Ada Jonuse of Lympo, The First-Ever Sports NFT Minting Platform, Plus: Dog Coin Boom, 1inch Crypto-Themed NFT Series, Doja Cat NFTs, And More...

||Sports NFT: Ultimately many stars and brands are going to interact with their fan base in this way.|Sports NFT: If the token is doing good and things are running, then everyone is happy. |Sports NFT: There are a lot of functional things that are coming that will impact everybody's lives, in some cases in very mundane ways, but still impactful and meaningful.|Sports NFT: One thing that definitely stands out within the crypto space in general and NFTs is incentives and motivation.|||
September 13, 2021
Podcast
NFT 44 | Sports NFT

 

Most people have heard that sports stars care about NFTs and crypto but most still don’t understand why. Learn more about NFTs in action as your hosts talk with Ada Jonuse on how she came up with the idea for her startup and how it achieved the success it has today. Lympo is a gamified sports NFT ecosystem that she co-founded in 2016. Ada’s an enthusiastic founder whose inspiration comes from many sources, including meditation, science, and art. In this episode, she discusses what it’s like to start out, identify where to pivot, and create deals that work. Join in as the crew explores the business side and the human element of how NFTs are changing sports.

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Ada Jonuse of Lympo, The First-Ever Sports NFT Minting Platform, Plus: Dog Coin Boom, 1inch Crypto-Themed NFT Series, Doja Cat NFTs, And More…

Welcome to another exciting episode. Stay tuned for how Lympo is upping the game for sports collectibles and fan experiences, details on which MMA fighters are taking big steps into NFTs, and the beautiful family story behind our guest’s most prized possession. All this and more on this episode. Enjoy.

This episode features Ada Jonuse, a startup founder and women’s empowerment agent. Ada is the Cofounder and CEO of the blockchain company, Lympo, a gamified sports NFT ecosystem, including NFTs with IP rights of world-famous athletes and clubs. Lympo was acquired by Animoca Brands. After leaving European politics, Ada worked with high-tech startups in the US, later became an entrepreneur and startup advisor herself. Ada is also the Cofounder of Womenat, a network for women professionals. Ada’s aspiration is to work with great people on meaningful projects. Her inspiration comes from many sources, including meditation, science and art. Welcome, Ada. It’s great to have you here.

NFT 44 | Sports NFT

Sports NFT: Ultimately many stars and brands are going to interact with their fan base in this way.

 

Thank you so much. I’m happy to be here.

It’s cool to connect with you through our friend at Animoca Brands, Yat Siu, who is one of our favorite episodes. It’s fun to learn about what that whole team is doing. I feel fortunate to have you here. Let’s dive right in. I know there has been some iteration that led you to this point with Lympo. How did the idea for Lympo come up? How did it get you to where we are?

We’re not a new team in blockchain terms. We started in 2017. In the summer of 2017, I started working on the first idea. Although years have passed but in crypto space terms, it’s like many years because so much has happened since then. The first idea that we had with Lympo had to do with sports and a healthy lifestyle more. We launched in 2018. We incentivized people to provide their health data and at the same time, get healthier with tokens. We did that for some time and then it didn’t go exactly as planned in terms of the business model.

Also, we’re not quite there yet. With the whole blockchain space, I believe that people should be rewarded for their data. This is going a little bit slower than we expected that the users would jump to decentralized applications, decentralized browsers and so on to take ownership of their data. We’re looking at like, “What happens very often in the startup life? Where can we pivot? What can we do with our knowledge and expertise? What is the next step?”

We met Animoca Brands in 2018. They were also investors in our company. We spoke about the situation. It turned out that Animoca was ready to acquire Lympo. Since then, we stayed with sports and athletes but we turned to the NFT space. We’re also following the philosophy of Animoca Brands and look a lot into gaming. We believe that gaming could be or is already the industry that is going to be affected by this emergence of the new technologies.

This is how it all came about. We’re at our first stage. We have our NFT minting platform live and various athletes were joined already. The sets have been dropped. Our users are getting the NFTs, selling on the secondary market. We’re working on the second stage where we’re creating our first game and working with various partners to enable our users to participate in play-to-earn games.

I wanted to follow up here. I know you’re doing things to merge the physical and digital worlds through the NFTs that Lympo produces. How exactly does that happen?

We believe that NFTs are more than only digital collectibles. When we release our NFTs, we think about how they’re going to be used in the ecosystem that we’re building. One of the first things that are going to happen is the holders of our NFTs will be able to stake them and get token rewards for that. The NFT is becoming like an asset that you can utilize further with the DeFi elements added to them. The next step is also going to be Star Tokens like social tokens of the athletes that we will release further on play-to-earn games.

We’re running our Lympo Auctions. This is where we thought it was nice and cool to get a unique, one-of-a-kind NFT. We have an auction of six cards so far and the next are following but in order to make it exceptional and more engaging because we believe in this engagement of the big fan base of sports fans, we thought that we could add some extra benefits and perks to those NFTs. Depending on the price for which the NFT was sold, the athletes are ready to meet the owner of the NFT, call them to interact, do some social media shout-outs or send some signed memorabilia.

People should be rewarded for their data.  Click To Tweet

There are perks that go up to some kind of private poker event with a progress bar and go into a game to see the athlete. Some of these perks are valid for a number of years. If you want to sell the NFT, then these rights to get these perks are going to be transferred to the new owner. We believe this also increases the value of NFT. We’re excited to see how this works, what people appreciate and what they’re excited about. We want to address this audience.

It sounds like, as a means of comparison outside of the blockchain industry, a cameo on steroids with the true fan to athlete experiences in a lot of ways that aren’t even possible without blockchain technology. How has it been to convey these ideas to the athletes and their managers? I’m curious how they’ve responded to these possibilities. Were they like, “Stop, you’re blowing my mind?” Was it very easy for them to ingest what’s possible here?

It’s part of the challenge. Everyone has heard of NFTs but still how exactly this is going to work, what the lifetime royalties are, how the contract is going to look like, how the social token will look like and what their athlete is comfortable with because we’re going to host votes where the fans decide ultimately what they do in uncertain questions. The value in crypto is changing and that’s the reality. Sometimes you sign a contract with a certain value in USD of crypto. You fix the price on that day and then it can be more or less. Explaining all of these details is part of the journey.

Generally, the space is very receptive but then sometimes the devil is in the details. It comes to smaller things that we try to explain with other examples, show how other companies work and convince that this is pretty amazing to have royalties, for example, on every sale of the NFT forever, things like that and how valuable the fan token will be, the Star Token of that star and so on. We have great people working in our team. Also for some other athletes, we negotiate on behalf of Animoca Brands so that these IP rights can be shared with various projects. They have projects that have been along for some time where it’s a bit easier to explain what we’re going to do.

Is there a particular athlete or two that become a BFF where they’re super pumped about what you’re doing with the ecosystem and what you’re creating that you could speak to?

Josh may be asking, “How many steps away are you from Tom Brady?” I’m not sure but that usually comes up in an episode.

I’m going to make a prediction. I’m not going to tell it though on which athlete based on Ada’s background, but we’ll let her answer that.

It depends. I come from Lithuania. We have a strong background in basketball. I spent my childhood watching NBA games at nighttime because it was night in Lithuania. It was such a big thing and everyone was talking about that in school. When I was watching The Last Dance, it was so amazing to see all the history unfolding. I’m excited about the basketball players. For example, we have worked with a number of MMA fighters and also some women power so the latest auction was Rose Namajunas, an MMA fighter. She herself and her managers are excited about what we’re doing and about the space and get involved a lot. This is cool when we have people like that on board.

Rose is a badass. I have a feeling that her opponents are crying the night before each of their fights with her. She is a tornado. Tell us a little bit more about the actual Star Tokens. What are they? How can users engage with them? Are those related to the perks that you were talking about that can be staked for? Can you go into that a little bit more detail for us?

It’s a new project. We haven’t released any Star Tokens yet but it will work as a token of a personal athlete. The holders of that token can do various things. They can vote on certain decisions. Voting is also going to work like staking a token. If a user is voting, they will get a part of the reward pool that is associated with that vote and also even more tokens if they guess what the outcome is going to be.

We want to involve the community. We want them to talk about their votes, to get their feelings, to build their reputation. What we often see in our organization is that many people are following someone who has built their reputation over time and following their decisions, knowledge and expertise. We want to do that.

There are going to be various polls, lotteries and questionnaires where owning the token, you can enter those and qualify to get some prices. Especially for the Star Tokens, we have amazing prizes that include this direct interaction with the star because this is what this is all about. We want to make sure that fans have an influence on the stars.

We believe that ultimately many stars and brands are going to be interacting with their fan base in this way. Everything is going in that direction. We’ll see whether that’s in blockchain or not but it’s a super cool technology for that to verify the votes to have a decentralized organization. We’re going to launch the first Star Tokens in the upcoming months.

Is there a consideration to egalitarianism in terms of people that maybe don’t have as much disposable income to stake on their favorite stars being able to participate? How have you tried to balance that with also recognizing super fans that are willing to put their life savings into meeting, for example, Tom Brady or someone like that? What has been your thinking on that balancing act?

When designing the voting mechanisms, we were thinking about the maximum number of tokens that you can stake to vote. It’s more about the number of people who can participate in the vote. That’s also going to be limited to have some gamification elements there but even holding a smaller number of tokens, you will be able to cast your vote and be heard. We don’t want someone holding a lot of tokens to always decide the outcome because this is boring for everyone. Everything in the blockchain space, it’s quite often you do things for the first time. That’s the interesting part of it.

NFT 44 | Sports NFT

Sports NFT: If the token is doing good and things are running, then everyone is happy.

 

We’re ready to adapt to see how the audience reacts to what happens what our user base is like. We did the polls on the NFT designs. We asked what designs people like the most. We want to slowly transition to more and more DAO elements in the whole NFT ecosystem that we’re building. We are opening applications for athletes so athletes will be able to apply themselves to be on Lympo.

We want to let the community vote whom they want to see next. Maybe in the future, even crowd-fund for some IP rights that they’re super excited about and then have also community designers to design the NFTs. We’re going to be slowly transitioning to that because we think that the biggest power is the power of the community.

What’s so interesting about what you’ve shared with us are the elements of traditional lean startup philosophy that have been accelerated by blockchain technology and what’s going on in the NFT space. Jeff and I were doing lean startup events together. You might iterate on your company in a meaningful way every few months and that’s aggressive.

With the way technology has advanced and the ability to engage your community, you can make some micro-decisions by the hour that sends you on the right trajectory with this concept. Having the solution at the end of the road isn’t so important anymore as it is having that ongoing dialogue with your community and being as responsive as possible. It’s cool how you’re going about not gripping the wheel too tightly here.

I must admit. It has both nice moments and difficulties. Normally, when you create a product, you’re there sitting with your team. If you have delays, you go to the board and say what happens. You don’t have 10,000 people watching you in progress. In crypto, you have to deliver on the promise but sometimes maybe you have to test more or do something else.

I’ve felt a lot of pressure given the fact that there is a community around. They’re super curious, watching our every step and ready to say what they’re thinking. At the same time, these are the people who are supporting us and who keep on believing. We have community members who have also been around since the beginning of 2018. If the token is doing good and things are running smooth, then everyone is happy. During the crypto winter, not too many people are happy. There are a lot of emotions in that space.

You’ll appreciate this, Ada, because of the background you shared. We’re going to make sure that you hook up with Roman and get a DinoMonks. When you’re having these difficult days, you can go on their Discord and participate in a mental wellness session that is redeemable from your DinoMonks.

DinoMonks don’t hibernate during crypto winter. I saw some indications there was something special going on for Halloween with those.

The community side of it is so important. I was at a talk with this guy, Alex Sheen. He runs a nonprofit called Because I said I would, which is all about keeping promises and how important that is. We’ve lost that a bit in the age of technology and things moving so quickly with over-commitment and things of that nature.

I wanted to ask back on the topic of the greatest of all time drops and all these fun things you have going on. Have you looked into historical figures of the historical GOATs? Are you doing anything on the horizon from that context, maybe past greats like the Muhammad Ali’s of the world or these types of characters?

We have looked at some sports legends. We hope we’ll be able to announce something soon. I don’t want to over-promise and name names. There are names that we’ve known forever and they’re still active in the space. There’s just this emotion that is attached to whatever famous football or basketball player or fighter. NFT is also a great way to continue engaging with the fan base for these stars that are not even active in the sport.

The biggest power is the power of the community. Click To Tweet

It’s funny that one of the things that we haven’t seen as much of in this realm of digital collectibles via NFTs is that nostalgic throwback. When you think of collectible cards or figurines and things like that, it’s really, in most cases, rooted in these historical sports legends or other people of this ilk, not so much the latest stars that are coming and making an impact.

NFT has been the opposite. We’ve started with the new stuff, whether it’s new music or new moments with NBA Top Shots like the latest and greatest. I feel like we haven’t seen a major impact of where fans’ true nostalgia influences them. I’m excited to see it. Maybe you will have a deep impact in that category.

I think about Larry Bird. How cool would it be to do something with him in the basketball world? I ran into Chuck Liddell at an event. What you’re saying is so true. The energy I felt towards this man that I had seen knocked out so many people and paved the way in the MMA fighting world, UFC in particular is totally a different experience. If you can channel that for fans, that’s very special what you’re doing.

We hope to do our best.

I want to go back to some ongoing auctions and upcoming NFTs to be launched. What other launches are on the horizon for you all?

Many things are happening at the same time. We’re running our auctions until September 20th, 2021. Every few days, we announce a new athlete. They’re earning both on the Binance NFT Marketplace and others on OpenSea. This is an ongoing effort that is happening. At the same time, we’re working on new pools on our NFT minting platform. We’re looking forward to launch an eSports pool. We’ll see how quick we can be on that. That’s the audience that is excited, both about gaming, crypto and collectibles. For some people who are a natural fit for that, this is going to be the first thing.

We’re working with various partners on joint NFTs. We did cooperation with another Animoca company and game, REVV Racing. In this case, our users were able to get the key to the car, get the car, go and play. This way, we can deliver our promise to have NFTs and play-to-earn games earlier than our own games around. We’re looking into doing more with Sandbox a few more projects. These are the next things on our own map.

Do you race your Lympo car? Did you try that? It was super hard but fun.

I tried a few times but I admit I have to get better.

You need some extra hardware for that one. Some of the gamers have the steering wheels, gas, brakes and everything set up right there. I feel like that had to have been a requirement to kick ass at this game.

There has to be some work invested in that. I know my Cofounder, Tadas, started racing on F1 Delta and in the end, putting a team and the players together and sharing the resources. Cooperation is the key also.

I need someone to be like, “Let me hit the break while I’m working on the gas pedal because I just have cleaned the walls.”

We need an Edge of NFT pit crew.

We had a car in that game as well, the Edge of NFT race car. Ours was pink and cool. I’m sure yours was awesome as well.

We’re going to do some more with REVV also on some special cars and adding some of the IP rights that we have to transfer to their game and fans as well.

I’m excited about everything that you are doing. We’ll keep an eye on it. Taking a step back and looking at the NFT ecosystem as a whole, what excites you in terms of what’s existing or hasn’t yet been formed as game changers in the next wave of NFTs outside of your project and partners?

There is a general agreement that it’s hard to price the NFTs and various tools to do that. What I’m excited about is the various ways to utilize the NFTs further either owning a part of NFT, wrapping for a certain period of time, putting NFTs alone and stabilizing for a part of the price. It’s okay. We all get a lot of pictures where our ownership of that is registered on blockchain and this is a cool thing but for me, the question is like, “What’s next? What can we do with this asset class?” That emerged and that is huge.

We saw NFTs being sold for millions. Many people in the space have tried this out, owned NFTs and like, “How do we work with this as an asset? What kind of DeFi elements can we maybe bring to this?” That’s generally something that is, for me, very interesting to see. There are many great concepts that people are trying out. I feel there’s so much creativity being put into that. I hope that great products will come out of that.

We appreciate you sharing so much about Lympo. For all our readers, check it out. It’s so cool. There are many fun elements here. Rose Namajunas has crossed that $15,000 threshold into the next level. I’m a huge fan of her. The next segment here is Edge Quick Hitters. They are a fun, quick way to get to know you a little better. We have ten questions and we’re looking for short single-word or few-word responses, but feel free to expand if you get the urge. Question number one, what is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?

Some sweets. It must have been something I got from the pocket money. It’s probably something strange that makes your tongue drool. It has different stickers and whatever comes with that thing.

Question number two, what is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?

I don’t remember this quite exactly but that must be some piece of furniture. I left my home country when I was eighteen. Since then, I have lived in eight different countries. I was moving all the time. Every time, I would get a lot of furniture for my new apartment or things. Before leaving, I tried to sell some off. It’s probably something in that area.

You realized that furnished rentals were the way to go.

NFT 44 | Sports NFT

Sports NFT: There are a lot of functional things that are coming that will impact everybody’s lives, in some cases in very mundane ways, but still impactful and meaningful.

 

It’s a bit difficult in some countries. In Germany and Belgium, you don’t have that many furnished cool apartments to rent. These are the countries where I had to get some furniture.

Question number three, what is the most recent thing you purchased?

It’s a big purchase. I got a loan and purchase an apartment.

It was an unfurnished apartment I’m guessing that you got to also furnish it.

Yeah, but that’s fine. I’m not involved in that myself so much, so it’s okay.

Question number four, what is the most recent thing you sold?

The most recent thing I sold was an NFT. I was happy with the price I could get for that. I was like, “This is so exciting.” When I saw someone bought it, I was like, “Who could that be?” I don’t even know how it’s valued. I turned from an only collector to also someone who trades in this space. That was cool.

Would you be willing to share with us the type of NFT?

It’s one of the Lympo NFTs. I believe in the project, try to do my best and see how things look like. I could purchase one NFT and then sell it.

Question number five, what is your most prized possession?

I’m always thinking, “What is my most valuable possession?” It’s this ring. It’s not very expensive.

Is that a crisscross, cool geometric pattern? Is that what it is?

Yes. It’s a ring that is about 150 years old. It was bought by my great-grandfather. He left Lithuania and went to the US in the 19th century to work. He worked as a labor in the ship, made some money and bought this ring for his future wife. He didn’t know who his future wife was going to be. He returned to Lithuania and met my great-grandmother. It’s part of who I am. If I lost this, I would be very sad. For all the other things that can be replaced, I try not to get too attached to stuff too much because we can lose everything in a way.

You get the award for the most cinematic, most prized possession. You could make a movie about that for sure. That’s a beautiful story. I love it.

Maybe one day.

Question number six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service and experience that’s for sale, what would that be?

I’m an art fan and I’m excited about paintings. Around the sixteenth century, this is where a lot of innovation came into the art space. I used to go to museums for so many years and I can only look at them. I want to touch the picture. If I could have a Flemish painting from this time and also something that remained valuable for years. I don’t think there are any Rembrandts for sale, so I would settle for something even less famous. This is something that would be the most amazing experience for me to have in my room. It’s not a big house with art.

Question number seven, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would that be?

It’s curiosity. I did a lot of things. I’m curious about many things. There are many more things to do. This drives me forward in learning about new things.

Out of curiosity, do you have a list of things that you operate off of or is it driven internally and by opportunity?

I see what comes up. I’ve spent a lot of time on Cosmology and Physics. It’s something I haven’t learned too much at school. When I discovered that, I was like, “There’s so much happening and so much to learn.” It makes you realize that the reality is nothing what we think of it. Knowing that, we can be more relaxed about everything about our own viewpoint. In any way, nothing is like it seems to be. Why argue about that? The reality is something very strange, and I’m curious to know what that is. That’s my latest passion.

Reality is nothing but what we think of it. Click To Tweet

Question number eight, if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?

I find myself very impatient sometimes. It’s like giving birth to your child. I have a son. You need so much patience with a child. That improved a lot but still sometimes, I shouldn’t push so hard.

Question number nine, what did you do before joining us on the show?

I was working and having lunch. I had some green Thai curry with tofu. It was very nice.

Last question, question number ten, what are you going to do next after the show?

My babysitter is going to be back with my son. We’re going to have some fun.

That was Edge Quick Hitters. Thank you so much for playing with us and sharing some of your insights. We appreciate it.

That was fun.

Let’s hit some hot topics.

Let’s get the first one here. “NFTs boom anew as DOG coin becomes $550 million asset overnight. The DOG coin, a fraction of the non-fungible token depicting the famous Doge meme, has doubled in value in less than 24 hours of trading according to CoinGecko data. That makes it one of the most valuable NFTs yet.” I’m wondering when Dogecoin and NFT stuff are going to get old. This trope can only last for so long.

There are many iterations of Doge, not just in the meme coin world, which really Doge is. It’s a huge coin and community-driven. They are fractionalizing the image of it and then that’s becoming super valuable as a result. I can’t imagine that anybody felt like it would have the legs and the same power that it had years ago. It’s amazing and crazy how it continues and evolves. It has positioned itself in the NFT and crypto ecosystem forever.

Did I tell you my theory about cats? I feel like cats, at some point, somehow discovered a time machine. Maybe in the future, it will happen. They came back and helped us create the internet so that we could popularize cat videos. Who thought about cat videos except for maybe America’s Funniest Home Videos? They became huge on the internet. This must be the dogs shortly afterward getting a hold of the time machine, coming back and supplanting what’s going on. That’s my theory.

Those are some of the favorites quite often. That’s one of the explanations of why things are happening.

Whenever my three-year-old sees any of the NFTs I’m looking at, he is like, “Cool.” If he sees dinosaurs, he’s like, “Dad, it’s a dinosaur. It’s got laser eyes.” We’re devolving in terms of age appropriateness.

I can’t wait to see Vitalik’s quote on this because here is this very technical, serious guy that invented Ethereum for all these different amazing, game-changing things. This is what people want to do and talk about. He seems to be rolling with it. He is like, “Whatever builds the ecosystem and shows people the different use cases, sure. Why not? Let’s do it.”

We can’t forget the fun, and so much of this is about fun. There are a lot of cool functional things that are coming that are game-changing that will impact everybody’s lives, in some cases, in very mundane ways but still impactful and meaningful. The community element of all this is what makes it so exciting. It’s important to hold on to that.

We should hit the next hot topic. Let’s do it. “1inch Network sponsors crypto-themed animated NFT series. Decentralized Exchange Aggregator 1inch has partnered with an animated series that pokes fun at startups in a Silicon Valley-like setting. In an announcement, 1inch said it would be sponsoring the non-fungible token or NFT series, Take My Muffin, in addition to providing its technical expertise for the show and introducing team members to projects in the decentralized finance or DeFi space.” What was it called? Was it called Silicon Valley? I never got a chance to watch that show. Was it a Netflix show or something like that?

I love that show. That was the best.

It’s fun. I was thinking of a project with a friend of mine to watch everything again because it gets funnier in time when you already know. I founded my startup some time ago. Many situations are real. They’re pumped. The biggest is in Silicon Valley because it’s a show. There’s so much truth about that. We could expect something good coming out of NFT or building a metaverse.

If NFTs are involved, we are always talking about how there’s so much branding and IP here like characters, storylines and how much of a role that plays in things. There’s a role here.

We get the community to decide on what happens next but then it’s boring to watch the show. Somehow we have to separate that.

It’s a lot of fun. It’s cool to see NFT characters come to life or characters to become NFTs and the interaction of that. It’s something that we’ve heard people talk about a lot so far. We haven’t seen an action beyond the gaming space. It’s cool to see it in traditional media. I’ll be keeping an eye on Take My Muffin.

Also the community deciding what happens next doesn’t have to be boring. This came up on a previous episode. We were referring to the three of us being involved in improv a little bit and this idea that the audience comes up with ideas for whoever is improvising. Sometimes the more awkward or crazy they are, the better it makes things. The audience can have their hand at making it a difficult exercise to implement and that could still remain entertaining, even though they know what’s going to happen.

We should hit the next hot topic. “Doja Cat gets into the NFT game. Only a few months removed from the release of her refreshingly weird third album, Doja Cat has revealed the first of three “Planet Doja” drops, which will go live via OneOf, the music-centric marketplace for eco-friendly NFTs that Quincy Jones helped launched.” OneOf have been in a pre-launch mode for a while. You could get on the site and get free poker tokens and NFTs to get in early and get an appreciation for being zero-order participants. They’re getting started in there as you should. They’re doing it big with a big star.

There are lots of cool tie-ins there. It’s similar to some of the things we were talking about before where we merged the digital and physical world and in this case, the experience that Doja Cat brings like her concert. The platinum-level tickets give you opportunities to win merch, seats at the events and other perks that will be forthcoming and haven’t even been defined yet in some cases. There’s a huge fan base already, a huge following and an opportunity to partner with a company like OneOf that’s trying to change the game in a meaningful way, expand her reach and reward fans for being loyal and participating in her world.

NFT 44 | Sports NFT

Sports NFT: One thing that definitely stands out within the crypto space in general and NFTs is incentives and motivation.

 

Doja Cat was quoted in the article saying, “I don’t know that much about NFTs but what I do know is that they can be bad for the environment and cost a fortune but mine won’t.” This again is something that OneOf is highlighting, making NFTs green. I was in a close discussion with tech people in all different areas. We were talking about climate change.

I brought up all the things we’re seeing around, what we’ve been talking about, making things fun and gamified in the context of climate change and not making the topic small. It’s a huge topic that we need to deal with but it’s like we were saying, “People get into stuff that they find fun.” It’s great to see an entity that has the power to use entertainment, to engage the masses, to also be doing it in a green way so that people can still have their fun and be part of something that’s good for the planet.

It’s something that came up with some of the negotiations of some of the athletes that we had. At this point, we’re going to move to another chain so we can explain this roadmap. It’s a concern for athletes. I have been working a little bit with One Art Project. It’s a huge concern for the art world. I know Animoca Brands has signed the Olympic Committee.

One of the companies, nWay, released the Olympic Pins as NFTs. They also wanted to make sure that it was on Flow but doesn’t have this huge environmental impact. From my point of view, it’s one of the biggest questions that we have to solve. Let’s see what happens. There’s a lot of innovation in the space. People care about that.

One thing that stands out within the crypto space in general and NFTs is incentives and motivation. We’re getting an incredible playground around incentives and motivation. Attempted to run a green project and a composting project when I was living in New York many years ago, I realized that’s a lot of what it’s about.

People aren’t just going to compost because they heard from you that it’s good for the environment and they should. They need to have some incentives. Some people will get it but some people have other things they’re paying attention to. They have careers and other interests. They need incentives to guide them in the right direction. Is there anything else on that topic or should we wrap it up?

We hit it and covered it. Ada, it has been great having you on. It’s so much fun. I’m a big fan of what you’re doing. I’m excited to see also where the Animoca Brands network and the companies that are continuing to work, evolve and intersect with what you’re doing. It’s super exciting.

It was great. I enjoyed talking to all of you and then having this nice conversation that we had here.

For our readers, where should they go to learn more about Lympo and the projects that you have forthcoming as well as yourself?

We can be found on our website, Lympo.com. We have communities both on Telegram and Discord. We have a Medium account where we publish a lot. I don’t tweet that much myself but I’m on Twitter as well. I might be retweeting. I normally use it as a source of information. I can be found there. I often do Q&As with the communities. People will send questions and I answer them if there’s anything they’re interested in. Normally, we have community managers who are there waiting for new community members and are happy to assist you with anything.

We heard that we’re going to be doing a little giveaway and contest. I’m wondering if you could give our readers a little high-level background on that.

We’re ready to give away 70 exclusive NFTs for the Edge readers. We haven’t done many campaigns like that. It’s just one campaign so far. This is going to be something very new. It’s exciting that we can provide NFTs for various communities. This is going to be something exceptional and rare.

Keep an eye out on our socials for all the details on that and you’ll be a part of something particularly special. Thank you, Ada. We’ve reached the outer limit at the show. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on the starship so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. How? Go to iTunes, rate us and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole.

Want to help co-create Edge of NFT with us? Got guests you want to see on the episode? Questions for hosts or guests? An NFT you would like us to review? Drop us a line at Contact@EdgeOfNFT.com or tweet at us @EdgeOfNFT to get in the mix. Lastly, be sure to tune in next episode for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.

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About Ada Jonuse

Co-founded 3 startups and one international startup community. Exited Lympo.com to an Asian unicorn Animoca Brands. Released two crypto tokens and went through numerous crypto hypes. Excited about technology innovations with positive impact. // 2018 Women Technology Leader of the Year (Lithuania) // 2017 Emerging European tech star (by Google, Financial Times and other partners of the New Europe 100 list)

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