Unlocking cross-chain growth: bringing gamers to Cardano through SpeedThrone's free e-sports gaming

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Behzad Khoshnood

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

Entity (Incorporated)

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

6

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language

No

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

SpeedThrone offers an AI integrated GameFi ecosystem, enabling blockchain adoption through free-to-play, E-sports gaming. 100,000+ play sessions and 30 partners, coupled with a unique game economy.

https://youtu.be/QVM4EOhsyVc

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.”

No dependencies

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

No

[GENERAL] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

All aspects related to the game economy are all hard-coded and published and can be reviewed by any party.

The main game code is the intellectual property of Orion Eunix AB and is not open-source.

[METADATA] Horizons

Gaming (GameFi)

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

SpeedThrone is currently already available to play, in a demo version available on our website. We currently have around 500 users that have played our game, and we aim to expand this through several areas.

Native token $SPDT

As SpeedThrone is a free-to-play game, the most important metric is the amount of players we can attract within our game economy. The game economy mainly revolves around our native $SPDT token, which operates as an ERC20 token, and which will be the main currency that can be both earned and spent when interacting within the ecosystem.

There has been a community driven seed round investment for the $SPDT token, and there are already several agreements in place with CEXes and launchpads, ensuring there is sufficient liquidity for our token when the launch time arrives.

In-game marketplace

One of the milestones we want to release within SpeedThrone is our in-game marketplace, acting similar to marketplaces within other free-to-play games such as League of Legends for example. The items being made available within the marketplace can range from buying unique in-game assets to even buying assets on Cardano, such as our Prime Series NFTs. This will allow us to illustrate Cardano's strengths, such as low transaction fees and security, through the game, potentially attracting Ethereum enthusiasts.

$SPDT thus serves as a bridge, bringing Ethereum-minded individuals into Cardano to acquire native assets, thereby opening up additional tools on Cardano such as

• wallets for viewing their acquired assets,
• marketplaces for selling/buying,
• lending platforms for obtaining a loan on their acquired assets,
• etc.

The primary benefit of owning assets lies in their role as a gateway to special events, providing access and a deeper immersion in the gamified aspects, including missions and challenges.

We strongly believe that SpeedThrone, due to its multichain nature by design, is in a unique position to boost the adoption within Cardano.

Project custom assets

As part of launching SpeedThrone on Cardano, we have also used our game environment as a marketing hub to increase exposure for projects through interactive billboards. Several projects have put up graphics for these billboards, which are then visible within the different gameplay levels. A recent example being for the Toolheads mint from CNFT.tools.

This ensures additional exposure for these projects to the players playing our game. Currently, this is a manual, design-intensive, process involving a lot of back-and-forth between both the SpeedThrone team and the interested projects. This is something we want to evolve into an interactive portal that allows project owners to upload custom banners that become available within the game.

We believe that web3 is a prime example of an attention economy, an economic system where the scarce resource is not traditional goods and services, but rather the attention of the consumers.

At every point throughout the day, we are competing with various forms of media, such as social media, websites, apps, and traditional advertising, which are designed to capture and retain people's attention. The more attention a product or platform can attract, the more valuable it becomes.

At SpeedThrone we believe that we will be able to strengthen the adoption of Cardano, by providing both an enjoyable gaming experience for players and an additional marketing stream for projects.

Expansion into mobile gaming user base

David Watkins from GlobalData mentioned that "Mobile gaming thrives on its ability to build communities quickly. Platforms like Telegram offer developers a chance to integrate gaming into social chats, adding a new layer of engagement that’s different from traditional app stores.". At SpeedThrone we wanted to make sure we also capture this form of community building and have recently built, in addition to our playable demo, a mobile tapping game on Telegram.

Our aim is to release this in the coming months, to strengthen our game offering as well as expand our potential user base.

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

Through continuing to develop SpeedThrone we envision there are two major positive impacts that we will be providing to the broader Cardano community:

• The first one is the most important one: the adoption on Cardano. We believe that by tapping into the potential of gamers and their interest in block-chain we will be able to pivot this group into embracing Cardano and discovering the potential it has to offer.
• The second one is equally as important: providing a method for additional marketing exposure for existing projects through our customisable in-game assets. In the attention economy every boost we can give to other projects will be a very welcome one.

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

We have already illustrated that we are capable of delivering an enjoyable gaming experience, by the demo version of SpeedThrone that we have released and which is currently available as a downloadable game from our website, and will be recently also releasing our mobile tapping game.

The game currently features several levels that are available to be played, and players can connect their Cardano wallet to integrate their Cardano SpeedThrone NFTs into the game. These assets serve as cosmetic upgrades and don’t impact the overall gameplay - avoiding a pay-to-win environment. Below is some gameplay footage of the demo version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OOzTNIG1JA&ab_channel=SpeedThronesharedinfo

Lastly, we also have several partnerships where we have provided in-game-assets, such as for Eternals, another game that is set to launch on Cardano:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLVroShVZG4&ab_channel=SpeedThronesharedinfo

[PROJECT MILESTONES] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Community building

Our first milestone is aimed at growing our community by really boosting the marketing efforts of SpeedThrone.

We will measure on-chain how many new wallets are created on the Cardano blockchain that are exclusively used for in-game SpeedThrone assets, which directly reflects the impact of SpeedThrone in attracting new people to Cardano. The higher these numbers, the higher the acceptance degree.

In-game marketplace

Our second milestone is aimed at releasing our in-game marketplace. By doing so, we can both expose our playerbase to the benefits of Cardano, even though they might not have started interacting with the blockchain yet, as well as provide several payment methods.

We will actively measure the overall interaction with our in-game marketplace, as well as correlate how many of those transactions resulted in onboarding additional users on Cardano.

Multi-chain portal

Our third milestone is all about providing our portal for multi-chain cooperability. This portal will enable us to adopt people that are not connected to Cardano currently and still give them the opportunity to acquire Cardano native assets by connecting wallets from different blockchains than Cardano. Our main target here will be MetaMask connection for Ethereum users, and Phantom connection for Solana users.

We will actively measure these connections on-chain, and report how many of these unique accounts we manage to onboard on Cardano.

In-game events

Our fourth milestone is focused entirely on providing exclusive in-game events. Within these events we will follow the familiar e-sports route, organising not only singular events but entire tournaments.

During these events we will engage with the community, ensuring that their testimonials and experience while playing SpeedThrone is shared within the Cardano community.

Project custom assets

Our fifth milestone is all about providing other projects the ability to create custom assets within SpeedThrone, boosting their exposure to the Cardano community. This can range from billboards along a race track to even custom cars.

We will ensure that this stream ties in closely to our overall in-game economy, for example by providing our native token $SPDT as a payment option.

Game launch

Our final milestone is all about launching our game. In this phase we'll also be looking at launching on gaming platforms such as Epic from Unreal Engine itself.

The most important metric here will all be about users trying out and playing the game. We are aiming at a total of 10,000 players, with of course as many daily users as possible!

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

The SpeedThrone team is a multidisciplinary team consisting of individuals with tens of years of experience, both in the gaming and blockchain industry.

• Behzad Khoshnood [CEO & co-founder] - https://www.linkedin.com/in/behzad-khoshnood/
• Soroosh Seyedin (Rush Dean) [Game director & co-founder] - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rush-r-dean/
• Hooman Maleki [Game economy and financial aspects] - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hooman-maleki-5181061a9/
• Saeed Moi [UX/UI designer] - https://www.linkedin.com/in/saeed-mohammadi-716a4a111/
• Massi [Graphic designer] - https://www.linkedin.com/in/masoomeh-taghipoor-921864217/

 On our website we also have a section dedicated to our team members, which provides an up-to-date view on our latest staff updates.

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

Within our team there are several roles that will contribute to the milestones outlined in the proposal. For each role we've come up with an average hourly rate, before all tax, expressed in USD. Some roles have multiple responsibilities and skill levels combined:

• (Senior and Medior) Developer: hourly rate of 70 USD
• (UX and API) Designer: hourly rate of 50 USD
• Project manager: hourly rate of 60 USD
• QA specialist: hourly rate of 50 USD
• Technical writer: hourly rate of 50 USD
• Social marketeer: hourly rate of 40 USD
• Community manager: hourly rate of 40 USD

In order to construct this proposal we took the assumption that 1 ADA equals roughly 0.40 USD, which has been the average price over the last six months (which is the proposed timespan of our proposal) and should account for price fluctuations along the way. The ADA/USD price at writing is 0.35 USD.

Per milestone within our proposal there are several cost factors we need to take into account:

1. Community building - 9,000 ADA
2. Marketing and community engagement: 30hrs x social marketeer + 60hrs x community manager = 9,000 ADA
3. In-game marketplace - 19,500 ADA
4. Development: 50hrs x developer + 30hrs x designer = 12,500 ADA
5. Testing and quality assurance: 20hrs x QA specialist = 2,500 ADA
6. Marketing and community engagement: 30hrs x social marketeer + 15hrs x community manager = 4,500 ADA
7. Multi-chain portal - 12,000 ADA
8. Development: 20hrs x developer + 12hrs x designer = 5,000 ADA
9. Testing and quality assurance: 20hrs x QA specialist = 2,500 ADA
10. Marketing and community engagement: 30hrs x social marketeer + 15hrs x community manager = 4,500 ADA
11. In-game events - 8,000 ADA
12. Marketing and community engagement: 20hrs x social marketeer + 60hrs x community manager = 8,000 ADA
13. Project custom assets - 11,750 ADA
14. Development: 20hrs x developer + 10hrs x designer = 4,750 ADA
15. Testing and quality assurance: 20hrs x QA specialist = 2,500 ADA
16. Marketing and community engagement: 30hrs x marketeer + 15hrs x community manager = 4,500 ADA
17. Game launch - 41,500 ADA
18. Development: 120hrs x developer + 60hrs x designer = 28,500 ADA
19. Testing and quality assurance: 40hrs x QA specialist= 5,000 ADA
20. Marketing and community engagement: 40hrs x social marketeer + 40hrs x community manager = 8,000 ADA

In order to ensure we can reach these milestones we also foresee costs in the following domains:

• Project management: 80hrs x project manager = 12,000 ADA
• Documentation and reporting: 50hrs x technical writer = 6,250 ADA

This brings the total ADA requested to 120,000 ADA.

[VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

The project cost of SpeedThrone represents value for the Cardano ecosystem by directly contributing to its growth and exposure. Being able to achieve our milestones will offer substantial visibility and additional engagement for Cardano through an active community.

This influx of users, potentially new to the Cardano blockchain, translates into increased adoption and a broader user base. The project's success in integrating gaming and blockchain technology also showcases Cardano's capabilities, potentially attracting more developers and projects to the ecosystem.

Thus, the investment in SpeedThrone is not just funding a game but also fostering the expansion and diversification of the Cardano community, which is a valuable return for the ecosystem.