Binance.com to list $CHZ, what it means and what’s next.
Dear Chilizens,
We will be listed on Binance.com tomorrow Friday 6th of September! First of all, our team and I would like to thank the Binance Listing team for the amazing work they’ve done and the due diligence carried out to understand our business model and vision. It was painful and stressful at times :-) and while it does NOT guarantee any success or profit in anyway, I do believe that the level of research and DD from the Binance team is the most impressive in the market.
As an entrepreneur investing time and resources in this industry, it is reassuring to see that the biggest exchange in the market (55% of market share) is structured for that. It is very motivating to engage with partners that have the same long-term vision that you have — and believe me, this is not something common in this industry.
Long term — these are are actually the most important words in this blog post. Chiliz is engaged in the business of tokenizing the sports industry, and has already secured some of the biggest global brands like Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain, AS Roma, West Ham and the esports team OG. We have more to announce, but my point is that we are trying to partner with the biggest brands and therefore we have a responsibility towards these brands to select our own partners carefully. Binance is one of them and I’m glad to put them next to our sport teams.
Binance is the beginning of a journey, not the end.
While in 2017 and 2018, Binance.com was a goal, due to market conditions and — for the greater good — maturity of the industry, getting listed on Binance.com is rather the beginning of the journey and not the end. We, at Chiliz, see it as having access to the best platform to promote our venture. I’m not sure what the latest official numbers are, but I recall they have more than 10 million registered users. We see Binance as the perfect platform to grow our consumer-facing blockchain-based venture. With the support of the existing teams we have and the dozens we aim to onboard, we really see the potential to promote crypto/blockchain to the masses over the next few years.
I could talk a lot about it but what I wanted to share is that, even though Binance is an investor of Chiliz and a good friend of ours, unlike what some may believe, there is no fasttrack/fastpass to being listed. It took us more than 18 months :-) as they only list the projects they believe in and and support. Being friends counts for nothing in business. Binance is a company that does $300m+ profit per year, so they’d rather lose an investment than damage their process and brand equity. This is my 2 cents worth :-)
Now, what’s next for us. Not the moon, just the earth.
Chiliz is launching it’s consumer facing product Socios.com in the next couple of months or so. Like every launch, it will be happen in several phases and over a period of a few months, as we need to educate fans, clubs, media and also add more and more features.
Our team is now more than 55 people strong, mainly based in Malta spanning more than 24 nationalities :-) We definitely cover the whole earth, which is important for 2 reasons — i) to be down to earth is critical in this industry and ii) more importantly our Total Addressable Market (TAM) is 3.5 billion, which is the total amount of football (soccer) fans in the world. Having signed already some of the biggest teams, who have 100m+ fans globally, this gives us the opportunity to engage and target these fans, together with the club.
Our team has a very strong background in the regulated and online gambling industry (15 years for several managers involved), and we believe this gives us a great edge in our ability to navigate between regulations, payments, banking, sports industry and the consumer-facing product (acquisition, conversion, retention etc).
Our goal is to reach 100,000 registered users in the first 3 months of our official launch and 1 million registered users after 12 months. We believe, if we succeed, that we will be the biggest blockchain-based consumer-facing application (beside the crypto exchanges obviously).
To achieve that, we will continue to invest in the product, in the marketing and in people. After our listing on Binance.com — which we see as a megaphone for product and brand awareness — are going to be more visible in the crypto sphere, doing more AMAs and cross-selling marketing operations with our strategic partners like Binance. We do aim to add a few other strategic partners for very specific markets, like Korea, for example.
We are one of the rare ‘projects’ companies that has a “real-life” application with major global corporations. One of the perks, is that we are gonna have more than 2,000 VIP tickets for the whole year for our Socios.com / $CHZ holders and Binance Traders to share :-) We also have a Skybox at Juventus as well as at some other (unannounced) clubs too ;-)
https://twitter.com/socios/status/1167866871137259520
We will also announce more teams that are joining us, including one tomorrow Friday 6th of September.
Ok, last but not least, to continue to show our commitment to this incredible venture, we have increased the vesting period of both the Team (colleagues) and the company’s reserve. Details will be disclosed in a few days.
Stay tuned over the next few days for great opportunities, news, updates and much more.
Alex Dreyfus
