AMA Recap — Spores Network x Epid Community
🗓 Date: 19th August 2 PM UTC | 9 PM (GMT +7)
🏚Venue For AMA: @EPID_Community
💰Reward Pool: 100$
🤵Guest Speaker: DUC LUU — Chairman
INTRODUCTION :
Q1. Could you briefly introduce yourself as well as your project?
Duc Luu:
I come from an Edtech, Proptech, and marketplace POV: I 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 valuations. I spent the next two years as Chief Strategy Officer looking at Edtech M&A and incubation opportunities worldwide.
The last two years I moved back to my homeland of Vietnam to build the country. I 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 I 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. I am a contributor writer for Vietcetera, TechinAsia, and keynote speaker in Edtech, Proptech, and now Crypto.
Eric and I met during our time working at the Proptech and decided that Blockchain and NFTs are our true passion and started Spores together.
Spores is an Asia-premier NFT marketplace with supported De-Fi & Interoperability Tools
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
An interoperable NFT Defi platform is the foundation of the future of digital “metaverse” that we envision, it allows for frictionless and borderless NFTs economies transactions to take place
Q2. What makes the SPORES project stand out more than the projects in the same direction at the moment?
Duc Luu:
How Spores Differentiates:
1. NFT Marketplace segmentation: 5 Main Verticals: Gaming, Film/TV/Music, Fine Art, Influencers, Animation/Anime; upper-mid to luxury price points for all verticals except for Gaming where seek to be the Steam for Blockchain Games.
2. Asia-centric NFT Marketplace promotes Asian artists and content while also bringing international artists and content to Asian audiences. As a result, we have deep buyer/seller bases and media support across North Asia (China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan), and Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, etc.)
3. Technical innovation in DeFi and cross-chain implementation, including:
- Gamified royalty sharing: Royalty sharing for NFT creators, incentives for users & traders with transaction mining
- T-DeFi: Fractionalizing multiple NFTs, utilizing LP mining on DEXes, lending & staking, to improve overall liquidity
- Batch minting & transfer: Bundles of NFTs can be minted and transferred with minimal fees
- Cross-chain trading: NFT swaps & wrapping across major blockchains (Ethereum, BSC, Polkadot) — erasing market fragmentations
Q3. What are the memorable milestones of SPORES in the research and development process?
Duc Luu:
Our MVP Beta Public Test-net was released, bug bounty program is on-going
Our mainnet is projected to release this quarter
We have announced a new Chief Content Officer — Mr. Allen Dam. Allen is a veteran Hollywood producer that has over 20 years of track records and an extensive network in the entertainment industry.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1378045/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
https://medium.com/spores-network/spores-introduces-new-chief-content-officer-3ad11197dc6b
We signed partnership with Blackdove — Digital Canvas NFT Artwork Displays, that now we will be able to offer our top NFT buyers the ability to also buy a display canvas to hang in their homes to showcase their awesome NFTs.
We have announced our creators line up including legendary game designer American Mcgee (game designer of Doom 2, Quake, Quake 2, and creator of American Mcgee’s Alice released by EA)
🔸Find out more:
Yesterday we announced a new creator, Jasper Wong, a famous artist, designer, and curator best known for his art that is a unique clash of Asian-influenced pop culture. Jasper is the creator and lead director of Pow! Wow! Worldwide, which is a non-profit organization of contemporary artists committed to community enrichment. Pow WoW instagram has over 350k of followers
🔸Read more on how Jasper Wong will enrich Spores’ portfolio with his upcoming NFT drop on the Spores marketplace:
TWITTER QUESTIONS :
Q1. “From @PKragak
Most projects are now abandoned in the middle of their operations due to a lack of sustainability and incapacity to support expansion in a market that is wildly shifting. How will Spores Network be able to deal with market fluctuations in an efficient manner?”
Duc Luu:
1. Spores’ Market Opinion: don’t worry about market fluctuations. Invest in good projects and good teams and the returns will follow. We think about building for the long term and for our community. Our returns will follow.
2. However, Spores Network and our founders are building Spores for the long term, which means a hyper-focus on community and customer-centricity.
3. Community: We work hard to recruit, engage with, and empower our community, #SporesWarriors, #SporesArmy, to speak and act on our behalf. In order to do so, we empower our community in the following ways:
- Monthly Live AMAs are hosted on That Nifty Show (LINK) to directly engage with our community, updating them on current and future milestones, answering questions, and listening to suggestions for future implementation.
- Multiple Telegram Channels to address major languages and geographies: Links
- Multiple Discord Channels to allow fans to deep dive into their favorite vertical and engage directly with artists and content IP
- Spores Ambassadors recruited, supported, and incentivized to encourage the development of our community as well as suggest artists, creators, and content IP be NFTed
- Spores Leaders such as VCs, KOLs, operating and venture partners of Spores Capital who regularly voice their support for Spores across their own social network channels
4. Customer Centricity: We believe in customer centricity at our very core. As a result, much of our operations seek to garner input from our customers to optimize processes, choose and sell products and services, and grow our community and global audience. For example, we regularly poll our base on product/service initiatives, tech feature integration, and marketing campaign targeting. We also implement AI-powered social listening to keep our company close to market sentiment.
Join our Spores Vietnam chat! https://t.me/spores_Vietnam
we’re super proud that we’re a Vietnamese team!
our goal is to hit 100,000 Vietnamese community members!
help us get there!
Q2. “From @skaop123
Each project has interesting stories before it is created. So can you tell people about the story that gave you the motivation to build and develop a great project like yours?”
Duc Luu:
March 2021, Eric and I were unhappily working for a proptech company funded and managed by Vietnam’s top two billionaires. Not only were we quickly aware of each other’s respective talents (Duc was COO in charge of Operations and Strategy, Eric did the quantitative analysis and real estate options creation for the real estate fintech division), but we were acutely aware that traditional companies, no matter how successful, we're unable to overcome Clayton Christiansen’s theory of disruptive innovation. Fueled by a desire to stake our own futures on our own terms, we sought to innovate in the crypto space just when the NFT sector was defining itself as a significant revenue driver and innovator even within crypto and blockchain.
While we both complemented one another with strengths in business building and centralized financial hedge fund trading, we felt that phase 1 of our master plan began with building a world-class NFT marketplace, whose differentiation we have spoken about in great detail. Luckily, we’ve been able to bring together a great team of employees, VCs, and business partners who share our vision and goals. We have a long and difficult journey ahead of us and seek your support to help us build a creator-centric, frictionless, borderless, and community-driven ecosystem.
Can you guess who the billionaires are? hehehe.
Q3. “From @KiyokoSumaru
The manga and anime market is growing by leaps and bounds in the last decade, due to the fact that it has been digitized and encompassed not only Japan but almost all parts of the world, how does SPORES NETWORK plan to take advantage of this great?”
Duc Luu:
As an Asia-centric NFT marketplace, we understand and embrace the popularity of animation, anime, manga, and comics. Our business development teams are scouring all sources to bring this important vertical to NFT lovers. We look to partner with creators, animation studios, distributors with IP rights to bring our NFT interpretations of such famous and rising star’s intellectual property. In the coming weeks and months, we will be able to share our signed collaborations with content from China, Japan, Korea, and the USA.
Q4. “From @LinhHong211
In mid-August Spores Ambassador Program is coming. Can you tell us what criteria does one must possess in order to become Spores Ambassador? What duties & role does Spore Ambassador should do to the community?”
Duc Luu:
We’re excited to announce that we’re finally ready to take our Spores Army to the moon 🚀🚀🚀
Introducing… Spores Warriors — Builders of the new digital world
As a Spores Warrior, you will be the voice, the advocate for a decentralized, frictionless, borderless, and people-centric future with the decentralization of ownership and freedom redistribution of capital.
Read more about the Spores Ambassador Program here: https://spores.link/2UjYFdy
At Spores Network, we have a fundamental belief that anyone can be an “” influencer,” as long as you are a believer of our project and our vision.
So if you are:
✔️ Knowledgable about the cryptoverse
✔️ Understands Spores vision and mission
✔️ Community-centric
✔️ Have a passion for creativity & content creation
✔️ Wanting to be a part of the Spores journey, not just as an investor, but also as a believer and advocate
We have many roles and responsibilities for our ambassadors to support including content creation, community management, social media, platform testing,… So if you’re interested, please fill out this form to apply for the Spores Ambassador Program: https://spores.xperx.ai/ambassador-apply
We have Open Registration from August 16th to August 27th!
Q5. “From @CaMapCon1436567
How does the team perceive retail investors SPORES token holders? Where do you see value in ‘us’ and what could we do to support your work most effectively?”
Duc Luu:
“To better incentivize our retail investors, we’re excited to announce that our long-awaited SPO/ETH LP Staking Program is finally here!
Our program will not only incentivize more liquidity providers to add liquidity into the SPO-ETH liquidity pool but will also reduce the slippage for SPO traders and holders, benefiting both liquidity providers as well as traders.
With this program, we’re looking to encourage the community to participate in $SPO trading, which will ultimately enhance our on-chain metric, as well as granting you the opportunity to earn rewards when trading the SPO/ETH pair.
Specifically, we’re putting aside 600,000 tokens (worth 50,000 USD at the time of writing this) as staking rewards for the 1st month of the program.
Please read more at: https://spores.medium.com/introducing-spores-spo-lp-staking-program-202e15f60647"
LIVE AMA QUESTIONS :
Q1: @angkhoa
Every project innovators are always on the edge of giving the positive and good features of their project, but can you kindly give few killer features of your project to investors?
Duc Luu:
Spores Network: A blockchain agnostic DeFi-powered NFT marketplace defining decentralized pop culture
It chooses to be primarily Asian-centric and is willing to focus on and promote industries with heavy Asian participation such as:
Digital Fine Art — we are bringing back elements of the gallery experience and focusing on upper-mid-end to high-end price points. Our curated artists will have had a solid reputation in the digital art or the commercial art world.
Gaming — we want to be the number one marketplace for in-game items and digital art for blockchain and traditional games, where gamers of all games can trade their collectibles.
Animation/Anime — we are huge fans of animation and anime and look to work with legends and top animators to NFT publish their archives, new work, or even commission work/projects that Spores will own and self-publish.
Celebrity — Film/TV/Music is a cultural intersection that NFTs will revolutionize. We will work with celebrities, influencers, musicians, movie studios, and music publishers to NFT archival music as well as the newest releases. Hollywood, Bollywood, China Media, K-Pop, we’re all in.
e-Sports — We believe that e-sports is hottest new arena of sports and we’re excited to support stars and team in this field through special NFT collaborations as well as sponsorships of new blockchain games.
Q2: @AAaAAAAA0AA0
Could you describe to me where can I buy $ tokens from right now and is it listed on any exchanges?
Duc Luu:
Uniswap, then Gate, KuCoin, BSC within this year.
Q3: @vothuhoa
What are the ways that your project generates profit / revenue to sustain your project and what is its revenue model? How can it be mutually beneficial for both the investor and your project?
Duc Luu:
Gaming is a very high potential area and one of the verticals that we are focusing on, we aim to build a platform that lists in-game assets of many blockchain games, supports blockchain gaming from launching, attracting audiences to payment and marketing. We have already signed a number of gaming partners that will be listing their in-game items on our platform when we go live later in Q3, we look to work with top 100 games in the blockchain space and bring their items all onto our platform.
E-sports is an area that is almost brand new for NFTs space, we are working with both teams and top e-sports players to bring them onto our platform to issue NFTs. At the moment we are working with some of the top E-sports players to bring onto our platform, many of them are amongst the best E-sports players in the world. We are talking players that have millions of followers across multiple social channels, and one interesting thing is that if there is one industry that shares very similar user base with crypto that would be E-sports, so we expect a lot of cross synergies in term of bringing a lot of non-crypto users onto crypto and onto our NFT marketplace.
Q4: @chidai1412
What are the main features of the Project that make it easy for users to see the difference in the way it works and what novel features are better than other projects? What advantages and competitive factors make you confident to dominate the DeFi market in the near future?
Duc Luu:
Spores Network: A blockchain agnostic DeFi-powered NFT marketplace defining decentralized pop culture
It chooses to be primarily Asian-centric and is willing to focus on and promote industries with heavy Asian participation such as:
Digital Fine Art — we are bringing back elements of the gallery experience and focusing on upper-mid-end to high-end price points. Our curated artists will have had a solid reputation in the digital art or the commercial art world.
Gaming — we want to be the number one marketplace for in-game items and digital art for blockchain and traditional games, where gamers of all games can trade their collectibles.
Animation/Anime — we are huge fans of animation and anime and look to work with legends and top animators to NFT publish their archives, new work, or even commission work/projects that Spores will own and self-publish.
Celebrity — Film/TV/Music are a culture intersection that NFTs will revolutionize. We will work with celebrities, influencers, musicians, movie studios and music publishers to NFT archival music as well as the newest releases. Hollywood, Bollywood, China Media, K-Pop, we’re all in.
e-Sports — We believe that e-sports is hottest new arena of sports and we’re excited to support stars and team in this field through special NFT collaborations as well as sponsorships of new blockchain games.
Q5: @Ariaww44
Do you have AUDIT certificates, or are you working to AUDIT your project, to make it more secure and reliable?
Duc Luu:
Yes, we’ve already passed security audits with Certik.
SPO token is the native token of Spores Platform is designed for community governance and DeFi utilization with NFT-creator-centricity and DeFi-community-driven purpose.
SPO is used to incentivize NFT creators, buyers, agents, and liquidity providers across the ecosystem. We will have an option for staking, platform fee discount, as well as exclusive access to NFT, drops for token holders…
The long-term increase in demand will come with amazing content we will be bringing to our platform in the upcoming months.
