Hello Nounsfolk!
It’s been a month since Prop #68 Nouns Esports passed. I thought it would be insightful for the community to have an accountability report of what we’ve done and how the funds have been spent. Also, a brief mention of future plans for Nouns Esports.
Budget Overview
Total Budget: 35 ETH.
Team Salaries: 20.6737 ETH upfront to the team, consisting of the five players, the coach, and their manager.
Bootcamp: 6.5 ETH to facilitate a practice and competition boot camp for the team in Philadelphia, from June 18th to July 7th.
Incentive Reward: 3 ETH as a bonus for winning the BTS Pro Series event. This is the largest tournament outside of the Dota Pro Circuit in North America. An incentive reward was planned in consultation with the team’s coach - we are happy to reward the team for their victory!
Staff:
- 2 ETH to Maty for design work. Making our logos, streaming assets, in-game assets, and supporting efforts for the in-game team bundle.
- 1 ETH to Brax for work as a community liaison and negotiating with the team.
- .4 ETH to Logical - Social Media - Twitter.
- .4 ETH to Papaya - Social Media - Twitter.
- .38393 to Shani - Video editor who is currently making a recap of the BTS Pro Series victory and content related to the upcoming boot camp.
- .1 ETH to Fari for design work related to the in-game team bundle.
Casting with Noggles
- 0.54 ETH retroactively rewarded to the casters ET and Kmart - .03 each per game they repped our AR Noggles on the BTS Pro Series official broadcast.
This proposal was envisioned as a pilot for future Nouns Esports activities. The downturn of ETH/USD did have an impact on what could be facilitated via this budget. I chose to focus on proposal execution rather than personal compensation while being in charge of distributing the pod’s budget. I believe the pilot was a success even at this stage, so in the next proposal, I would like to include retroactive compensation for my work.
Highlights & Disappointments
Some obvious highlights from the proposal thus far include the BTS Pro Series tournament victory and now the team’s latest Dota Pro Circuit win over Evil Geniuses with 40,000 concurrent spectators on Twitch! If you missed the series, here’s a recap video made by a Dota content creator (with 140k+ views!).
One of my favorite moments was when the mother of one of our players discovered the Nouns playground for herself and made a new PFP in support of her son who goes by Moo. Another moving occurrence was listening to Gunnar describe the impact of sponsorship in his post-game interview after beating Evil Geniuses, historically the best North American team, earlier this week.
The team has six more Pro Circuit matches remaining, until mid-July. So expect more Dota esports content forthcoming!
The biggest disappointment thus far was receiving our first dose of NFT backlash from a grassroots tournament organizer we wanted to support. Their community chose not to associate with something considered NFT/Crypto related. We expected initial backlash via Reddit/Twitter when signing the team since most Dota players are still unfamiliar with Nouns, but this was our first rejection letter. There are other potential organizational partners for us to be involved with going forward, but this was the best opportunity within our proposal timeframe.
Conclusion - A vision for Nouns Esports going forward
The idea for an intersection between Nouns and Esports started as a casual DM to the Nouner Goldy back in early January. Now we have our inaugural team and our first tournament victory! I have received a lot of support and positive feedback from both Nouners and Nouns Folk in regards to this proposal. Thank you! Big shoutout to Brennen and Maty for their energy as builders, leaders, and active multisig participants.
With the recent announcement of 30 teams (10 more than last year) at the upcoming “The International” in Singapore, and a new tournament to qualify for in Malaysia this August, the Dota team will have abundant opportunities to compete in the coming months. Expanding the Esports Pod and extending our time with the Dota squad will be the next proposal I will bring in front of Nouns! As previously mentioned, this first prop was seen as a pilot - I think Nouns has great potential to be the first “Tier 1” Esports team that’s powered by crypto natives - scaling towards that is my goal.