BTSE AMA Highlights: A Conversation with Peter Ing, Founder of BlockchainSpace, on November 11, 2021
BlockchainSpace is a guild hub for play-to-earn communities. They build tools to empower play-to-earn communities and run their own guilds to identify economic opportunities in play-to-earn games.
Here are the consolidated and edited highlights of the AMA.
• • •
BlockchainSpace’s Team
BTSE Moderator:
Welcome to our AMA event today. Please welcome Peter Ing from BlockchainSpace!
Peter Ing:
Hello everyone, pleased to meet the BTSE community! I am Peter Ing, founder and CEO of BlockchainSpace. We have two co-founders here at BlockchainSpace, myself and CTO Felix Xing. We are supported by a team of 15, covering roles in IT development, marketing, community management, and finance.
• • •
What is BlockchainSpace?
BTSE Moderator:
Could you introduce the project at BlockchainSpace?
Peter Ing:
In a nutshell, BlockchainSpace empowers play-to-earn guild owners and gamers to become successful entrepreneurs by equipping them with tools and financing. Some of you may have heard of Axie Infinity and the Axie Scholarship model. Guilds run the Axie Scholarships, and as the number of Axie Scholarships grows, the more support they need with tooling and financing
• • •
What Problems Does BlockchainSpace Solve?
BTSE Moderator:
What is the main problem that the core team is targeting to solve?
Peter Ing:
Guild owners currently lack a starting point and the relevant tools to operate their businesses successfully. The guild space for NFT Games is still very new. Some of the challenges facing guilds today are:
● No accurate, fast, and timely cashout solutions;
● No proper accounting or CRM solutions. There is no quickbooks or salesforce equivalent;
● No industry benchmark or comprehensive tracking tools to know how well your guild is performing;
● Nobody can currently track how well large or small guilds perform; there are no benchmarks;
● No platform to share or learn best practices on how to run a guild;
● No financial solutions specifically for guilds that are ripe for expansion;
● As guilds grow, they face difficulty managing human relationships at scale.
The list goes on and on.
BTSE Moderator:
How is the team going about solving these problems?
Peter Ing:
We focus on three core areas to solve these problems:
1. Education through community building:
We build educational academies for each game we research. The purpose of Axie Academy and Sandbox Academy is to share best practices and innovations and build the community amongst emerging play-to-earn guilds. We run scholarship programs in both and help provide jobs to those in need in developing countries.
2. Toolkits and automation;
We have a CRM that allows guild managers to monitor each player within the guild. We measure the performance of game accounts and track overall guild insights. We also help with gamer onboarding, forecasting, and automated cashout. These are pain points for guilds as they scale. As you can imagine having 100 gamers request cashouts is the same as doing payroll for 100 people.
3. Access to financial services.
We can become a guild Data Bank that provides in-depth game analytics across guilds and help to provide industry benchmarking across all P2E guilds through data analytics. We have also become a guild financial bank allowing both guilds and gamers to gain access to financial solutions, based on track record and performance. We can automate credit scoring for gamers
• • •
BlockchainSpace’s Major Milestones and Future Plans
BTSE Moderator:
That being said, what are the following upcoming products or features on your roadmap?
Peter Ing:
We have some excellent automation tools being released for guilds in the coming months:
● New versions of our community management bot in Discord;
● New web-based dashboards for guild performance management;
● New data feeds that allow partner institutions like Coingecko to use our data to give traders, investors more data about guilds.
Additionally, we will automate some credit features for guilds and allow auto-loans to happen natively in Discord.
BTSE Moderator:
Your current products are Discord-based. Are there any plans to shift them for use outside of Discord? How easy is that process?
Peter Ing:
Yes, we will be adding new web-based features for guilds. The web-based features will synchronize seamlessly with our existing tools in Discord. So if you are onboarded on one, you are onboarded on the other!
BTSE Moderator:
Will you cater to games other than Axie Infinity?
Peter Ing:
We are already preparing for The Sandbox to take flight and have already close tabs on other games.
Since Axie Infinity exploded, there are several new play-to-earn waiting to explode onto the scene
BTSE Moderator:
What does your current community base look like?
Peter Ing:
We’re already serving over 2,000 guilds and target more than 500,000 people using our tooling. We’ve been so head down with development in the last year and want to share our successes with the community. We’re looking forward to more people joining our advocacy in supporting play-to-earn guilds and helping drive more employment in developing markets. We currently serve guilds across the globe, such as in the Philippines, Brazil, Venezuela, and India.
• • •
BlockchainSpace Token — $GUILD
BTSE Moderator:
Let’s talk about tokenomics. Tell us more about your token, $GUILD. What does it do? What are the benefits of holding $GUILD?
Peter Ing:
We split benefits and token value accrual into three categories:
1. Ecosystem Value Accrual
2. Protocol Value Accrual
3. Token Holder Benefits
1. Ecosystem Value Accrual
$GUILD will be used for:
● DAO participation;
● community Rewards;
● allocation towards ecosystem partners (e.g., education, partnerships, integrations, etc.) as grants;
● inter-guild investments;
● esports tournament prizes.
2. Protocol Value Accrual
$GUILD will accrue value from:
● loan referrals;
● CRM cashout commissions;
● scholarship management;
● advertising sales;
● token-granted SaaS features;
● inter-guild transactions;
● esports tournament fees.
3. Token holder benefits
$GUILD holders:
● have the potential to give yield exposure in over 1,500 guilds;
● will receive a portion of the $GUILD treasury;
● are eligible to join the DAO with further financial perks;
● receive discounted access to BlockchainSpace tooling;
● receive discounted access to play-to-earn guild Activities;
● receive NFT drops and exclusive content from partners.
BTSE Moderator:
How do we purchase $GUILD?
Peter Ing:
We’re not listed yet, so watch out for the news. We will be launching an ambassador program in our Discord soon, so you can contribute and earn tokens. If you are running a scholarship program, make sure you use our existing Discord bot. The more you interact with our tools, the more tokens will be aggregated.
BTSE Moderator:
There are quite a few guild tokens in the market, with the two most prominent being $YGG and $MC. How does $GUILD compare to these two?
Peter Ing:
$YGG and $MC are both play-to-earn guilds that we support with our tooling. You can check the YGG Discord for our Axie Academy Discord Bot. You can consider $GUILD as the layer on top of these guilds that support both of them if $YGG and $MC give you exposure to the yield-bearing NFTs in their portfolio. $GUILD gives you exposure to both $YGG and $MC.
• • •
Community Questions
EM GAI MUA ( @emgaimua23 ):
The idea of this project is unique and incredible. How did this idea come about?
Peter Ing:
We’ve been working in the industry for three years already, helping onboard regular people into crypto through education. When Axie Infinity exploded in the last year, some opportunities opened up that we knew we could fill; we’ve been addressing these same challenges for so long.
Check out the history of myself and our co-founder. You will see that our backgrounds fit perfectly with what we are doing today: Working with fintech wallets, big data aggregation, and risk management, providing tooling and automation.
• • •
Wally Hutcheson ( @Wally_Hutcheson ):
Currently, NFTs are a hot topic, but NFTs are not just for art. Does your project think that more real-world use cases will emerge for NFTs as time goes on? Why should we take NFTs seriously?
Peter Ing:
Yes, the guilds we work with are not just accumulating NFT art but what we call “Yield-Bearing NFTs.” It means these NFTs have a use case that can derive yield.
Right now, this narrative is being driven by play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity and The Sandbox. The NFTs in these games allow gamers to earn tokens in a game that are convertible to real-world local currencies.
What we are seeing today is people in developing markets are playing these games “to make a living,” literally to put food on the table. We are just at the start of the play-to-earn revolution, and we are positioned to accelerate and empower the communities that are driving the adoption
• • •
Quinn Johnston ( @QuinnJohnston):
Can you list a few features of your project that put it ahead of competitors? What are the competitive advantages your platform has that you feel most confident about?
Peter Ing:
We are neutral in the play-to-earn industry and want to work with everyone. This gives us a huge advantage as guilds are becoming rival communities. Just like in computer games, guilds may compete with other guilds; however, we will serve all of them.
Because of this fact, we have been able to aggregate more data than anyone else, which allows us to become the most powerful data feed in this space. It also means we can aggregate value from multiple competing guilds and accrue that value into $GUILD, which will be the universal token for inter-guild transfers. You can imagine, some guilds do not want to hold other guilds’ tokens
• • •
Natasha Wright ( @Mervin_dale_2001 ):
How old is your project? What are the significant plans ahead? Could you show us your roadmap?
Peter Ing:
Our business has been around for three years already. We were previously a blockchain education hub. We pivoted to go into play-to-earn full-time in November last year.
You can read my backstory here in our local media coverage. For our roadmap, you can find it on our website.
• • •
OletaWiles ( @OletaWiles58 ):
On your website, you don’t mention that you have done any internal or external audit of your smart contract, so can you give us details of any previous audits? If you haven’t, do you plan to perform any review of your smart contract soon?
Peter Ing:
We are in the process of an audit right now. Because of the popularity of projects popping up this year, we are still in the queue. We spoke to some big audit firms and believe in prioritizing security and putting customer safety first.
• • •
Twitter Questions
Q1 — @Alon_D99999
If I don’t play the games, can I still generate passive income by staking the NFTs with BlockchainSpace? Please share some ways to generate earnings with BlockchainSpace?
Peter Ing:
We will be announcing our staking mechanism in the coming weeks. For now, the best way to earn $GUILD is to participate in our community in Discord.
• • •
Q2 — @SLiomie
Almost 80% of investors just focus on the token’s price in the short term instead of understanding the real value of the project. Can you tell us the motivations and benefits for investors to hold your token in the long term?
Peter Ing:
Absolutely. As mentioned before, the play-to-earn ecosystem is brand new. Right now, there is only one game leading the play-to-earn revolution, Axie Infinity. More than 50 games are waiting to make their debuts. We are just at the start. More games will bring more guilds who need our support: the more guilds that join our ecosystem, the more value for $GUILD token.
• • •
Q3 — @MdRakib1212123
Most of the questions people had during the AMA asked about the strengths of the Project. So, at this time, can we talk about your difficulties and challenges? What difficulties did you face developing your project, and how did you overcome them?
Peter Ing:
Blockchain games are still in their infancy. This means changes can happen on a whim which may have significant knock-on effects on businesses in the space. An example is if the game developer changes the game mechanics overnight, it can change our analysis processes. We understand this will not change any time soon, and we have structured our team to accommodate fast changes around the clock.
• • •
Q4 — @Joy1nahidul1
Partnerships are always an essential factor for every project. So, who are your partners? What benefits are you receiving from those relationships?
Peter Ing:
I’m looking forward to the community learning about our partners in the coming weeks. At this stage, we cannot announce which partners we work with, but I can confirm that we currently work with more than 1,500 guilds in the industry already
• • •
BTSE Moderator:
Thank you so much for answering these questions. As the last question, what should the community anticipate in the near future?
Peter Ing:
The announcement of our partnerships is coming soon!
About BlockchainSpace
BlockchainSpace enables play-to-earn guilds to scale in the metaverse. We build tools to empower gaming communities and run academies to identify economic opportunities in games. Our aim is to embolden the next generation of play-to-earn gamers and guild owners to become successful entrepreneurs by equipping them with essential digital tools and financing.
Follow BlockchainSpace on social media to stay up to date with all the latest developments.