[IMPACT]
Market Assessment
As of 2021, the Esports market is valued at approximately 1.08 Billion, and many games that currently don’t have a strong competitive community, could bootstrap their own using the tech of the platform.
Product
A community owned and run DID-powered profile platform that allows players a space to advertise achievements and accomplishments, as well as socially network with other players and create emergent communities, tournaments, teams, etc. Connections and histories from legacy esports platforms and services can be brought along to this new paradigm by connecting those legacy profiles with their new one.
Key Characteristics
A) Creation of self-sovereign profiles that allow competitive players to create a space to upload content and posts, display verifiable statistics, and authenticate history.
B) Native Token incentives for building networks among players and NFT creation/fractionalization for tracking progress, and creation of communities.
C) Cross-chain compatibility with Ergo and Milkomeda to allow flexibility in how distribution of tokens can occur as well as access to the capabilities of proof of work mining via Ergo allowing for easy entry for gamers into crypto.
D) Community led decentralized governance via Catalyst API’s
F) Integration with other services that already exist such as ESEA and FaceIT
The Vision
With the Esports Aegis platform, the vision is to empower all who participate in esports and competitive gaming with Decentralized Identity tools to give them agency over their competitive gaming experience, as well as foster environments that allow for robust and highly competitive communities and scenes to form.
- Economic incentive to participate and to find up and coming talent, share strategies and improve the value of the scene the players reside
- Creating longer-lasting teams, scenes, and bonds between the players as well as fans who would like to follow their journey
- Allowing the esports industry platforms that already exist to empower their user-base as well as crowdfund and collaborate with the community to develop new technologies or services based on the Aegis DID platform.
Opportunities:
A) An ecosystem-wide need to retain and cultivate more talent at the lower levels to sustain the business of platforms that provide services to the competitive players who love the games they play.
B) Due to centralized services being the primary way of players' talent and knowledge being transferred, many talented players go unnoticed and information is often lost to time and not well preserved.
C) Dire lack of amateur players that are able to consistently work their way to high/pro-level play and a stark lack of community and grassroots support for one another.
D) There are many who are playing esports titles who would like to improve but are unable to find teams, experienced players, and comprehensive didactic educational content to better their skills.
E) The broadcast side of the esports industry could provide a great opportunity to show Cardano technology in action, as well as improve the regularity and interest in lower level grassroots gameplay.
A) Technical and social barriers to adoption.
Early on, the tech may be rough or not as instantly recognizable to the average user as something as powerful as it is, so adoption may be slowed, but our familiarity with gamers knacks for adapting to new tech to help them in gaming, can help us find unique ways to integrate and support the work necessary
B) Subpar interaction / Community Growth
Crypto is something not too many gamers have a lot of direct interaction with, while there's tangential knowledge of what it is, and some pockets of people who do understand the technology, nothing has ever been attempted such as this in competitive gaming before. Outreach to key community figures, and players, will be key to ensure that the technology is understood for what it is, once it's mature and ready to see a wider adoption and usage.
C) Relatively slow adoption from esports incumbents
Due to the nature that some may view crypto-powered technology as foreign and unintelligible, they may feel that an outright rejection of it is necessary to keep the status quo. I believe this will be less of a problem, as currently, major entities in esports are looking for ways to strengthen the grassroots of their scenes by leaps and bounds as a lack of grassroots amateur competitive scenes threatens their business models fundamentally.
[FEASIBILITY]
SUCCESS DEFINITION
This project is currently being undertaken by me the proposer and formalization of the architecture of the software stack and finding a team will take time, but the knowledge of both the esports industry and paths to finding counsel to better the project is clear. The idea of the project has been iterated on for approximately 3 months. We will use 3 milestones for success to give an idea of where we'd like to be over the next few years.
Short Term Success (Focus of this Proposal)
Success will be accomplished if we have a live service with DID integration as well as communities and content being made documenting the working towards the completion of the project within the next 6 months.
Mid Term Success
Success will be accomplished if we officially launch the platform in 8 – 12 months and acquire the active participation of players.
Mid-Long Term Success
Success will be achieved if we have functioning governance and new incentive models within the first 2 years.
Long Term Success
Complete success will be defined if our platform achieves the following:
a) Is self-sustaining and healing.
b) Balanced and fair governance with respectful and innovative communities.
c) Platform is the primary way for players to connect and learn with one another for their respective Esport titles.
d) DID technologies are fully integrated and allow players to take their identities between games and services while retaining personal privacy.
e) Becomes the primary knowledge and talent hub for learning and recruitment in esports.
Cost Estimates and Breakdown For Short Term Success - $50000
Breakdown:
$~40000 for development and content creation work among the team working on it.
$5000 to fund the creation of a staking pool and marketing outreach.
$5000 for partnership outreach to organizations and endemic esports industry outlets.
Currently it's only me, Blake 'Firestar' Houston, I'd like to find engineers who could help with the UI/UX, and backend, as well as someone for a marketing/social media role. I'm currently about to embark on the Atala Prism Pioneers course, and I aim to learn how to interact with the SDK in order to make integrating the DID aspect of the technology with the platform seamless.
[AUDITABILITY]
This project is currently being undertaken by me the proposer and formalization of the architecture of the software stack and finding a team will take time, but the knowledge of both the esports industry and paths to finding counsel to better the project is clear. The idea of the project has been iterated on for approximately 3 months. We will use 3 milestones for success to give an idea of where we'd like to be over the next few years.
Short Term Success (Focus of this Proposal)
Success will be accomplished if we have an MVP and clear roadmap to mainnet launch, as well as communities and content being made documenting the working towards the completion of the project within the next 6 months.
Mid Term Success
Success will be accomplished if we officially launch the platform in 8 – 12 months and acquire the active participation of players.
Mid-Long Term Success
Success will be achieved if we have functioning governance and new incentive models within the first 2 years.
Long Term Success
Complete success will be defined if our platform achieves the following:
a) Is self-sustaining and healing.
b) Balanced and fair governance with respectful and innovative communities.
c) Platform is the primary way for players to connect and learn with one another for their respective Esport titles.
d) DID technologies are fully integrated and allow players to take their identities between games and services while retaining personal privacy.
e) Becomes the primary knowledge and talent hub for learning and recruitment in esports.
This is my second submission to Catalyst.
The link to the previous submission is here: