Welcome Onlylarping from Karate Combat, how are ya? I'm good, I'm good, it's a pleasure to be here. I love Karate Combat and I'm so excited to talk to you about some of the cool things that Karate Combat is doing. You know, as you know, this podcast is about messaging, positioning, growth, marketing, and Karate Combat, think by all measures, is growing in so many meaningful metrics. And so we'd love to hear what you guys are doing across the league. but also especially on the crypto side, what you guys are up to. But let's start with your origin story. To the extent you're comfortable sharing something about yourself, we'd love to hear how you founded Karate Combat and your entry into the Web3 space. Yeah, sure, definitely. So I've actually been in the Web3 space going back to 2014, building businesses, investing in crypto, being obsessed with it, brainstorming ideas. Karate Combat is kind of a separate path. So one of my best buddies from college started Karate Combat in early 2018. I actually funded it for the first five years. We built it together with about 30 million bucks of our own money. And the goal from the start was to build a sports league for the next generation of fans. Younger people watch sports so differently, they're more likely to watch sports on their phone. Frankly, a lot of them are just watching highlights on social media, much more likely to gamble on sporting events. And so we built Karate Combat for them. We didn't do any overlap with crypto for the first five years, despite me being completely obsessed with this space. But a few years ago, we came up with this idea we fell in love with and we've been working on it ever since. Tell us about that. As a league, you guys had been steadily growing year over year, and then you created the Karate Token. We can probably get into it later, but I'm curious about how you, I guess, introduce the idea of the Karate Token and its role in Karate combat. Yes, sure. So, the idea kind of dates back to a core problem every sports league has, which is converting kind of awareness and casual fandom into super fandom. You know, the people who will travel around the world to events, appointment view, buy merchandise, spend money to watch events. That conversion is really tough and For a league that was built really to reach younger demos we came up with a thesis around financialization that you know Surfaced a solution that couldn't be built without crypto So credit credit combat itself. It has very large awareness. We have six million plus followers We get hundreds of millions of views on the internet every month. But converting that to true super fandom, it's really tough. Honestly, ordinarily, it just takes a lot of time or a lot of money. But I had a thesis that there may be a shortcut there with our demo by financializing things. If you talk to our demo, frankly, younger males, almost half of them will tell you that they don't enjoy watching sports unless they have a bet on it. And so the dream was, imagine if we could get a little bit of financial upside on every single fight to every one of our fans. If we could pull that off, maybe we can get them doing this really critical self-started research into slightly lesser known athletes' backgrounds, their names, their narratives, the things that really get someone emotionally invested in the outcome of a sporting event. And so that is why we launched the CROTI token, all to build this application that we ended up calling up only gaming. Wow, okay, there's a lot there. You shared some numbers on the leagues, the fans in the league or the fans of Karate Combat. And that is a tough problem, how to convert all of those fans to become super fans. And you want to use the karate token or you financialization as a way to to convert them to become super fans is what it is. think what you said. What's the strategy around that? how I as a karate combat fan, how do I become a karate token holder? Sure, it's actually, we made it incredibly easy. So we really, really prioritized user experience because when we came into this, our goal was to not just on onboard crypto natives, but to onboard millions and then tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of regular sports fans. And when we were starting to spec out the product, was sort of a... kind of a lucky thing happened. It was right when Stepin took off in a huge way. You know, they were onboarding thousands or tens of thousands of people a day. And it became very obvious to us that a lot of that success was really driven by their native iOS and Android applications with an embedded wallet. And we saw the success they were having and we realized that to really get this in the hands of tens and then hundreds of millions of people, we probably had to do something similar. So we went out and built it. We do have a web app that you could use with any compatible wallet, but 99 % of our players are using our native iOS and Android apps. So if you want to get involved, all you have to do is download the app. You automatically get some free tokens dropped into your non-custodial embedded crypto wallet. You can back up your C phrase or iCloud with the click of a button and then you're ready to play. That's really cool. In terms of events, mean, you guys draw a huge crowd, in-person crowd. You are almost at every crypto event that I could think of, and with a ton of KOLs and crypto influencers attending and just being wild and having a lot of fun at these in-person events, and also on YouTube. and and tons of followers and views. I mean, you guys have a massive, massive audience. And I think it's really, really cool that the way you're thinking about how to create these super fans by using the karate token as a financialization instrument to help them to feel like they're really, really part of the community and also be vested in the growth of karate combat. I think that's really, really cool. As you as a founding team, you know, as you were thinking about, you know fandom and growing and You know web entering the web three spaces a potential path towards growth in creating more, you know super fans Did you receive any? I guess pushback and if so, like what what were those conversations like? Yeah, I mean, probably less than you would expect. We were really, you know, for a founding team that was like completely obsessed with crypto, you know, if you're obsessed with crypto, you're thinking about it all day, every day, right? And so always kind of naturally thinking like, how do I combine these things? But for instance, we never even launched an NFT for the league. We just never, which like pretty much every sports league. We just never thought that our fans would really care. And we never would have launched the token purely as a governance mechanism. But I think the core gamification around Up On The Gaming, which we should go into, just sort of resonates with sports fans and really never got any massive pushback from our existing fan base. Yeah, let's jump into that. Tell us about Up Only Gaming and its relationship to Karate Kombat. Sure, so like this was the idea, this is the reason that we did all this to really like convert our casual fans into super fans. The way up only gaming works, before each event, all of our token holders can vote on which fighters they think are gonna win. And when they vote on winning fighters, they earn a little bit more karate from a fixed karate prize pool on each event. If they vote on losing fighters, nothing happens. So super important for a league that has events in the Middle East, the US, mainland China, this is not regulated gambling. You're not risking losing anything, but hopefully this couple percent more tokens that you could earn on each event is enough to get these fans doing that self-started research into the athletes. And the prize pool comes from the Karate Combat League. Yeah, so right now all the prize pools come from the League's treasury. One of the ideas around the future tokenomics of the Kradi token is that eventually these prize pools will be funded by Upland Gaming sponsors. that I can totally see how the karate token can convert a casual fan to a super fan and encourage them to really study out the fighters and the backgrounds and to make a decision on who they think will win. And the financial upside could be hugely positive and fun. I mean, think this demographic, it's like, they would view that as really, really fun. Would you consider that as, would you call that fan ownership, I think is the term that I've seen. Yeah, I mean, from a technical perspective, nobody owns Karate Combat. We did something pretty crazy before we launched the token and built up on the gaming. We sold the entire league to an ownerless Cayman Foundation. And we structured the foundation such that the token holders can have real governance over aspects of the league. But from, yeah, the goal is to make the token holders feel like... feel like owners of the league. That's really cool. And I can definitely see how that can, you know, as a casual fan of karate combat, I can see myself becoming very active and becoming a super fan by holding the karate token. Going back to combat sports and competing against, I mean, there's, I think, some big formidable competitors in the space. How are you positioning karate combat against some of your competitors. Yeah, so what we're trying to build is sort of the UFC for striking. In the UFC and other like full-fledged MMA leagues, the belt holders are really dominated in large part by athletes with incredible proficiency in jiu-jitsu and grappling. Just the kind of the path dependence of how the ruleset was set up. When the UFC started, the marketing pitch was, let's get a jiu-jitsu guy in here versus like a karate guy and a taekwondo guy and a wrestler and a boxer and see what type of fighting is the most dominant. Now, over 30 years later, it's sort of a settled question. In large part, the UFC is dominated by grapplers and experts in jiu-jitsu. What karate combat is trying to do is build a sport of a similar scale but really focused on striking So the biggest complaint from casual fight fans when they watch UFC is the time on the ground if you don't understand jiu-jitsu You know watching guys roll around on the mat for 10 minutes can actually be quite boring It's incredibly technical. It's kind of hard to see Sorry, second. One of my kids ran in here for one second. I apologize about that. And so by taking that out, it really opens things up to a different pool of fighters. Fighters who may be the best punchers, the best kickers in the world, but aren't at the top of their game in Jiu Jitsu. And so that's really what we're going after. And it's a pretty wide open market. if you think about like the space between boxing and UFC. Yeah, I remember when I first watched my first UFC in 1995, I think it was. you're right. mean, back then it was, they pitted martial arts against different martial arts. And it was so fun. And I had done Judo at the time. And so I was familiar with Jiu Jitsu, the Japanese version of it, not necessarily the Brazilian version of it. And... And so I kind of knew what I was looking at until all of a sudden, like it would just end and you don't know why it ended. And so I think the positioning of Karate Combat focused on striking is really fun. you can tell, I mean, in some of the fights of Karate Combat, I mean, these are like really fun fights and you know what's going on. You don't need to know a ton about martial arts to know that, you know, what's happening. And that's pretty cool because the adoption curve is a lot lower for someone to become a fan of fighting. Let's talk about the, I guess your event calendar. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Karate Combat is almost at every major crypto conference. And is that right? Or maybe you can tell us a little bit about that. I mean, it's pretty new and it happened by experiment. But we bet the entire league on Web3, you know, and we, I guess the start of it was the first time we did it was actually a token 2049 Dubai. So we had been working with the Dubai government on partnering on an event. specifically like their tourism and branding departments around Token 2049. So they sponsored the event in a big way and we did it that crazy, crazy week where Dubai completely flooded out. We had a huge event in the tennis stadium. It completely flooded. We had to pump the whole thing out, but we got it off. And it was such a big success because we were able to bring in thousands of crypto natives to a sporting event. And as you know, there's like incredible competition for side events around crypto conferences now, but this was like so out of left field. Everybody just absolutely loved it. And we kept going with it. We did an event the next month that consensus in Austin. We did an event. at BTC Nashville, another one at Permissionless. More recently, we were in Bangkok over DevCon. And this year, over half of our schedule will be at the biggest crypto conferences in the world. We do about one event per month. And so you should expect, I don't know, anywhere from like six to 10 karate combat events this year at the biggest crypto conferences in the world. That's awesome. Now I'm excited to attend. I'm curious about the logistics of moving the pit and the seats. I mean, that's a major production. What does that look like on the back end? So like the pit itself, we have a bunch of them kind of throughout the world And we can build them pretty quickly if need be It's it is not easy though You know the the pit It's not like a cage. You can't just like move it in in an hour. It weighs a massive amount You can't just like carry it in So that is a big production, but so is everything else and a lot of these places. We also have to build quote unquote, seating. And a lot of them for us, it's just like purely standing like risers, trusses to hang the lights, you name it. So the setup for a karate combat event takes a few days. Tear it down takes a day itself. But yeah, it's a pretty big production. That's awesome. My, this is not in comparison at all, but my wife is a big Taylor Swift fan and she and I were talking about, I mean, her stage and her production is massive, right? And apparently it takes seven, seven eight days just to set up and then just about the same amount of time to take down. And so they have a couple of these stages that they fly around every, for the Ears tour. just the logistics would be fascinating to learn about. So that's really cool and so hard. You guys are like an actual physical events company, a sports league, and now you have the Karate Token. You guys are doing so much and it's like hard work. Like most crypto projects are just kind of, you know. I'd say fairly pretty easy to build. But you guys are like are actually working. Yeah, you only know half of it, to be honest. And the other thing is we don't make it easy for ourselves on the production side of things. So our goal on production is to make every single event look like a real-life version of a unique level on a video game. And so two-thirds of our events we hold in front of 3D VFX backgrounds rendered live in Unreal Engine. And then the other one-third of events, which no other sport does, by the way. If you look at karate combat, looks unlike anything else in sports. The other one third of our events we have in outstanding real world locations. So for instance, we did an event in our president's mom's backyard hosted by Rick Ross in January. We did an event at a venue that looked like a Mexican prison. We did an event on the beach in Playa del Carmen during spring break. We just did an event in a private airplane hangar in Florida. We're about to have an event on the rooftop of a building. So, yeah, it's very difficult to pull off events in places like this. We definitely do not make it easy on ourselves. That's really cool. Let's go back to the audience that you guys are aiming to serve. And so we have, on the one hand, you've got casual fans. And I'm not sure how you define that, but I have an idea. And then you've got super fans for which you're trying to use the, you want to financialize being a fan with the Karate Token and to convert. casual fans to super fans and a super fan is one that owns a karate token or karate tokens and they are more active in learning about the fighters and then maybe being more active in the the discord community or other communities in which you guys are have a presence. Is that about right? Like is that how you define both audiences? Yeah, I mean, think, you know, if you look at some of our posts on like Instagram or TikTok or something like some of these posts will have like hundreds or hundreds of millions of views, right? And our product looks extraordinarily unique. There's no other kind of fight sport that holds professional fight sport that holds events in a pit. And so like our brand awareness is extraordinarily high, especially for Crypto Project. But the goal is to convert that awareness into people who will appointment view Karate Combat, travel to events, merchandise, you name it. And what's the plan to convert a casual fan to a super fan? Like what does that look like? yeah, what does that look like? Because that's a difficult conversion step in my mind. Yeah, so like that's really why we built up on the gaming. So if you think about like why someone becomes a super fan, it's usually at the core of it, you know, the athletes, right? The stars and building a startup is incredibly hard. Step one is getting fans to learn their names and then their backgrounds and the narratives, you know, for the fight. And that's where we think financialization really comes in to get the ball rolling downhill because if you have upside on a sporting event, you're much more likely to do that research to figure out like, which of these athletes should I pick? And then during the event, you're hyper engaged because you have the chance to win some money. So it sounds like it starts with the athletes, the fighters themselves. In general, mean our product is so differentiated so that you know like some people are you know coming just to watch the striking or you know just to watch the really unique rule set and the production format but in general like the biggest funnel towards building super fans is the athletes themselves. Can you share maybe a couple of really up and coming promising athletes that the audience could start to learn about and become interested in? Yeah, of course. So, you know, one I would be remiss not to mention is Shazab Rin. Shazab is an interim belt holder. He's 6-0 in karate combat. He's now one of the most famous athletes in all of Pakistan because of his record at karate combat. Young, charismatic, good-looking, great at marketing, and he just crushes opponents. What martial arts did he practice? Is it mixed? yeah, really interesting story there. He actually learned how to fight by watching YouTube. Isn't it? Yeah, that's amazing. I heard of another, I don't know if it's actually true, but I heard of a javelin thrower, a javelin athlete who learned how to throw the javelin on YouTube and he made the Olympics for his country. I don't know if that's true, but I heard that from somewhere. That is really cool. Well, what's another athlete that the audience should know about? Yeah, we've got a really kind of an up and coming fighter. He literally just won the belt at our last event a few weeks ago, Arturo. And he's really taken a liking to Crypto Twitter. So he's been going nuts engaging with the entire community. You can find him on CT at, well, the name is a little bit complicated, so it probably doesn't make sense to... doesn't make sense to read it out but um, MakakoFlo on Twitter. But if you, yeah, if you check out the Karate Combat Twitter you'll definitely see it. That's really cool, Macaco flow. We'll definitely check them out. Let's go back to events this year. So East Denver is coming up in February sometime, I think end of February. Yeah, do you guys have an event then? We do. February 28th in Denver. That's awesome. And I think I'll be attending. And all the side events, think Karate Combat will be for sure the most, even though it's competitive and there's swag everywhere and free booze, Karate Combat by far will draw probably the largest audience. So that's, I'm excited for that. That's really cool. What about any big announcements for 2025? Is there anything you can talk about or give us a hint of? Yeah, so I've been talking about this on Twitter a little bit. You know, last year was an incredibly successful year for us. And it takes some time for like sports traction to convert into new business. And that stuff has been building up throughout the second half of the last year. And we're kind of about to go on a spree of announcements over the next month or two from, you know, traditional brands, web three brands. Host-city relationships you name it that should all be you know coming up pretty soon That's amazing. And you guys are in no short of crypto influencer fans. I I've seen some of the biggest KOLs at the Karate Combat events. I'm curious, are they aware that there is a karate token? And if so, yeah. aware, but it's kind of funny. We did this really, really hard thing. We made the crypto community fans of a sport. And it's not something you could necessarily predict that the outset would work. Just knowing crypto people. But I think over the last year and a half or so, We sort of assumed that the product would speak for itself and people would kind of learn about the token, but I think we kind of messed that part up. You know, we didn't really talk to kind of the token community about, you know, kind of how they expect to be talked to. We built these amazing products that are really kind of tailored for them. And so a big part of this year is really educating people about it. And we want to do our part in helping the crypto community understand the role of the karate token in the ecosystem. You've shared that in up only gaming, know, they can use, they can earn more karate tokens when they make a decision on which fighter will win. And if they win, they earn, you know, a little bit from the price pool. What else can you tell us about the karate token and why should crypto Twitter and the web3 audience in general become interested in it? Like what's in it for, I guess, how could they, what's in it for them? the token side? Yeah, so the Karate Token is extraordinarily unique, but it's really really well thought out. So first of all, as I mentioned, we did all of this from a starting point for this OPPONLY Gaming product, which is something that's impossible without crypto. So as an owner of the Karate Token, each event, which in general is about once a month, You can vote on which fighters you think are going to win and earn additional karate tokens for making accurate outcomes. As I mentioned, right now those prize pools are funded by the league's treasury, but in the future, one idea is that they could be funded by sponsors of Up Only Gaming. So that's probably number one. If you're at the top of our Up Only Gaming leaderboard, you get incredible benefits of the league. Because nobody owns the league, all the perks that traditionally go to owners of sports properties should really flow to the token holders. And so each year on the anniversary of our token launch, which is May 12th, the Uplinly Gaming Leaderboard resets and the top players from the previous year get access to all sorts of benefits. So for instance, over this last year, our top 1000 players all got an honorary AI generated NFT based on their username the top 1000 all got free merchandise and Depending and they all got you know free access to Cardi Comet events and then depending where you were on the leaderboard You also got trips to the events access to Ceremonial weigh-ins press conferences after parties at our next event in Miami a bunch of you know, our top token holders are going to Train with our league president awesome zady at his gym go chat in Miami and so all that's like extraordinarily unique and then on top of that There's league governance so over the last year and a half we've probably had 10 15 league governance votes Most of them today have been around league rule changes, but also liquidity provision changes to up only gaming etc And we have incredibly high participation As far as Web3 governance goes, we're seeing like 2,000 7,000 people participate in these governance votes. That's incredible. You don't see that many votes in a lot of governance changes. That's incredible. So it sounds like there's a lot of ways in which value can accrue to the Karate Token. And so many ways in which Karate Token holder can participate in the ecosystem and the community. In terms of building awareness, what are some ways in which you you're planning on doing that with the crypto community that many of whom are already fans of karate combat, but some don't know about the karate token and in ways in which they could benefit. Yeah, I think it's just kind of using some more of the traditional tools from like the token education playbooks. So just by being like very blunt, you know, engaging the right kind of educators and KOLs to really kind of speak the language of the token community and kind of explain all these things very simply and repeatedly and, you know, explaining our future roadmap. Yeah, I think that would work a lot too. Tell us about Influencer Fight Week. What's that about? Sure. So this is another kind of project that we started last year, last February. We built something called the Influencer Fight Club. And most of the athletes to date have been from the Web3 community. You know, very large names from the crypto community from BitBoy to Nick Carter, David Hoffman, Kane Warwick. And these folks get a chance to fight during pro karate combat events against other influencers. So same rules, well, we don't allow any elbows in the Influencer Fight Club, but otherwise same rules, fighting with four ounce gloves, so not like some big boxing gloves, and shorter rounds. But it's been... incredibly fun to watch. The growth in just this year has been pretty tremendous. And it's another way we've really been able to kind of get so many Web3 eyeballs on the sport of karate combat. Yeah, it's definitely been super interesting. One of my friends was a fighter in the Influencer Fight Club, Dreamer from DeFi Kingdoms. unfortunate, he lost in the first... did lose, but he's really involved in the IFC now. That's, yeah, he's great. Wow. Well, Onlylarping, this has been super helpful. I'm a casual fan of Karate Combat, but I didn't know much about the Karate Token and the ecosystem and the tokenomics and the various ways in which value can accrue to the token, and also the ways in which a token holder, Karate Token Holder, can benefit. and participate in the community. So this has been really, really helpful. In the notes, we'll put the names of the two fighters that you recommend we take a look at. And I'll be sure to share your Twitter handle, and so that people can follow you. Before we end, is there any final thoughts that you'd like to share about Karate Combat? Well, download the app, check out what we built. Check out our socials, like go to our Instagram page, watch the highlights, come to an event if you can. You know, if you're gonna be at any of these conferences this year, please do come check out Karate Combat. Hit me up on Twitter, I'm at OnlyLarPing. And yeah, that's probably about it. Awesome. Well, I'm going to download Up Only Gaming for sure. And I'll get started with that. Awesome. Olin Larping, thank you so much. My pleasure.