Bankless - Scaling Sorare's NFT Platform with CEO & Co-Founder, Nicolas Julia

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

Nicolas Julia is the Co-Founder and CEO at Sorare, building the next generation of Sports games… where fans can play with skin in the game. On this episode, Nicolas shares Sorare's exciting new launch, how Sorare grew to reach millions of users, what's next for Sorare, and so much more. ------ Push | Try the Communication Protocol of Web3 https://bankless.cc/Push  ------ SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  ️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  DESO | DECENTRALIZED SOCIAL BLOCKCHAIN https://bankless.cc/Deso  BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  TRUEFI | CRYPTO FINANCIAL HUB https://bankless.cc/TrueFi  SEQUENCE | ALL-IN-ONE PLATFORM https://bankless.cc/Sequence  ️FUEL | THE MODULAR EXECUTION LAYER https://bankless.cc/Fuelpod  ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 7:51 2018 to Sorare Today 15:41 Sore's Obvious Success 20:15 Combining Communities 24:41 Speculation & Profit 26:46 Sorare UX 31:51 Licensing Rights 39:57 What's Next for Sorare? 43:16 Sports Fan TAM 49:14 Can Sorare Handle the Scale? 50:44 Advice for Other Builders 53:44 Other NFT Projects 57:05 Closing & Disclosures ------ Resources: Nicolas Julia https://twitter.com/ni2las  Sorare https://sorare.com/  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Hey, Bankless Nation, happy state of the nation. This is an episode where David Duet, a deep dive on the topic that's been making headlines recently. David, I feel like we are on a redemption arc today because we are notoriously not into sports. At least we haven't provided good sports coverage on bankless in the past. But today, we are talking all about sports and the blockchain, sports and crypto. I can get behind that. So at least I can get behind a 50% of this, but we know there are a ton of sports fans in the bankless community. How do we know? Because you've pointed out our mistakes.

And you've told us, this is an episode on the future of on-chain sports with, I think, an organization and a project that is doing more in crypto sports than anyone else. These are the folks behind so rare. They started with football in the EU, and there would be soccer for us Americans, and have since expanded, and this is recent news, to the NBA. This is a recent announcement from them also to Major League Baseball. So, David, what are we going to be talking about today? I think this is going to be part of the overarching story, also timely with the whole Reddit phenomenon,

where Reddit put NFTs into three million people's hands. How did they do that? And so it's a story, I think, of Ethereum, of blockchains, layer 2s, NFTs, finding their ways into communities that are like outside of crypto-Twitter, outside of just like these deep NFT, deep-gen communities and are more mainstream, right? Sports are mainstream. And so rare, unquestionably has discovered product market fit at the intersection of sports and crypto, which seems like, you know, at cursory glance, a weird intersection, right?

Sports crypto? What does this have to do with each other? And so we're going to answer this question as to why so rare has found product market fit here in the intersection of the nerds and the jocks, if you will. And like what it really takes? What's the secret sauce behind these things? And what lessons can we pull away from the product market fit? fit that so rare has seen. We usually do disclosures at this point in the episode. Disclosure,

there are no disclosures. David nor myself own any equity or tokens in a so rare. Or so rare cards. I don't even own a so rare fantasy card. There's a sad story behind that in that I actually offered the opportunity to be an angel investor in so rare. And guess what? I turned it down because I didn't know enough about sports. So my sports, you know, lack of knowledge, ignorance has hurt me a lot over the years, apparently as well. David, before we get to this episode, let's give a shout out to our friends and sponsors over at Push. This is a super neat protocol. It gives you on-chain notifications.

David, I'm showing the interface. What sort of things can you use Push for? Just to get notified of stuff going on on Ethereum, on the world of the Metaverse, whatever. that may be, is your ENS name expiring soon? Oh, well, you got to go fix that. Like, oh, is your vault about to be liquidated? Oh, you should go go fix that. But Ryan, like, I know, I know, because you're, you know, a normal person. Well, actually, you're an AI. But the first thing you do, I bet, when you wake up in the morning, is you check your phone. And if you want events that are going on in crypto to show up on your phone, you need push. Whether you are a consumer of those

notifications or you are actually an application pushing these notifications out to your users. Either way, you need push. There is a link in the show notes to go get started, getting notified about events in the Metaverse. That's really cool. I mean, Earnify gives you the ability to get notified for AirDrop opportunities you might be eligible for. That's just one of them. Ryan is leaking some alpha here. You could just sign up for all of these. Anyway, opt into these. There's a link in the show notes. All right, David, what should people look out for in this episode? I know this is partially a story about product market fit and crypto. But I also feel like there's a layer two story behind So Rare.

What are some of the things people should be on the lookout for? Yeah, so I want to ask Nicholas about just the usability in UX and how, like in the world, if you go on to Reddit right now and you go like, I like NFTs, you get 10,000 downvotes. So I want to learn about like how the word NFT and crypto has been accepted by this community that is seemingly outside of the crypto community, how far outside the crypto community is it? And what is the secret sauce behind why product market fit has been seen at So Rare? And what can we, what lessons can we learn to apply that to other fields?

So like there's one, there's one part, a layer two conversation. There's one part an NFT conversation. There's one part, a gamification part because that is what Sorearer is. It is a fantasy game built on top of actual real sports. And so how did all of these things? things come together and how can we leverage these the secret sauce to apply to other projects out in the crypto space. So that's the thing to pay attention to. Definitely a lot of lessons for us here. We'll be right back with Nicholas Julia, who is the co-founder and CEO of So Rare. But before we do,

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environment, go beyond the limitations of the EVM. If you want to learn more, there's a link in the show notes to see how you can get involved with a fuel network. All right, guys, we are back with Nicholas Julia. He's the co-founder and CEO of So Rare. They're building the next generation of sports games where fans can play with skin in the game. This is a mix of fantasy sports and also NFT collectibles, sort of tokenized cards that you can actually own.

Nicholas, welcome to Banglis. How you doing, man? Thank you. for having me. Very excited to have this chat with you today. Me too. Do you know it was, you tweeted this out right before and this was a memory. I'd forgotten this email right before we started. This is an email that you sent me, I think like, is it four years ago now? Yeah, four years ago. I was in 18, I think.

And this is when you first started getting into NFTs. This was an email you sent me. He said, hey, Ryan, I just read your tweet storm about NFTs. This was back in 2018, and I guess I was tweeting about NFTs. We were just kind of conceptualizing them. I feel like as an industry. And I said, you're excited about it at the debate to determine which underlying protocol is going to win the NFT war. Oh, I remember this era of crypto where we thought a single protocol would win the NFT war, huh? Yeah.

And then you said you're fully dedicated to crypto, you had some ideas on it. And my, how far you and So Rare have come since then. Can you just take us through the last four years of what you've built and what So Rare has accomplished maybe some of the stats and take us from this conversation all the way to so it's so rare today no of course i mean when i was you know like uh starting to look at nfts so early 18 end of 17 early 18 i was sorry i was fascinated by the fact that they're going to bring digital property to the web and you know i i was i was keep on digging digging and i was looking at this cool feature which is digital scarcity and what it could bring to collectors.

And human beings have been collecting in the physical space for centuries. And I was convinced that this behavior is going to apply to the web. I'm a massive sports fan. So I was dreaming to bring all these athletes and teams and leagues on top of it and, you know, like develop officially licensed NFT cars representing the players, the teams that we love. And look, I was convinced. that just this would be 10 times bigger than physical collection because you have provable sconsetive, through ownership,

it's easier to trade, it's easier to show to your community. There's many, many reasons why I was thinking about that. But I was also thinking that for that to be huge, really mainstream, and reach hundreds of millions of fans across the globe, we would need to bring a usage value that is beyond collecting. So that's where the fantasy game, the game, PILAN is coming from, having a cool way for fans every day, every week to engage with the card. So we got started at this intersection of, you know, this emerging technology,

NFTs, like official partnerships with the top IP in the world of sports, and then gaming. So we got started with Sokhan, as you said, and, you know, now we have like more than 2 million, 2 million users and plus 2 million users yeah half a million active on a on a monthly basis so that's wow that has been a strong start i would say yeah we can i can i ask by the way because um are they still active like have they felt this like bare market at all your user based how does that how does that look these days versus like a year ago when the crypto market was booming no i think i think that if you look even at crypto slum or any nfti tracker or any nfti tracker or right, you would find that, you know, at before the big market, we were like in terms of sales

volume, like we were somewhere between the 15th and 20th position with all the profile pick NFTs being, you know, topping this list. I think if you look at the last week, if we are not at the top, so that's today. I think that we are looking if you go at the top, you can, you can a bit of be above above that. Yeah, higher. If you look at seven days, we are pre, we are the top. And I think that speaks to the fact that we kept on, we kept on brain during this PR market. If you look at all the metrics, like new users, sales and so on. So I think that's encouraging. And that speaks to the fact that when you do something beyond collecting, beyond trading,

I think you are more resilient because people have fun, people express their passion, their identity as sports fans and they keep on using and playing with the accounts. They speed the fact that the markets are going on. So I just want for folks that are listening to this, maybe can't see. We are on a website called CryptoSlam that is tracking NFT collections by various metrics in terms of sales, in terms of transactions. And this is so rare on a seven-week or seven-day period of time leading the pack in terms of sales. sales volume, yeah.

Sales volume. Nine million in sales volume. But also completely dominated on unique number of transactions coming in at 154,000 transactions over the last seven days in comparison to board apes coming in at 78. Yeah. Gauzen Chained also kind of in a similar category versus a collectible. I would say a similar category versus so rare. 177,000 transactions.

And then down to Cryptopunks where you see 44. So you can really see the division of the categories here. Yeah, I think like one important point here is that this is only tracking our secondary transactions. And so there's a significant volume of transactions and sales that is coming from the primary market, the cost that we sell for the first time as well. And that's also only tracking the paying users that are engaging with NFCs. But we have a significant number of users that are engaging with the free to play game and engaging with the fantasy this way.

What I think is really neat here is because you, Serverr has not suffered a decline in the way that board apes has or even Cryptopunks have because this is sort of a real world fan base that is not as tied to like crypto speculative markets. And so we talk so often about in crypto about real world use cases. you know that like normies would actually use well this is one of them guys like people who are into sports which is basically everyone that you know like you know is into some uh sport right all of the normal people that you know david and i well but you know what it's the only reason david and i like uh david used to be who'd you say like you're you're a big sports fan like oh yeah

i'm like seattle mariners between 1999 to 2001 2002 yeah big time so i grew up in canada in the Toronto area, huge trauma-made beliefs fan. I used to follow it like my entire childhood up until like, you know, I was out of college and such. And I just haven't had time lately because like crypto is kind of dominated by life. So anyway, tons of sports fans, real world use case. And it does well, even when crypto prices are down. This is quite a testament. And look at those transactions, right? We'll have other questions about how are you actually scaling this. But I just want to folks to see kind of the volume and the level that's going on an NFT world. And all of this is happening kind of behind the scenes quietly.

Yeah. And Nicholas, I want to parse out two or three things that I think that you definitely noticed very, very early, things like that you picked out earlier than most other people. And that was NFTs. In 2018, NFTs were a theory, not practice. And then, but also scale. And I'm pretty sure so rare started. understanding that, yo, the Ethereum Layer 1 is not going to do it for us.

And then also extra crypto communities. And so you kind of slammed these three particles together. NFTs, a community that's outside of crypto called the sports world, the sports community, and NFTs. And maybe there are some other things as well. But I really think that's what some of the secret sauce is behind so rare success is that it identified these three things and the potential here way ahead of schedule back in 2018. 2019. What about those three things were obvious to you? Like what did it, did it feel obvious at the time?

Or just can you go through the thought process as to kind of how you put all these things together? Yeah. I think, I think from the very first day was like, because I remember in 1718, like the very small NFC community was that there was a debate was how we should, you know, like simplify the user experience or keep this clunky experience of, you know, like sitting, sitting up a wallet. and like this, I don't know, between 15 and 20 steps before you can buy a crypto bank, right? And so part of the community was thinking this is education, like when the users need to go through it, it's a feature not a bug, all of that. And I was like, no, I think, you know, if we want to really, like, reach like millions, dozens of millions of users, we need, we need to abstract the complexity

and deliver on the benefits of NFT collectibles to the mainstream. And so, and so the benefits, for us in our in our case are like the digital quantities or the collectability, the true ownership, the fact that you can sell your card freely, the fact that you can move it to other games and outside of the platform and so on. So people need to, fans need to fill it, you know, and not go through different steps or to a Q&A to understand this.

Like they need to feel it through design, through the user experience, through copywriting, whatever, but really feel it, right? So that has been like, very important in the way we architected and built the product. And then, like, our conviction was baked in the fact that we are answering, like, human needs that are, like, very, very deep, right? Like, expressing who you are, your identity for a sports fan. Like, it's collecting plays a big role.

And NFTs are enabling digital collection, right? So we were, like, into this track. we were also into the track of like you know like kind of uniting sports fans or enabling fans to connect and obviously connecting is also something that is very important for us as

as human beings and so enabling there's fans to play against its children with the bragging rights that come with it to meet more people also was something that that was very important to us so So, so yeah, we are, we, we, we were, like, very convinced about, like, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the intersection of collecting and, uh, and playing with your friends, basically. Uh, and, and for us, and if this just happened to be the perfect technology, uh, to, uh, to unlock this potential.

Uh, and, uh, you know, the market feed was such, you know, such, you know, such abuse that we, we haven't, you know, like, made any pet marketing so far. Like, we, we, we haven't spent money. and marketing. So everything that happened so far has been organic, like with the referral program and so on. Around the World Cup, so in a couple of weeks, we're going to do our first marketing campaign, actually. So we're going to start, you know, putting the brand out in the US, notably. Well, I think there's this tremendous potential for us. And so, and so no, I believe that the product is getting closer, you know, to the, to the state I wanted to be in to start, like spreading the world.

And, yeah, there's still like some steps to remove the frictions that I like us to do, but we're getting closed on to, you know, to show this product to big audiences. So for the bankless listeners that aren't actually familiar whatsoever actually is, like what you do with these NFTs, it's kind of like it's a fantasy game where you have these NFTs that represent real players, football players, that's soccer for the American people. baseball players basketball players kind of like a baseball card

kind of like a basketball card yeah and then there's points that if the player in real life in a real game does something in their game that would be that would score points for people that have these cards that have selected these cards to be

in that fantasy game for that week or something and so the idea is you you collect the cards they have a real link with a real player that player scores points in the real life, points are scored in the fantasy game, and you can only get those points if you have the card that associates with the player. Nicholas, how much overlap is there between crypto people like me and Ryan, who don't know who Raphael Federer Nadal is or whatever, the tennis players, and the people that are on So rare? Like, to what degree are these crypto people, or are these

just mainly, like, sports players? How much overlap is there between these two communities? So yeah, we know, like as for any like consumer product that aims to to reach like very, very big audiences, like you used to start with an early community of early adoptance. So for us, it was crypto enthusiasts with an interest of sports and even NFT enthusiasts in the early days with an interest in sports. So let me tell you, it was very like a couple of hundreds and a couple thousand people, like very limited segments. And then, like, we grew to people, you know, with an interest in sports and spending money in games where they could have, like, skin in the game, right? And no, we are exchanging to a new user segment. So people playing fantasy sports, free-to-play fantasy sports notably, and also collecting in the physical world. So we are moving from segment to segment and, you know, evolving the product to cat on to this new segments.

And right now, most of the users that are jumping in, they don't even know, you know, that there's a blockchain behind and, you know, it's an NFC, all of that. They, you know, they don't know about that, right? So they, but they understand the benefits. They get it. And at some point in their journey, they understand what it is. And most of the time it changed their mind by the way about NFTs because the perception of NFTs in sports. Right now in Europe in particular is not that good, right? like because, you know, like during the bull market, we've seen so many like, you know, like cash grabs and so on that, you know, it kind of undermined the perception of the fans.

And hopefully we are trying to do things the right way in here and build the best product for the fans. And I think so, yeah, the way the product wants, as you put it very, very well, like it's a mix between collecting and playing fantasy. so you would collect NFT accounts representing the players that you love. And some people just engage with that part, just collecting. And then they are composing a team with their players and engaging with the fantasy game where they can progress and win rewards. And so, yeah, there's already the two pillars. And so, yeah, put it in the way, I would present it as, you know,

collecting on steroids, like owning this officially licensed NFTs, open a new world of things that you can do. So engaging with the fantasy game and winning rewards, but also accessing physical experiences. So we are starting to reiterate on, okay, you own this NFT, you can go to this game, you can meet this player, you can access this training ground. So all those things that we are doing in collaboration with our partners, all the top, you know, the Sports League in the world and athletes. Like we have Serena Williams as a board advisor, Kieran Mbapé as an investor and ambassador and Rudy Gober in the basketball

world and many others that we're going to announce in the coming months. So this bridge between the digital and the physical is also something that we are very excited about. And so what role does money play here? because we're looking at Ryan's screen as he's navigating and you can buy these cards, one put card you can buy for $4.44, another card you could buy for $213. Like when people hear NFTs, they kind of think, you know,

speculative asset collectibles that go up and down our price. What role does speculation play in owning some of these cards? And also, like, can you, as a player of so rare MBA, so rare MLB, so rare football, can you, like, make money playing this game? like a core part of it or is the money more of an afterthought? Yeah, I think like another way to think about the product is like in the physical world, like when you think about like an NBA team for instance, like you have different roles

that you can play. You could be a team owner, right, making decisions on what players to buy. You can be a sport director trying to find the next time and scout for the next time. You can be a coach like thinking about what players to put. on the court for the next game and you can be a player obviously. And I think what's amazing with this product with Surin-Bier, because we're talking about this, is that you can play all those roles.

Like there's four roles, like team like owner making decisions on what to buy and being a sports director or scout, being a coach, being a play. You play all the roles. And so that's amazing. To get back to your question, I think that there's different motivations for different people on the product, like people engaging only with the collect, acting part, people engaging only with the trading part, people engaging only with the fantasy part.

So there's all different motivations. And yes, some people are making money by reselling a card like they would do in the physical world with tops cards or Panini cards or any collective right. But at its core, it's a new way to engage with the passion, right? And to express where you are, to play with your friends, to meet your friends. And that's, I think, what's, So it was really exciting. Nicholas, I'm just kind of scrolling through this user interface here. And I think you said it early is, did I catch you right? And a lot of users don't even know that they're using NFTs, basically.

That's not what's material to them, the NFT itself. Like the, what's impressing me most as I'm scanning through this interface is like it doesn't feel like a blockchain. It feels very much like a Web 2 app. And yet there are so many things that like I'd recognize. I was like, oh, the ability to kind of transfer Fiat for a moon pay or ramp, the ability to add ETH my wallet, and I can bid on each of these players, and I can bid directly from my credit card or in ETH, right? Like, all of this feels so familiar to a crypto native, but also, like, the user experience

here is like there's a wallet behind the scenes here, but it's just, it's not clunky. You don't even, it doesn't feel like all of the, the crypto interfaces that, that I think, crypto natives have experienced in the past. Can you talk a little bit about this? So this had to be hard making this happen and smoothing out all of these rough edges. How did you get to this point? Look, no, it has been like, first of all, as I said, it has been like one of the key principles that I gave as a product direction to the

team, like abstracting all this complexity so that we can deliver all the benefits to the fans. I think that's the first thing to say. I think we went through phases. I don't know if you remember Lume Network. I do. I remember you paying me, what, it's 2018, 2019. You're like, hey, we're not sure I had to scale this thing.

I'm looking at Lume. And at the time, this was like plasma layer two was the promise. Yeah, tell me where that ended up. Yeah, no, so long story short, like it has been painful, right? because we moved from layer one to layer two with LUM to layer one again, because LUM disappeared at some point. And then again, moving up to layer two with Stangler. And we, but always with this goal to abstract the complexity

and have something that is secure, that is scalable, obviously. And so yeah, we went through different phases. No, we are happy with the outcome that we are. We still have, you know, like some steps to go to really like reach the audiences we want to reach. Mobile is an issue. So we have good conversations, you know, with Google, with Apple, because right now you know, the problem better than I do, but it's not possible to sell. There's digital collectibles on the App Store. And I've seen like recent news like on, you know, like terms on the up store.

You know, it's, it's not really like an FD friendly right now. So there's, there's still some, you know, some conversations to be to be had and, and some progress that we we should all do for the space, I guess. Yeah. Seeing where this app has come just excites me so much because I think, you know, so many critics, particularly of crypto, but then in NFTs, they're always asking. So where are the use cases? When is this going to go mainstream, right? And here's a perfect example of so rare, which is scaled a real world use case. I mean, this is not using like Ponzi economics in order to scale.

Can you imagine? It's just real demand from sports enthusiasts for recognizable real world assets. And they built it while, you know, doing so within kind of the constraints of crypto, But like smoothing out all of the rough edges from the UX perspective. And I know there's still work you want to do there. So you're probably seeing some of the imperfections. But I'm seeing like how far we have come. And like this being a use case that doesn't use Ponzi economics, smoothed out all of the rough edges.

And it's actually like scaling on layer two. So this is these are real NFTs secured by Ethereum and and settled at the base layer. That is pretty damn impressive. And honestly, I think that probably the so rare team doesn't, this use case doesn't get enough credit in crypto circles. It's because it's sports. We're like, oh, yeah, I forgot about sports. I think that's part of it, part of it. And part of like we are, you know, we're reaching a community that is, well, you know, like,

they're very different from crypto Twitter, for instance. But I agree, Rand, with your point. Like, we, we like, you know, when you look at crypto Twitter, like this, we are naturally present there on hand. Yeah. It's so great to see. Actually, this is probably going to be one of my favorite kind of real world use cases next time as skeptics. Like, what does NFTs actually accomplish for people?

One last question I have for you. And then we do need to break and come back. We got a lot more to cover. But how in the world did you get organizations like the NBA, the MLB, and some of the original football organizations in Europe to sign on to this project, get that licensing setup, because that's another feat of magic. Wow, you actually got licensing rights from some of these major organizations. And I guess particularly the early ones, they took a bet on a startup doing this weird crypto-NFT thing. How did that happen?

Yeah, I mean, that has been like, yeah, that has been a very long, very long process with lots of education and efforts. Because, you know, you have seen probably like lots of points. between crypto companies and sports leagues. And so you have this partnership category where you use sports teams and leagues to bring awareness to your crypto product. But what we are doing is different. We're going to have some marketing and we're going to start using it with the leagues and the teams.

But at its core, it's licensing using the IP, meaning the players and the name of the teams and the league to sell products. So you have the IP on the products. and their IP is the biggest asset that they have. So they are very conservative. And what we've done in football, like bringing all their teams and leagues together, there's probably two companies that have done it in the last 60 years. Panini in the world of physical collecting and electronic arms with the FIFA franchise,

the video game, right? So it's not every year or even every decade that these organizations decide to partner with company like us and give their IP. So in order to get down, like our strategy has been to start small and prove the model. So we started with the Belgian League and then adding like little by little other leagues or the clubs and proving that, you know, it was the future of sports gaming. It was working, you know. It was a legitimate use case and it was engaging sports fans in a sustainable way.

And also proving them that we are building. you know, like a world-class consumer experience, right? And because they care so much about their IP, they care about the quality of their experience. And so this is something that we spend lots of effort also. And so then we, you know, we move to this place in football with millions of users and lots of engagement and, you know, like huge sales volumes and so one.

And so leading, creating this new category, this new markets, we were in the best position to convince then US leagues to jump in with us, like being the category creator. So they believe that we are the best position, sorry, to develop this category for them. And not only to be a new stream and they are interested in this, of course, but also help them to reach new audiences. So right now, like the MLB, they are very excited about the potential that we have. to grow the sport with them in Europe, in Asia, and these geographies where they want to develop outside of the US, basically, right? So it's very exciting because we're going to put the pie for everyone. We're going to help the football, the soccer teams and leagues to grow in the US with the

IP that we've acquired here. And the other way around, we're going to help US lakes to grow in other parts of the world with this vision that, you know, this is going to be the marketplace where you're going to be able to trade your Libran James against your Killian Mbapé or O'Donel Macy, right? I think this is something that's very unique that we are doing. Well, you know, it's one product, right? And so with one wallet, we've won you, one account, you can play different games, different sports and move across them.

And I think that's pretty amazing. So you want to collect all the sports then? NBA, MLB, soccer, football. That's kind of the start. But there are a few other sports to collect. Yeah, there are more sponsors to collect. We're interesting in all the top points in the world with global audiences. And so, yes, we have two of the three major U.S. sports.

We have football with billions of fans across the club. And that's a very nice stance. And we are like, like, laser focused on delivering for that three sponsors right now. But obviously, like, we would look to expand at some points in the future. Amazing. Nicholas, I think it's unquestionably that so rare kind of knows what's up. And so as somebody that has taken a product into product market fit and now is in a post-product market fit world, that makes you like one of the few, right?

And so I want to pick your brain a little bit in the second half of the show about like just advice and perspective that we could give other people who are also still on this path of maybe they're working in NFTs, maybe they're working on mainstream apps, just as somebody who's gone through the dark forest of building a product for non-crypto people and that product be successful. I just want to pick your brain a little bit about how any advice that you might have for the people still working towards that would pass. So all of those questions and more are coming up in the second app of the show

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can you just kind of tease what's next on the frontiers of Sover? No, look, I. It's going to be interesting because during the bull market, we have been quite quiet on marketing, as I was saying earlier. And we know we're going to start around the World Cup, notably in a couple of weeks, marketing aggressively the product. And I'm very exciting to see this result. So the World Cup in itself is the biggest sport event in the world, right? So there's going to be lots of attention. That's bigger than the Super Bowl for all you Americans. Like, it's a lot bigger than the Super Bowl, right?

A lot bigger, I think. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so you're going to start marketing, like Sovere has not gone and started marketing. You're going to start marketing at the World Cup of football, soccer, the globe's most viewed sports event. That's when you're going to start. That's correct. So it's coming. It's coming.

It's coming. So, no, I'm very excited. It's going to be our first brand campaign. So we have lots of initiative around that. I'm very excited by that. So it's not only marketing, it's also product evolutions to cat on to broader audiences. So I cannot reveal everything. It's going to come in coming days, but social features, collectible features.

You know, right now our product is really around fantasy. And we, you know, we have lots to do to improve the collectibility of this course and to improve the social features of the product. And so we have like a couple of amazing launches that are lined up for the for the for the World Cup in the in the coming wings. So so I think that's number one in what's next. Obviously number two is growing aggressively our US Ponce that we we've just launched. So we you know, we are very excited like the early results are amazing and there's much, much more we can we can do for them. So we're going to keep on like growing, growing this products and

listening to the community and improving the product every week, as we've done with with soccer in the in the early days. So I think, I think that's, that's number two. And yeah, number two is keep in number three is keep on growing the team. Right. Like it's a 160 people right now split between Paris and New York. And so yeah, we brought amazing people like people leading design at Spotify, engineering at SNAP. Like we have really like amazing lead-dance like with us right now. people that have seen scale with web2 companies, right, and that are bringing this knowledge to us. And, you know, I want to stay true to our crypto DNA, but at the same time,

benefits from like, you know, like people that have seen scale in the previous wave of tech companies. And this is something I'm very excited and spend a lot of time having the best talents and onboarding them. And yeah, that's something I'm spending. Yeah, I'm very excited about it as well. So, Nicholas, this is so cool. And I feel like there's an element to you, which I really like is that's just very understated for the amount of progress that you guys have made.

Like, it's just absolutely incredible. And so we're at, you know, 1.5 million or so users of so rare today. And I was wondering, and this is before you've actually turned on kind of the marketing engine before you've done World Cup, before you've done all of these things. Can you give us a sense for the total addressable market for like sports fans? How big is sports?

But let's say like I mean like the World Cup alone. I mean how many football fans do we have? And I'm talking about European football when I say football, right? And so like what is like, do you see a world where maybe 10% of the sports communities are kind of actively have some sort of. of, you know, so rare type of collectible? And what kind of numbers are we seeing? Yeah.

You guys are maximally successful here. No, I think it's an interesting question. So like football fans, there's billions of football fans. So then it depends on, you know, like what's really a fan? And like, do you, are we chatting someone engaging like, you know, like once a month, a week, a year? But there's billions of people in the world who declare interests for, for football. care themselves as fans. I think that when you think about the most popular games in the world of Sokhan, we are talking a couple dozen million people that are engaging with the product.

My aim is that we reach hundreds of millions of people with this product. And I'm going to tell you why I'm very convinced that we are going to do this. The first reason is that it's much easier to engage with this game than a video game. You don't have to buy a PlayStation and to install a game and to learn how to play the game. All of that. It's much easier, right? It's a casual game.

Yes, casual. You buy a card, you compose your team. Like even, you know, you can engage, you know, within 20, like 30 seconds. You can get the basics, right? So I think that's reason number one is easy to access, is your own to understand. Number two is that we are tapping into something. that like we are tapping into like behaviors that are existing right like like this need to collect and express your identity this needs uh to connect and socialize with people this need to have

fun and to connect with your passion so we are tapping into there's existing behaviors but with this amazing thing which is owning your game right like owning your assets and be be with the, you know, the freedom to do whatever you want with it. And, and, and, you know, when people get it, like, when people understand that they truly own part of the game, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's crazy. They understand that, yes, you know, I can, I can resolve this item. Yes, they can move this item into a side game. Yes, they can, uh, reuse this item for the next fourth season, as opposed to being forced to buy again, something that I don't own, right? So, so, so it's really like, uh, a, uh, a shift from a world where people who are buying stuff. And, you know, in video games, there are close to $100 billion spent every single year, you know, from fans paying stuff that they are not owning and that they are forced to buy again next year. Right.

So, and I mean, and so when you move from here to a world where you give control back to your fans, to your community, where they truly earn it, they can keep it and so on. when this is going to reach broad audiences, this is going to be crazy. So yeah, so speaking of broad audiences, Ryan, I've got the 2018 FIFA World Cup numbers in front of me

and the reason why, Ryan, you might not know this, Ryan, but I do know this, is that the FIFA World Cup only happens every four years. So the last one... I didn't know that, David. I did know that.

We know some sports stuff here. So the last FIFA World Cup, 2018, 3.5 billion people watched at least one minute. Are you kidding me? One minute. That is half of the globe watched at least one minute of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. And it's estimated that the full game was watched by 1.1 billion people viewers worldwide.

That is a... That's about exposure. Yeah. That's like everyone who has the capability to watch. saw the World Cup on a screen for at least a glintz during 2018. And so, yeah, I'm looking at this upcoming World Cup. And so Janine Fantino, who's leading FIFA, is projecting $5 billion. So he's leading FIFA.

Oh, my God. Five billion people. Wouldn't you ever heard of a metric like that? Yeah, that's, I mean, how many multiples of the total number of crypto users is that? All of them. So here's my question. And so you're saying when you have numbers like 3.5 billion and 5 billion, and you're saying you think that so rare could get to you hundreds of million of users. Guys, what that means bankless listeners is we're talking about an onboarding mechanism to crypto wallets for things priced in fiat, but also priced in ETH to hundreds of millions of people.

All of those cards that were on sale were denominated in ETH that we saw on your screen. This is a crypto onboarding mechanism. And it blows my mind. If just to all of the Meta Mask users right now, 30 million or so, that's what they have in terms of like, I think, like monthly actives, 30 million, right? And we're talking about one single app being able to potentially onboard hundreds of millions. Okay, so my next question here, Nicholas, is, can we handle that kind of scale right now? You're going to break it to me?

Are we going to go, do kitty it? Or do you have a way to like make this thing scale? Look, look, my co-founder and CTO would be a better place to answer this one. I think from the latest I've heard that, you know, he's very confident. Obviously, the numbers we're discussing right now. You know, it's going to be like, it's going to be phases, right? Like, we are very confident for the next phase. Of course, you know, moving from millions to dozens of millions.

We are very confident about this. But, yeah, just to touch on, you know, like what you were saying before, like this unrun for mainstream people, mainstream fans into the web free world. I think this is something that is important to me as a founder, right? And so when I was starting this company, I was thinking about NFTs as a way to educate people at some point and to put digital assets in their hands. And at some point they could also look at other cryptocurrencies and so on. Obviously, they share lots of properties with cryptocurrencies through ownership,

portability, all of that. And I think this is something I'm very excited about. And I think it's, yeah, it could be like huge for the space in general. So, Nicholas, there's so many reasons. I mean, in hindsight, it makes sense. Sports, billion person fan base. I really liked what you said about you're tapping into behaviors that people already know

fantasy games, collecting, sports, money, like throwing it all into a single app and again, in hindsight, it seems to make sense why So Rare has done what it's done. Do you have any generalizable lessons for other people? NFT builders, DFI app builders, what lessons have you learned that are perhaps less so rare specific and more timeless and universal

that we can all, anything just really stand out to you? What life advice do you have to give us as crypto people? No, yeah, I think what we've done in terms of, in terms of like testing, iterating is that, like, we, a couple of values or principles. Listen to your core community and on a weekly basis, prioritize and move fast to improve the product and ship what. what they want. I think the velocity is really key, like to make your product evolve and more importantly to learn what's working, what's not working, right? And it's better to have something that is shipped, that something that may be better in a couple of weeks. So I think that that that that was that that that that's that's like something that that has been very, very important for us. And I think, uh, yeah, probably like another one has been to focus on the right metric and to be very deliberate about what you are optimizing for for a very, very long time. We've never, and it's still the case, actually, we are not optimizing for revenue, for instance, right? We are, I mean, we are lucky to have

been profitable since the very early days. We raised $680 million CREs, but since the very early days, we are focusing on how do we retain the users, or do we engage the users. And this kind of matrix were really driving our efforts more than short-term things that are maybe pleasing the investors, our bond short-term, but are hurting the company longer time. One example that I want to give, we could have done an ICU and have our own token or whatever, but that was not aligned with this goals of, you know, like, delighting the users, retaining the usans, all of that. And I was thinking that could be, that could hunt us in our way to reach hundreds of millions of useance. And so,

because of, you know, all the risks that we all know about this. And so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, that's another important lesson, I think. Well, I have been, uh, observing Nicholas so rare from afar from the, the, the last, uh, four years, which, yeah, yeah, I would love to have been. closer retrospectively, but like I can't say enough about what you guys have built. And something I think that the crypto community can take away from what you just said is you guys didn't take any shortcuts. You just built a fantastic product for your community. You had a vision and you executed. Execution, execution. This is the common denominator that we see in successful

crypto projects that are able to last from cycle to cycle. And congrats to you guys for doing it. Nicholas, thank you so much for joining us. I have one last question for you. And this is a question related to the NFT market. I don't know if you kind of dabble or look in kind of the wider crypto-NFT market or if you're just so heads down focused on what So Rare is doing, kind of the fantasy sports in the sports team that you haven't looked. But what do you think of the current NFT market in in crypto you know the board apes the crypto punks all of the gaming nfts all of the stuff that's going on do you have any thoughts on it are there any projects that you really like do you have any wisdom to leave us with no look i think uh during this bull and market we've

seen lots of projects that were focused on extracting value on the short term and that you know that that that that that thing hurts the overall space um i think that there's lots of build down with a long-term vision. I'm sure we, we, like, lots of you have seen, like, what Reddit has been doing with the digital collectibles, as they call it, recently. I think that's, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's a good way to again show the benefits of owning an NFT

without, you know, like, having to explain or educate or like, you know, users just fit it, right? And I think that there's other, there's other projects that, I'm really excited about. And I'm not, I'm not, you know, I'm not like, I think for us, usage value and building a game has been like, you know, a key to our success. And I think that's amazing because then you retain usance and you bring them every week and so on.

But I also think that this amazing use is just around collecting and art and all of that. And so I hope to see more of them as well. and I hope to keep on seeing more and more artists, you know, like developing the audiences and diversifying the way they make a living, right? So, so, so, so, so, so yes, that's, yeah, I don't have any specifics. I don't spend, like, the time I would, I'd love to spend, like, looking at, at a new, new projects, but I think what I see is that there's lots of build-dance in games, gaming in particular, you know, like world-class people coming from the video game industry,

notably that are quietly like building the future of this space. And it takes time because building a good game takes time. But it's coming. Absolutely. It is coming. All boats rise together. Nicholas, keep building, man. It's great to have you.

Thank you so much. Risk and disclaimers, guys, as always, got to mention. None of this has been financial advice. Hasn't been sports advice either. David and I are not in a position to give either of those two. things never do. I'd rather give financial advice. So our NFTs, so is crypto, all of Defy is. You could definitely lose what you put in, but at least you can own it. At least you can own your own collectibles. We're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're

glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.