Santiago Portela on FITCHIN's blockchain esports platform and play to earn games

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have santiago portella ceo of fichen santiago welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time hi aston thank you for having me here you're very welcome i appreciate you coming on in the middle of the nyc nft nyc conference i know it's crazy times in the market and

0:24surprisingly that doesn't stop anybody from continuing building all of these amazing companies with blockchain technology that are just innovating the world and it looks like the conference is doing amazing and so how is it there and how is everything going if you're here you wouldn't know how the market is it's it's packed it's

0:46full of people and full of people building new stuff and fantastic things and so it's a you see the energy and that's that's something has that has changed in the market it's it's not so much of how prices are right now but all the people building and the things are that are coming through right amazing and you know a big part of nfts is not just

1:11with digital art it's moving into all industries but one of them is obviously gaming and gaming is just since the last couple years and you know people being in their houses more gaming has just exploded to all ages and casual and intense gaming and esports and the best part is that nfts are coming into gaming and blockchain allowing people to get more

1:36Value from the games that they actually play and take something away and not just play games and not really get anything out of it and i know your team is working hard in the gaming space trying to bring more community in there i'd love to just kick off our conversation about fiction with an overview from you on what are the solutions that your team is driving into

1:55the industry and then we'll dive into all things gaming sure the let's let's start by by giving an idea of what esports is or the size of it right we are talking about a big part of the gaming community it's the amount of people watching games play online it's almost a billion people people following esports is roughly 500 million people

2:25and hardcore fans or enthusiasts of esports are 250 million people so we're talking about a pretty big community and one of the problems it has is the teams are quite weak not weak on they have they're doing amazing but they are weak in the sense that all their revenues depends on advertising and

2:52there's because of being digital teams and digital communities it's they're having problems on board in that community or getting closer to that community and blockchain and web3 is just perfect for that and that's that's our goal is how we can bring together these teams and change the way how they address their communities or work with their

3:17communities and profit from their communities how they generate revenue by also bringing together the user base that or the fans that they want to get closer to them they want to have different experiences more experiences they want to play they want to interact and well how you do that and that's that's where we're playing around with the in our platform in

3:42our playground it's it's that it's bringing those together and playing around and getting them more experiences great to hear and those numbers you mentioned at the beginning are pretty incredible to see how quickly esports is growing and to think you know half a dozen years ago that you mentioned these numbers and people are just they can't even believe it that

4:04many people would be interested in gaming and one thing about gaming is it can be very social but can also be very anti-social and i feel like having community platforms like this is a great way for those anti-social groups to find their communities and you know connect with other people through gaming as well and i'd love to hear a little

4:28bit more about how exactly you're able to help those groups of people you know get into their communities no and you're right it's being together in community is a big part of this and you see it on the last two years because of it and everything in the pandemic there were a lot of events that were cancelled and were not irl events and now you see them coming

4:56back and the stadiums are packed and so we're talking about a digital community but whenever they have the chance to get together and being social they pray for that and they look for that because we think of gaming as an independent game or independent thing you do but it became very social it became playing with friends and they might

5:22be in different places but we're all together we chat we have discussions there we even go into games not to play the game just to meet our friends and so it's it's it's gaming it's now it's all about community the question is how you bring these communities together or around what these communities build and we think that esports teams are a big

5:48driver of these they are the ones that can encompass a big amount of people around them and can drive that communities one way or the other so they are the perfect vehicle to onboard those communities and give them a place to be that's great to hear and i know exactly what you mean about getting together in person and having those online communities you

6:16know being a gamer growing up most of my friends were actually built out of the gaming communities and those kind of kids that grow up playing games they really they almost like their online friends and connect with them more than people in real life because they have that common interest yeah yeah but then it's they want at some point in time to know

6:40them to meet them so and that's why what we are doing how to onboard these communities is and what we are providing teams is a platform where you can become a member of the team so it's a an nft as a membership or a membership in the form of an nst plus a tournament platform so you can play around with that community and maybe you're not a pro but you want

7:07to play with them but what does the membership encompass and that's the discussion with the teams and definitely needs to be in real life events and that kind of experiences but also we are exploring and working on digital this is the experiences such as i met hours the team's housed in the metaphors and how you

7:34give them a digital experience where it doesn't matter where you are or maybe you don't like the in real life experience and you want something that is more digital because of who you are how you are and that needs to be addressed for this whole community definitely and you know when i first started hearing about esports when it was getting

8:01popular in into like mainstream culture i would hear of you know fortnite and league of legends and they're starting to televise it but from what i understand any kind of community games that have a competitive nature and community nature can become a part of the esports you know wing how far does fitchin's communities encompass in terms of different kinds of games

8:27and genres of games right now we are targeting more the league of legends valorant and those type of sports or games because those are the communities that the teams the esports teams right now have now that's that's only the beginning we are seeing communities go around p2e games and those will be definitely

8:58something that will continue on growing and you will see communities around that and we want them as well it's it's very much related to what people are playing and not so much what we want to push because we don't push what people want to do we just give them a place to be and an experience and that it's all about right it's a

9:25playground for the gamer to come in and have fun and we have to understand their needs and not what we want to what we want to build it's it's what we can build for them obviously there's there are things that they haven't experienced yet met hours for instance and there's a lot of that can be repair for them and handle to them but

9:49it will be in conjunction with the teams who are at the end of the day who have their communities and who will bring those communities here and who will be the ones really pushing the adoption and pushing the this new market or this new experience yeah well said santiago good approach you know there's already such large communities in those games that i

10:16feel like that's a great place to start and you know you talked a few times we're being aggressive i'm talking about millions of people on boarding for sure and you know a metaverse approach is it's not some it's not a small feat you know metaverses can be small but they can also be infinitely large as well how how much of the focus is going to be

10:42on that and how big is that as a part of fiction we are not going to build our own metaverse we are meta agnostic it's we believe that each metaverse will have or has its own personality or different things that you look in one another and we want to give the users the experience they are looking for so i don't know we think of

11:09going to a place like the sandbox and having our neighborhood there which with each team however having their own house and exploring games there or having that as a place where then you go to the to the next layer to a game or that kind of experience if you go to the central and it will be more of a hanging out and getting together through

11:33community then you have places like insomnia where it's more a vr experience we don't want to give the experience of the or put a box into what the user can experience but make it more of a broader open experience where depending what you're looking for you can go one way or the other and you have the whole website

12:00experience taking your your persona to the different places and at the end of the day having fun and that's what a gamer is looking for having fun spending a good time that's when we think of gamers and crypto they're not coming to invest they're not coming to make money they're coming to have a good time a nice experience and we have to be very certain that we

12:26provide that experience definitely i like that approach as well because i feel like anything that boxes in you know a metaverse is probably not the way to approach it because a metaverse should be you know endless possibilities you know there can be metaverses that are underwater anti-gravity or just social and build your own so i know and

12:51and exactly and it's what is the criticism that we always do to the old web 2 word is that your things are stuck there so if i build all the experience in one place you're stuck in that place i don't want you to get stuck i want you to be able to move around to have fun to own your stuff and look for the best experiences and my job as a as a company is to help

13:20teams get the their followers following base the experiences that they need and experiences they are looking for great and santiago where exactly are you at in growing the platform and you know with these games that you mentioned already are there already people joining in are people able to join into the membership right now not right now we are we should have

13:47the tournament platform ready mid next year that makes next year meet next month in mid-july and the memberships should be around a month or month and a half later so we are building that as you know time it's it's it's it's hard to predict sometimes with

14:14technology but we are working hard together at the same time having said that we have already organized a tournament with a latam team the biggest latam spanish-speaking team in valorant we are organizing end of the month another tournament with another team in latin america so we are already building these experiences for their

14:43users and then it's a company and then the building the tools to keep on growing that community and keep on board in that community okay that's great to know about the timing and speaking of spanish i did see on your team's twitter you know a lot of the posts are in english and in spanish and i'm curious on your insights into esports

15:09communities and blockchain gaming growing in both the spanish language and where you're targeting in english as well well it's it's hard to know right now it's they're growing a lot or they have been growing a lot x infinity was a big push mostly targeted to play to earn or the concept of earning the

15:38there's a lot of new games coming in the scene and we are gonna see a development of this in the next couple of years we'll see where that takes where where all this market goes so i'm really optimistic of the possibilities there i don't think we have already seen the full capacity of these games so it's it's more in a way wait and see but

16:08with optimism and possibilities i think it's it's great what's being done there then the question is how you build communities on top of that and how you make these games last longer and probably competition will be a big driver of this and we have seen with other games traditional games such as well league of legends or counter strike and you name

16:37it there's a couple of games that have been there for several years and competitive gaming has been been a big driver of those titles still been there so we'll see how the publishers of these new games or the developers of these new games use the power of esports to grow their franchise and be there for the long run yeah i'm definitely excited to see if

17:06some of these big you know aaa games start integrating nfts in blockchain as well and just a comment on the language barrier you know it's it's beautiful to see games like like counter-strike and league of legends just you know totally break down language barriers and you could be facing somebody that doesn't even speak the same language as you and

17:27you know you're facing head-to-head on your skills in gaming and you can become friends after even if you don't know the language so i think that's a great thing about esports communities it's it's yeah and it's it's that it's communities it's how people get around games is how people get around playing together and having a good time and it can be in very different ways but

17:53that sense of belonging and that sense of and also competing make a lot of that right competing helps you go into some getting better but also get into these communities and then showing off but at the same time being respectful of who you beat and continue on playing and next time we'll do better and both

18:22come together into what's next and with the lead up to the launch for the platform and the nft membership is your team also considering creating a cryptocurrency as a part of the blockchain interaction in the platform and if so what would that look like and how does it create a sustainable ecosystem well yeah we are we are planning on

18:48launching a token the we are building i would like to say a playground for gamers and that's an ecosystem a full ecosystem where you can mint your your membership pass and then you can play a tournament and then get the prices in our token so it's a kind of a close ecosystem where there's a ton of things you can do there digital assets

19:16ticketing for in real life events so there's there's a lot of things being done there and content being generated all through you all using our own token and we see a lot of value in having our own token for that the as always it's okay so how you do what you do so that the token doesn't lose value or increasing in value and well

19:44the important thing here for us is generating content and bringing this user base growing that user base and generating more content and generating more experiences and that's how in a way you generate the deflation of your token and then yes you have prices and you increase the supply but it has to be also very much targeted into growing the

20:11the assets that you generate the content and providing more to your for to your users all right well i'm looking forward to just seeing more on that with the release of the platform as well and for the viewers to follow along with the release of the platform and the token and to learn more about fiction beforehand what is the best way for them to follow along with all of these

20:35updates yeah we have our twitter account and it's in spanish and english so you will be able you might find it weird sometimes that we right in spanish but don't worry there's a lot of english content and we try to be mindful of both markets because we're focusing both and you can do that through 15 gg and then we have our

21:03Our site is 15.gg so you can also find us there plus discord is for gamers a big place and well also nft holders you know about that platform so we're also there in our featuring channel sounds great santiago thank you for taking the time all the best with these updates and the upcoming launch of fiction i will leave those links in the description box

21:30below as well for the viewers and let's follow up in the near future i would love to thank you austin for having me here it was a pleasure and thanks again whenever you want i'm here you