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Base Founder Space
Recorded: Jan. 19, 2026 Duration: 1:05:06Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent Twitter space, Adam from football.fun discussed the successful Token Generation Event (TGE) and the platform's impressive growth, with over $100 million in trading volume and 140,000 packs opened. He highlighted strategic partnerships, innovative features, and the importance of user retention, while also reflecting on industry trends and lessons learned from past projects like NBA Top Shot.
Full Transcription
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Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music I'm going to go to the next video. The Oh
Oh I'm I'm going to go to the next video. Thank you. Amen. Hey, Mr. Adam
Hello, hello, good evening or morning, wherever you guys are
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's good morning for me
Lurky, is it good morning for you as well?
Yes, sir
Good morning, everybody.
I love it.
We're at opposite ends of our day.
It's nearly 9 p.m. for me.
Yeah, I think you've had an absolutely insane week, have you not?
Yeah, it's been quite the week.
So obviously we did our, this is football.fun,
so we did our TGE
last Thursday
I believe it was
seemed to go very well
I think one thing
we're just really happy about
is that the execution
was solid
I think you know
sometimes the price
can do what it does
but if the team shows up
and everyone gets
what they expect
and you feel like
it was a smooth rollout and you
get all the good exchanges on your team you know you can be proud of that at least so yeah we felt
like we had a good run yeah I think there's I think there's a lot of things that that you had
to be proud about and I do have like a list of questions you know for for this space but I do
want to ask one kind of jokingly first Adam Adam, you definitely had a hell of a week last week.
What was one thing that you did to de-stress?
There's a bottle of whiskey that is emptier than it used to be.
That's what I do on a sort of night out, after like work.
That's what I do on a sort of night out, after light work.
I will pour myself a whiskey.
If we've had a particularly good day, I will very occasionally also smoke a cigar.
So definitely had one of those and a whiskey after the TGE.
So yeah, that's what I do.
I sort of just have a drink.
Not too many, but yeah, like one or two whiskeys will help me chill out at the end of a long day. No, I think that makes sense. I mean,
I'm a big fan of Warren Buffett and I don't know if you've heard this, but on green days,
he gets a large order from McDonald's, but on red days, he gets a smaller order from McDonald's.
He's got, for one of the world's wealthiest people he's got an interesting
definition of a treat day. Yeah, I McDonald's is good. You know, when you when you just in that
mood, there's only one thing for it sometimes. That's true. That's true. I think it's always
interesting learning about, you know, billionaires diets, you know, McDonald's and currently my
president's diet as well.
But I can go ahead and say the disclaimer and then we'll dive into the space.
So today's conversation is for informational and educational purposes only.
It does not constitute financial, technical or legal advice.
These express are our own and do not represent base nor Coinbase.
Nothing shared today should be considered an endorsement or an official
statement by us or coinbase i'm really excited for this twitter space lurky you are always the
co-host i'm happy to have you and then adam do you have like an insane week so first of all i think
my first question is did you play football as a kid like what got you so passionate about football i did yeah um so i was i was probably
like four or five years old when i first started playing um i was i don't ever remember deciding
to i don't think it works that way i was just i was a leeds fan because that's what my dad supported
um so i always supported leeds and i tried to get into my local teams. And I was actually quite bad.
I was not naturally gifted at football whatsoever.
But I was very determined.
So I ended up becoming a defensive midfield sort of player
and realized that maybe I don't have Messi's skills exactly,
but I could actually learn to stop other people having fun.
And that became valuable in the team.
So I eventually found a way to be good at it,
even though I wasn't naturally gifted.
But yeah, it's something I've always done
since I was very young and then always got into like,
I remember so many hours playing like Football Manager
or like any, even for like some of the older listeners, like Sensibleensible World of Soccer was one of the massive games in the 90s.
All the way through FIFA, Pro Evolution Soccer, and fantasy sports games too,
from fantasy Premier League to the modern ones like SoRar.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I mean, I grew up playing soccer as well. I mean, for me, as an American, unfortunately, I have to call it soccer. But Lurkey, what about you? Did you grow up playing soccer or football?
I didn't play soccer really growing up, but I did a lot of American football.
of like American football I like it I mean it's it's completely different but
I I'm I'm a big fan of football.fun I love how you came up with the concept
but like how did you actually build the product itself like walk me through the
early days of football.fun yeah so we I guess we're talking 14 months ago now.
We just, I basically self-funded it with me and a few friends.
We got a few hundred thousand dollars together to do it because you couldn't raise from like mainstream VCs at that time.
There was no such narrative as like prediction markets or sports
or anything like that.
It was just, it was not on trend.
But it's something I've always wanted to do.
You know, it's obviously, as I mentioned, it's something I've done.
Throughout my whole life and the last seven years, particularly,
I've been working in and around fantasy sports and also in Web3.
So it's kind of like a coming together of all those different things.
And I guess I've just,
through all that experience, I could see like there was a gap there in
a really kind of rewarding tokenized sports product that kind of moves as fast as sports do.
So we've obviously seen like first generation Web3 sports platforms, things like NBA Top Shot, which in a way was amazing
and like proved that so many people are excited of this.
And the thing that always sticks out to me is that
so many people who are like big crypto OGs,
they got in through Top Shot
because it was just a great way to onboard new people,
but they had no like sticky gameplay loop.
So what we really wanted to do first is before we introduced any real cash,
we actually launched in February quite quietly.
And we launched with a completely free to play experience,
just with about 2000 representative sample users.
Maybe they'd played other fantasy games
like Top Shot or So Rare or DraftKings.
But we're also like somewhat into crypto at least.
And we made sure that we actually had a fun experience
to build something around.
Because if you're only going to play for the money,
then you're never going to keep people long-term.
So we proved out that, hey,
this is actually a fun experience without the cash. And then we launched in August.
And that was kind of really wild, probably even bigger or more exciting at the time than even our
TGE. You know, it was just like there was this new product, everyone on crypto Twitter was talking
about it. For, you know, two or three weeks, it was it seemed to be the thing that was just on the timeline.
And, you know, we we did really, really well.
Everyone was excited. And, you know, we've just kind of, I guess, booked that trend, because everyone
when that happens, everyone expects you to sort of fly up and then all this thing will thing will just be dead in a month like everything else in crypto.
And what people are realizing about us and this team is that that's just not the case and that we are built different.
We do work extremely hard.
The team execute really competently.
And every time we do one of these big launches, it has gone well.
So I think what we're starting to see is that people are starting to believe in us and a team more and more every day.
And then when we talk about things as like, hey, we actually can be that consumer app that is popular and can go mainstream.
People start to believe us now because it's like, hey, they've seen us make promises about what we're going to do before.
And we've always hit them.
Yeah, that's actually a really interesting journey. But whenever I look at the numbers,
I see $100 million of volume on your platform and well over 140,000 packs open just on football.fun.
And I think I'm really curious about, because you're clearly mainstream,
in my opinion. How did you achieve that? How did you actually just grow that volume on
your platform?
I think it's some sort of crossover between the product and the marketing. I think some
people consider these as separate endeavors, but they're absolutely not.
So when I talked about like that breakout month in August, it's not just good marketing,
although the marketing was good.
It was actually about like the product and the marketing working together. And what I mean by that is that we targeted a very specific audience, which is the crypto proud.
We gave them exactly what they want, which is, you know, this is crypto.
They want the number to go up.
They want excitement.
And they also want a good product, you know.
And if you can deliver those two things, you will end up doing well.
And then the marketing side was really mainly about making it shareable
so that people could talk about it.
So really, we kind of got the price action of meme coins.
So a lot of the economics of that launch was,
hey, every athlete is a token.
Start them really low.
Don't auction them off.
Don't make people buy them at higher prices.
Literally just launch them at meme coin sniper price. Doesn't matter
which player it was, can be the best player in the Premier League. You launch them at that same price
so that the people coming into the platform get all that benefit and that early upside.
And then they were sharing on socials like 100x, 10x, 50x. And that is how you go viral on crypto Twitter.
You give people what they want.
The difference is that we actually had a plan
for what to do with that attention when we had it.
So we actually found that we retained a lot of those users.
They kept trading.
20,000 paying wallets, which isn't that many.
If you were thinking of a real mainstream consumer app,
20,000 isn't tons, but in crypto, it's a lot
because those wallets are big.
So we've got guys who are $300,000 wallets,
$50,000 wallets, even a couple of million dollar wallets.
So yeah, the plan really is to very much take that mainstream.
And when I say mainstream, I always think let's be more specific
because mainstream is not an audience.
It's just a kind of concept.
I think this product is going to be really appealing to guys
who are like into DraftKings or other kind of paid fantasy products.
So we're going to be moving in that direction as well.
Yeah, and it's just, that's going to be the focus of our year
is just like broadening the audience,
bringing more and more people in.
And then we released the token,
you know, 40% of our revenue is going to be going to buy back that token.
40% is going to continue to go back into our sports markets.
So yeah, it's very much a kind of like aligned ecosystem.
I know that is an overused phrase,
but that is genuinely what we're trying to do.
You know, if you've got our token,
then it's got great utility in the game,
but it also kind of makes you part of the whole ecosystem as well.
Something that you said that I really loved is how you leaned into that meme coin style of marketing.
And we do have a new speaker.
We have Ryan Gittleson.
I call him the god of go-to-market.
Ryan, I saw your hand was raised.
Can I hand it off to you?
Yeah, it was just nice to get acquainted and meet you. It's an amazing journey seeing this
amazing growth that you've had in a relatively short timeframe. My question was kind of piggybacking
off of what you just mentioned. So 20,000 users is great. Clearly high value users,
So 20,000 users is great.
Clearly high value users, generating tons of trading activity.
A token that's just launched, which is fantastic.
I actually, back in pre-base days, had an online poker company that I attempted to use
our token as an accelerant to help grow our overall net user base as a way to try to
cross the chasm and go beyond necessarily unique crypto users to try to generate like
positive EV for new customer acquisition. My question to you is like, while it's totally
embedded within your ecosystem, how do you plan on trying to use your token as an accelerant to get that 20,000 user number up?
And how do you also kind of in parallel use your communicating naturally to maybe a not crypto native audience?
So how can you use that incentive while also speaking their language on trying to onboard them as customers?
It's a great question.
I think it's not just the incentive package.
It's almost like a whole different way of running a business, right?
So if we think of our competitors as the main fantasy games in DFS,
the kind of draft kings of the world,
we have to be, yes, more entertaining,
but also more rewarding than that. So, we have a monthly retention system, which is kind of similar to like a casino style
monthly reward system where you do a certain amount of activity each month.
And if you keep hitting like your activity level, like whether that's trading or trading
or trading or trading or trading or trading or trading or trading or trading or trading
or trading or trading or trading or trading or trading or trading or trading or trading similar to like a casino style monthly reward system where you do a certain amount of activity each month.
And if you keep hitting like your activity level,
like whether that's trade volume, you get rewarded.
And one of those things that helps you get along that,
like earn that XP, earn those points is holding the token.
So in order, like when you do that,
you get both a rebate on your fees that you've paid for playing the game.
So your cost to play comes down.
You get a bonus to your rewards and your winnings, which in our case are more packs,
which you can optionally choose to sell on the market.
And then you can also get more fun rewards as well.
So basically, we want to make sure that everyone who plays our game
feels that if they're good at it,
that their rewards are outstripping what they are getting elsewhere.
So I guess the vision for a company like this is,
hey, if we're spending 40% of revenue on the fun token to support that price,
then what do we get for that?
Is that a more effective marketing spend?
Or as you've got companies in a more traditional sense,
they might spend 50%, 60% of revenue on marketing.
My hope, and it is absolutely not proven,
is that that marketing cost can come down significantly
because a lot of your marketing will be done virally
by word of mouth, by people sharing their games because they actually just do make more
and find that our platform is more rewarding than other platforms out there.
Yeah, no, there's so many parallels in that.
That's an amazing thesis to test in the market.
I think for the poker parallel, it was how do you best use breakback
as an incentive to help grow your overall net
liquidity and customer base and the the poker industry for years had made an error in just
using it as an incentive to to reward the highest volume users and the best players um when in
actuality there's this big kind of strategic shift in the market where they realized they should
actually be using that that rakeback to to, to incentivize the, the, the long tail losing player in that new depositor.
So it, I think, I think it's going to be really fascinating to, to see how this plays out.
I think there's like the, the, the iGaming space has, is both a well-established industry,
but this is a, a very new product with new mechanics that allow you to try to test those new
hypotheses for customer acquisition. So anyway, I just wanted to chime in on that. I think it's
fascinating and I'm a big fan. Thank you. Just had one point, Zach. When we put this kind of reward mechanism together for just after TGE,
because notoriously everyone always says that any airdrop you give away after TGE
is going to be instantly dumped on the market.
So we got all the statistics from that.
And usually that is true.
Usually it's about 80% to 90% of airdrop tokens are sold within,
I think it's 40% in the first hour and 80% to 90% within airdrop tokens are sold within, I think it's 40% in the first hour and 80
to 90% within the first day.
So loads of people were saying, don't do an airdrop, Adam, that's crazy.
But actually, if you don't, then what's the point, right?
Like if your own users are not benefiting, then, and you can't excite them enough to
want to hold your token,
then that is a skill issue on us as a company.
So we did a 4% airdrop, which I think is quite generous.
And we put this incentive package that I described together
where if you hold for the month, you get even more token,
you get rebates on your fees, you get bonus winnings.
And the last time I checked,
which was, I think it was mid-Sunday afternoon, we had over 90% of people holding that token from the airdrop, right? And it's things like that that make the difference on your TGE day,
because if you remove that cell pressure,
you're setting yourself up for success.
But you can't do it just,
and I would say this very often in the buildup of the TGE,
because you get a lot of advice,
usually from people who have PTSD from having done a failed token launch.
But you really need to be careful who you listen to
and not get too defensive.
You need to actually not just protect the tokens and worry about not giving them away,
although you do worry about that, but you need to make sure people have a really compelling reason
to actually want to buy your token and be excited by it.
And I think that's actually the most important thing to think about.
I think that's an interesting way of phrasing things, but something that I've noticed, and this is something I'm really curious.
There's a lot of intensive tokenomics to where you built that beautiful loop to not only bring people back to football.fun, but to incentivize them to keep playing, keep holding.
How did you get enough feedback to kind of build that loop
to where it has that perfect economy?
And like for everyone in this space,
I'm just gonna highlight a few things.
They have well over a hundred million in total volume,
well over a hundred thousand caps open
and 20,000 playing users.
The retention rate, Adam, that you just mentioned
for token holders is well over 90%.
How did you build that feedback loop? Like how many calls did you have to get feedback?
Adam Werner I mean, it's kind of like a year in the making. So a lot of products,
like they hit crypto Twitter when it's time to TGE. But for us, obviously, it was a lot longer.
And we actually launched the product in February.
So there was six, seven months of iteration then.
But then we also found that when the pro version hit,
we had to make a lot of changes.
We had to completely change the skill system that we'd come up with.
The reason being, people play free products in a
completely different way to the way they play the pro product. So, you know, some of the things that
they liked in free, they really, really hated in pro. So that was just something we had to learn
real quick and make some really rapid changes. So yeah, I think the product is far from perfect.
And as a founder, you're often sort of, I'm obviously really, really proud of what we've
got to, but also like very slightly, well, more than slightly embarrassed about some of the
features that we haven't got to yet or are lacking. So we've set ourselves a goal for the new year of
three months to like get this product to to where we're really proud of it
and that we don't have any of those misgivings about it anymore.
So that it is genuinely then ready to roll out to a wider audience.
I think certainly if there's an audience that is more forgiving,
it tends to be the crypto crowd.
So for example, our onboarding
experience absolutely sucks. It doesn't exist, right? And the reason is we deliberately de-scoped
that, knowing that if crypto people thought they could make money, they would bother to learn,
which is true. Whereas if you take that to a normal kind of more mainstream audience who are used to apps with perfect onboarding flows,
they will churn if they encountered our app right now.
So we're aware of that and we will make those changes.
And then we will roll it out kind of at the right time.
But we've set ourselves a really tight deadline of three months to make that happen.
Just because I think if you set
yourself a year, you'll take a year. We have a really team who are really fast. And one of the
things we're known for in our community is just shipping a lot of changes, a lot of product
updates real fast. So yeah, I think for us three months is achievable, but it's not just that time.
I would say it also takes about eight, seven, seven or eight years to have the experience
to put yourself in a position where you can build something that is really innovative
and different.
I don't think it's a case of just six months or a year at all.
It's a long, long process.
Yeah, the product lifecycle, all honesty is never finished. But I think what's really
amazing is how you innovate and consistently change based on user feedback and data that
you get from your platform. So something that you've mentioned is that you have extremely
high, not only user user retention but also token holder
retention i'm curious how you know you said like a little bit ago about how there's not really a
good onboarding experience but there's such high user retention how how do you actually retain
those users whenever they get to your platform yeah i think the um That's probably a great way of thinking about it.
The onboarding isn't great,
so you have to kind of fight through the
what do I do here moment.
But once you go through a full tournament experience,
particularly if you've got friends,
so if you've got your group chat
and you're all talking about the games, playing along together, you've got friends so if you find like if you've got your group chat uh and you're all
talking about the games uh playing along together you've made your picks um you've put you know
you've bought a hundred thousand shares of whichever player um ideally your friends didn't
and they all wrote wrote him off um but he comes through for you and you win loads of player packs and out of those packs you get
one of the top pulls
it's super addictive
so if we can
make sure you have that
experience, like we've
made it so it's easier for you to be
social, so for example
what I mean by that is right
now you can pull your friends in
and you can make your own group chat.
And great, it's a social game.
But we're actually bringing in social to the app
so that people can live chat around each game.
So even if you don't have friends straight away,
you can still talk to other people
or at least watch what other people are reacting to.
So I think that's really important.
We are bringing in a new reward system soon which is
amazing so one of the things we've added a system in which is way too complicated so right now when
you get a pack you open the pack but you're not allowed to have the player straight away
he goes into this like pool of players and then every day you can promote some from that pool of players.
This sounded like a good idea.
But it has good like economic reasons for like control of supply
and not issuing too many supply.
But what that feels like when you open a pack is,
hey, I don't get my stuff.
Like I've opened a pack, but I don't get it right away.
So that doesn't feel good to the player.
So we're making it so that when you open the pack,
you just straight away get that asset
and they go into your inventory.
And then you just feel instantly like you won.
So one of the observations we make when we see people play
is they can be winning like $500
and they're just sort of scrolling through it like it's nothing.
And if you win $500 in an app or a game,
usually you should be jumping around,
like best thing that happened all day.
So we've kind of reworked that whole system so that when you open that pack,
it feels like a really rewarding, great moment.
So all these things combined,
if we can make sure that the new users
are having the same great experience that our kind of OG users are, we know the retention is good
already. It's just a case of like getting it there and making it easier for them.
It's a beautiful way of saying it. And retention is such a hard aspect, not only in Web 2, but also in Web 3.
I mean, Adam, I know you can attest to this, but I think there's a great way that you actually looped in how perfect economics should be to actually maintain those users on your platform.
Yeah, I mean, it's very difficult and not without its challenges.
Yeah, I mean, it's very difficult and not without its challenges.
So what people don't quite get about us at first is that it looks like a sports app,
but it's actually somewhere between that and a DeFi protocol.
So it's actually a very complex economic product
with all the technological bells and whistles that come with our decks
and a lot of complex economics as well.
So what we're trying to do is ensure not only is it a fun game,
but it's also a good trading environment with deep liquidity.
So we've built a buyback, like probably like top of the range, like buyback bot,
which operates 24 seven,
just, you know,
supporting the prices on our sports market
and deepening that liquidity.
So yeah, it's actually,
I would say,
and I have said this when,
particularly in like calls with investors
or like anyone I was pitching,
the real innovation and the
product is actually a lot of the stuff you do not see.
It's like different ways of doing the economics or like the prize pools.
It's not so much you maneuvering men in shirts into spots on a football pitch.
You can do that as well.
But that's never been the bad bit about fantasy sports you know
the picking players putting them in teams great often with the web3 elements it's always been
the economics where it's fallen down so that's where a lot of our innovation occurs actually
it sounds amazing ryan i see your hand is raised i'll hand it to you next. No, yeah, it's just, I mean, it's super fascinating to learn all about the under the hood inner workings of this. primitives that are underpinning this product. Do you see your general growth strategy being
divided across the crypto native, like more trader investor profile type? Or do you see it
leaning more towards like the general consumer who is using Web2 products right now? And over
time, how do you see that respective share
shifting as the product
and market evolve?
Good question.
I don't think we're
not even close to tapping out on
the market, even
in just the crypto native space.
So if you look at
our numbers, we're actually
way faster out of the gate than either TopShot or SoRare by a long way.
But in terms of how far we have to climb, we're probably not even at 5% of where both those products got to
in terms of total volume or total value locked on the platform. So, you know, absolutely not done with moving more and deeper into the crypto market.
But I think, you know, looking ahead like three years or so,
I do think this will increasingly just become the same thing.
Onboarding in UX is getting easier.
I think if we were on Spaces two years ago,
everyone would just be talking about UX problems.
It does get easier now.
We've designed the game,
so actually you do not really need to know
that this is crypto.
If it wasn't for the fact that
you had to actually get on crypto in the first place,
if you were just a mainstream person,
you were being demoed the app,
you would not know it's crypto.
So it's like, there's no signing.
It's actually a really easy flow.
We've got our partners Moonpay now
who have enabled credit card onboarding.
So yeah, I think ultimately right now,
we obviously are where we are.
So we want to get that more crypto native players.
They have very big wallet sizes.
But we also think that in three years time, you will stop using the terms Web2 and Web3.
And they'll just be some apps that happen to use blockchain.
And we think we're in that sort of category.
And when it comes to like the audience, i always think when people talk about mainstreaming
it's always a very kind of windy terminology like you actually need to pick um pick a group
um and for us i think it is like the the draft kings dfs sort of players um often in the us as
well like they are just very much predisposed to spend money on apps like this.
Europe, kind of less so.
They're used to playing more like free fantasy games.
So we have a free-to-play offering as well.
But then globally, there's also just a massive,
probably like the sports betting market in football
is also much bigger than the US.
So I think with the product suite that we've got of the biggest sport in the world,
which is football or soccer, depending on what you want to call it,
and then NFL, which is just massive for DFS,
that sort of market is where we want to get into.
Yeah, that totally makes sense.
And also, the customer lifetime value probably right now is like insane for a crypto native user coming onto platform. So it makes sense. You know, you mentioned like, I remember like the rise of NBA Top Shots. What do you think were some of their pitfalls? And how are you going to avoid those as you as you progress going forward
yeah i mean um they did a lot right i mean people love opening packs they love sports um
the the licensing did did well for them um the prob and their marketing was great as well like
they hit a thing um and they hit and they hit a need at the right time
and they marketed it well.
What they found is quite obvious
is that they just had no plan really
with what to do with that attention when they had it.
So these collectibles, you couldn't really do anything with them.
There wasn't particularly a compelling game
that kept people coming back and playing.
And then once they sold all,
there's only so many moments, right?
Once you sold them all,
they were left with,
well, let's make different tiers of that moment.
And then suddenly that moment isn't that unique anymore.
So I think for me,
you've got that element of, me, you've got that element.
Okay, you've got to make a game
that people want to play.
I think the technology
is not necessarily the correct one.
I think NFTs are great for collectibles.
If you want fast trading, use tokens.
So we're the first platform
that has built this
in a kind of gamified deck style,
which means you've got instant liquidity.
The game moves as fast as the real world does.
If a player scores a hat trick and you want to buy him right then,
you can just buy him immediately.
You don't have to wait for an auction.
If your player breaks his leg and you want to dump him,
If your player breaks his leg and you want to dump him, you can dump him straight away.
you can dump him straight away.
You don't have to hope someone else buys him.
You don't have to hope someone else buys him.
It's just a much better set of technological rails to run a platform like that, I think.
Totally makes sense. Thank you.
Lurky?
Yeah, I had a couple of questions.
So, say a new player enters the market and somebody purchases it and opens up the pack,
is that what cedes the initial liquidity or are you guys ceding it yourselves?
We started this by running what's called a founder's pack sale.
So basically they purchased some packs, they got a basket of randomized player tokens.
So yeah, we made those available to our earliest adopters.
We have our own reputation score on the platform.
So the better your reputation score,
every time we have an opportunity to give them the best deal on something,
so whether that is like, hey, we're going to launch a new sport.
Let's say it's NBA next.
Obviously, our highest quality people
who we know are not there
just to get things and dump them on day one.
They are going to get rewarded for sticking with us.
We've been trying to prove that time and again.
So with TGE last week,
some of our airdrops to some of our biggest fans
were $30,000, $50,000 in FunToken.
Because we wanted to...
Every time we do something like this,
we prove the narrative wrong.
Like, hey, I got a thing, I need to sell it.
Because that's like the PTSD belief of this cycle,
is that everything goes to zero.
Ours hasn't.
And actually the guys who have held ended up doing well
and that we try and reward them as often as we can.
So we're trying to create that culture where people know that,
hey, when they're holding sport.fun assets
and they're enjoying Sport.Fun assets,
and they're enjoying the game and they want to be involved,
they don't have to be looking over their shoulder,
watching the price every three seconds.
Because they know that we've got lots of next,
more exciting things on the horizon.
Launching other sports, the World Cup this summer.
Actually, the NFL Super Bowl is in a couple of weeks' time, were just talking or three weeks time i think um and we were talking today about like what event
we plan around that so um sport is cyclical and it's always easy for us to come up with like
really exciting events around sports um and that's and so i think our fans are getting used to us now and what how we treat our highest
rep holders. I think it's a interesting that you're kind of going around sports because
it's such a big market that everyone engages with. I do kind of want to king it over to Ray.
Ray's a big fan of basketball. He's also one of the founders of Advantis, one of the leading
trading protocols on base. Ray, I'm curious if you've played around with football.fun, but
more specifically, if we could just talk about the intensity of economics behind a good platform.
Yeah, for sure. So economics, like token economics or like business model?
I think the business model?
I think the business model behind football.fun is really interesting,
just how everything loops back into retention of the players,
incentivizing them to play more.
Yep. No, absolutely. So nice to be here. And hi, everyone.
I'm Ray, one of the two co-founders for Avantis, PerpDocs on base.
And, you know, Adam, congrats on TGE.
We know how tough those tweets are.
And, you know, I'm always here to chat about anything post-TGE if you want.
Feel free to DM me.
Yeah, so I think, like, you know, I had a chance to play around with it a little bit.
Still trying to, like, buy my pack and stuff.
But I'm in the app and i've like
you know uploaded my usdc and stuff so i was like a big soccer player growing up and trying to follow
the premier league and mls actually um so i get what you're doing and um very excited i think um
especially to have like given the social ecosystem on base i think it's actually like very well positioned relative to even like where top shot was uh with flow and their own chain um and i think for us
with avantus like we're trying to make trading fun and social and i think there's like
so i think both of our protocols will draw a lot of synergies just from the existing
um community and especially like you guys have a super slick mini app i've played around with it and So I think both of our protocols will draw a lot of synergies just from the existing community.
And especially like you guys have a super slick mini app.
I've played around with it.
And, you know, not too many folks have like re-architected to be mobile first.
So like especially kudos for having done that.
I think like just, you know, business model, like to your point, Zach, around incentives and like retention.
I think like just to draw a little
bit of parallel to our protocol and how it works, you know, we have like a similar-ish loop, I would
say, where like token holders, especially if you stake, get a bunch of incentives when it comes to
fee discounts on trading, kind of special privileges, you know, extra tokens that they'll receive
if they stake their token. But then also just like our biggest traders, we're actually like
working on like VIP programs for them, a lot of IRL type experiences. And then we have a very
actually strong like referral program that we've been running for a while where, you know, people
have their own ref codes um we bring people on as
ambassadors and then you basically get um referral rewards for for people you bring in um so we've
tried a lot of different things and i think like our newest uh model is um you know like our view
is basically like airdrops will only go so far uh token is a great way to like
start the flywheel and to bring on a critical mass of people to experiment with different ways
of monetization but then it's ultimately like what's next and for us we're in this phase now
of experimenting with all types of new things right like more traditional web2 type ways to
bring on customers and testing cac And that's like things like ads.
We're starting to experiment a lot with like live streaming,
like trading live streaming and all these different things.
Yeah, sounds amazing.
Adam, I'm curious about your TGE.
And I think I'm more curious about how you actually
depicted that flywheel loop to just not only retain users but actually a
4% of supply to those top users itself. What was the hardest part of TGE and how
did you plan everything?
Yeah, I actually, there's something wrong with me, but I actually quite enjoyed the everything. Yeah.
I actually,
there's something wrong with me,
but I actually quite enjoyed the whole thing.
I guess there's,
not many founders say that,
but yeah,
I think like the,
I guess it's like doing so many things at once is always a thing. So you've got all the exchanges to negotiate with, and you are trying to lock in
all the deals. And it's like 4D chess, because if you get this exchange, then you can go back and
get a better deal with this other exchange and all of that. But we did a good job with that. We got
some good deals with those partners. I think the hardest thing is that you get so much advice, right?
From probably like 30, 40, 50 different people suddenly all in your DMs or like on calls telling you that, oh, you should do this or do that.
Or I had this experience.
And I think ultimately launching token is it's a little bit like astrology.
Like no one really knows the best.
There is no best way of doing it.
I think if you follow other people's patterns,
you will fail because actually there are so many variables
that I think as the founder,
you have to launch in a way which is unique to you.
So if there's another founder who's going to TGA
listening to this podcast and they're like, oh, we what was the last one that succeeded oh football.fund didn't did well
so i should make my edge up four percent no like that could be completely wrong for your project
um and i think there's too much following of like whatever seems to work last time
um and yeah i think ultimately you've got to listen to the advice,
but like work out who, who is actually most useful to you. And then ultimately, as the founder,
you've got to make the decisions about what is correct for your project. And there isn't actually
a one size fits all playbook. And certainly don't just follow what seemed to work in another project
i think that's a beautiful way of saying it like what works for one project doesn't work
doesn't work for all of their projects i think that's really interesting i'd love to hear i'd
love to hear from ryan on this topic more specifically so ryan i'll hand it to you
yeah i've been there um so quick question for you, and it's probably a bit too early.
I find that when I've talked to a lot of founders post TGE, one of the challenges is that you are almost managing two entirely separate products that may, they may have overlap, but
the needs, the costs, and the focus areas sometimes create a split in focus.
How do you plan to, in your kind of unveiling of your strategy with using it as an incentive for customer acquisition retention, plan to try to tackle that challenge?
on the call about thinking through how to approach a TGE
without it compromising your focus on a product roadmap.
Yeah.
Of course it does.
It absorbs bandwidth.
TGE is kind of like anything.
The same is true of like doing the ICO
or even just like fundraising in general, right?
Like you particularly as like the CEO, you end up focusing most of your time on that.
So yeah, it absolutely will.
It will split your time and you just have to be able to deal with that to an extent.
I think for us, we've actually been running live markets for six months now.
So I think one of the things that new teams struggle with post-TGE is that,
oh no, now there's a number on a board and that is the number that we get judged by.
We've been dealing with that every day.
We have two DEXs that we run. we have two like we have two dexes that
we run they have market caps people watch them all the time so for us like the that isn't a new
experience that i hope doesn't really distract the team um but yeah it is it is difficult um i think
certainly now that i i guess like one of the things we've done is hire really
really well so we haven't
waited till TGE to hire
people so we've hired
you know
people in the team who basically had nothing
to do with TGE you know they were just focusing
on the product this whole time
so that means when I make
these claims about yeah we're gonna
roll so many product
developments out in the next three months, it's actually because I know we've actually
been working on them for the last two months already.
And that there were other people in the team who were covering that.
Even while some of the team were really focused on TGE as the main thing that we were doing,
there were other people like, we've got eight engineers in the team.
Their contribution to TGE is that we have a brilliant product
because of the work that they do.
And that, of course, does impact whether people are going to buy the token
or think well of the company.
So everyone contributes to each aspect,
but not everyone contributes to each aspect but not everyone
contributes to everything in every way you know you know sort of um sort of focused on your your
area yeah that that's a fantastic answer i i think um it sometimes it's the inclination for
for a founder to try to maybe own too much on that front
and having the right people in place, especially someone product focused in that scenario,
it's just such a load off and allows you and your team to execute on both fronts better.
Lurky, I saw you had a hand up.
Yeah, I have a question afterwards. It doesn't have to pertain
to exactly TGE, so if you want to
keep talking and then I can change it up afterwards.
I feel like we've just gotten
an amazing amount
of information from Adam
and insight on that front.
So I think
Zach, unless you have more questions,
I'm happy to let Lurkey
ask his question and change directions.
Yeah, I think I had one last question about TGE, just because it's such an important thing for almost every product in Web3.
And it's something that's almost impossible to get done right or perfect, unless you're Satoshi.
were perfect, unless you're Satoshi.
Adam, I'm kind of curious, what was one thing, even if it was small,
what was one thing that went wrong that you wish you could change?
Yeah, I am actually like genuinely very happy with how it went.
I think, again, it would probably fall down to like the numbers of advisors that you get.
I think you learn, the problem with TGs as a founder is that you only do it once.
So it's not like, you know, I'll probably never launch another coin on Coinbase again,
right?
Like, I hope not.
Like, you do this once.
So when you're early on in that process and you're negotiating things like advisor deals
for tokens or like, you know, exchange listings, like you just don't necessarily know what
a good deal looks like.
And you can kind of like over commit a little bit or like assume that you need people that you actually don't.
I think hire fewer people than you need in terms of like advisors.
I think most people, this space is full of a lot of people
who want to advise and don't want to do any work.
And I think the value of them is not always that useful.
So yeah, I think it's like, if I was to do it again, I would rely more on my in-house team and less on the external team, for sure.
I think that's a great way of saying it, because I have launched products in the past and I do agree that advisors will jump at deals and it's best to just kind of identify people within your own circle, you know, to lean in more.
Lurkey, I'm going to hand it to you next.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense what you said.
And also I've had that with VCs before.
People as a VC, they say they're going to help you a bunch, and then they kind of don't do too
much. So yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, the question I had was, as AI is increasingly
becoming more consumer-based, how has your consumers leveraged AI to make predictions
or help build their teams out? Do you have any opinions on this?
Yeah.
It's amazing what the lengths people go to to win.
It's really quite incredible.
So within weeks, we had really great community tools spring up.
Some of them were like economics tools.
But yeah, there's certainly people out there who are going to be using AI I think we've also had discussions around bringing our own AI into the game to help you make your own decisions.
Because if you think of why fantasy sports and games are not going to be a good thing,
it's not going to be a good thing.
I think we've also had discussions around bringing our own AI into the game to help you make your own decisions.
Because if you think of why fantasy sports
in general has hit a ceiling,
it's usually because it's a bit of a pain, right?
You've got so much to keep track of.
What if my player gets injured?
Is this player going to be in the starting lineup?
So if you take all that heavy lifting of that burden of information research
and you surface like an AI agent in the app who knows your preferences,
can ping you if one of your players is injured,
says, hey, you've got three players who are underperforming here.
Would you like to, you know, these guys fit the profile that you like?
That's not really cheating. I think that's a massive unlock for fantasy. I think that will genuinely make fantasy more popular than it ever is, and it ever has been, because it takes that sort of spreadsheet-y nerd vibe out of it. Almost everyone enjoys picking a player and being right and winning money.
They just don't want to do the hard work and do the hard work and do the hard work and do the hard work.
And I think that's a great thing.
I think that's a great thing.
I think that's a great thing. because it takes that sort of spreadsheet nerd vibe out of it.
Almost everyone enjoys picking a player and being right and winning money.
They just don't want to do the hard bit.
So yeah, I think AI is a massive unlock for it.
Yeah, I think that... Thanks.
Go ahead.
I was just saying, yeah, thanks for your answer.
I appreciate it.
So Adam, I know that it's late for for you and I do have a few last questions but guys if anyone has any questions for Adam or football.fun
feel free to raise your hand because we might uh we might be closing the x space up in about five
minutes so Adam I know that go ahead sorry go ahead Zach you go ahead uh no I think my questions are
funny questions so Ryan if you have a serious, I'll hand it to you first.
No, not a question, more a comment, Adam. I just wanted to thank you for honestly giving such direct and thorough answers to all the questions that we've thrown at you today. I know a lot of people like to sometimes keep their secret sauce close to the
vest. And I think really the purpose of this show is for this to be kind of like a knowledge sharing
exercise, particularly around giving the tidbit on founders, not just copying what has worked in
the past, I think is like some of the best advice I've heard. So shout out, excited to follow football.fun's progress.
And thank you again from my side.
I just have to run.
So I wanted to drop that before I leave.
I am well known for this leaking thing.
So it's true to form.
All right, take care.
All right, Adam, I do have one question for you.
So who football or sorry, the World Cup is happening in the US.
And specifically, there's one game that's happening in Texas.
I'm curious if you're actually going to be attending some of these games
and by any chance if we could meet up in person.
Um, you know what I have?
I have no plans to get to the World Cup unless we...
I'd better get on signing some sort of sponsorship deal where I get a free ticket or something.
I did ask and the cost is absolutely insane.
I spoke to a firm who were like a major advertising agency.
And they were like, they only sell boxes.
So like, they want like $20,000 for like 10 tickets
to like go and see one game featuring the US or England.
So I just, even though we're doing decent revenue,
I'm quite, you know, I'm from the north of England where we're
notorious for being tight. We're basically like the Ned Starks of crypto. So I'm not sure we'll
swing to $20,000, but I'd love to go. No, I think it makes sense. You know, there's so many
conferences and events out there and some of the prices are ballistic do you actually attend like local sports in in england and then use
football.fun to to bet on players uh yeah i do so when i'm in the uk i would go to newcastle a lot
and leeds so leeds are my home club the club i support and i lived in newcastle for a long time
um and newcastle has the best it's probably the best atmosphere at any stadium that i've ever been
to um the fans there are so like hyper passionate and depending on the result like the whole city is
obviously depressed or delighted for the next three days after each game. So amazing
time there. The last game I went to see was actually Barcelona versus Newcastle
and Newcastle almost did it as well. They were actually pretty good until a Rashford goal,
which is probably one of the best goals I've ever seen live to Rashford's credit.
I've ever seen live to Rashford's credit.
That's amazing.
I wish I could go to football games
and just hear that vibe and that energy.
Is there someone that currently works for football.fun?
Who on football.fun is the most passionate about sports?
There's a lot of them, actually.
But then there's also people who aren't.
We've got some of the engineering team, they're passionate about technology, right?
They like to go beep boop and, well, they like to build, you know,
some of them have become sports fans through playing the app,
which is like really interesting to me because they actually like the game
even though they had no prior interest in sports.
And there's a theme there.
We've met a lot of people along the way who,
maybe they're traders in crypto,
who had no interest in sports before,
give them three weeks on the app because they can trade it.
And they're talking about every player
as if they'd known them their whole lives.
Same way no one's really interested in DeSci.
No one even knows what that is, but if they can trade the token, they'll suddenly become a DeSci expert. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. he's absolutely hardcore fan so he was one of our original investors
he's the CFO now
at football.fun
he joined us full time about four months ago
and he's
he was one of the biggest OG whales
and so rare back in the day as well
so he's a massive
football fan
we've also got Sean
who is...
He's basically spent the last 12 years of his life
working entirely in fantasy sports.
And he helps people win, like, real cash fantasy sports games.
And we brought him in to lead the sort of rule set
and design for the NFL game.
So every time we'll do a new sport,
we make sure that there's someone on the team
who's like a real authentic super fan of that sport
and they can make sure all the details are right
for that particular crowd.
Yeah, that sounds massive.
Well, Adam, I think that that's it.
That's all my questions.
Thank you for staying up late for us.
But Ray, Lurkey, if y'all have any last minute questions for Adam, feel free to ask him. But if not, we might be ending the space.
one little question what is something uh you're excited for for the future maybe it's in production
maybe it's not um but yeah just give a little maybe alpha i know you dropped some already but
yeah uh man there's a lot so yeah the new the new reward system it's going to be much more obvious
how much you're winning uh we've got a new pick system which will be the easiest way to show basically your predictions and like how skillful you are and allow you to like flex on your friends.
So I think that's going to be a really exciting feature as well.
I think what people don't realize about the fun rewards and like the, it's not even staking, you just have to hold it in your wallet.
You don't have to stake it.
This is a monthly thing.
So we're not actually just doing one airdrop.
So if you want to come and start playing right now,
you can still participate and get monthly fun rewards
just for playing the game.
You get fees back, you get more rewards,
and you build up that loyalty system as you play.
So yeah, we're just looking to make it like,
basically, we just think about it
as the most rewarding fantasy sports game in the world.
If we get that entertainment right,
if we make people feel valued,
we actually just create this really efficient company
where we only charge a small percent trade,
a small percent on the trades.
We actually don't take a, we don't take
the 70-80% up front that
the other
products do. It actually all lives
in the market
and goes back to users. So
by having this like
really small, efficient team,
we maximize
the rewards back to the users and the
players. And I think that's how we're going to win at the end of the day.
It's going to be an exciting 2026 for you, Adam.
Thank you so much for joining the Twitter space.
It was amazing talking with you for an hour.
I know it's very late, so it means even more that you showed up.
Lurkey, thank you so much for joining.
Ray, same to you. Guys, I think that's a wrap I think we're good Adam any last-minute words or are we ending it no just thank you for having me on
always love hanging out with the base base team yeah cheers and thanks for
everything you guys do to support the product. Appreciate it. Of course. All right, guys, that's the space.
We'll see you this Friday.
