Spores — AMA

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RoundtableDAO Project Development

20 min readDec 1, 2021

This is the transcript of the AMA session held on the 29th of October by the RoundtableDAO team with Duc Luu, Chairman & Co-Founder of Spores. You can find the full video on the RoundtableDAO’s Youtube Channel.

About Spores

Spores Network is the swiss army knife NFT platform. It offers all the required tools to create and interact with NFTs in a single place:
NFT Portal where creators mint their own NFTs and holders manage their assets.
NFT Marketplace with an auction platform, and an NFT Decentralized Exchange.
DeFi for NFTs with staking, farming, liquidity mining and NFT-collateral lending.

Ask me anything — Transcript

Astropark: Hi guys, this is Astropark, and today we are with Jay and Duc Luu. This live stream’s about Spores Network. Hi Jay, how are you doing?

Jay: I am not too bad. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Roundtable DAO TV show. Today we welcome Spores to our live AMA show. Spores Network is a cross-chain DeFi-powered NFT marketplace defining decentralized pop culture. The platform is focused on the five NFT content verticals: gaming, esports, animation/anime, digital fine art, and anything to do with Celebrities. Spores promises a smooth integration between bringing the best of NFT and DeFi together.

So today we have with us Duc Luu, who founded The Edge Learning Centers in 2008. He built the blended learning centers concerned into a successful, profitable business. He’s an industry leader with an international footprint across six cities and four countries. He’s the Co-Founder and now the Executive Chairman at Spores Network, so we have invited him to talk to us about the latest updates of Spores, and speak with us about what will be upcoming for this great product. So, welcome to the show Duc, very happy to have you with us.

Duc: I’m really, really happy to be here and thanks for inviting me. And I appreciate your patience.

Astropark: Thank you for being here. Can you give us a brief introduction to Spores Network? What do you aim to do and solve in this sector?

Duc: So, when we were raising, the most asked question was “What kind of NFT marketplace were we trying to do?” Because there’s like many options out there and the issue was, of course, you have guys like OpenSea, Rarible which are basically NFT aggregators. And we obviously see the value in aggregators, but what we were trying to do was a curated platform. We wanted to look at the best of the best in each of the verticals that we were interested in and really sign branded IP and partnerships in those verticals, or really to endorse top artists in those verticals. So the first vertical that we have is digital fine art; so we’re bringing some of the top artists in the street and graffiti space to work with us. And we’re doing an NFT.NYC private dinner this week, that’s happening right now.

Then we have entertainment, which breaks down into film, television, and music. So, there we have animation and anime. There we work on projects where we sign deals with studios, whether it’s movie studios, music production studios, et cetera, to bring in high-quality content. I guess we’re going to talk about some of those deals that we’ve done recently. Finally our game store — obviously everyone knows Play-to-Earn is a big space; we knew it very early on. My co-founder has been in the space since 2017 and has been investing in play-to-earn games. But what we do is we’re really doing sort of a triple down on that sector: we’re trying to invest in games; we’re trying to bring games onto our platform for both primary and secondary sales. So most recently for example, we did — many of you guys know the game Netvrk, it’s one of the hottest games out there — so we were lucky enough to work with them directly. And we did their land sales which, first-round, we sold a million in less than three days, and then second round we sold, again, over a million in NFT sales. The first round was land sales, the second one was NFT sales. So we think that’s going to be a very crucial part of our business, and we actually have about eight games lined up to do different types of land and NFT drops with us.

Jay: That’s amazing, tell me what makes Spores Network special? What features does it have that differ from other products?

Duc: I think the first thing is our Online-to-Offline (O2O) solution. We launched, on the 29th of September, our physical gallery in Shanghai. It’s called LMG+ Spores, and there we have a bunch of monitors that show our current library for sale in our marketplace. And so you can go visit and interact with the pieces live, and then get on our site and buy right away. And actually, it’s unsurprising that this has been a really nice bridge for artists who are a bit uncomfortable with the purely digital experience; they’re like, “Well, I sell for six figures, then how does my collector show it off?” And we tell them, “Actually we have solutions.” We’ve partnered with, for example, Black Dove to display the work. Physically, we can actually have you buy an LG screen to load up your work, as one option. The other big thing — so, we’ll have a lot of exhibits throughout the year in China — so for those of you who think, “Are NFTs dead in China because of recent China commentary?” I can tell you that it’s very much alive and well. Our legal and marketing teams who sit in China give us a governmental update on that.

Jay: That’s great to hear, actually. It’s good news.

Duc: Yeah, we were a little worried too, to be honest. Because we definitely started with our China market and dug deep into it. There’s a partnership that we were supposed to launch this week and we had to delay it, not because of the legislation, it was because corporate in Europe said, “We’re going to hold off into Q1” and that’s a very expensive luxury car brand, and we’re doing a special NFT drop for them. So unluckily, we were super excited about announcing it and then suddenly Global was like, “Hold on, we can’t do it.” I’m sure you guys know in North America, they’re running short on car chips, so literally there are no cars in the showrooms.

Jay: There are long waiting lines because of it.

Duc: Yeah, and then the other individual thing for us is our VR Gallery. I can’t even think of a marketplace that has done this level, which is, we’ve put a lot of money into this VR Gallery, it’s a gallery and museum. We’ll do both temporary and permanent displays at this space for longevity. In fact, some of our top artists, we’re actually going to announce next week. One top artist that we’re announcing literally agreed to work with us because we can do a retrospective on his career — twenty plus years in the pop art space — and it’ll be “the origins of so-and-so artist” for example. We have another private collection, again I can’t tell you what kind of art it is because those in the know would know very well what the collection is. But let’s just say it’s one of the biggest and sexiest collections out there of this type of art, like Sotheby’s-level quality, and they’ve been in talks with us for a while to have a permanent exhibit in our VR museum. To give you an idea, they’re already in permanent exhibits in major museums around the world.

Astropark: How is the Spores Network development going? Can you describe the current development status, market expansion plan, and expected applications?

Duc: So, physically we’re in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Shanghai. We also have business development in LA and Chicago. So that’s where we’re geographically set. The website is live and operational as I said; we’ve done a couple of million already in NFT game sales and art. We have almost a full year planned out for our fine arts side; basically every month we’ll have a major marquee featured show with a featured “big gun”. Actually on the art side we’ve been really lucky. We announced, for example, last month an artist named Carlos Luna James, and he was an up-and-comer when we announced that we had signed him for a drop, and then this month he actually dropped at Sotheby’s. We got the scoop, and he was like, “Guys I’m super loyal, I’ll come back for a drop next month with you.” And we were like, “Yep, we’re ready to go with you.”

There’s another artist we signed: Jasper Wong, who curates a group called the POW! WOW! group, quite a big name guy, he’s every hot street brand you can think of: Bape, LV, he’s done art for. And then he told me he’s doing one of the “big boys”, it’s either Sotheby’s or Christie’s, and then he’s also doing a drop I think at Makers coming up. So we’ve got good taste, we’re picking the right both up-and-comers and the experienced guys on the fine arts side.

Jay: We have no doubt about that.

Duc: So for the product development, we’re live on BSC right now; we’ve got staking features going on. We promise interoperability, and so that’s something that we’re trying to deliver. So we actually work closely with Polygon — very very closely; we talk to their leadership. And we also work, as you guys may know, during our launch we actually work quite closely with Cardano. So Polygon is on the path, I believe our new roadmap is going to come up online again in a week or two, and it will tell you where Polygon is, but I believe it’s only delayed by a couple of weeks. And Cardano, so you guys know how Cardano operates a little bit, it’s sometimes challenging, but again we were quite lucky to actually be connected to Cardano leadership, and so we were mentioned at the Cardano Summit three weeks ago by the head of NFTs. And I can’t disclose what’s going on, but basically we’re going to be very much a part of the Cardano path to NFTs.

Jay: Wow, thank you for sharing.

Duc: Yeah, we’re working really closely with them. They’re really good guys. We were quite lucky to connect really early on with Cardano and with Polygon. How many NFT projects get to speak to the leadership of the two major Layer 2s and Layer 1s?

Jay: Yeah, not many.

Duc: It’s rare. So what we’re really concentrating on on the product road map is really getting vertical, getting all the functionality of a great marketplace in place within Ethereum first, and Ethereum-related Layer 2 chains. And then we’ll start to move cross-chain. We actually spoke with Solana leadership as well about a month and a half ago, so that could be on our roadmap but we think that it’s better to go vertical. Get one chain really really right and then we’ll quickly move to the other chain. So interoperability is still very much a core mission for us.

The other thing I want to mention is we’re actually doing investing, and one of the questions that some exchanges were asking us was, “We know you’re an NFT marketplace, so the product roadmap doesn’t matter as much, it’s really the biz dev roadmap that matters”, which we 100% agree. I think that’s something that if you are a big fan of NFT marketplaces and where they need to go — yeah there’s a lot of DeFi solutions, there’s a lot of interoperability — but at the end of the day: biz dev, the content that you’re bringing to sell. It’s a store at the end of the day. A store is a store; you can have all the tech in the world but if you don’t have stuff on the shelves, no one’s buying.

Jay: Exactly, no one can do anything with it.

Duc: Yeah, and I think in the last iteration, when DeFi was big, product was really important, but with the rise of NFTs, what do you care about? You care about the floors of crypto punks. You care about the next hot PFP. You care about where generative art is going and who’s selling it. You care about where are the hot P2E games launching, which chain? What do their land sales look like? That’s what we’re trying to be aware of, and signing deals towards.

Jay: That sounds like a great roadmap. Honestly I can’t wait until that roadmap becomes available. I’m guessing you’re probably gonna talk about it on your…

Duc: On our Nifty show, yeah.

Jay: Okay, great. I would like to know if you’ve completed any security audits. What measures have been taken to protect the Spores community?

Duc: Yeah, that was already done a long time ago with Surtex, so we’re secure, no issues there.

Astropark: Great to know. And also another question, there is always a lot of talk right now in the NFT space, in the metaverse area, about land sales, transport pre-sales. So can you tell us something about this? If you have already taken this kind of opportunity, are you doing land sales on your platform anytime soon?

Duc: Yes, we already did it. So we were ahead of the curve, we knew that it was already happening because we’re already investing in other games ourselves. So we actually — even before we did our first land sale — already signed eight top games within the top 50 games on Blockchain DappRadar to come on to our platform, to our marketplace. So our first land sale was Netvrk, and so that land sale was a million dollars, which was done in like three days. That’s how fast that sold out. And then, Dan, their CEO came back a couple weeks later and was like, “Yo guys, do you want to do our NFT transport sales?” And we’re like, “Done.” And we actually just finished that sale, so we did another like 1.3 million, again within three or four days.

So the thesis is this — and full disclosure, I invest in Altcoins, I invest in land, I invest in PFPs, NFTs, so I try to understand the market as best I can, I’m in some secret Discord groups that you have to buy to get in, to know what’s hot or not. So our current thesis right now is that land is going to be huge. And there’s a way to think about land sales, to value land sales relative to one another, so it’s sort of a relative valuation metric that you can use. So if you use that metric you can get a good sense of which games are offering relatively cheap land, or land that will have a lot of upside. We love games where the land will give some level of rental revenue, as kind of a “royalty”. We think it’s gonna be big. Land by itself is still valuable, especially if it’s buildable. But again, some of the things that we invested in definitely have a roadmap to have some cash flow attached to it.

Jay: A little bit like real life in a sense.

Duc: Yeah, I mean we try to avoid death and taxes but surely they come up. Rental and land are basically the taxes of gaming. So for NFTs, we did a transport sale with Network that nearly sold out.

Astropark: I also heard about a partnership with Super BOOMi in China; can you tell us about that?

Duc: Okay that’s actually a different thing. So, just to finish off the land sale stuff, we’ve got three other games that we’ve lined up for land and NFT sales. That’ll come in the month of November. One of the games is one of the biggest games period, and is going to drop with us. So we’ve already said yes, both sides are good to go. We’re actually catching up during NFT.NYC to do some more talk and then it’ll happen. So I think that our goal is to have for our marketplace probably two games per month onto our platform for 2022. And really having a full division that supports games on Spores Network.

So, Astropark, you’re actually talking about an asset that’s within our animation.

Astropark: It’s a question that was dropped in the live stream that I can read to you: “When can we expect NFT Super BOOMi? Will it be a Global announcement in China? That is, the project creates a unique NFT together with Spores Network. Will this be a unique proposition for the market, only for Spores Network customers?” So can you tell us a bit about that?

Duc: Sure, so first for those of you who don’t know what Super BOOMi is, it’s an animation series in China that has five billion views on YouTube. The founder himself is a celebrity and is considered the Walt Disney of China right now. They actually just released the French version in Canada, because he’s Canadian-Chinese originally. So, huge following. What we’re doing with them is — how do I explain this — this is one of the things that we’re trying to shift the narrative of our company a bit, is that we’re not just signing an NFT deal, dropping a couple of NFTs, and moving on. Instead, we’re actually partnering as an NFT content creator with that asset. So with Super BOOMi, the CEO and I talked extensively about what they’re trying to do. And they want NFTs and digital goods to be an integral part of their sales funnel and their marketing funnel.

So as a result, we actually finished the artwork already, it was done this week, but our first drop will be a collection of their characters in different rarities. It’ll be a loot box style and have elements of a PFP to it. So we’ll do several drops. They’re actually associated with the NHL, so they have to deal with the NHL, and I can hint to you that we have a relationship with the next Olympics that’s coming up. People don’t understand, this is huge. It’s not their fault, it’s our fault. We teased it in a PR thing a week ago, and we actually met with their team yesterday as well as working with our global and regional PR teams to lay out a full campaign for the next 60 to 90 days.

We’re looking at games with them, and so that’s one of the things, is the narrative is going to slightly change since you guys were involved with us early on. The narrative is going to change to a place where we’ll actually green light games, we’ll actually green light movies and tv, and that’s the kind of deals that we’re putting together. So we’re really kind of shifting a little bit of our scope to be an entertainment and a media company and not just backed by an NFT marketplace at its core.

Jay: It’s a great idea actually for the market to be able to touch what nobody has touched before, so it’s quite interesting what you’re saying.

Duc: So that’s literally BOOMi and how we’re doing it, as it gets laid out we’ll show you in a nutshell why we are curated, and because we’re curated what can we really do. Because we’re signing — again these are not like one-off drops, these are multi-year deals where we have phases and we’re working. It’s not like, “Oh I’m going to sign Gronkowski, and we’re going to do one drop, make five million, and move on to the next celebrity.” No, we’re actually co-brand building and co-product building.

Jay: In a sense you’re ensuring business coming back to your platform.

Duc: We’re ensuring business, we’re picking up more royalties, we’re also then able to and willing to drop on other marketplaces as a part of our drop plan. So it’s not solely on Spores’ marketplace. However as to your last point, yes, there will definitely be exclusive content to Spores Network NFT marketplace and our token holders. We actually have an artist that we’re going to announce next week at NFT.NYC. He’s a titan in his space; he did a very big project about a memorial that just happened recently, that’s very famous. And so he’s going to create a special sort of Metakey with us, so that we’ll co-release. And so in future works that he does, people who have bought the Metakey will have access and will get freebies.

Jay: Right, very interesting. Astro, do we want to go with another live question?

Astropark: This is a nice question: “About how many chains will Spores Network be eligible to reach out? What is your 2021 ending in this regard? How many chains are we going to be in?”

Duc: So we will have BSC and Polygon by the end of 2021, and then Cardano should be in the first half of 2022. Again, we’re talking directly with Cardano leadership; two weeks ago I was in a call and I was like, “Yo, we need more Haskell engineers — can you help?”

Astropark: Yeah, it’s difficult to find Haskell developers.

Duc: Why not ask the guy who chose it, right? We were like, “Can you do it?” and they’re like, “We got you. We know the concern. You’re first in line.” So that’s the best we can ask for with regards to Cardano. I think after Cardano we are thinking about Solana because we spoke to their leadership already. It’s really about what product is out there. And the other thing is that we’re very much working closely with Cardano so we’ve made promises to them on working together. So once everything is tech done, you’re gonna see a lot of Cardano-specific NFT drops that’ll be done. And we’re very much their partner.

Astropark: Also another question: Spores allows loans with NFTs as collateral, so how do you price the NFT to know how much the owner can borrow? Did you integrate an oracle to understand how to price an NFT? Is that something that is already in place, or are you developing it?

Duc: So we’re looking at fractionalization, we’re looking at collateralization. In essence, collateralization is a pawn shop. I think NFT20 is doing a version of that right now, but collateralization is a little bit of a finger in the air, which direction does the wind blow. So we actually haven’t launched that utility because we’re trying to find out what the algorithm should look like, or are we gonna do pawn shop style and just do cents on the dollar. Is there really a demand for that quite yet? What I’m particularly seeing in the market is not quite yet. I’m in the Discord groups that are heavily trading, and the heavy heavy NFT traders are just making sure that they have solid liquidity. And actually the guys who could collateralize — you have to understand that if you’re gonna collateralize, what are you gonna collateralize? We would love to collateralize random PFP, but I won’t help you. Because random PFP is not worth anything. But if you wanted to collateralize Crypto Pump number 604 — well let’s say that’s worth two million bucks — the question is how liquid could it be really if we had to unload? So you might end up doing just something like 10 to 20 cents on the dollar. And if you do that, the question is does that guy care? Is that unliquid?

And actually we personally talked to some of the biggest — by the way here’s a nice little scoop for you: There are big hedge funds coming out and doing NFT investing. Straight up buying top generative pieces, top NFT art like the one of ones. We know that’s happening right now. If you do a little bit of digging, you’ll see that that group of buyers is quite small. So in that particular market, even though the high-end market is somewhat illiquid, I haven’t heard those guys really complain that they don’t have cash to buy. So it’s a little bit early. We’ve promised it on our roadmap, and I think we’re probably going to try to land some of those tools in the queue in the second half of 2022. It’s really about, what’s the demand out there? And so if the demand out there is saying we need “this this this” for biz dev or the commercialization side, then we’re going to go do that first, rather than the tech side. What I think about NFT DeFi tools is they’re basically liquidity tools, so if we don’t have other ways to get liquidity, we’ll look at it.

Astropark: I guess we’ve ended our session. We have time for another question. Jay do you have a question?

Jay: We have one last question then maybe a word just to end the session. Somebody asked here: “Spores is an NFT Swiss Army knife, so it aggregates many functions. Are there any functions seen elsewhere that are not available yet, that you haven’t spoken about up to now?

Duc: No, we’re pretty full. We can’t add more functions. No, I think for our community we’re big on play-to-earn games and we’re big on fine art, so those are the two areas we’re pushing pretty hard. The rest of Q4 and Q1, and then the other verticals we’ll start adding in right after. For example, sports. There’s no thesis that I particularly like right now within the sports segment, only because there are bigger 800 pound gorillas tackling it.

I can tell you guys, for example, I know the owner of the Brooklyn Nets; I’ve had conversations with that whole crew. I was like, “Guys, can you do me a good?” and they were like, “We can’t because of binding issues by the NBA.” And it’s like “ow”. They literally said to me, one of their heads was like, “Man, we can’t do it because we have to follow number one the NBA and number two Dapper is all over that.” And then they’re like, “You gotta go sign player by player.” Personally, we are reaching out to certain players who have an entertainment background already, they’re already in the game. But if it’s someone who’s like, “I’m just a baller” for example, we’re trying to avoid that. We know the UEFA license is up for bid. We were asked if we wanted a bid, and we’re like “not really”. So, not really sports. We’re not going to sell random web3 addresses, like true OpenSea style. I think the most recent phrasing of what we do is we’re “decentralizing pop culture”. What’s cool, what’s culture, we’ll do. Outside that, we won’t.

Jay: In a few minutes, we’ll end the conversation. Is there anything that we haven’t talked about today that you really wanted to tell us?

Duc: Yeah, I think first and foremost we’re moving to become sort of a trans-media company that has at its core an NFT marketplace. So you’re gonna see in the future that we’re getting into a lot of media type deals that’ll be very interesting and of course profitable for us. So it then brings longer streams of revenue in place. As I said, the BOOMi deal is not just a single drop, it’s a multi-year partnership. So you really have to think of us as building a network, a Netflix-type library, and we’ll start to stack it in.

Upcoming, we’re doing a big PR push in Japan. So we’re gonna finish up China in the next couple of weeks and then we’re gonna shift to Japan marketing. We actually just had a kickoff meeting this morning about Japan and then after that we’ll do Korea. But we’re also going back global, because we feel like in actuality we have a lot of traction in places like the US and parts of Europe, so we’re gonna go back out there and really do a lot of global marketing for our token.

And then the other cool thing is, we’ve signed this already, but we’re actually going to do a deal with this company called Forecast News. I don’t know if you guys know them, they’re like the CNN of Crypto. And so I’ll be one of their guest hosts on all things NFTs. So that’ll be a weekly show. We’ve also got an explainer series that’s going to come out so we’re going to provide a lot of thought leadership in the NFT space.

Jay: Perfect. Well, Duc, thank you so much for being with us today. You were very generous with your time and your explanations. You even gave us a few hints and exclusivities, so thanks again and we honestly hope to do this again. Maybe another update where you can tell us what’s going on and what you’ve built.

Duc: In the first half of 2022, we’ll do that.

Jay: Astro, any final words?

Astropark: It was a real pleasure to meet you and for your time also. And I hope everybody filled out the form with their questions. We tried to pick as many questions as possible. So thank you for watching guys, stay tuned because we always have a new AMA session with new prizes for you guys. Cheers, have a nice day!

Duc: Thanks Jay, thanks Astro for your time, appreciate it! Bye.