← Markets Outlook
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- [00:00]
A
For UFC, they run 44 events every year. 12 of them are tent pole events like pay per views. We have games you can play in right now. Pick the fighter that wins and stake your fight tokens and make sure that you get a booster. Things like that are happening right now. So there's a new event for you to do every week with our ecosystem. That's why it's so important for us to have that special partnership with ufc.
- [00:30]
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- [01:49]
A
What's up? Hi Jen.
- [01:50]
B
We're talking all about crypto and combat and I gotta say this is a narrative that that's kind of been around in the industry for a while. Let's start here. What do you think makes crypto and fighting or crypto and sports good partners?
- [02:07]
A
Well, look at the demographic. It's predominantly male. It's high entertainment value. The age demographic is 20 to 40 for both the fight combat sport audience and for crypto overall. That's a great overlap. Both entities have a global presence. So our goal is to expand all of crypto from a lake into an ocean by bringing on the community 700 million fight fans for the UFC and you know, multiple over a billion dollars in sale year after year. It's a great sport. All the fight fans that watch UFC are already used to seeing Crypto.com in every fighter's jersey, so they're very curious about crypto. Fight idea is a great way to onboard this masses into web3 space. We've been working on this for over a year. We are bringing the fight fan base on chain and the way we're going to do that is through fight id. It's your identity as a fight and sports fan. It's your reputation for doing cool things on chain and ownership where you get to own either tokens, digital collectibles and other things. It's a way of converting spectators into stakeholders.
- [03:17]
B
What does it mean to convert spectators into stakeholders and what does it mean to bring the fight community and the fight economy on chain practically? Like, why does it need to be on chain?
- [03:27]
A
Well, first of all, I'll say that we've already been hosting community events for fight fans who also buy digital collectibles, invest in tokens and it's a great crowd. We already have, thousands of people have already joined FightID. We are going to have, I think in the future everybody will have a fight ID in the same way that everyone's on LinkedIn or X. The way to do that is it's really easy, takes one minute, go to Fight id, create an account immediately, can link up your socials, join our discord. And that's where all the community stuff happens. People will come to our fights, they hang out with each other, sometimes watch fights together. It's a great community just to belong into. And you get airdropped for doing cool things on chain like completing quests like collecting digital merchandise or physical things and all kinds of other cool activations.
- [04:15]
B
There have been communities, brands, games that have tried to do the same thing and it hasn't really worked out that community momentum has sometimes fizzled. Why do you think this is different and how are you thinking about sustaining momentum?
- [04:29]
A
That is a great question and I think that's why UFC is the perfect partner. One reason it's hard to maintain momentum is where does the next cool thing that keeps us interested come from? If it's a game or something else, even. Most crypto projects for UFC, they run 44 events every year. 12 of them are tent pole events like pay per views. We have games you can play in right now. Pick the fighter that wins and stake your fight tokens and make sure that you get a booster things like that are happening right now. So there's a new event for you to do every week with our event ecosystem. That's why it's so important for us to have that special partnership with ufc.
- [05:05]
B
I just mentioned that fight token pre sale, completely over subscribed, raised over $180 million. I believe the number is $183 million. Talk to me about what this suggests about fan economies and bring it back to the UFC for me.
- [05:20]
A
So first of all, it's a pre sale by the fight foundation and we want to test the market and see how well our tokenized ecosystem would do. So I'm part of the devco. The foundation is the one that partnered with Hollow World. We did the pre sale, we opened up a small $2 million raise. We were blown away by the support and the belief. $183 million raise. Most of that is getting returned, but it showed us how much people believed in the things that we're doing here. I got to tell you, if you've ever been to a fight, it is electric. There's a lot of gambling in fights. There's a lot of speculation, there's a lot of skills. It's a great sport. Right. And we are going to do some cool, cool things. There's some money can't buy access for only your fight tokens. So when I put that whole story together, the token allowed to do governance, of course staking money can't buy rewards. We've already been rewarding bringing people like you into, into the fight game, into the octagon, meet the fighters, special events. Those are all things that come out of the box.
- [06:17]
B
You mentioned governance, staking rewards. Tell me a little bit more about that and how you plan to educate fans on this more active way of engaging, this more active way of building a community vers is, you know, what fans have been trained to do now which is watch and kind of have a one way relationship with the sport.
- [06:35]
A
Yeah. For this thing to really take off, Japan doing this for two years. And the reason UFC believes in us is because how resilient we've been in working with them. As we all know, it's been some, some pretty tough times in crypto winter for two or three years. We've built with UFC for the two or three years. So for us to get everything right, we had to get UFC's belief first. And we did that with a multi year partnership deal with UFC for their sponsorship, for licensing, for exclusive rights to any video on chain apps and digital collectibles. So UFC really Believed in us because we never tapped out. They had other Web3 partners that tapped out, not us, so. So UFC, the brand believed in us. The next thing we had to do, by the way, there's been a lot of shitcoins with UFC attached that never paid ufc. They just did random things with fighters and most of the time it didn't work. I don't want to shit on the coin, so I'm not going to talk about that. But the second thing I had to do, right, was get all the fighters on board. So we already have an athlete council with championship level fighters Gilbert Burns and Alejandro Pontoja, who's fighting this December. They really believe I've spent time with them in the Octagon. They're all crypto curious, so they're really curious what it means.
- [07:43]
B
Hey, what are the questions they're asking you?
- [07:46]
A
Well, first of all, they love kicking me. Their belief is that if you're like a crypto guy, you're like a tech nerd and you're rich, which is not entirely accurate, but they'll ask me, hey, what does it take, James? I may have two or three fights left in me and I want some sort of assets to invest in. Should I do crypto? And so I find myself giving them advice like, well, if you're new to crypto, maybe just download like Coinbase or something, buy two or three tokens, see how it makes you feel. That's what it means to own something and belong to a network. So we talk about reputation, ownership, identity. That's what I'm talking about, right? So I start walking them through what it takes to buy a wallet, and it's actually easier than most of them suspect, you know, and they say, should I make my own token? I'm like, that's pretty dangerous. You know, you're going to get the UFC to back it up. So when they know that we have the UFC backing, they trust us. When they know that we're all pretty savvy developers in the crypto web3 space. I've been doing this for seven years, IPO to game companies. So I've already been working in virtual economies for decades before I got into this. So I'm able to help them along. So once we have the fighters and the brands, we're able to bring the masses on, right? And that's what makes us, I think, stand out. We love what Pengu is doing by putting a giant brand in the mind eye of web3. But name another brand that's gone beyond crypto. So that's what we're trying to do. We're almost like a brand token. We consider ourselves an IP ecosystem token.
- [09:05]
B
James, thank you so much for joining Markets Outlook. It's been a pleasure learning more about fight and fight id and maybe we'll see you at the next fight.
- [09:14]
A
Yes, I could get you into Octon if you'd like. Come see me. All right. Couldn't you see the fighters? And really pleasure to be on with you, Jen.
- [09:20]
B
Thank you, James. I look forward to that.
- [09:22]
A
All right, thank you.
- [09:53]
B
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