our daily contest and you know with our daily contest you're essentially you know using the athlete marketplace to

2:14buy a team and when you use those athlete tokens in these contests you're competing with other folks in a real live contest that uses the real life performance of all these athletes in their in their in their actual matches and so by by combining kind of this ownership model with this game model you know the participants in the game earn gambit if they win and so this

2:39creates an amazing you know flywheel that doesn't really exist in web 2 fantasy games you know we call it build player and so the idea is you know you're building a team you're playing and you're earning and then you're incentivized to continue to play more games and earn more it's just keeping you know our gambit our token in the ecosystem

3:03there are other games in web 3 that are using you know fantasy you know so rare is a very common you know example of you know success in the web 3 fantasy space and you know we're doing something a little bit different than sorry one of the challenges with web3 fantasy games is that they use nfts and you know we chose very purposefully not to use nfts

3:23or using fungible tokens to drive our marketplace and the reason for that is when you're when you have an nft it's it's it's scarce and so you know for an average casual sports fan to play so rare they are you know spending a lot of money to buy that rare messy card it's thousands and thousands of dollars and so it kind of really you know makes

3:46it inaccessible for a large audience and so by using fungible tokens you can buy fractions of your favorite athlete and so you know if i wanted to buy messi because he's my favorite you know soccer football star i can buy messi i can buy you know half a token of an sc or i can buy 10 tokens of messi and i have the ability to do that another interesting thing about you know

4:09kind of the web3 mechanics with nfgs is that they use you know a card opening mechanic i open up a pack of cards and i randomly get three or four or five you know athletes some of them i may not even be familiar with and you know you know it's our perspective that fantasy sports is a way to bring sports fans closer to their favorite athletes and teams and so you know

4:32when i want to participate in these games it's a game of skill and i want to be able to purchase the athletes that i want to purchase and so you know that's how we sort of differentiated ourselves from you know your your traditional web 3 as our web 2 fantasy sports games as well as you know web 3 as well very cool riaz thanks for that intro and i really do like that sort of play to

4:54own i haven't seen that in fantasy sports where there's almost like there's a game but then there's like the long-term game on top of that as well yeah you know people that want to root for the underdog can and can like hold on to those tokens and now it can get a little confusing talking about tokens and then the gambit token are the player tokens that are within

5:18gambit are those sort of like in-game tokens or are those actual cryptocurrencies or the only cryptocurrency is actually the gambit currency itself i mean right now the in-game tokens are an in-game construct and the future is that you know we'll want to go in and put those athlete tokens on the blockchain as well right so there's there's a path to progressively

5:43decentralize a large part of the game but you know at least in our initial kind of implementation in our alpha and our beta where we're learning to about kind of the game mechanics the economic you know factors that come into play and making sure that we have product market fit we're largely focused on you know having gambit as our you

6:05know cryptocurrency and then eventually over time the athlete tokens you know will be on chain and then beyond that you know all of our gaming logic our contest entry our settlement all that would be moving to smart contracts very cool thanks for that and you mentioned at the beginning working with zynga on the game side and the score i'm familiar with both you

6:29know in sports and gaming great companies you know what kind of knowledge and expertise did you take away from that to ensure that you know gambit will be successful at penetrating into the market yeah i mean there's there's a bunch of things there at least from you know my zynga experience i worked on games with millions and millions of daily

6:51active users and a big part of you know building and operating games of that scale is making sure that we have a great ux and so you know i see this as one of the challenges when i started exploring web 3 was that the ux wasn't necessarily up to a level that consumers come to expect and so that's one of the things that we've sort of taken on you know as as as a big part of our

7:14goal is to make sure that you know when we deliver experiences for you know whether it's a crypto native or a newbie that we're delivering a consumer experience that is easy to understand right a big part of what we're doing with gambin in particular is we're adding a free-to-play tier and so we want people to learn about one fantasy sports at their own pace and two learn

7:38about crypto at that pace as well and so by allowing folks to come in and play our game and then upsell the value of token ownership you know we create an experience that allows folks to participate at higher levels of game of the game at their pace you know a lot of the early web 3 games you know ask the user to purchase some crypto on day one learn a game on day

8:04one and you know they don't really know what they're getting themselves into object cases and that's you know when you lead to a lot of speculation and things like that from my experience you know at the score i built a fantasy sports game there and it was it was a free-to-play game i took a lot of you know what i learned at zynga and applied it to

8:24to you know the daily fantasy sports space right so you know having a virtual currency you know and things like that using an ad based model and what i learned from from building that experience is that you know retention beyond kind of the season the sports season right so if i'm if i'm a fan of the nba and i'm religiously playing you know a

8:47fantasy sports experience and when the nba season ends i kind of i'm kind of done right you found it very hard to convert that nba fan into like a major league baseball fan right and so what happens is when the new mba season starts we are you know attempting to reacquire an existing customer and sometimes it's as easy as sending a push notification or an email

9:08but oftentimes we're actually spending money you know reacquiring the users that we already have because it's a very competitive market and so what web 3 and blockchain gives us with these you know athlete tokens is that we now have you know something that a player can own beyond the season and one of our goals at least from a gamut's perspective is we want to build games

9:30and experiences for the off season right we see these athlete tokens as kind of the central piece to almost a fantasy playground right so if i own a specific athlete well i can play a salary cap game i can play a very easy tier based groups game in the off season i can play a game that uses historical stats there's a whole bunch of different games that we

9:53plan to build around this the central idea that we've got you know participants in our game who own these athlete tokens and will continue to drive more utility for each of those participants and those athlete tokens very cool great to hear about that experience and you know i want to go back to the point about having sort of an ownership in the athletes in the

10:16platform and having financial incentives from that have you seen in the market that these players that are that are playing fantasy sports they really want to have that financial incentive where they're coming away you know they're actually betting their own money and earning money and is that kind of industry continuing to grow in what you're

10:40building i mean if you look at fantasy sports in general there's there's kind of two flavors to it there's a season long flavor which you know it's me and a couple of friends you know start a fantastic league at the start of the season we trapped it's a very social experience generally speaking there's money on the line right people are putting some money on the line and

11:00there's a big prize pool with a whole bunch of winners at the end and bailey becomes a little less social and more transactional where the outcome again is the financial incentives certainly you know the existing you know model for fantasy sports supports you know the idea that i am going to participate in some sort of game and there is some financial reward and i

11:22don't think that changes for us as well i just think that it gives us a lot more creativity on how we deliver a lot of these experiences it also allows us to think about you know new users in emerging markets so we're focused a lot of our alpha was built on an audience in emerging markets indonesia vietnam philippines india and we saw a lot of engagement from

11:49from these players who again as i mentioned were you know not necessarily mba fans but started to learn about the mba and participate maybe their initial intention was the financial incentive but they came to learn the game and became active discord members talking about the game which was kind of an amazing thing to see there was even one one one of one of our discord members

12:10you know got a streaming package so they can watch the nba games in india and follow along while they're playing the game and so you know we see this we see this opportunity to bring fantasy sports and that connection between you know fans and athletes and teams to a part of the world that hasn't necessarily seen it fantasy sports has generally been you know a north

12:32american phenomenon definitely yeah and i'm curious about that because having you know a huge up and coming growth in these emerging markets in sort of the asian market where do you focus your time on the sports that you add in you know what's the priority for gambit you mentioned nba at the beginning you know are you focusing on sort of the big four

12:55american sports you know in asia there's other types of sports that are that are more popular as well so what's the priority for gambit in adding other sports into the fantasy league yeah well right now we're focused on large you know international sports sports that have you know penetration kind of globally so the mba makes a lot of sense you know when we looked at the

13:17nba initially you know i don't know a lot of a lot of people know this but outside of the us the philippines is the second largest market for the nba and so you know if you take the fact the fact that you know the philippines is also a large you know portion of the users who are playing axe infinity it almost creates this perfect mix for us to go

13:35and you know take a lot of these attributes of plato earn and play to own and bring them to a market where there's already you know a high level of interest in that sport beyond the mba we're looking at soccer so in august we're launching our beta with you know five-year-old soccer leagues against soccer is or football i should say you know being in canada we say soccer

13:56football is very very huge internationally right it's a global sport they've got you know fans you know all around the world you know southeast asia europe africa parts where you know again there's not a lot of fantasy sports and a lot of fantasy sports offerings and so you know looking at that is an important part of it beyond that there's something that's

14:18happening in november which is the world cup and you know we see this as a very opportunistic you know point in time where we can again you know you know have the opportunity to deliver an experience to folks globally there's a high level of interest around that time you know when i when i when i worked at the score we built a bot on

14:41on messenger and you know our highest peak you know in terms of usage was around the world cup and so we really see that as a as a great opportunity for us to you know drive new users to the platform and engage with the fun games that we're building beyond that we're looking at qriket india is a gigantic market yeah yeah it's a it's a gigantic market for

15:05fantasy sports i believe there's 100 million fantasy qriket players in india already you know there's companies like dream 11 have done a tremendous job taking that traditional web 2 model and applying it to india and so you know we feel you know that is you know a huge opportunity for us as well so you know tend to focus on those large international sports you

15:26know after we get past those there's obviously those north american sports that are huge you know american football would be on that list you know and you know it doesn't necessarily mean that we have to stay in kind of your traditional sports realm you know we can get into esports and in other categories as well where there's there's team-based

15:45play very cool riaz looking forward to that and you mentioned about the world cup i think that's going to be huge a great opportunity to build up to them and i saw in the recent news that to help with that and just the growth of the platform your team recently closed a seed round so congratulations on that maybe you can talk a little bit about

16:05that your partners and how that helps moving forward yeah that was a pre-seed round you know we are funded by a venture studio called super layer so super layer is a is a venture studio that incubates a various set of consumer tokenized applications and so you know i joined you know them to help incubate and build gambit you know it's run by kevin chu

16:31who you know previously you know built kabam which is a massive gaming platform and sold it for i think approximately a billion dollars and then and then built you know rally you know the innovators and social tokens and forte which is a blockchain middleware company and so they kevin along with mahesh's partner decided to build super layer to you

16:56know fund and grow you know a bunch of amazing you know consumer-focused tokenized applications wow incredible great to have those partners and you mentioned you know there's a lot of different sports and growth in the works but right now there's the alpha and nba what's the best way for people to get started with that or just to learn more

17:21about the platform and talk to others in the community yeah i mean the easiest way is to one sign up for our beta which is coming in early august with eurofootball you know you can do that at gabbitgames.com and you know from there's our socials so we've got a very active discord with you know about 20 000 folks in it right now and as well as twitter where we use you

17:45know we'll be updating you know our community on what's happening great realize i'll leave those links in the description box below for the viewers to make it easy as well thank you so much for the insights on fantasy sports blockchain play to own which i think is very exciting all the best with all of the growth moving forward with gambit and let's

18:06follow up in the near future okay awesome great great to chat ashton appreciate it you