Thank you all for joining us on our Gather Day 05 on Friday, February 17th. On time before our next Gather Day, we would like to recap the highlights that featured the next phase of $RIDE Metastaking and our crypto roadmap for 2023 while looking back at our holoride retrofit reveal at CES 2023 in Las Vegas.
A retrospective on CES 2023
“I am overall very happy with the press articles written about holoride and our retrofit solution” Nils Wollny, CEO & co-founder holoride stated, as he kicked off the fifth Gather Day and looked back at CES 2023 for holoride. With the holoride retrofit solution — a compact device no bigger than your usual smart speaker — any car in the world can be made holoride-ready. CES (short for Consumer Electronics Show) is where it all started for holoride. After our inception in 2019 in Las Vegas, we wanted to double down on it with the onsite reveal of the retrofit. We’ve been thrilled about the positive press coverage incl. the LA Times who declared holoride and the retrofit solution as “Best of CES” and Tim Stevens from TechCrunch who compared our tech to “Finding Vegas VR nirvana”, just to provide some of the team’s favourite examples.
A special moment for the whole holoride team on-site: Taking George Buhnici on a holoride, who is a well-known Romanian journalist and content creator with an interest in technology and crypto.
Being a pioneer in unprecedented forms of in-car entertainment and launching a product that has never existed before, holoride is very much looking forward to receiving feedback from the community about their first experiences with holoride. In order to render the retrofit solution more accessible, Nils announced that rate payments are now enabled in the holoride webshop. “We know the price point is not cheap,” Nils added. That’s why people can now split the payments over the course of up to 36 months.
But that was not the only announcement made during CES 2023. holoride also revealed the release of a new game: Pixel Ripped 1995: On the Road! It is a spin-off of the popular 90s classic Pixel Ripped 1995 and will delight nostalgics as much as Gen Z players. We continuously grow our content library with Pixel Ripped being one of the newest, fully immersive additions.
The holoride content library offers a huge variety of experiences to its passengers. One can choose between immersive games, casual and well-being experiences, edutainment formats and browse & stream options such as the very own holoride browser, which provides passengers with no less than the biggest in-car screen to date. To offer such a wide range of experiences, holoride has a special working relationship with Indie Studios. Why? Because Indie Studios accommodate the most creative minds and push the boundaries of what’s possible.
It’s no surprise that Pixel Ripped 1995: On the Road was developed by ARVORE, an Emmy award-winning studio, based in São Paulo, Brazil. “It’s Metaverse, Multiverse, Motorverse — all in one. Because while sitting in a real car you are at the same time in a virtual car, playing video games that then mix with reality. It’s mind-bending.” Nils added.
CLX: Bringing the holoride retrofit to Audi car dealerships
The community was also let in on an important, large-scale event currently taking place at Munich behind the scenes, called the Central Launch Experience (CLX) organized by Audi Headquarters.
Whenever Audi launches a new car model or product, representatives of car dealerships from across the globe gather to try out the newest innovations.
The event lasts for 12 weeks, with an incredible amount of approx. 8.000 car dealers getting the chance to try out holoride. What a unique opportunity to present holoride to relevant customer touchpoints around the world and receive feedback from a professional group, that knows exactly what holoride’s target group is looking for!
Presenting the next milestones for holoride’s web3 journey: The crypto roadmap for 2023
The big highlight of Gather Day #5 was the presentation of holoride’s crypto roadmap 2023. 2023 will be the year to see some fundamental $RIDE utilities come into fruition within the holoride ecosystem. The product needs to be fully fledged out first before RIDE utilities can be implemented in a sensible way. With the retrofit solution on the market and more and more people embarking on the holoride journey, 2023 will be the year for the first major RIDE utilities to go live.
But first things first: Nils kicked off the conversation with some really good news. RIDE Metastaking has been extended until the end of June and the staking rate stays the same at 12% APR. There’s still 1 million RIDE in the staking contract and holoride dedicates another 8 million to the extension, which makes a total of 9 million RIDE in the Metastaking extension. Simultaneously, holoride is working on an enhanced RIDE Staking Successor program after June, beginning in Q3.
Moreover, NFT staking will be integrated into the successor program in Q3.
Nils added: “NFT staking is a very powerful tool, but we believe it needs to be implemented in a way that boosts storytelling.” Cloudbreakers is designed to ultimately grant holders a more profound and immersive experience of the whole Cloudbreakers universe, including the game and other media formats that might follow.
Consequently, holoride is taking its time to develop this in a meaningful way, instead of just issuing more tokens with no clear purpose. As Nils aptly put it: “Staking can bring a lot of value to holders and also stabilize a token, but this can only work long-term when there’s a rationale behind it. Otherwise it’s going to bring in people to communities for the wrong reasons.”
Another major utility to be introduced in 2023 is the integration of RIDE as a payment option within the holoride ecosystem in Q3. The specifics of RIDE payment are in the process of being explored and evaluated, but one thing is for sure: Payment in RIDE will both reward existing holders by for example granting discounts if you pay with RIDE and will incentivize regular holoride customers to embark the crypto space.
The next exciting RIDE utility planned for Q3 is the launch of the RIDE governance program. Granting holders the right to co-determine certain decisions with regards to holoride’s further development will give the already strong bond between RIDE community and holoride another boost. Asking Nils what governance might look like in practice, he elaborates: “For example, RIDE holders will be able vote on content creation. If there is a small studio, a freelancer, or a single creative with a great idea, the RIDE community can co-decide which content gets funds to turn the idea into reality.”
In addition, the community will be able to co-decide where to allocate funds and thus help with the assessment which existing, popular games should be turned into holoride-compatible experiences.
Q4 will see another big milestone in terms of RIDE utility: The implementation of a Ride and Play and Earn mechanism. While it is one of the most exciting utilities in terms of boosting engagement, it is also very complex. The structure of the current GameFi market is token-centric in most cases, which can create a number of issues, for example, that it’s not about the game play and the fun anymore but that inversely, games become a utility of tokens they issue. So tokens come first, and contents later. This is something the holoride team wants to prevent. “Gaming is supposed to be something that enriches human experience through the act of play”, Nils explained, “so consequently we want to explore Play and Earn in a way that is not an end in itself.”
We will share a dedicated a roadmap summary post here shortly.
Once again, we’d like to thank all of you — the community — who joined us for Gather Day 05: Your questions, the answers to which you find down below, are much appreciated and help us to continuously step up our game! Stay tuned for Gather Day #6!
Community Questions Gather Day No. 5
When will the retrofit be available in other countries?
We launched in the US in January. Next will be the UK in late spring, followed by other European markets like France, Italy & Spain in late summer or early fall. The rest of Europe will then follow in fall. For the end of the year, we’re planning to launch in China. But of course, things might switch a little bit, especially if we see strong demand in another country.
Will there be games where we can earn RIDE tokens?
Yes, we will add this, but in a meaningful way and not in every game. It needs to fit into the gameplay.
I’m very curious about my order from 06 Januar. If I bought the retrofit package earlier, will I have access to the ambassadors “room”?!
Thanks for being a loyal fan & customer! We’ll have different ambassador rounds this year. The Cloudbreakers community will be the first, and we might let the raffle winners decide whether they want to include early purchasers as well, as we want to involve them.
Will there be any real uses/utility for the token? Metastaking, buying/sells exchanges, any more adoption?
On the one hand we want to increase the adoption of the token. However, RIDE is a utility token and we want to turn it into the mobility experience token. It’s not only about making money — I’m more thrilled by all the utilities we will launch for the holoride ecosystem. You’ll find more information about this in our detailed crypto roadmap.
Will the holders get an SFT for each Skyjack that was held from mint in their wallet? These would serve as identifiers for true holders and can be used for various things: boost APR of a staking pool that the NFT is in, automatic WL+ discount on future collections sales etc.
No, we would like to integrate also members that discover the Clousbreakers project or the Skyjack NFT at a later stage, and we’d like to reward engagement over just being the first.
holoride said a while back that they have an agnostic approach to things; when the time comes to go cross-chain, would you consider charging a fee in RIDE to convert your NFT to a different chain? That fee can either be burned or reverted into the staking pools to grow the APR.
Of course, our devs are evaluating different options right now — but first and foremost, it needs be beneficial to our RIDE community.
Will there be a way for people to have their voice directly heard by holoride? Like the ambassador program, not based on winning a raffle but rather being selected to take part in such circle.
It’s a great compliment that so many people want to be part of this circle. In general, no voice is being unheard. We read everything and our community manager forwards every idea, every message she gets. We will think this through, but please consider that we always have to stay fair and transparent. Selecting some members over others does not really reflect the Web3 spirit as it gives power to us deciding who gets a special treatment. If we implement something like that, the criteria must be very clear, transparent and fair.
Are other VR headsets being considered for the holoride experience?
Yes, definitely as we follow an agnostic approach.
About holoride
holoride creates an entirely new media category for passengers by connecting Extended Reality (XR) content with data points from the vehicle in real-time. These data points include physical feedback, like acceleration and steering, traffic data, as well as travel route and time. holoride technology provides a new type of immersion into any kind of VR content, creating a breathtaking, immersive experience, and significantly reducing motion sickness.
The tech startup was founded at the end of 2018 in Munich, Germany by Nils Wollny, Marcus Kuehne, Daniel Profendiner, and Audi, who holds a minority stake in the startup.
In April 2021, holoride raised €10 million in its Series A funding round led by Terranet AB, earning the company a €30 million valuation. That same year, holoride won the prestigious SXSW Pitch and was also named Best in Show. It has been hailed “Best of CES 2019” four times, recognized as one of the “100 Best Inventions of 2019” by TIME Magazine, and is part of the global innovation platform “STARTUP AUTOBAHN powered by Plug and Play”.
