UFF Sports Important Update
UFF Sports is making its biggest changes in its two-and-a-half-year history, and you all deserve to know exactly what, how and why. This article is designed to explain everything as thoroughly as possible while still being easy to understand.
WHAT IS HAPPENING (Part One)?
First of all, UFF Sports is moving away from the Zilliqa blockchain to its forever home, the Cudos blockchain. You can read about that announcement here:
WHERE ARE WE MOVING TO?
Great question. Solana, Avalanche, and Flow were strongly considered. Solana has a great gaming and NFT community. Avalanche is growing incredibly fast. Flow is focused on NFTs and sports and already has partnerships with most North American sports leagues. They seemed like the perfect fit, but unfortunately don’t allow for fungible token integration into the Dapper wallet. That means you wouldn’t be able to have your SCO coins and your players or franchises in the same wallet. Leveraging their sports partnerships was also not possible, which would have been the reason for building there in the first place. On the crypto side, the community is surprisingly small and unknown. It seemed to be an exciting option but the headwinds soon became obvious.
SO, WHY CUDOS?
They are a custom blockchain built on Cosmos. For those not familiar with Cosmos, it is a very large ecosystem (slightly smaller than Solana) with many different projects already built on it, each with their own custom blockchain built to their specifications. Out of all those blockchains on Cosmos, only one of them allows native NFT integration along with the fungible tokens…CUDOS. This means that any project wanting to offer NFTs on Cosmos must do it on CUDOS. This is a big deal. Other blockchain projects have recently partnered with CUDOS for this exact reason…they plan to issue NFTs on Cosmos using the CUDOS blockchain. Here’s one example:
https://www.iqstock.news/n/cudos-copernic-space-drive-satellite-data-tokenisation-4159314/
Copernic plans to deliver satellite and space data on NFTs via CUDOS. That’s not a little niche project — partners like these have big plans and CUDOS is the engine that will drive it all.
CUDOS is basically focused on two things right now: NFTs and the metaverse. UFF Sports is a NFT project that plans to build in the metaverse. Plus, they already have a partnership with CUDOS in place, so it was a no-brainer.
CUDOS may seem like another boutique chain with a small market, but the partnerships are huge and the Cosmos community is also quite large which will hopefully support and get involved in the UFF Sports ecosystem by buying the SCO token or even sports franchises.
WHAT IS HAPPENING (Part Two)?
With the move to a new blockchain, it seemed that this was the perfect opportunity to roll out other major changes at the same time. People often struggle to adjust to change, so implementing all changes at the same time will allow stability from this point forward.
One of the biggest flaws in the UFF Sports ecosystem design was the lack of income sources with scaling potential. Each league brings money to the platform via transaction fees, league fees and registering of players on the blockchain. However, with only up to 32 teams in each league, the opportunity to scale was limited. Franchises were able to build their brand and sell merchandise (and virtual merchandise for the metaverse in the future) but again this is limited, and true metaverse integration is still probably a year or more away.
This all changes with the DFS (Daily Fantasy Sports) card game.
WHAT IS DFS?
For those not familiar, DFS means playing fantasy sports and earning money on a daily basis rather than yearly. You don’t have to draft a team, or make trades all season long. You can play only one night if you want, build your roster and compete to win prizes based on how well those players do in real life that day. You can build a different roster every day, and can play only on days you feel like it. You also get paid immediately if you win any prize money.
DFS is EXTREMELY popular among millennials and young people. It appeals to their limited attention spans and affinity for gambling. Draft Kings is the most popular platform offering this in North America, and they made $473 million in revenue the last quarter of 2021. Take a moment and let that number sink in.
Draft Kings is popular but the players you put on your roster each night, aren’t digital assets. They don’t belong to you. Imagine you could put a player in your lineup, win some prize money, then sell that player to someone else and get paid again.
Someone else already thought of that brilliant idea. They are called So Rare. In their system, you sign up for the site and then have to buy your players individually. Think of a sports collectible card but a digital version that actually goes in your crypto wallet. Then you can choose from the cards you have to form a lineup on game day and earn points (and prize money). You can buy or sell player cards anytime you want. Look how much money they raised:
https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/20/sorare-raises-680-million-for-its-fantasy-sports-nft-game/
Lastly, you’ve likely all heard of a company called Electronic Arts, or EA Sports. What you might not realize is that they no longer make most of their money by selling video games. They make much more by running their own card game (called Ultimate Team). Billions every year. With a B. Take a look:
Probably the coolest part of EA’s concept is rather than buying your cards one at a time from someone else on open market (like So Rare), you can buy packs of new cards. It’s addicting and fun to crack a new pack and see if you can pull a rare card of a great player! It can also be profitable — many users don’t even use their cards in gameplay, they only open packs and flip cards on the open market to earn a profit. There’s multiple ways to be involved.
So what did UFF Sports do? They combined the best elements of these three platforms to come up with their own DFS game.
· You can either buy cards individually on the marketplace, or can buy bronze, silver or gold packs of cards and see what you get. Silver packs might have a rare card in them, and gold packs are guaranteed one rare.
· You can sell your cards anytime.
· Choose from your collection to put a lineup together to play DFS and compete to win prizes.
· There will be bonuses for completing certain collections of players.
· There is a limited number of cards for each player (less for the top players, those are your rare cards). Once packs are sold out, cards increase in resale value.
· There will be easter egg cards (which are just special cards that do different things). For example, some may be coupon codes to redeem for discounts or free stuff on UFFS or with other partners. Fun, right?
· For UFF Sports digital athletes (players partnered with the platform), their player cards have multipliers which means they will be boosted and get extra fantasy points for your lineup every night that you play them. These cards are autographed and look really snazzy.
· Your cards belong to you. They sit in your digital wallet and don’t expire.
· Each year there will be a new set of cards minted and sold as packs. Each years set will look slightly different, but old cards can always be used in DFS gameplay.
· Besides just competing against all other players to win prize money (and yes it will be free to play), you will also be able to challenge a friend to a head-to-head matchup and wager any amount of SCO tokens on the outcome.
As you can see, this is a massive industry that is growing and has practically unlimited potential to bring massive revenue to the platform. Here’s the best part that hasn’t been mentioned yet: this income is being partially funnelled back to the UFFS sports franchises. It’s going to boost prize pools in the regular leagues. Finally, franchises have a steady income stream.
One other exciting development is that UFF Sports is preparing to accept fiat payments via credit card. One of the biggest complains from users so far, is how complicated it is to purchase SCO and get it into your wallet, in order to participate in platform activities. This hurdle cannot exist if the DFS game is to be successful. The final details are still being put into place, but by the time packs become available for purchase, the expectation is users will be able to do so via credit card. Proceeds will be used to buy back the SCO token on the open market.
WHEN WILL IT ALL HAPPEN?
Timelines are the one thing that won’t be discussed in this article, because those details need their own space. Exact dates and deadlines for any calls to action will be posted everywhere.
The DFS component launches for the upcoming football (NFL) and hockey (NHL) seasons in September and October respectively. Baseball (MLB) will begin gameplay in spring 2023. The plan is to launch this in every sport as soon as possible.
WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH THE SCO TOKEN?
Let’s not mince words. It’s been a rough 2022 for the SCO token. The price has declined far below the original IDO price of $0.10 which has decimated the prize pools in the fantasy leagues, and has hurt the wallet of everyone that holds the token. There are improvements that will be made.
To begin with, we need to examine why the price went down:
· The overall crypto market went into a bear market and pretty much every other coin is also down in US value. This was outside UFF Sports control.
· The UFFS project has been entirely self-funded up to this point in time. This meant that all expenses were paid using the SCO token. The payroll increased rapidly during 2021 as the team expanded, and this meant more tokens were distributed and sold by employees to pay bills. This can and will be rectified. UFF Sports is in the process of raising outside funding, something the CUDOS team is assisting with. When this funding is secured, staff will be paid in stablecoins or fiat, removing the constant sell pressure on the token. This capital raise will be discussed in more detail later in this article.
If there is a silver lining in the past few months, it’s that 42 percent of the entire max supply of SCO tokens is now in circulation. The inflation rate will slow down significantly from here, as max supply will not be reached for another three years. This should give the token more favorable conditions to potentially go back up in price.
WHAT ARE THE CHANGES (short version)?
1) The SCO token (along with the rest of the project) is moving over to the CUDOS blockchain.
2) There is a new exchange (place to buy and sell your SCO).
3) There is a new personal wallet (if you don’t want to keep your coins on the UFF Sports website wallet).
4) Staking will be different.
5) The liquidity pool will be deeper.
WHAT ARE THE CHANGES (long version)?
1) The SCO token (along with the rest of the project) is moving over to the CUDOS blockchain. This means your old SCO tokens on Zilliqa will have to be swapped for new ones. This may sound complicated but it won’t be. The swap will occur right on the UFF Sports website. You will have to move your tokens from wherever you have them right now (perhaps inside your ZilPay wallet or elsewhere) over to the internal wallet on your UFF Sports account. If you don’t have an account, don’t worry. The UFFS team will help you get one. You will then log into your account, click a button and your tokens will be swapped. If you need help with this, don’t worry. The UFFS team will help you. The deadline to complete this swap will be December 31, 2022. That’s a LOT of time, so don’t worry. When the time draws near, the UFFS team will send out reminders. So…don’t worry. The entire goal was to make this process as easy as possible on users.
2) There is a new exchange (place to buy and sell your SCO). It is called Osmosis. It is the biggest exchange on Cosmos, with an average daily volume of $25 million. You can visit it here:
Don’t worry, the UFFS team will release detailed instructions on how to navigate this site and buy/sell your coins. This article is already long enough, so let’s not include that here.
3) There is a new personal wallet (if you don’t want to keep your coins on the UFF Sports website wallet). Please note, if you want to keep all your SCO coins on the website that’s fine, but for added security it’s recommended that you keep larger amounts on your own personal wallet. Be reminded, if you do this you are responsible for your own coins and if you lose your password, nobody will be able to help you recover your funds. So be careful. Now, onto the wallet. It is called Keplr. It is the most popular wallet in the Cosmos ecosystem. Download it either onto your computer or your mobile device from this site:
Again, the UFFS team will release how-to information for setting up the wallet and sending your SCO coins to it, if you don’t feel confident figuring it out yourself. The Cosmostation wallet is another popular alternative but Keplr will be the main recommended wallet for novice users.
4) Staking will be different. The old staking mechanism will be discontinued. You will have time to unstake and swap your tokens over (as mentioned above) but you won’t be earning rewards anymore so there’s no point in leaving them there. Watch for the official announcement.
The new staking system is slightly different. You will no longer be able to simply stake SCO for more SCO on the UFFS website as before BUT you will have the ability to provide your SCO coins to the Osmosis exchange as liquidity and in return you will earn rewards. Now this is very unique, so let’s take a moment and explain.
When you provide liquidity to an exchange, you are rewarded with a share of the transaction fees that the exchange earns. The less people that provide liquidity, the bigger slice of that pie you get. Every swap on Osmosis that involves SCO token will have a 0.5 percent fee, which goes to the liquidity providers.
The other thing that is happening is UFF Sports has set aside 2,000,000 SCO tokens to be distributed as BONUS rewards to any liquidity providers for the next year. This is 2 percent of the entire max supply! This is ON TOP of the transaction fees, so depending on how many people end up providing liquidity (which is a fancy word for the new staking) the expected APY (or rewards percentage) could be very high.
Normally, providing liquidity is somewhat riskier than regular staking because of a little thing called impermanent loss. That just means that if the price of the token moves up or down by a lot, anyone providing liquidity can actually end up losing some of their coins. It’s math mumbo jumbo, if you really want to read about it, you can here:
https://academy.binance.com/en/articles/impermanent-loss-explained
If a coin price doubles, you could lose 5.7 percent versus if you had not staked at all and just held your coins. That’s shitty, right? Luckily there’s a solution.
One of the coolest features of the Osmosis exchange is that you can list tokens with customized parameters to avoid this. The SCO token liquidity pool will be comprised of 80 percent SCO tokens and 20 percent of the other token (rather than the traditional 50/50 ratio). If you really want to read about how the sausage gets made, here you go:
https://arnauramiomateu.medium.com/understanding-balancer-protocol-frmo-0-to-100-998ba20c6834
Skip about halfway down the page and read. The short version is that with this new 80/20 system, if the SCO price doubles you will NOT lose 5.7 percent of your coins by staking. The penalty is much less. AND you will be making many more extra SCO coins in rewards from the transaction fees and the generous 2 million SCO pool discussed earlier.
This new system is a bet on the SCO coin. It’s saying that the UFFS team believes strongly that the new changes could result in the coin increasing in value, and if you share that belief and provide liquidity on Osmosis, you will be rewarded for it. In an uneven 80/20 pool, if the SCO coin were to decrease in value it would hurt a liquidity provider more than a 50/50 split, but if you truly believe the coin is going down in value forever, you probably aren’t still reading this long-winded article by now.
So that’s how the new staking will work. It will be available as soon as the SCO coin is launched on Osmosis. You can unstake at any time. In order to be eligible for the bonus rewards you will have to lock your tokens up for at least 14 days, but you can still receive the transaction fee rewards without locking. Got it? Ok, moving on.
5) The liquidity pool will be deeper. There used to be total liquidity of over $1 million USD value, meaning it was possible to buy and sell large amounts of SCO without affecting the price too much. This was good because it kept the coin more stable and less volatile in terms of price swings.
The new liquidity pool on Osmosis will be deeper than the current one, and with other SCO holders encouraged to provide their own liquidity (discussed above) to earn rewards in the new staking program, this will help boost liquidity even further and enable larger buy orders for SCO again.
WHAT IS HAPPENING (Part Three)?
An airdrop! To celebrate the partnership with CUDOs, and the move to CUDOS blockchain, UFF Sports will be conducting its first ever airdrop. A total of up to 500,000 SCO tokens will be dropped to certain CUDOS holders that meet the requirements. Details will be released on this shortly, but the best way to prepare to qualify is to hold CUDOS tokens on mainnet (in your Keplr wallet) and stake them with the UFF Sports validator node. You can view all the validators here:
https://www.mintscan.io/cudos/validators
One thing to add to this before we move on. Airdrops are usually a bad idea in crypto. They almost always get dumped by the recipients. However, the Cosmos ecosystem has a surprisingly good track record of new projects choosing to airdrop tokens to previous Cosmos token holders on the same blockchain. Amazingly, these drops have historically not been immediately sold. As the first token to launch on the CUDOS chain, it makes sense to set a generous precedent and perhaps garner attention and interest from the CUDOS community by rewarding their stakers, especially those staking with UFF Sports. Subsequent tokens to launch on CUDOS in the future may choose to airdrop tokens to SCO holders.
WHAT IS HAPPENING (Part Four)?
Franchise staking! In the original planned tokenomics, 50 percent of the entire max token supply was allocated for staking and DeFi (decentralized finance). UFFS was to build a new swap called Sports Swap in which users could provide liquidity and receive SCO tokens as rewards. There was going to be a separate token for each sport and Sports Swap was to be the central hub for all the action.
Quite a few things happened behind the scenes that derailed this plan, but what’s relevant is that the decision was made to abandon this idea and run all leagues on the SCO token. This was definitely the right move in hindsight, but what it meant is that 50 percent of the SCO supply needed to be re-allocated. Drumroll please…
UFFS is happy to announce a franchise staking program that will last for three years and will pay out a minimum of 15 million SCO tokens over that span. This accomplishes a few things:
· It rewards franchise owners for their significant investment in the ecosystem.
· It creates a monthly income stream for franchise owners for the next three years, designed as an artificial runway to keep them profitable while franchises develop their own brand and metaverse integration in order to replace this income by 2025.
· It places SCO tokens in the hands of the people least likely to dump them on the open market, as franchises need these tokens to fund day-to-day operations or pay league fees.
These tokens will be paid on the 15th of each month beginning August 2022 into each main franchise wallet on the UFF Sports website. 5,000,000 SCO will be distributed over the next 12 months to franchise owners, and this total amount will be reviewed once a year (with the possibility of a small increase but no decrease). For the first (next) 12 months, the rewards have been split by UFFS league as follows:
UFAFL = 2m SCO
UFHL = 1.5m SCO
UFBA = 500k SCO
UFLB = 500k SCO
AFLL = 400k SCO
UFWBA = 25k SCO
UCFFL = 25k SCO
UFWJ = 25k SCO
UFAHL = 25k SCO
Each team will receive an equal amount of tokens relative to the totals listed above. The breakdown by league is based on approximate valuations of the combined franchises in each league, as of July 2022. The criteria for appraising franchises in the future, is yet to be finalized. The plan is to have a more scientific, data-driven process rather than vague valuations and this process is already underway. For the immediate future, the above breakdown ensures that every franchise owner is rewarded, while recognizing the larger investment of franchise owners in the flagship leagues UFAFL and UFHL.
Please note that in order to receive these monthly rewards, franchises must remain in good standing and not be in arrears for any payments of league fees.
WHAT IS HAPPENING (Part Five)?
Franchise lending is still under construction. This is a feature UFF Sports is serious about intending to offer. The last franchise sale was for $80,000 USD worth of SCO, and these prices are expected to continue rising as the platform grows. This would be a great time to insert a soliloquy about how sports is becoming an increasingly recession-proof asset class but let’s digress. As prices increase, franchises become more valuable but also less liquid, much like real estate. This is why home-equity lines of credit exist in the outside world — it allows homeowners to borrow against their house in order to free up cash to do repairs, maintenance or otherwise improve the property and improve their resale value.
The same goes in UFF Sports. With increasing franchise values, small-market owners might feel forced into selling if they can’t afford to run daily operations, bid on players, pay staff, pay league fees, etc. Franchise lending would solve this. Owners would be able to borrow against a portion of their franchise and pay interest-only payments to the platform, in order to free up liquidity. Failing to make payment would result in the platform seizing ownership of the franchise and selling it to another buyer.
The concept is very powerful but there are a few roadblocks still.
· How are the franchises appraised for value?
· Who gets to do the appraisals?
· Where do the borrowed funds come from?
· How is the platform’s risk level managed?
With smart contract technology, it’s possible to automate much of this process and make payments permissionless. It’s the future and it’s exciting to think about. On the Solana chain, DApps that offer this feature already exist, but not on CUDOS just yet.
To summarize, the goal remains to implement franchise lending in the near future (in-house or via third party) but the actual plan to execute it is still under construction. Stay tuned for further updates.
WHAT IS HAPPENING (Part Six)?
The plan is to launch new sports and sell franchises. The most significant addition planned is for soccer (football). This is the biggest sport in the world with an almost unlimited number of leagues, teams and players. Needless to say, it’s important that this is implemented correctly and managed impeccably. Which brings us to the final point which is…
WHAT IS HAPPENING (Part Seven)?
UFF Sports is currently in the process of raising capital. It has been entirely self-funded up until this point, but with these massive new developments, outside funding is needed in order to scale operations to the next level, which is mainstream.
1) Crypto marketing for the token would help gain token holders, via YouTube influencers and other proven techniques which are effective but expensive.
2) Marketing of the platform to sports fans everywhere would help bring in new franchise owners and drive up sale prices.
3) Experienced upper management is needed for several sports and for new divisions requiring full-time maintenance (like DFS).
This was part of the rationale behind building on CUDOS, as their partnership offers opportunities to secure funding. This process is already underway and the community will be updated as things progress. Rest assured, any SCO tokens that would be part of an agreement would be subject to vesting and could not be dumped on the market.
CONCLUSION
If you’ve managed to read this far without skimming or skipping, congratulations. Hopefully this information has been helpful, and that you are excited as the new chapter of UFF Sports begins.
There are many little goodies being improved and added as well. Here’s a short list of some of them:
· Website improvement
· Auction tool bug fixes
· Scouting system optimization
· Greater Discord presence
· Community management
· Support in other languages (especially after soccer leagues are created)
· More athlete partnerships
· Multiple exchange listings
· Increased media presence for each league
· All documents (whitepaper, tokenomics, roadmap) updated on the website
The work never ends, to be honest. But UFF Sports is executing a vision which hopefully is a little easier to understand, after wading through this article. One thing that needed improvement was communication. This is the beginning. See you at the relaunch.
