esportsref progress update
It’s been a while since the announcement of the Bibox exchange listing in the Telegram group, and I appreciate some of you will be wondering what’s happening.
We received the contract offer on April 22nd….
I have to admit that when I first received a copy of the contract it was very exciting! We’d been offered the opportunity to list on a well-known exchange, that also happens to list HPB, and considering we are a new startup, it was incredibly encouraging to see the exchange reaching out to offer to list our token.
We’ve discussed the listing in the advisory group on multiple occasions, and whilst there is certainly unanimous agreement in terms of getting a token listing on a well-known exchange, there are conflicting opinions on WHO we list with.
Let me expand on this a little.
So just briefly going back to what esportsref actually is. It’s a DApp that will allow esports players and casual gamers the opportunity to compete for either HPB or ESR tokens. What’s slightly different here, is that we’re not primarily targeting typical crypto traders. Of course we want to appease investors, and many of the people who invested in ESR tokens early on, don’t actually want to play e-sports games…..they want to make profit on their investment! But as I say, the primary audience for the DApp is e-sports players and casual gamers.
Now lets say for arguments sake that we list on Bibox. For traders who are comfortable with CEX exchanges, this is a reasonable thing to do. If you have ESR tokens, you can exchange them for USDT, and you can then send them off to somewhere like Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, etc., and cash them out. The same applies if you want to purchase more ESR tokens for your portfolio. You might have some HPB that you’d like to convert to ESR, and the process is relatively straightforward. Typically speaking, crypto investors know what they are doing.
But stop to think for a moment about a casual gamer who wants to compete for a tangible prize, and has never dabbled in crypto before. If both HPB and ESR were listed on Bibox, what steps would they need to get started to actually use the esportsref DApp?
Well first they’d need to get some USDT.
Does Bibox allow you to purchase USDT? No unfortunately they don’t. The process of purchasing some form of crypto directly from an exchange or provider is what is known in the industry as “on-ramping”.
So if we were to list on Bibox, then for a new e-sports player to get started with HPB or ESR, they would first of all need to sign up with someone like Binance or Kucoin or any other premium site that supports “on-ramping” where your can purchase crypto DIRECTLY, using a debit/credit card or a bank transfer.
Hopefully you can see how that additional step of having to purchase BTC/ETH/USDT on a completely different exchange, and then transferring it to Bibox, makes life far more difficult for a gamer who is brand new to crypto.
Now many players who will wish to compete for HPB or ESR tokens will have a FIAT mindset. What I mean by this, is that they might be competing for HPB or ESR, but will still be thinking to themselves, “I want to win $50 worth of crypto”, as opposed to, “I want to win 120 HPB coins. Whilst some will see their crypto win as a potential investment that can be traded, many of them will simply want to cash out, and get that money in their account. This will be the case for many players.
So how would they cash out, if ESR was listed on Bibox?
Well they’d have to learn how to trade their ESR for BTC/ETH/USDT and then once they’d converted to a major crypto, they’d then have to send it to another exchange that allows you to convert the crypto to FIAT and cash out.
This cashing out process is known as “off-ramping”, and as far as exchanges go, this is an even rarer service offering.
Binance offer it, Coinbase offer it, and a small handful of other premium exchanges offer this service, but Bibox doesn’t. Bibox don’t “on-ramp”, and they don’t “off-ramp”.
So when you factor those things in, as least from an e-sports player and casual gamer perspective, you can start to see that perhaps Bibox isn’t the “optimal” exchange to list on to best serve ALL people.
Some investors might not care. They just want to be able to trade ESR on a DEX, and we of course understand that, but based on the fairly substantial Bibox listing fee, we’re no longer unanimously convinced it’s the best option for the project at this early stage.
Currently Bibox want $30,000 to list ESR (apparently this is still a significant discount on the standard $50,000 listing fee) as well as a contractual agreement for esportsref to supply them with 250,000 ESR tokens for a promotional air-drop during the listing build-up.
Based on the “on-ramp” and “off-ramp” limitations of Bibox, we’re not convinced this represents good value as a primary CEX listing.
So the obvious question is, “why not just list with an exchange that does offer on-ramping and off-ramping then?”
We’ll that’s what we’re currently exploring, however you have to understand that most of the “premium” exchanges that offer On-Ramp and Off-Ramp services, will either charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to list you (For example, Kucoin charge $150,000 to list and they only offer “on-ramp”) or in some instances they will list you for a substantial discount if they see that your token is making major shockwaves in the crypto community. We hope that at some stage esportsref will do this, but it’s unrealistic to expect Coinbase or Binance to suddenly list ESR at this early stage!
So what are the options?
Well we haven’t ruled out Bibox completely. It’s still a useful exchange for crypto traders and investors and we of course must cater to our investors as well. We just feel that the current listing fee being offered to us is perhaps not as favorable as it could be, and the best use of project funds. We will continue negotiating with Bibox, and if we can reach an agreement that we believe to be reasonable, then we may still decide to list there, if only as a token trading vehicle.
In the mean time, we’re looking at other exchanges. Funny enough, I’d had a few conversations with the listing manager of Hotbit, only to find out the other day that they got hacked! This option no longer fills me with confidence.
We also received a listing offer from CoinSuper, but its a similar situation to Bibox (no on-ramp or off-ramp), and the listing fee wasn’t much less than Bibox either, so we probably won’t pursue this option.
Coinsbit looks interesting. They do offer “on-ramping” (unfortunately not “off-ramping”) and actually offer multiple pairs (ESR/ETH, ESR/BTC, ESR/USDT) for the same price as the Bibox fee for one pair, however Coinsbit is perhaps not as well-known, and so far their communication engagement for listing hasn’t overly impressed me. Days can go by before I receive any form of response to a question, so I’m not sure how their on-going support would be.
KucCoin would be great (although it’s “on-ramping” only) but the listing price is currently too much. We’ve asked to see if the price can be negotiated and are awaiting a response.
We are still 100% committed to a CEX exchange listing, but the point is that we need to factor a lot of things in, including “market making” for trade volume when we do list, and if we blow the entire budget on one exchange listing, there won’t be enough funds to act as a market maker to keep trade volume levels where they need to be.
So what are the other options?
Ever heard of Moonpay? Transak? Wyre? Ramp?
To many of you, these company names will be brand new. They are crypto on-ramp and off-ramp API services. Not exchanges. You don’t use them to trade one crypto against another. They simply sell crypto to you, or buy crypto from you.
So how would that benefit an e-sports player or casual gamer?
Well imagine going to the esportsref.com website, and clicking on the “Buy HPB now” or “Buy ESR now” buttons, and within seconds, you have some HPB or ESR in your wallet. All from within the same website that you intend to use to compete. Can you imagine much easier would that make life for a casual player!
What about cashing out? “Sell your ESR now” or Sell your HPB now” buttons. A single click and FIAT is heading your way into your bank account.
When you look at it from an e-sports player or casual gamer perspective, this would be a far more appealing option! This is why we are looking into the integration process of various on-ramp/off-ramp API providers.
Here’s some more reading if you’re interested:
The next thing to talk about is the interaction of the DApp with Metamask. I actually quite like Metamask. I’ve been using it for around 4 years, and it’s stable and works well. But again, if you are new to crypto, this is yet another hurdle to overcome if you want to be able to compete on esportsref. you’ll need to install the Metamask extension, point Metamask to the HPB network, deal with your private keys, etc.
Once again, if you were an e-sports player or casual gamer, wouldn’t it be cool to just visit esportsref.com, login to the site and then connect to a wallet with your standard social media credentials, and where the HPB network is already setup?
Well there are lots of exciting new developments in the wallet space for crypto. We are currently exploring a wallet called TORUS which looks very promising!
You can even “top-up” (on-ramp) from within the wallet, and we’re looking at adding the HPB network as a “default” network when logged into TORUS for the esportsref.com DApp. This is very exciting and an extremely powerful solution.
what else is new?
In terms of marketing and advertising the project, this week I’ll be working my way through a list of over 80 e-sports influencers to look to establish ambassadorial partnerships and advertising of the DApp. I’ve also had a couple of guys working on esportsref articles that will provide the necessary SEO backlinks to the site to eventually help drive traffic once we’re ready to share the alpha. Some good progress being made here.
Also, I’m in discussions with HPB management regarding a few things that will act as enablers for esportsref to progress. For example, in order to list on CoinMarketCap, we need to complete a listing form, and one of the listing requirements is to provide a URL link to the API of the block explorer (which in our case, is https://hpbscan.org) that will allow CMC to reference coin supply. This API feature isn’t currently available on HPBScan, so HPB management are looking to assist with introducing this feature.
As most of you know, we’re now listed on MyTrade. There are plans in motion for a really cool trading competition, so will update everyone with more info once it’s in place.
One last thing to update you guys with.
Unfortunately my last full-stack web developer was unable to continue with the project. The good news is that we’ve on-boarded a new, super-talented web dev.
Jason Liu joins the esportsref team with a wealth of experience and the following skill-set:
Programming Languages
Javascript, C/C++, C#, Python, Solidity
Frontend
React.js, Next, Gatsby, AngularJS, Vue.js, Blazor, MaterialUI, KendoUI, AntDesign, Tailwind CSS, Tachyon CSS
Backend
Node.js (Express.js, Molecular, Hapi), ASP.NET Core, Python Django
Database
MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Firebase
It’s great to have Jason on board!
Look forward to updating you guys again next week
Jeff
