Launchpool AMA Recap — xG Studios
Launchpool & xG Studios AMA Summary
Place: Launchpool Official Telegram Community
Date & Time: Monday 28th March, 13:00 UTC
Guests: Jim Harrison and Neil Cole, Co-Founders of xG Studios
Host: Mickie (Launchpool Team)
Launchpool was excited to host Jim Harrison and Neil Cole, Co-Founders of xG Studios for an interactive Ask-Me-Anything session with the Launchpool Community. This AMA comes in anticipation of the xG Studios weeklong Allocation Mining Event on Launchpool from Monday 28th March 2022. The session lasted approximately 1hr, and consisted of questions from the Launchpool Team as well as questions from the Community.
Questions from the Launchpool Team
Mickie:
Hello and Welcome all LPOOLers,
As many in our Community already know, today we have an AMA session with Jim Harrison and Neil Cole, Co-Founders of XG Studios.
xG rewards athletes’ real world sports participation with personalised digital collectibles and the xG utility token. Starting with grass-roots football, athletes will be rewarded for their real-life sports performance with NFTs and the xG utility token.
As always, the chat will be muted for roughly 30 mins whilst we ask the pre-prepared questions. After this, we will open up to questions from the Community for another 15 mins. We will also enable “Slow Mode” for all questions.
Welcome, Jim and Neil!
Jim Harrison: Hi there, everyone!
Neil Cole: Hi all, thanks for having us!
Mickie: Great to have you both here. Can you please tell us a bit about yourselves?
Neil Cole: Ok I’ll kick it off Jim…I was a TV producer & programme maker, then moved into digital in 2009, working at Manchester City, relaunching City TV as a digital first proposition. We did a few innovative things — made some fun, behind the scenes content to really maximize platforms like YouTube to grow online communities.
Then I’ve spent the last 10yrs as a creative strategy / content director at a renowned sports agency, working for brands like Real Madrid, the ICC, Gran Turismo, SailGP, F1 — a broad range of projects spanning content & social it’s been a decade of massive change.
Jim…
Jim Harrison: Thanks, Neil…Well, like you I started in TV at Sky and Endemol then I met Neil when we set up Manchester City TV. I was then responsible for producing and distributing social media for large sports organizations like the FA (the England Team) and covered two Rugby World Cups — which in 2019 generated over 2bn views on platforms like Snapchat & TikTok.
So we’ve spent a lot of time delivering large Web2 projects in sports & social media…and have now become really interested in what Web3 and digital collectibles can bring to sports.
Mickie: Great experiences you got there! Please also tell us a bit more about your Team.
Neil Cole: Mieszko Manijak is our CTO — he’s a full stack developer who’s built numerous blockchain products, DeFi and consumer dapps. He’s the smart one — and we’re very lucky to have him.
Jim Harrison: Yes, and Josh Parr is our social media & community manager, who’s worked in sport and is very Web3 savvy. He has a very entrepreneurial background, having grown a number of sports social media channels and sold them on to digital publishers.
Neil Cole: We’re also working with Troon Technologies — they are pretty awesome. Seasoned blockchain developers who have built things like CryptoSlam.io and lgnd.art marketplace — and we are working with their team developing our MVP at the moment.
Jim Harrison: It’s a great crew to be working with!
Mickie: Looks like it! Can you tell us how xG Studios came about?
Jim Harrison: Neil, I’ll let you start!
Neil Cole: Ok
So… we were working for big sports federations — and many of them have a problem — which is how to get people to keep joining and participating in their sports.
So we were making videos with famous athletes to get people signing up to play, or to attract female players to a sport… and videos and marketing hype was all we could offer in Web2.
So it got us thinking about how Web3 can provide a whole range of new engaging ways to reward and incentivise real-life players … and so we developed xG as a response to that need.
Jim Harrison: Yes, and recently we’ve seen play-to-earn pioneers Yield Guild Games talk about how the space is going to evolve and incorporate real world activities such as learning, education — as well as physical activity and sports so we’re excited to be developing in an area that is clearly on the minds of some pretty serious players!
Mickie: Ok great, so in simple terms please tell us what your project is about? How does it work? Is this strictly for those who are into sports?
Neil Cole: Well, xG rewards athletes’ real world sports participation with personalised digital collectibles and the xG utility token. So if you score a goal, or run a 10k — you’ll get a suitably impressive personalized NFT Reward to add to your collection.
The idea is that we celebrate and encourage grass-roots sports activity by creating new digital experiences for players and athletes.
Jim Harrison: Rewards will be generated by data sourced from a validation process or a sports partner’s API and airdropped to athletes, who can build their collection. You can think of xG as a collecting experience for athletes — like NBA Topshot — but for your own performance-related moments — with a collecting journey unfolding alongside your irl activity.
And actually you can check out our promo video here if you haven’t seen it:
Mickie: Looks really exciting. So how exactly are rewards generated? Can you elaborate on that a little bit.
Neil Cole: Well, we won’t be working with any leagues whose results aren’t available. So all data will be validated against the official sources. As well as that, we’re developing a way for teams themselves to earn xG by contributing data to our platform. to the xG protocol.
Jim Harrison: Well… we don’t want to give our secret sauce away too publicly but just think of a multi-sig wallet. So, after a game, players from both sides have to ‘sign’ and agree the data (result, scorers, etc). And for sports like running, we’ll take race data from a partners API (e.g. timing data) so that’s pretty straight-forward.
Mickie: And it doesn’t stop there, right? Did you say there were gamified layers for players on top of this?
Jim Harrison: Well, yes, as well as stacking your NFTs for your wins and goals. We’re building a gamified collecting experience that adds a bit of magic on top of that core collecting experience. We want to create a multitude of ways for athletes of all levels to achieve milestones or unlock rewards for challenges.
Mickie: Well, that sounds like A LOT of fun and a big vision to build towards. But the problem you’re trying to solve is really about incentivising sports participation, right?
Neil Cole: Absolutely. Fundamentally, it’s our mission to encourage grassroots sporting activity and to get people involved and to keep them involved playing sport. Web3 provides the infrastructure to create an incentive and reward loop between physical activity and digital experience to help us achieve that ambition. When we create a really engaging digital collecting experience that provides ownership and is valued by our community of athletes — then we’ve got a great chance of realising this goal.
Jim Harrison: And it’s important to say participation sport has such a massive impact on the health of the nation.
Mickie: I agree with you on this one. #MoveToEarn
Jim Harrison: Like here in the UK, it disproportionately benefits people from lower socio-economic groups - both in health, wellbeing and in economic terms. So xG it’s something we believe can play a part in making a positive difference as well — it’s a social impact project as much as a Web3 one!
Mickie: While it is still early on, in terms of token utility, what can token holders expect? How does the token fit into the product experience?
Neil Cole: Great question. The token is central to the xG experience — both for early holders and for the athletes who accrue a holding from their sporting activity once we arenlive. There’s lots of benefits.
Holding xG confers access rights to the xG marketplace. xG can be used as currency and receive discounts in the xG marketplace. The quantity of xG held will be used to determine access and priority levels for drops — with tiers of exclusivity.
For example, xG holders with a certain threshold of xG can access the most exclusive and rare drops and be eligible for selection for randomised community perks, such as VIP match experiences and training sessions for their team.
Jim Harrison: Yes, the token grants access rights to the xG community, including gated Discord channels and Metaverse meetups. It also provides loyalty card-like access to unique NFTs, community opportunities, events, part of the xG ecosystem. And xG token holders can benefit from exposure to partner products, merchandise, features, and exclusive consumer goods.
Mickie: Woah, reading the benefits ~ looks like it’s a long list of great opportunities! Tell us about your tokenomics model. What is the estimated total target raise?
Jim Harrison: We’re basically following the Launchpool Labs incubator process and are going into our Seed round now. We’re aiming for a min. of $1m raised via pre-Seed, Seed, and Private rounds… and looking to raise $2m overall. Launchpool — who have been a great partner btw — will be raising the pre-Seed, Seed and a pre-IDO in the private round.
And we’re also thinking about a public-IDO — but watch this space!
We are having some interesting discussions which mean that we may be broadening that out, but can’t reveal too much yet.
Mickie: Okay…that’s a…cliff hanger right there. Haha! Are you going to sell NFTs as well as the token?
Jim Harrison: NFTs? Yes! As xG is all about rewarding players and athletes with NFTs we’re going to be creating NFTs that resonate. We will make some of these available on our marketplace as well.
Mickie: Can you tell us more about these NFTs?
Neil: Well, we’ll announce it later this week properly but we can give the Launchpool Community a bit of Alpha and a sneak peak.
we are soon to announce…
That we are working with the team who created the super-successful Adidas ‘Into the Metaverse’ drop, which was a collab with Bored Ape Yacht Club and Punks Comic!
So that’s where our thinking is, players will get NFTs like that which will resonate and take holders into this collecting world we’re creating, so they’ll have secondary market value too.
Mickie: I see what you did there.👏 For general roadmap review: please share with us what the roadmap will look like, and the stage of the MVP development process you are currently at.
Jim Harrison: So… this year is all about tech development and prototyping.
We’ve already started building with Troon — which is great and we’ll have prototypes ready for Q3 that we can road-test with athletes and leagues
After that we’ll start expanding properly in terms of scale and more teams, more leagues, more geographic regions and more sports.
Neil Cole: It’s probably useful to think of our roadmap as two main tracks — the first is that relationship with sport in real life. As described by Jim, the tech product that allows that is coming together.
And in terms of the other part of the roadmap, we have the digital experience we’re creating: NFT design etc… where holding and collecting xG rewards and the xG token unlocks a gamified layer.
Long term, we’re excited by the prospect that your NFT reward assets can contribute to building something uniquely yours, that can have identity and status value connected to your real world performance.
Say it Jim…
Jim Harrison: Can I? A Metaverse status and identity created by your real-world athletic performance!
Mickie: I bet our Community is excited with everything! Tell us about how you see xG looking when it is live, working with athletes?
Neil Cole: Sure thing…Well on the one hand you can look at xG as a collecting experience for athletes like NBA Topshot but for your own performance-related moments with a collecting journey unfolding alongside your IRL activity.
For the xG brand, we essentially see xG as operating like a publisher, but serving an already huge participation sports community. We’re not community building from ground zero — but we’re offering a shared experience for all these athletes to get additional value from taking part in sport.
And so the content and social world we’re building around xG is going to be pretty dynamic — and galvanize the athlete community around content and their shared collecting and playing experience.
Mickie: And as a recap for people, what does XG stands for?
Neil Cole: xG is a metric used in football performance analysis, it means: “Expected Goals”
Maybe just to wrap this bit up, as we come from a content and community background — that’s an area we feel pretty excited and confident about bringing to life.
Mickie: Can’t wait for more great stuff from you guys. xG Tweeted last week about a Survey you had done with 500 grass-roots football players — can you tell us more?
Jim Harrison: Yes, we commissioned a survey about players’ attitudes to Web3 and crypto with a company called Pitchero. The results were really interesting as there was a clear lack of knowledge and misunderstanding about Web3.
A fair amount of negativity as quite a few of players see NFTs as just money-grabbing from the big clubs. However, when we asked players who are “not negative” towards NFTs about getting them for on-pitch activity - they loved the idea! So we are pretty confident as Web 3 grows, and when the Premier League launches collectibles people will start to grasp NFTs and we’ll be in a great space!
Neil Cole: Here’s the link featuring the survey
Mickie: Is there any exclusive information you can share with our Community today?
Neil Cole: Well yes, 3pm today check out the xG Twitter and Telegram at if you want some real alpha. We have our first ‘football player’ signing. That’s all we can say for now. Announcement at 3pm across our channels.
Jim Harrison: Also, later in the week, we’ll be announcing which Blockchain we will be building on so look out for that !
Mickie: How can the Community get involved? Please share with us the links to your social media pages.
Neil Cole: Well we like to hear from our Community so please do get involved in Telegram as we genuinely like to hear from people, particularly potential investors — and we are quite active in there. Questions and input on the project always appreciated.
And then yes, follow on Twitter for the news and updates and we’ll be promoting Discord as we start to actually onboarding players.
Mickie: Great! Thank you Jim and Neil for sharing this information with our Community.
I will now open up the Community to questions from the floor. Please be reminded that we have “Slow Mode” enabled and will only be answering questions related to xG Studios. Any other questions can be answered in our 24hr dedicated Support Chat.
The Floor is Now Open❗
Questions from the Launchpool Community
Question: About your NFTs, can you explain further about the utilities of these NFTs within your platform? Are they meant to be held as simple collectibles or will they have additional benefits?
Neil Cole: Thanks, good question. The Lite paper covers the full outline:
But worth adding that the gamified experience means we will unlock lots of real world and Metaverse experiences for athletes that reach certain collecting milestones.
Question: There is always Competition in DeFi/NFT Technology. How do you plan to be at the forefront of innovative Platform of NFT Technology. Can you share some of the unique features of your project!
Neil Cole: Thanks, this is true. We plan to make a product that wows our community of real world athletes and players. There’s nothing currently out in the market like this that makes their experience one that enhances their enjoyment of sport. It comes with lots of interesting challenges but we have a great team and the progress is very exciting.
Question: Are you looking for a long-term vision? How will you reach it?
Jim Harrison: Our long-term goal is to be the go-to platform for sports performance NFTs. All sports, all regions. We are starting with Football (world’s biggest sport) and running — and once we have those real-world examples we will expand to new sports and new regions.
Question: What are the DEXs and CEXs are you considering on having a partnership with?
Neil Cole: We’ve got many announcements over the coming week and this is one that we’ll be addressing soon. Please stay tuned.
Question: Will the xG platform be available on mobile too?
Jim Harrison: Well yes, definitely! However, funnily enough we are talking about that with Troon at the moment. We are considering making an app but a mobile friendly web dapp will probably our launch proposition.
Question: Will people be able to create their own NFT in XG or is the NFT reward already built in?
Neil Cole: The NFT Reward is generated by your sporting activity and performance related achievements. So players will receive goals, wins etc and runners celebrate their marathons with an xG Reward.
Mickie: If the Community has any more questions or if a question is unanswered here, please hop on over to the xG Studios Community to have it answered.
Mickie: Again, thank you Jim and Neil for your time and sharing all the info. We can’t wait for what’s ahead!
Jim Harrison: Thanks for hosting Mickie.
Neil Cole: Much appreciated, enjoyed it Mickie. Thank you everyone!
Mickie: Excellent. Thanks to everyone that participated!
This will be the end of our AMA.
About xG Studios
xG® rewards athletes’ real world sports participation with personalised digital collectibles and the xG® utility token.
We want to celebrate and encourage grass-roots sports activity by creating new digital experiences for players and athletes of all levels.
About Launchpool Labs
#beyourownVC with Launchpool Labs! Join the Launchpool Labs Investor Club, and get access to off-the-market exclusive allocations in the projects we incubate every quarter. Access offers with your NFT membership card (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond), stake $LPOOL, and mine an allocation.
High risk — high reward.
Launchpool Labs is a chain agnostic incubator for teams, builders, universities, & developer hubs, where teams can build MVP (minimum viable product) and MVC (minimum viable community).
