Launchpool AMA Recap — xG Studios
Welcome back to Launchpool’s AMA sessions!
This week we had Jim Harrison, founder of xG Studios, with us for an AMA session to discuss xG Studios, sports culture, and their vision for the crypto space.
For anyone who missed it live, here is the recap. If you want to know when our next AMA will be, please follow us on Twitter.
Guest: Jim Harrison (Founder of xG Studios)
Host: Mickie Ann Perez
Location: Launchpool Community Channel
Q: Can you please tell us a bit about yourself?
A: Yes, I’ve spent 15 years in social media developing social media for large sports organisations.
For example, I set up Manchester City TV, and also FA TV — the online channel for the England Team — and also covered two Rugby World Cups!
Whilst my background is in delivering large projects for sports and social media, over the last couple of years, I have become really interested in what web3 and digital collectables can bring to sports.
Q: Please also tell us a bit more about your Team.
A: The team behind xG Studios is made up of two sides really: experienced sports industry professionals, and people who have worked for high-profile sports organizations delivering complex projects.
We have also assembled a team of well-regarded crypto advisors to help steer the project, so we have insight into the world of crypto which requires quite a specialist knowledge.
There will be more announcements about the core team over the next few weeks but the plan is to develop a good, strong long-term project, where the best of sports knowledge and crypto advice are on the board.
We are also bringing in expert blockchain advice from Troon Technologies, which is a well respected blockchain development company most know for delivering Cryptoslam.
Q: In simple terms, please tell us what your project is about.
A: Web 3 has enabled the advent of digital collectables and it has truly taken off in sports like no other sector.
NBA TopShot has consistently been the most traded NFT, and now the NFL, ICC and the recent superfunding of Tom Brady’s Autograph shows how much digital collectables mean to sports fans.
In parallel, games like Axie Infinity have redefined the idea of play-to-earn, where online activity generates collectable and tradable rewards for online gamers.
xG is a completely new concept to bring web 3 and real-life sports participation together.
It’s Play-To-Earn but in real life; as amateur athletes real-world sporting performances are rewarded with NFTs and tokens.
If you score a goal at your local Sunday League football match or achieve a personal best at a 10k run for example, you will be rewarded with a personalised NFT and xG to mark the occasion.
Athletes can hold these NFTs, building a collection with genuine personal meaning, a nostalgic value and maybe even monetary value for the occasion when a player goes pro.
Or trade them on our marketplace
The xG marketplace will feature regular drops of authentic football culture NFTs. These drops are above and beyond the NFT rewards players receive for their IRL achievements.
Q: Is football the main sports you’re looking into?
A: Great question. As football is the world’s largest sport, and has the most passionate communities, we want to focus on that first.
We are also looking at the sport of running in parallel.
However, once we have a working protocol, our plan is to be able to adapt the protocol for any sport be it basketball, badminton, etc.
The scale of the opportunity is quite significant, however we will start with football and running.
Sorry, soccer for any American Football fans!
Q: Can you tell us a bit more on the token? In terms of token utility, what else does it offer its token holders?
A: The xG token provides utility for all of our playing community, who can collect tokens for taking part, regardless of their ability or level of success. Holding xG comes with a range of benefits, including marketplace access for regular drops of exclusive, sports-relevant NFTs and other rewards.
The xG mission is to drive participation and to make playing sport more fun, both individually and as a team. The addition of Metaverse ready rewards for a generation; for whom ownership of digital assets is the norm, takes the experience of sport into our digital lives in a complementary and rewarding way.
xG also unlocks a new economy for grass-roots sports, with smart contracts providing athletes ownership of their moments.
We are also looking to develop a staking benefit for the protocol, especially for admins and officials who will be rewarded for contributing to the protocol.
Q: Can you share with your tokenomics model with us. How do you intend to offer your tokens to the public?
A: Yes, this project is absolutely a community driven project. In time the ambition would be for xG to be entirely community governed and owned.
Regards the tokenomics , we are aiming for a minimum of $1mil raised via pre-seed, seed, and pre-IDO.
Pre-seed & seed on Launchpool Labs are confirmed and Pre-IDO (private round) on Launchpool is confirmed.
Q: Can you share any future plans beyond this year with us? What milestones have you achieved thus far and what are your upcoming plans?
A: Well, we have just posted our initial litepaper here
And as part of that there is the roadmap, however the plan for this year is to prototype the protocol and get real-world user feedback.
We also have an exciting decision to make about which blockchain would work best for the project. We are mindful that this project is about on-boarding large numbers of real-world (non-crypto) people to potentially their first NFTs, so simplicity and user-friendliness will be key. We’ll share that decision here in the Launchpool Telegram as soon as we confirm!
Q: Is there any exclusive information you can share with our community today?
A: Well, we’re more than excited to bring the project to the Community. We think it will be a genuine game-changer for how people will view and use NFTs, and has the potential to be a really positive and uplifting project. I think the Launchpool Community will recognise that and see the potential scale for it as well.
In terms of exclusive information, I’ll have to ask people to hold on while we finalise some agreements…all of which we will post here!
COMMUNITY QUESTIONS
Q: How do you choose the players and athletes that can or are allowed to create personalized NFTs?
A: In the short-term, a player will have to be part of a league…so there is data about them available.
Q: How does the protocol/platform aim to generate revenue?
A: You have to keep in mind that a key part of xG is an NFT marketplace, where we not only develop our own NFT drops, but we have big plans to take football culture into the metaverse, and strike up partnerships with all sorts of real-world sporting and metaverse entities. So revenue generation comes from NFT sales in the marketplace.
Q: Do you also envisage NFT collaborations with Premier League stars? Similar to Ethernity.
A: We won’t be rewarding professional players with xG. It is focused on grass-roots participants but we will absolutely look to reward xG token-holding athletes with NFT collaborations from all sorts of exciting sporting and metaverse partnerships!
Q: What is the meaning of xG?
A: xG stands for Expected Goals and it is a new way of looking at a player’s impact on a game.
SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Studios_xG
Telegram: https://t.me/xg_studios
Discord Community: https://discord.gg/ed2ng7nh
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).
