Dear chiliZens,
As some of you don’t regularly follow our blogs, videos and twitter accounts, I think it’s the right time for me to update you. First of all, thank you — all of you — for having contributed and supported us and our vision. This wasn’t an easy journey but it’s definitely an exciting one.
Personally, it was a steep learning curve and I like to remind myself that I was, quite incredibly, an opponent to crypto only a couple of years ago, as you can see by my tweets:
- https://twitter.com/alex_dreyfus/status/515225759427088384
- https://twitter.com/alex_dreyfus/status/879996902363856896
- https://twitter.com/alex_dreyfus/status/867394613820129280
- https://twitter.com/alex_dreyfus/status/890266023085182976
- https://twitter.com/alex_dreyfus/status/890272617428656128
- https://twitter.com/alex_dreyfus/status/913826366562488321
I think it was a healthy process for me, because I really had to educate myself and dive deep into the technologies. Along with plenty of arguments with my poker friends, who were involved in that space way before me, I really developed an understanding for user cases.
Throughout most of my life as an internet entrepreneur, I think I’ve been an early adopter. Except this time, I arrived late. But being late today, is still very early in the grand scheme of this revolution and disruption. This is a long journey, but experience has taught me that the longest journeys are the ones that succeed. You need to have time to educate, convince, develop, fail, fix and repeat. And time is money. We now have time. That’s why we are very lucky to have succeeded a significant Token Sale Private Placement of $66M+, thanks to great partners all over the world.
Team
A project is first and foremost a team, and I’ve been blessed to have great talents joining us since the launch of this venture. We went from 12 people in January to 30 right now, heading to 40 by the end of the year. We built a solid tech team of 10 developers led by Thibaut Pelletier our CTO with whom I worked with for almost 10 years in gaming and regulated businesses.
We also beefed up our central functions, such as our HR team led by Jade Cruickshank and Dorianne Spiteri, our Legal Counsel who comes from a banking background. Our job is a lot about education and mainstream adoption and we have now established a great PR & Comms team, led by veteran Emma Diskin. (see below).
Product
I’ve been presented this week with our first Minimum Viable Product, as we are introducing it at the GamesCom in Cologne next week, to selected esports & gaming partners.
This is FAR from the definitive product, but I’m pleased that we have now finished building the foundation of our platform and can now focus on the features, innovation and UI/UX. We aim to release the first version of chiliz.com platform and mobile app in Q1/Q2 next year. The more we work, the more there is to do, because we want to add so many features but I’m happy with the direction the team has taken to develop our blockchain application.
By the way, what do we do? :-) We are a “Tokenization Platform for Sports Teams”, meaning we are creating Fan Tokens for esports & football-soccer teams, which are the two markets we are focusing on right now. These Fan Tokens allow fans to engage with their favorite team(s), voting rights and they can also be traded on our platform. We are a turnkey solution for sports & esports teams, who want to monetize and engage more with their own fans. This was inspired from the concept of ‘Socios’ at Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, etc … We did NOT reinvent the wheel, but we modernized it.
We also believe this is a very strong user case of blockchain technology, as we are creating digital assets (powered by a regulated framework in Malta), that requires integrity and to be tradable.
We are not just another blockchain company who wants to revolutionize the world of payments or finance, we are building blockchain applications — on existing protocol — to reach mainstream consumers (esports fans, football fans, …) creating a Total Addressable Market (TAM) of billions. Our offer is currently unique, with no competition, and we definitely aim to leverage our first mover advantage and our ability to invest and deliver, to secure this position.
Education / Transparency
As I said above, a LOT of our job and duty is about educating and sharing knowledge about blockchain, the technology and its applications, and how this can be applied to businesses.
Just as I was once, uneducated, we need to educate others, ensure that they understand the potential and opportunities ahead of us and in our particular case, how our platform and venture can help innovate in sports industries like football & esports.
This is gonna be one of our main focuses in the next few months and that’s why we built a team of 5 talents in our PR teams to cover Events, Social Media, Content — including video, to help support in spreading our narrative. We also recently partnered with TheStoryMob, leading esports agency, and Pretty Green a leading UK-based sports agency.
Like I did in my other ventures, I believe in transparency and communication, as long as it serves the purpose of sharing a vision. We need to find the right balance to share information to our community, but also to engage with new ones. I invite you to see some of the videos we’ve done last few weeks by clicking here
The cryptocurrency industry can be a bit shady sometimes, and we want to make sure that our company stands out in the right way, not only by its product but also by the image we are delivering. As someone who experienced and lived the early years of internet in 1996, I know how important education and “evangelization” is. That will be part of our strategy and mission.
As we have been very active in the blockchain community in Korea (another blog post) & Japan, through several meet-ups and conventions, we will work more in Q4–2018 and H1–2019 on China, South East Asia, Middle East, Russia and Europe.
chiliZ Blockchain Campus
As presented in our White Paper, 7% of our Token Sale Proceed is going to be invested in the local ecosystem, in Malta. To support chiliZ growth, we are moving into new offices in September in a completely new building. As part of this move, we decided to take few more floors to create a complete blockchain ecosystem/cluster, that will help chiliZ to engage and work with other blockchain companies, but also to increase its exposure and recognition globally. The chiliZ Blockchain Campus gather around 2,000sqm of offices, that will host some of the biggest and most recognizable operators in the market like Binance, OKEX and many others that will be announced in September. The Campus will also have reciprocity agreement with hubs, accelerators, incubators in France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Korea, China, Singapore and many more to create a network — a chain — of partners helping a growing ecosystem.
The chiliZ Blockchain Campus and all the companies involved will host more than 250 people in its full service.
All the services of the Campus will be only payable in $CHZ.
Tokens
While we closed our $66m Private Placement Token Sale, we are working towards getting all the paperwork done and taking all the necessary KYC/AML compliance and regulatory steps, especially being based in Malta — the first country to regulate ICOs. Banking has been a challenging issue, that we managed to handle properly after unexpected setbacks. We are getting close to proceed with the Token Generation Event, followed by distribution, which we are planning in few weeks once our deal flow (onboarding teams) will be more secured.
We believe, that in the current market conditions, we need to outstand the market by distributing $CHZ tokens that will have real utility in very short term, thanks to deals and agreements and services being negotiated.
I guess I could continue writing more and more, but I’ll keep some fresh news for the next update. Please follow us on Telegram, Twitter (company + mine) and our Medium Blog.
Thanks for your support and if you have any questions, you can always reach me on: alex@mediarex.com
Alexandre Dreyfus
