KuCoin AMA with Arenum (ARNM) — The Global Matching Engine for eSports

Dear KuCoin Users,

Time: April 11, 2022, 12:00-13:25 (UTC)

KuCoin hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with Alexander Pasechnik, Co-Founder of Arenum in the KuCoin Exchange Group.

Arenum is the next step in the evolution of the commercial and technological infrastructure of web3 gaming. Delivering powerful initial infrastructure for gamers and SDK for game developers Arenum makes huge steps to mass adoption of crypto. Fiat beta versions already have 2M+ registered users (for esports) and 50k+ installs (for casual games tournaments).

Official Website: https://arenum.io/

Whitepaper: https://arenum.io/pdf/arenum-whitepaper.pdf

Follow ARNM on Twitter and Telegram.

Guests:

Alexander Pasechnik — Co-Founder of Arenum

He is a serial IT entrepreneur who has built online educational platforms, marketplaces, eSports platforms, and a blockchain payment system. He has attracted ~$9M of venture capital to his companies.

Q: Can you please introduce the Arenum team and tell us more about your project?

Alex: Sure, I'll start with the team; so far, the team has determined the DNA of the company, then will introduce the project.

As for the founder’s experience:

Eduard Gurinovich (Forbes 30 under 30 ranked).

He raised over $90M of venture capital for his companies. A founder of CarPrice and CarMoney with 50+ offices across Russia, Japan, India, and Brazil. In 2 years, CarPrice was ranked among the largest Russian IT companies with revenue of over $200M revenue. Eduard knows how to scale!

Alex Pasechnik (me)

I bootstrapped various IT products from zero to $1M revenue. Besides bootstrapping, I've also attracted ~$9M of venture capital to my companies. I've built online educational products, marketplaces, and eSports platforms. I'm responsible for product and marketing development in our team.

Alexander Zelenshikov

He developed several high-performance proprietary rendering engines. 17 years in game development at key positions as a tech lead in international companies: Digital Element, Novy Disc, Nival, and Obsidian Entertainment. For the last 5 years, he has led his own outsource software company specializing in high-performance technical solutions for game rendering, streaming, and VOD.

Besides that, we have 37 strong employees in the team, covering all the necessary competencies: marketing, development, product management, QA, community, and support.

We have been working together for the last 5 years and built our own:

• blockchain based on the tendermint

• on-demand high-load video services

• mobile video streaming services

• AI-video analytics system

• Arenum Tournament platform (since 2018)

Now, when you know the team, I can tell you more about Arenum.

Arenum is the next step in the evolution of the commercial and technological infrastructure of web3 gaming. Leveraging its powerful SDKs Arenum aims to become the Epic Store of Solanaverse that brings together game developers, gamers, and influencers. What’s so special about Arenum? It’s actually easy.

We call them moon factors:

The Global Matching Engine (tournament platform) for eSports: Arenum is built from the ground up to reward both the players for their engagement in the games they play and the developers for the games they labor on. We give players an opportunity to compete in their favorite games and earn crypto.

The Epic Store for Solanaverse: Arenum offers powerful SDKs that enable traditional game developers to seamlessly port their Unity/Unreal Engine gaming infrastructure on-chain and enable Play-to-Earn mechanics from the get-go.

Production-ready: Arenum is here to deliver. We are a long-standing business with years of experience, millions of registered users, and a cash-positive business model. Supported by the industry's leading partners, we take it all and bring it on-chain.

You can take a look at how products work for eSports games and casual games. Our fiat beta version Scorebeat- is already in production with over 50k installs, waiting for the crypto update. We’ve done a tournament for the Kucoin community - I’ll announce it at the end of AMA.

Q: Can you tell us about your current project development and the team's marketing activities in the future?

Alex: As for the product - we have a beta version for casual games tournaments and eSports tournaments. We already have product metrics and working on retention growth.

You can take a look over here:

For casual games:

https://apps.apple.com/ru/app/scorebeat/id1556264579

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.arenum.blitz

For eSports games:

As for casual games fiat beta, it already has 50k+ installs. As for the eSports product, it has over 2M registered users and 150k paying users. We’ve managed to grow day 1 and day 3 retention during the beta tests by 30%. Besides, we’ve added some new functionality allowing anyone to create a tournament for their community.

We are doing many marketing tests, working with crypto communities and paid traffic, and reducing customer acquisition costs. So far, our product can bring the mass adoption of crypto - we pay lots of attention to marketing. The main idea is that it is not just founders' fantasies and beautiful deck. These are existing products with real users and real metrics.

Q: Please provide a detailed overview of the $ARNM token. What are its use cases and tokenomics? How can users buy your token?

Alex: We have restricted the tokenomics with lower unlock, increased cliffs and vestings for the VCs, reducing $937k IMC to ~ $600k IMC. So investors from the community will have more chances to have a good X.

As for the token utility:

1) We will add farming for liquidity providing (liquidity mining for token holders)

2) For game developers, it is necessary to stake our tokens to use SDK

3) For KOLs and streamers who want to launch their own tournament for any games on our platform it is also needed to stake tokens, but they will earn commission from that tournaments, and they will promote it on their social networks

4) We will organize vast numbers of promo tournaments for gamers, free to enter, but the sum of prizes will depend on the size of the winner's stake.

We aim to bring mass adoption through casual and hypercasual gaming. Easy way to GameFi. Not only for "black belt in crypto" users. Hypercasual games are played by 3 billion gamers - our goal is to take at least 100 million and bring them to the blockchain.

To sum up, token utility meets both players and game developers, providing them with the initial infrastructure. So both gamers and game developers can easier overcome blockchain barriers. Also, we plan to do a Season 1 league with some exchanges and big communities - so in the long term, we consider the demand for the token will be high.

Q: What are the benefits of holding your token as a long-term investment? And can you tell us about the motivation and benefits for investors to keep your token in the long run?

Alex: It is an important fact that we build the platform, not one more game.

In the long run, platforms thrive. Arenum is a platform giving the initial infrastructure needed for game developers and gamers. Arenum is above the hit-driven game industry - using successful games as fuel to power the platform’s growth and income, we play by the rules we’ve created.

Higher retention and opportunity to use the cross-game exposure makes the marketing cheaper and ensures the platform from an ‘a flash in the pan’ or one-hit-wonder consequences. Arenum sits at a level above games and remains stable by focusing on using trends to grow as a platform.

Q: Non-crypto users are very important for mainstream adoption. How are you planning to attract non-crypto users to your project? Is there any upcoming partnership that will bring non-crypto users and real-use cases?

Alex: Good onboardings are very important. We'll be using step-by-step onboardings to be able to adopt new players to crypto. Most play-to-earn products are really hard to understand.

We use easy and familiar fiat player games for the soft onboarding process, which will let us to have a wide funnel as possible. We want to merge the play-to-earn model and a nice gaming experience as far as we come from traditional gaming. We are very much focused on the LTV and long-term metrics. We realize that if we are able to bring fun and excitement to the play-to-earn model, our product will be the Top 1 thing.

We are doing many product tests and using data to make product decisions. So far as the beta versus already exists - we have this opportunity. Our goal is to build a performing platform with stable growth. Not 1 day pump with 100x and then 101x down.

We work with real users and make data-driven decisions. Besides, we see the proven track record in competitive casual games with Skillz and MPL - and want to adopt some patterns to crypto in our products. So for us, onboarding the new crypto users is a priority task. Besides, we are building a direct fiat-crypto gate, enabling new users to buy their first crypto without KYC. Also, we are preparing some partnerships with huge game developers. I hope we'll be able to announce it officially in a month or two.

Q: Marketing is a central element of every project so that everyone knows the potential that a project can bring is vital to achieving the goals set. What is your strategy to attract new users and Investors to your platform and keep them long-term?

Alex: There are various sources of traffic we consider working with:

- Paid traffic. We are strong at paid traffic (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, google ads, etc.), and we've dropped customer acquisition costs 4-4.5 times in Europe, the USA, Brazil, CIS, and Mexico. We work with creatives and analytics, rebuild the companies and trigger events, doing lots of experiments - so we will be able to optimize the paid price at any market.

- Opinion leaders. We have experience of work with gaming bloggers/streamers on youtube and twitch. We have a wide range of KOLs working with us. The process of KOLs interaction is worked out and optimized.

- Referral and reward system. In our experience, we had almost 23% of traffic generated by the referral system. We know that the best cases go up to 40%, so we will be eager to reach these numbers. The Reward system gives you small awards for completing the daily quest and sharing the results to your social networks accounts. We release some news, or the player wins the match/gets the reward and receives a pre-prepared screenshot to share and get a small reward. 100k of those who share will generate huge advertising reach and coverage.

- Cross-promo with other games and communities. In terms of operations, it is very close to working with opinion leaders.

- PR and content. We have good connections with crypto media and business resources. We have PR consultants that have been working for the Solana community and will give us arrangements in top business publications (Forbes, NY Times, Inc, etc.)

So once we reach product metrics that allow us to scale - we'll accelerate the marketing in all directions.

Q: Too many projects promise magic but never release any working product or prove any revenue, Within a short/long time of release. Is your project also like this? If not, can you tell us, What makes your project different from other projects?

Alex: I guess that the team. We have experience in building big companies. We have experience of falling but saving the team and moving forward. Founders have attracted $99M total to previous companies, so we have a reputation that we don't want to spoil.

And we don't promise 1000x on day one. I say that it will be a long-term work of improving the metrics and making data-driven decisions on the product and marketing. There will be no magic. Only hard daily work. This is not our first business. That's why we know it.

Q: Where can I currently buy Token?

Alex: $ARNM token will be listed on Kucoin on April 12th at 10 AM UTC.

Q: I just downloaded your app for the e-games tournament since I'm a huge fan of CODM. Can you explain what are those yellow gems and can they be exchanged for real money?

Alex: Cool! You've used our app and seen updates.

It means that later Gems will be exchanged for shards of NFTs needed for the battles in the metagame. So far as we are testing marketing and the funnel already, we've done this intermediate step as Gem soft currency. We are looking at metrics and data.

Q: What steps does your team take to ensure that "Arenum (ARNM)" user support is long-term and not temporary? How can your team increase the engagement of all users with your product and project capabilities?

Alex: We engage the community in many activities. We communicate with them on all the questions and do this in a 100% open and frank way. When we've just started to add games: we've been playing for private allocations. Those who defeated me - they've got private allocation.

We didn't make a lot of airdrop events. We attracted only those who like the product, who participates in our activities. Not for bots - activities for the real people. Here you can see an example of such an iteration. We took AI for drawing creatures, and our community helped us to teach this AI to draw AI DAOmons fully for our feature NFT metagame. We had dozens of thousands of descriptions.

Q: I have played Play-to-Earn games several times, and there are many bugs and lags in playing them, maybe because many people are playing at one time and rarely do maintenance. Is ARNM any different? And What about the security of players' accounts and personal data?

Alex: I believe we also have some bugs, lol. But so far, as we've already done lots of tests and community tests as well - the crucial part of the bugs is already fixed. So far as we are doing PvP engine - good sync is very important for us. During the test, players from Turkey played with players from Indonesia, for example. So in these terms, our products are much more production-ready than raw ones.

KuCoin and Arenum (ARNM) have prepared a total of 2,000 USDT to give away to AMA participants.

1. Free-ask section: 75 USDT

2. AMA activity: 1,925 USDT

Activity 1 — Quiz: 1,500 USDT

Activity 2 — Price Guess: 300 USDT

Participation Rewards: 125 USDT

. . .

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