Interview with Peter Shen, CEO of Asura Coin — A self-sustainable eSports ecosystem.
Welcome Mr. Shen. To start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your background?
“Hello O Lord & Savior, thank you for having me. My background mainly lies in start ups, what I do and have done in the past consist of helping existing companies turn profitable or create growth, especially in China. Having created brands based in NZ and then set up distribution/marketing in China, turning profit, then selling or merging said brands with bigger corporations enabling further growth.”
“With that said, my experience from all this has resulted in me acquiring skills in internal business management + external business development.”
To summarize, you want to create a central hub for the gaming community, a utopian community. How will Asura stand out to the numerous other platforms, which I believe are exceptionally strong competitors?
“Asura World in a shell, is a self-regulating, self-developing and self-evolving ecosystem for the community, we don’t dictate it’s direction of growth or development, we let the community decide that for themselves. As for the greater platform of Asura World, users holding ASA Coins are presented with the options to Bet on Tournaments, watch said Tournaments, Coach or Learn, Host Tournaments or participate in tournaments, engage in community match making in solo or team modes. There’s not one feature within Asura World that does not already have an established market, Asura World is simply improving these existing mechanisms, enabling smart contract actions to automate and service these mechanisms and then interconnecting them all together with the NEO blockchain. With a more focused variety of mechanisms, as a gamer myself, I am presented with not 1 or 2, but multiple avenues to both earn and spend ASA Coins, increasing retention rate and most importantly, it’s more fun. Isn’t that the key component of anything that’s gaming related?”
Can you explain how Asura Coin (ASA) can be spent/earned, and why is there the need for a unique coin (ASA) instead of e.g. GAS?
Asura World members can SPEND ASA Coins by:
1. Betting
2. Participating in hosted Tournaments
3. Participating in the Asura Tournaments
4. Hosting their own Tournaments [hosting fee]
5. Watching and Learning from ranked players.
6. Reward other users, eg: Content
7. Staking against other players in match making.
Asura World members can EARN ASA Coins by:
1. Winning said Bets
2. Winning said hosted Tournaments & Asura Tournaments
3. Hosting their own Tournaments [having other players join]
4. Creating Quality Coaching content
5. Contributing to the community by either creating content, interacting within the community, or by being helpful & kind.
6. Winning match making.
7. Participate in monthly Asura World events in the Community Hub
The core reasons as to why we’re issuing our own tokens is:
1. To keep our token values independent from native tokens such as GAS.
2. Allowing our community and market to self-regulate on the prices based on supply & demand, whereas if we were to use GAS, our supply & demand would not impact it.
3. It would incentivize early adopters of our platform [users not investors].
4. To maintain Asura World’s core values of a dictator-less ecosystem, having our own tokens would allow a market to emerge based on Asura World’s growth, our supply & demand of our services than acting as a simple form of currency. This is advantageous to mechanisms such as our Coaching & Guide service.
This one is interesting, next to tradition betting rules Asura World also introduces Unique Betting Rules. What does this include, what are the possibilities?
“This comes back to the core values of gaming, gaming is all about having fun while feeling rewarded. IE: leveling up, finding a new item, winning a fight, etc. However, traditional betting only provide the reward but not the fun. By utilizing smart contracts, users are able to CREATE their own bets that they think would be fun, and the community can vote for their favorite creations then the top voted bets would be implemented automatically into the betting mechanism. This would all happen automatically and untouched. Panding, our data scientist, would be creating an algorithm of return spreads, so any bets created would trigger the set of rules enabling odds provided based on past win/lose histories, skill level, social media, and match data.”
“Anyways, in general, users can bet with rules that a much more game orientated than boring “Team A will win by 10 points over Team B” etc.”
The community matchmaking seems really well thought out, could you shortly explain how it works? Is it required to link a IGN or ID to your Asura account, in order the prevent unfair matches?
“When users login to the community matchmaking of the Asura World, they would need to choose the game they wish to compete in, and then link their game profile to our platform, this would provide us with all the details of their gaming account, their level, rank, or class [This sounds complicated, but it’s in fact just 2 clicks]. After linking their game profile to our matchmaking platform, they are allowed to start queuing for a match, the queue will search for other players of similar location for the best performance delivery and also within the skill levels too. So players will always match within their own skill range.”
We want everyone to have fun, and obviously being bullied by a far greater skilled player and losing your ASA Coins is not fun!
I understand from the whitepaper that streams will be directly linked to other platforms such as Twitch. Why do customers want to access this through Asura and not directly go to Twitch? In addition have you thought of adding individual streaming to Asura as an option to earn ASA and attract customers?
“I’m rather realistic when it comes to business, I want to fight the battles I can win in. Trying to compete AGAINST a monopoly such as Twitch [in my opinion] is just stupid and a waste of time. This isn’t a matter of David vs Goliath, but rather David without a sling vs a Group of Goliaths armed with guns, on an open field. Our streaming service is more a convenience support than anything else, players can bet while watching their games and watching their bets win in real time, under 1 browser. We will not be implementing our own Streaming anytime soon, and will concentrate our time on non-live content creation instead. Articles, Guides, Discussions, Events, Videos, Tutorials, Gameplay, Replays etc.”
“Implementing something like streaming is not difficult, but I think many people don’t realize the costs behind it. It far outweighs the returns unless they can gather enough momentum.”
I’m really enthusiastic about the DNSSEC protocol, what is it and how did you come up with the idea?
“DNSSEC in general is security, because we aim to be self-everything, security will need to be at an extremely high level! DNSSEC protects users from being misled to fake websites.”
“So with the DNSSEC protocol, some people may have picked up the fact that if a user’s client does not support DNSSEC then it goes back to standard DNS.”
“However we will be using something called Bind, it’s an open source DNS server, removing the need to manually manage zones, and extremely adaptable.”
Will the Asura Ecosystem be completely self-regulatory and self-driven, or is there still the need for admins/mods to prevent e.g. content spam, etc?
“Our sense of Self-regulating and self-driven is, the business that is Asura World LLC, will not do anything towards how it evolves. All we will be doing is bug checking, marketing and creating new features in the future. As for existing features, that will entirely depend on the community and what they want to do with it. How it’ll progress will determine their popularity with the community.”
“As for mods and admin, there is no specific role, but rather the platform encourages everyone to manage everyone. And by being continuously helpful, contributing to a greater community, Asura World will automatically reward these users through a set of rules and delivered by smart contracts.”
“As for spammers, scammers, and cheaters, there will also be some that hide behind organic accounts and do things in the shadows. This is the only exception where the Asura World team would step in to remove.”
“Fortunately, the use of NEO blockchain technology removes the middle man, and allows Asura World to run as a trustless platform.”… “By leveraging the use of NEO blockchain technology, the security of the Asura World platform is improved considerably over traditional centralised systems. Blockchain is able to remove human error, make data records tamper-proof, and create a trustless system for worry-free transactions.”
Besides NEO there are other options as a platform that are also quick and scalable, was/were there other specific reasons to choose NEO as your preferred platform?
So a reason behind the technicals?
Actually, the main reason we chose NEO wasn’t simply the technology behind it, but rather a more “human approach”.
“When Eman and I came up with the idea of Asura World, we did plenty of research on the current market, it’s past growth, predicted future growth and adaption growth, all of this shows the current infancy stage of cryptocurrency usage globally. We realised whatever we were going to build, it would need a minimum 5 year business plan rather than a short term 1–2 year plan. Taking into account on our focus on community, we had to find a foundation suitable for our future rather than “what’s popular right now”. NEO’s vision aligns with the Asura vision, a strong sense of unity within the community, co-operative growth, and an extremely fast supporting response rate. I think in 4–5 years down the road, NEO will be vastly different from competitors such as Ethereum, and at that time, the benefits of NEO to Asura World would be extremely prominent.”
We have to think long term!
General Information
Token Sale
A total of 1 billion ASA Coins will ever be created. To achieve the development goals set by the Asura World team, The 1 billion coins shall be allocated as follows:
Crowdsale — 65% of ASA Coins (650,000,000) will be available for purchase during the crowdsale. 20% Bonus applies to the first 300,000,000 ASA Coins sold.
Growth & Betting Reserve — 25% of ASA Coins (250,000,000) will be for the referral programand to leverage strategic partnerships with key companies to grow the Asura World network. The Asura World team will seek to run contests with prizes awarded in Asura Coins.
Team — 10% of ASA Coins (100,000,000) will be allocated to the Asura World core team and advisors, to align the team with project delivery.
Road Map
Team
Advisors
