Blockchain Interviews – Alex Kokhanovskyy, CEO of DreamTeam

0:00I'm Ashlyn Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have Alexander koknal ski the CEO of dream team Gigi Alex it's a pleasure to have you on the show today and it's great to see you Thank You likewise wonderful let's talk about dream team could you give us an overview of the project and how is it

0:23changing the esports and the gaming industry yeah so just on the very high level dream team is like a first infrastructure platform for eSports in gaming like solving problems of hundreds of millions of players who must find teammates manage their teams improve their skills and earn money yeah so on the one hand we can say this we're building some sort of the link

0:47LinkedIn like a professional network for gamers when are we lighting and providing them with essential tools yeah such as tools for recruitment team management and analytics that's what all gamers wanted all University on the other hand using blockchain and smart contacts we are building one-of-a-kind payment gateway uniting players teams tournaments and sponsors and ensuring

1:11all financial operations between those parties so if you want to pay out salary from a team to coach manager player if you want to transfer the players receive the prize money sell your sponsorship advertisement meteorites or even merchandise or digital memorabilia you can do everything inside of it that sounds great Alex and eSports is becoming so popular as of recently that

1:41is it are there problems in the industry that you guys are solving or they're just currently isn't a lot of companies that are just providing any kind of solutions at all for the industry yeah so I've been using for its industry for past 20 years already yes so I started 1999 dark ages then boot one of the most popular one of the most successful east

2:03first team called na'vi then boot busines partner esports holding the sort of biggest on the planet this was sold for a million dollars 10:18 so I've been through all the stages of the development of the market and what I can say of course is words is booming rapidly growing but it's facing numerous issues yeah first its to market is kind of insecure

2:26yeah there is a fraud sometime non-payment from from tournaments non-payment from sponsors sometimes team owners are not fulfilling their obligation towards the players so or sponsor they are not paying up what they buddy shoot to a team or players that's the one part the other one that's the market is really fragment yeah there is no entry point if you have sponsor or if

2:50you are like if you want to like buy some agility on this but how I can do it there is absolutely no getaway and the last but not least there is no possibility for a gamer right now to understand a clear and transparent path from novice to amateur to professional so those three courses are holding kind of the market development at the moment that's it very interesting and that

3:17sounds like the perfect match for blockchain technology with eSports to allow for those payments have more transparency and I can see how you guys you know are a perfect match for that so was dream team when you founded the company how long have you been working on it by the way as well but were you looking at integrating blockchain technology when you started it at the

3:39very beginning or was this a thought afterwards so we started human like early 2017 but to launch the product around late so it was like part of the development of course whenever we started it was like a little bit different than we've been thinking about through different concepts but when we when we like being introduced to the ball change technology but one of my

4:04partners it was a really good match because we can hang we can remove like a middleman a-absolutely it just facilitated that peer-to-peer can have financial operation between those parts and just get our small fee out of it and it was like perfect when I we don't need to store users money we don't need to be responsible for this one all their relationship only like they

4:26can decide everything face to face with no sir fighting you and then many said hey that's the perfect mention that's how working and build the first kind of bloke utility for gamers and resources exists that's amazing and how has the traction been so far what games are you guys supporting and are you looking at expanding that right now so since our launch we reach 1.5 million users it's

4:50proximately we have around 1.1 million players and 350 something thousand teams on the platform already we supported three games at the moment that's counter-strike League of Legends epics Legends and shortly I think we going to launch the biggest game at the moment this fortnight well and of course during this year rule fully integrated tools

5:18for team management and some blockchain components so people can start using crypto and our tokens of life that's amazing and you talked a little bit at the beginning about how smart contracts can be used for payment and transparency but there's also the cryptocurrency aspect of it now is there a dream team coin or token and if there is how does that work

5:38in the ecosystem as well yeah so we issued our own token which will be responsible for all kind of we're using this one for all and any transactions on the bus so on in one hand you can use it for one-time services you can approach it like boosters some sort of Hispanics you can get you can even which is a premium account using our token on the other hand token is used as like few for

6:04all 24 all smart contracts on the platform so that's kind of the the fool to do this that's we going to add I think we are starting with like sort of the services in late two three early early before but being moving forwards in in 2020 we will have like already like fuchs marks complex for the pinions that's great so the platform is live right now but there aren't blockchain

6:32integrations in it yet is that what you're saying we don't fortunately raishin back in the day whenever we run for example at that smart contact I play out four teams to players like as a seller it was like fully on the blockchain you see though that transactions on the but we've been running these composite desk tokens and 35,000 teams and players used used

6:59blockchain you used kind of our currency and uses these services to pay out then we released also like in it and on the real network already a boosters so you can top up your account by paying these tokens so it's already there we've been testing and right now we're bringing we are moving from a test hat to a live net shortly will you put a lot of these

7:19things that sounds wonderful and in terms of running the business of dream team is there a revenue model or a business model and how are you guys creating that sustainable business with your users yeah first so the like the first layer of my of kind of monetization is for sure as we acted as a SAS yeah we get the freemium model so we're charging the subscription so

7:45that's the easiest way to go for gamers whenever they're receiving the majority functions for free but the core functions locked under the payment war on the other hand as we get smart contracts we are running certain we are writing like depending on depending on the contract and depending on the actual transaction which aren't your small fee from two to five percent out of all in

8:12any transaction that we've got where there will be going throughout that's a Tier one kind of monetization now using they will bring the majority of the revenue on the other hand we still have opportunity to serve advertisement for our users we get already a couple of requests for consumer data analytics as we are assembling a lot of data from users and we can provide it's like for

8:34companies such as Nielsen yeah on the other hand it's also like more a long-term discussion but there is a potential to provide and data for banning companies for making all those betting odds that's amazing sounds like you guys have quite the diversification and that's great and now in terms of your investors and advisors and partners have you guys made

8:56a lot of partnerships or had a lot of investment to grow to this size so far yeah so after our poking sale we also we also raised a five million round seed round from manga capital those guys early investor in Skype weeks let go walk me so they're like really experiences us and like in unicorn so like we really like see the value of this company

9:22what combat value this guy's hiring to our business and of course was a partnership with Lenin like pretty decent partnership on to a sports field in the gaming field in general like the partnership with a few tournaments like ESL Sardar with professional teams such as phonetic Navy with D market it's a virtual item ID marketplace EXO low payment anyway we should use our tokens

9:45as for advisory board I think we we gathered one of the strongest advisory board in our field including experts from a different fields from eSports in gaming once again I think it's combination it's a one on the one hand on the other one that FinTech and banking so from the eSports side we got Ralph record is the co-founder of ESL that's the biggest esports company we

10:10asunder DiGiovanni CEO and co-founder of MLG from investments in financials have a gasoline ISA he's a partner at evolution media capital big essentially my fans and emanuelle I do is like director of auctioning cryptocurrency among the leading banks in us it sounds like a great list of advisers and partners and it makes sense because you guys have had

10:37such growth so far now as you continue to grow do you see your new target customers coming from specific geographic regions or really is it just spread out throughout the world in whichever games are popular yeah that's a good question yeah the majority of the customers of course are coming from the actual audience of the game yes so right now we get 60% of our

10:59users are coming from Europe in US and since we got going 20 the crypto like the food put the component in like 53 early before I think all users will be introduced to crypto to search yes they can start getting to start to ramp it up there may be crypt assets not only dream to talk about something else so I think this is really the way how I want to do it is a

11:23really good way for gamers to like to enter the market them to like enter the market with ease I would say that very interesting and what do you see as one of the biggest challenges moving forward for you guys to grow is it customer acquisition more investment what are the challenges you may face um I see the wantonness at least in my mind bother me

11:51the most it's like whenever we can accumulate the critical mass of the users you know whenever it like will be a snowball effect so I think it was 1.5 million it's not enough yeah we need to hit something like if we're 4 to 5 million to have like a kind of a solid solid market position and then I can say hey that's the unstoppable project that's only skilled enough so I think

12:14that's the only one challenge if we can heat those we're done that sounds great and with the addition of fortnight and that sounds like that would greatly help with that so that's that's lodged with that Alex now if thoroughly if there are investors partners or gamers that are looking to learn more about Dream Team what's the best way to get involved or

12:35get in contact with your team the project you can visit team GG if you want to learn more about our talking to you what wonderful Alex Cokin offski CEO of Dream Team GG it's been a pleasure speaking to you thank you so much for your time it sounds like you guys are yes sound that you guys are doing well

13:02see you later