Their story, mission and our interview with the Community Director and Product Manager. Building on Blockchain is an interview series, to find details on this series start here: [ link ].
We are proud to present the first part in our interview series with FirstBlood's Community Director and Product Manager, Auryn Macmillan.
FirstBlood is the first ever competitive gaming company to be powered by blockchain technology; allowing anyone to compete and win prizes for video games they are already playing. FirstBlood was one of our top choices for Building on Blockchain. Today we’ll be covering our interview with Community Director, Auryn Macmillan. Thanks again Auryn.
FirstBlood launched in 2016, with goals of using blockchain technology to solve common problems in the eSport industry. In just 2 short years FirstBlood is doing just that. The platform we tested is their free FirstBlood Royale app, which is still in its beta. We have to admit, we enjoyed ourselves.
FirstBlood has already paid out over $50,000 in rewards, hosted more than 53,000 matches and logged over 60K gamers. The FBR app automates everything; from registration and competition bracket management, to scoring and prize fulfillment. As a gamer, you simply make an account, log in and register for events while you game. You can win all sorts of prizes based on your in-game performance. Thanks to FirstBlood, the process is simplified.
We chose FirstBlood for Building on Blockchain because of how quickly they’ve grown as a community, the simplicity behind their platform, and the planned use of blockchain as an integral part of their operation.
From consistent growth and development updates, to partnerships with eSport teams and games; using Oracle to fetch event results and smart contracts to instantly process the competition rewards- quite ingenious.
Here’s a picture describing how it works:
Although the blockchain portion of the app isn’t ready yet, we didn’t have any complaints. In fact, we love’d everything the app has to offer- Especially the Survival Sundays (Survival Sundays are weekly PUBG matches). Your team can register and qualify throughout the week. Right now the platform only supports DOTA 2 and PUBG for PC; but there are plans to add Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), League of Legends, Overwatch & others soon.
We spoke with the FirstBlood Community Director and Product Manager: Auryn Macmillan
He had exciting things to say about the FirstBlood team, the project and looking ahead.
Below is our Q & A:
ELC: FirstBlood’s focus right now seems to be on Dota 2 and PUBG, are there plans to add more games in the future or adding more features for the games you have now? Auryn Macmillan: "Yes to both. We’re going to add additional game-modes, and tools to improve player experience."
ELC: Any important FirstBlood events coming up? Big dates to look forward to? Auryn Macmillan: "We do have some pretty big stuff coming up, but I can’t tell you too much about it. There’s a big PR marketing release plan for that. No dates, or details now. I can tell you we do have another PUBG Invitational Pro Event coming up. More than likely another $10,000 prize pool."
ELC: Awesome! Where do you see the future headed for both the blockchain and eSports industries? Auryn Macmillan: "Well the Crypto space in general in the last few years has been really really telling. Looking specifically at the Ethereum space we’ve seen a bunch of projects start up, that should now be starting to all come online. FirstBlood launched it’s first app late last year, but if you look at other projects like Gnosis coming online, Status Network coming online; there’s a whole bunch of projects that funded around the same time that are now coming online and making real-world usable products, and that trend is just going to continue to ramp up. The eSports space in the last couple of years has grown exponentially and I don’t predict a decrease in that rate of growth. The amount of money, time & effort going into building and promoting eSports is mind-boggling."
“We really are kind of testing-time for the Ethereum and Blockchain space as a whole. To see whether or not these projects can actually gain a user base now that they have a product.” — Auryn Macmillan
ELC: Will the prizes and funding be continued? Or scaled to size? Auryn Macmillan: "For the time being, we’ll have a steady pace with the prizes and the value of them. But we definitely plan to scale up both the value of the prizes and the frequency of events to scale with the number of users that are playing."
ELC: Auryn Macmillan, thank you so much for your time. Before I go, tell us about your background. Is eSports something you always wanted to get in to growing up? Auryn Macmillan: "That’s a really weird question. I actually come from a professional sporting background. I played basketball professionally after college. I did that for 7 years. Coming over to the U.S. to do that, obviously my goal was to play basketball. So at first this wasn’t necessarily what I envisioned myself doing. I got pretty heavily involved with crypto in late 2012, since then I’ve had some involvements in other projects; most notably the DaoHub. The DaoHub, I actually founded that and still own that."
A big thank you to FirstBlood and Auryn, for giving us the pleasure of an interview.
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