Jun 21, 2021
AMA RECAP : DeFi Raccoons x Spores Network.
Date : 21 JUNE 2021
Host : SB
Guest : Spores Network Team.
INTRODUCTION.
SB | Admin @DeFi_Raccoons:
Please be so kind as to introduce yourselves to the Raccoons!
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
My name is Eric Nguyen, I am the cofounder and CEO of Spores Network, Asia premier NFT marketplace.
SB | Admin @DeFi_Raccoons:
Please share with us about your experience and work in the crypto field.
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
My background is in Investment and Trading, first working on the Trading Desk at the largest Japanese Investment Bank — Nomura in London, trading a book of over 300m USD of high yield and distressed credit for 5 years. Later, I moved to Elliot Management, one of the world largest hedge funds with over $70bn AUM where I was senior investment analyst co-managing a portfolio of over $2bn. I joined the cryptocurrency space in early 2017, and actively invested and advised in many early stage blockchain projects. I was poached by One Mount Group’s venture OneHousing, a venture created by Vietnam’s top two billionaires of Real Estate and Banking to create financial derivatives products for real estate in Vietnam. Thats where I met my cofounder Duc, and we both decided that NFT and blockchain is our passion and interest and we both left started this exciting journey together at Spores!
SB | Admin @DeFi_Raccoons:
Ok, once again welcome, glad to have you with us today! We like to start off with an elevator-pitch for the people that haven’t yet heard of Spores Network — Tell us what #Spores is and what are you guys trying to showcase?
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
Spores Network is Asia’s Premier NFT Marketplace with supported De-Fi & Interoperability Tools. We focus on creator verticals including Gaming, Esports, Celebrities, Digital Arts, Animation and Entertainments
Spores Network founders deeply believe that a digital “metaverse” is being built today that will revolutionize our thoughts and behavior with respect to living, owning, sharing our physical and digital lives. Spores seeks to empower creators to create, exchange, and communicate their life’s work. We believe in a future that is creator centricity, frictionless, borderless, community driven and we want to be at the epicenter as an ecosystem with a marketplace, de-fi tools, and venture fund that seeks to create value through project funding and support for our community.
SB | Admin @DeFi_Raccoons:
Your goal is to become the all in one crypto hub of future.
Can you illustrate your idea about crypto “metaverse” in relation to today’s market?
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
Sure, think of Decentraland or Sanbox are the closest example of that. But I would argue they are the very early iterations of that. The full blown metaverse, we gotta think of Ready Player One and the Matrix, and I believe we will get there eventually and NFTs will be a very important foundation of that future.
SB | Admin @DeFi_Raccoons:
So NFTs
Will be your major focus
As the crypto market is expanding, we are seeing the onset of the NFT Era — what hopes do you guys have from this.
How will you implement and use NFT in your project?
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
We hope and very excited that NFTs will be the cornerstone and foundation of future digital metaverse, together with Defi, we believe NFTs will be the driving force to bring mass adoption to blockchain space.
Our team has extensive experience of building marketplaces before in the edtech and proptech sectors. So a good way to understand how well a marketplace can function is to understand the key principles we need to foster:
1) solid inventory (in our case, great NFT projects/products),
2) large volume of buyers and collectors (we’re spending a lot of marketing to reach target investors/buyers/collectors to support our artists)
3) the tech to handle transaction volume, especially in blockchain
4) the governance mechanisms to support trust, transparency, and efficiency of markets so that all parties feel like they are monetizing their time, effort, and creativity.
5) Defi solutions, to empower and support the growth of the NFT ecosystems
SB | Admin @DeFi_Raccoons:
How are going to attract a large number of buyers and collectors?
What are your marketing strategies?
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
For us, content is king. People will come and buy if it is the contents + IPs great NFTs that they want and love, this applies to both crypto and non-crypto users. So securing those contents pipeline is our major focus. We have partners in both crypto and non-crypto channels these will be marketing go to market path. We have exciting news in the pipeline that we are looking to announce in comming days and weeks to come.
SB | Admin @DeFi_Raccoons:
You mentioned about different projects here.
So do you take them as your competitors?
Or
You aim to grow with them mutually helping each other.
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
These two projects I mention, they are in different market segment, so I wouldnt call them competitors.
I think at this stage, its all about working together, the market size is still quite small and we are at super early stage, there are many challenges that the industry need to come together and solve, ultimately this will create more value for the ecosystem as a whole and thus everyone win. But for sure down the line, there will be competition both from within and outside of crypto comming to the space, but at this stage we welcome them as they do bring new much needed developments to our space.
SB | Admin @DeFi_Raccoons:
Great
When there are competitors, There ought to be partners.
Partners play an important role for the marketing as well as development of the project.
Do you have any strategic partnerships that are backing your project?
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
We are announcing our investors and partner list in an official announcement soon. But I can share some early info here: our investors including top VCs in the crypto space including NGC Venture, SVC, Exnetwork Capital, SL2, Twin Apex, Focus Labs… We have investors and partners across the world from Asia, Middle East, Europe and the US, major partners from both blockchain space to traditional space, that we will be very excited to announce in the upcoming days and weeks to come.
SB | Admin @DeFi_Raccoons:
What is the major market you are focusing on?
Are you going to launch globally?
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
We are an Asia focused NFT platforms, so major market for us are China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, SE Asia, Singapore, India…. What we see missing from NFTs market place these days are Asia-centric contents, think of Gaming, animation, Digital arts, Esports, Celebs, those will be the line up that we go for. In the near future we will sure be looking to expand our footprints.
SB | Admin @DeFi_Raccoons:
When it comes to eSports, Asia is surely a gaming hub.
Can you please explain about your “Gamified Royalty sharing”
What is it’s mechanism and how is it different from others?
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
This is one of the features we are currently experimenting and testing with, will be sure to share more once we can later on. Just to share out background philosophies when we design this, as we are a creator-centric marketplace, we want to design feature that reward and incentivises artists to innovate and creates, as well as communities to actively participating in that process
SB | Admin @DeFi_Raccoons:
What is the speciality of your “Fully-stack interoperable NFT-DeFi platform” that you are working on?
How will it be different and more beneficial that others in the market?
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
There are 3 key parts how we differentiate ourselves:
- Contents: we believe that content is king and also I think this is where our strength come in that we can leverage on our network and expertises to bring exciting IPs and contents to this space. Just a sneak peeks, we onboarded a new to be announced Chief Content Officer, who was a formerly very successful executive producer at Hollywood (many of his movies I am sure the communities have seen), this is the sort of network I talk about that empower us to bring exciting IPs and contents to our marketplace.
- Our blockchain agnostic approach that we look to incorporate multiple blockchain platform that allows users to trade NFT on multiple blockchain platform seamlessly
- Last but not least is the Defi Solution we bring to complement the NFT marketplace, we believe Defi is the life-blood of the market and will help to jumpstart the growth of NFTs and take NFTs to the mass communities.
SB | Admin @DeFi_Raccoons:
In terms of value capture, what is the tokenomics of SPO token, and how do you stimulate the users to hold your token in the long run?
What is the use case of your token?
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
We believe in building and creating value for all stakeholders of the project over the long term, this we believe will translate into greater value to our token holders, communities and creators.
Spores token is utility tokens of the Spores platform, that let you access many features including trading fees discount, access to pre-sale of NFT drops, NFT airdrops, exclusive access and payment method for certain limited edition of NFTs.
We have extensive plans for our tokens and our token holders as it is the life-blood of our ecosystem. This includes token staking to generate an attractive return for the users. Also NFT farming, some of that will include some NFT airdrop for token holders, weekly/monthly lotteries for token holders as well.
Also we will have a reward program, whereas active communities and users on our platform get rewarded with tokens based on their activities on our platform.
SB | Admin @DeFi_Raccoons:
Can you tell us about your listing plans?
Especially the ones involving major exchanges, CEX and DEX.
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
For DEX, we are ERC-20 first so the natural first place is Uniswap.
Listing plans as you know are confidential and sensitive information that we cant disclose yet. What I can share is we are in talks with major exchanges and we have the right connections and support from our partners and investors to help open those doors.
LIVE AMA QUESTIONS.
Adelaide Nall:
Q) Many projects rug pulled and exit scam recently. Why should investors trust in this your project not to do the same?
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
Hi, first of all I recommend that all our investors do their own research before making their investment own decision, investing in early blockchain project is like investing in early stage startup, a few things in my opinion is quite important (not investment advice):
1. Strength of the team and their track records, do they have relevant experience, have they delivered before?
2. Strategy, do the strategy they layout is something that makes sense to you and you believe in?
3. Execution, are they able to deliver on what they promise, in term of miles stone and business development.
Answer all these questions should give you a good sense :)
Engelz Qotalo Las Dotas:
I understood that the role of the community is vital for Spores but do you have plan to educate non crypto people on how to use $SPOs in sustainable way in able to be part of your Community? I am talking about non-crypto people , like real-world companies …. Do you also have plan to target or attract real-world companies and have Collaborations with them?
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
This is one of our primary focus, bring non-crypto users/partners into the NFT ecosystem. Like I said our focus is bring exciting IP and contents to the NFT space, and yes this involve work with real-world companies for sure. (think of movie studio, Animation studio, gaming publishers…) So definately to bring them onto this journey with us, educating them, work with them is definately our priority. Pls do stay tuned to our update, I am sure communities will be positively surprised what we can bring to this space in term of IPs and contents.
Nathalie Evane:
Can you tell us about the motivation and benefits for investors, to keep Spores in the long run, How are you fighting inflation?
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
Sure and I think this is a valid question, the clearest way to combat Spores token supply inflation is by creating demand for our tokens, this come from a number of ways, by great rewards for our token holders and users, by expanding our ecosystem and hence our tokens use case, by bringing even more value to our tokens buyers/holders ( this I have described more indepth above) . And above all Spores as an nft marketplace and ecosystem need to flourish, and the go to place for many users when they want to trade NFTs
Tifa:
Spores Please tell me your team background and What makes your team interest to build this project?Network 17h.
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
You can find my background above
My cofounders Duc comes from an edtech, proptech, and marketplace POV: Duc built and sold an Edtech startup in Hong Kong, sold it to Bain Capital Private Equity China and then took the parent company public on Nasdaq in 2017 for over $1 billion valuation. He spent the next two years as Chief Strategy Officer looking at Edtech M&A and incubation opportunities worldwide. The last two years he’s moved back to his homeland of Vietnam to build the country. He served as COO of Propzy, a proptech play, where he helped raise $25 million from Softbank Ventures Asia, Gaw Capital, and Insignia Ventures. The company currently has over 20 stores in Vietnam. Soon he was poached by One Mount Group’s venture OneHousing to lead strategy and operations as COO, looking to scale another proptech play with backing by Vietnam’s top two billionaires of Real Estate and Banking. He’s a contributor writer for Vietcetera, TechinAsia, and keynote speaker in Edtech, Proptech, and now Crypto.
Other advisors on the team come from a number verticals including gaming, digital arts… that they are experts in, e.g. one of our advisor Mr. American Mcgee is a gaming titan with over 20 years experience, he is most famous for being the game designer of Doom 2, Quake, Quake 2, and creator of American Mcgee’s Alice(EA game).
Lovely_DC 💋:
I see on RoadMap that CardStarter also aims to be a nurturing force in the Cardano ecosystem, And Cardano has seen great success despite being a fairly new network. Can you tell us about the benefits Cardano brings to the SPORES ecosystem and users? And do you have plans for HACKATHON to check the security of your ecosystem regularly and also invite developers to build your project?
Eric Hung Nguyen — Spores:
High gas fees and the environmental impact of BTC and ETH networks have the defi community looking to the potential of Cardano. Once ADA mainnet goes live, Spores will be there waiting for them as the premier Cardano NFT platform.
Spores aim to be the first NFT market place to integrate with Cardano blockchain technology, that is green, low cost with higher throughput that can facilitate NFT and Defi solutions for years to come.
Yes we do have plan to host hackathon to get communities involved in our project develoments as well as spotting outstanding talents in tech
IMPORTANT LINKS.
TELEGRAM : https://t.me/sporeseng
WEBSITE : https://spores.app/
TWITTER : http://twitter.com/Spores_Network
MEDIUM : http://spores.medium.com/
Group’s Description:
An investor community for everything related to DeFi, NFT, IDO, Blockchain, and much more. We share our analysis, fundamentals and hold AMAs with all sorts of projects!
That’s all we have time for today, until next time, consider joining our socials underneath to join our DeFi Discussion!
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Now for a disclaimer — I’m not a financial advisor, anything you read on my Medium isn’t financial advice, it’s a log of myself doing due diligence on projects, please verify any and all information presented (error reporting welcome) and make your own decisions.
