First Blood (1ST)

First Blood

Total supply	85,558,363 1ST

Basics

• Asset
• “Play eSports, Win Rewards. Decentralized eSports platform based on Smart Contracts”
• A decentralized eSports (betting) platform started out on Ethereum and then switched (13-12-2019) to Tendermint based Dawn.
• Value proposition: Holding the token will give yous part of the fee’s.
• From this CryptoCompare guide:
• “It allows players to test their skills and to bet on games without being subject to downtime, hacks, traditional money transfers, financial regulations, and middleman corruption and fees. FirstBlood intends to make the eSports industry more transparent and efficient while bringing in a new demographic into the crypto community, thus bringing cryptocurrencies one step closer to mainstream adoption.“

History

• From the notes of a, now deleted, podcast (16-9-2017):
  1. "Joe’s co-founder, Anik, is also a big gamer
  2. 04:08 – They were both fans of League of Legends
  3. 04:14 – They attended a Hackathon where they were challenged to build an application that has never existed before
  4. 05:00 – Joe co-founded Alt-Options while he was still in college
  5. 05:15 – The technology was built from scratch
  6. 05:18 – There were about 2K users during the testing phase
  7. 05:50 – It was bootstrapped and $50K was raised from families and friends
  8. 06:02 – There were a group people who wanted to get into the space and Joe worked with them as a consultant for half a year
  9. 06:44 – Joe decided to do the token issuance because of the support they were getting
  10. 06:55 – DAO was successful until hackers were able to get into it due to a bug
  11. 07:19 – FirstBlood was one of the most promising projects that was going to DAO
  12. FirstBlood was operating under Project Tron in the DAO community
  13. 08:15 – After the bug, FirstBlood started building what was needed to run a successful crowdfunding campaign
  14. Joe came home with a budget of 3-5 years runway for the entire team
  15. 09:46 – They’ve raised $5M in funding
  16. 09:52 – Team had 6 people and now they have 15 people
  17. – FirstBlood raised the money in just the first four blocks and processed in just 7 minutes
  18. 12:41 – FirstBlood has sold 465,313 ether tokens
  19. 22:20 – Joe can’t disclose the amount he owns from FirstBlood tokens
  20. 22:50 – The allocation for founders is around 10% of the tokens
  21. 6:38 – The fund is owned by the project
  22. 27:08 – The ether can be used to keep buying the project
  23. 27:30 – Some of the money from the funds are used to pay the team
  24. 28:03 – FirstBlood liquidates 80% of the ether post cross-sales and 20% remains in the smart contract
  25. 28:39 – FirstBlood has around $4M in the bank that pays salaries and other company expenses
  26. Ether was valued when Joe liquidated the 372K shares at $11 per share
  27. 32:38 – Joe didn’t wait for the share value to increase because they needed the money to get the project running"

ICO and Launch

• From their blog (12-2019):

"On September 25, 2016, FirstBlood first made headlines by raising $5.5 million dollars in ninety seconds, in one of the first ICOs launched on Ethereum. By January of 2017 had launched a fully decentralized alpha version of our project for Dota 2."

Then ETH mooned and the SEC started coming down on ICO's.

"We continued focusing primarily on building a frictionless esports-wagering dApp, without publicly releasing or publicizing it, while doubling down on our traditional esports tournament platform and introducing our PUBG Battle’s product that remains our most popular platform. This proved to be a critical decision. A year and a half later, we now have 250,000 users and are poised to integrate our Dawn Blockchain that will solve the user friction problem."

Dawn on Tendermint

• From their blog (12-2019):

"By the end of 2018, Ethereum’s hash rate had risen by 10,000% from the rate at the time of our crowdsale. The popularity Ethereum had gained also created frequent network congestion that would delay settlements of transactions. For FirstBlood, this meant that the consistency of the duration it will take for our smart contracts to lock matches into our system and process results could be unpredictable, plus the yet-to-be-solved UX issue makes our model, and additionally our envisioned fully-decentralized product, not viable until Ethereum releases its long-awaited 2.0 upgrade. However, waiting for that solution was not an option for us. We sought a scalable solution for our user-friction problem so that we can finally build the killer dApp. We found it in Tendermint."

• FirstBlood’s Tendermint blockchain, Dawn, currently being built using Cosmos SDK.

How it works

• From their blog (12-2019):

"First, the Tendermint architecture allows Dawn to scale transactions-per-second well above the current Ethereum limit, and at a significantly lower cost to end-users, while keeping Ethereum as our top layer. This means that we can eliminate the scaling problems we encountered in building on Ethereum, without losing its credibility as a powerful, trusted platform for maintaining token ownership and transactions. To do this, we are building our new Dawn blockchain (Dawn) as a “Cosmos Zone” built on the Tendermint consensus, using a bridge contract deployed on the Ethereum mainnet. This way our existing tokens can be “received” by the “Cosmos Zone” to bootstrap the Dawn’s initial governance and staking mechanism. Additionally, other ERC-20 based stablecoins can also be safely moved into, and later withdrawn from, Dawn.

Second, we no longer need to tie the wagering function, which generally works better with stable-valued assets, to our deflationary FirstBlood token. In the new model laid out in our new whitepaper, the new Dawn token will act only as a staking and governance token, not as a chip to be wagered. Instead, users will be able to enter our “Cosmos Zone” to wager stablecoins and other crypto-assets, with a percentage of the fees collected floating up to Dawn token-holders via smart contracts. This will exponentially strengthen the value proposition of our underlying token that will ultimately allow holders to control the platform itself.

Third, the Dawn Cosmos Zone will allow for fairly frictionless user experience, finally allowing us to build a killer dApp. Users will be able to deposit stablecoins and other assets and take advantage of the far higher TPS rate on our new blockchain. We are working with Changelly and other payment partners to make this process quick and painless. Once you have funds on the platform, you will be able to set up matches quickly and easily.

Finally, our 2.0 opens up a world of possibilities ranging from launching new crypto-assets on our blockchain to integrating new asset classes into our Dawn Cosmos Zone. We intend to establish FirstBlood as the premier protocol for empowering and rewarding gamers. In achieving this, we will deliver on our promises and reward our early users and supporters."

Competitors

• Round

Team, etc.

• Zhou, Joe; co-Founder & CEO
• Coburn, Zack; co-founder, chief architect
• Dang, Anik; co-founder & developer
• Cuesta, Marc; co-founder & Head of Business
• Krug, Joey; tech advisor