An Important Update On The Future Of Ludo Labs
Our mission, journey, and plans for the future
Dear Ludo Labs Community,
We hope all of you are well and are enjoying the European football off-season! This is an important update from all of us here at the Ludo Labs team. The keen-eyed amongst you will have noticed that for the past couple of weeks, we have not been running our usual activities such as Meme Mondays and Trivia Thursdays.
This is because our team has been engaged in internal dialogues to decide the way forward for the project and community. Now, after much deliberation, we have arrived at a decision.
Before we come to that decision, we would like to just begin by recounting the origin story of Ludo Labs:
Our Origin Story And Raison D’être
The idea for Ludo Labs came about in May 2021 in a conversation between a few friends. Back then, all of us were newly enthralled by the exciting potential of NFTs and the opportunities we saw to improve upon the prevailing static pfp-based paradigm.
At the same time, all of us in the founding team have been die-hard football fans our whole lives, and we knew how much passion the sport can generate. When you add in the fact that a couple of our founders had robust pre-existing relationships with many top footballers, it seemed like we had stumbled upon a concept that was perfectly suited to our interests and resources as a team.
We immediately set upon working on the idea whenever we got the time. For the most part, this meant nights and weekends, as everybody in the team already had full time jobs and external responsibilities. Nonetheless, we steadily made progress and added new team members to our roster.
Each and every team member who joined the cause was a passionate football fan with interests in Web3. This was a very important consideration for us because we felt it would help us uphold our three main objectives for the project:
To create a tight-knit community of football lovers from around the world
To push the boundaries of what was possible with NFTs as a technology
And most importantly, to deliver incredible experiences that would bring football fans closer to their favourite players in a new, authentic way
All things considered, we feel like we were able to deliver on these goals. Our community, which has remained active and vibrant to this day on both Twitter and Discord, has always stood strong as the cornerstone of the project (more than 5000 awesome members on Discord!). We are proud that we have built a digital home for a diverse and multinational group of people united by a love for the beautiful game.
In terms of the innovations we tried to bring to the NFT space, we feel we were able to contribute to or improve upon a few ideas in the ecosystem landscape. Amongst them are the following concepts:
An instant reveal mint which prevents meta-data leaks and rarity sniping
A method of conducting verifiably random raffles using the Ethereum blockchain as a source of randomness and IPFS as the guarantor of procedural integrity (the famed Ludo Labs ‘Randomizer’)
A novel way to unlock NFT utility - namely collect-to-experience ie. the concept that by trading and collecting different assets, fans can unlock different real-life experiences
A set of ‘redeemable’ NFTs wherein the user redemption flows occurred gaslessly, with the project ensuring the integrity of the redemption flow by later publishing the users redemption message and signature as call-data to the blockchain
And lastly, we are delighted that we have been able to deliver numerous incredible interactions between our community members and some of the top footballers from around the world. In fact, given the centrality of this objective to the whole project, the details of these experiences deserve their own section in this blog post.
Our Experiences And Rewards For Collectors
Before we dive into the experiences, we present a few figures and statistics about the project:
The Ludo Labs Genesis Collection sold more than 1000 unique NFTs! (1002 to be precise)
There are more than 312 unique owners of these NFTs on Ethereum mainnet
With regards to redeemable NFTs, we issued 24 redeemable NFTs in the Ludo Labs Elite Collection to winners of various skill challenges, meme contests, and other community activations
As for the ownership distribution of our project, we had the following spread within our collector set:
Overall, 40% of our collectors owned more than 1 card, with 10% of collectors holding more than 5 cards. This is consistent with our experience of the Discord community as a haven for a small but very passionate and engaged group of holders.
Coming to the experiences, we can divide them into 3 broad categories:
One-To-Many Player Experiences:
This category comprises the experiences we provided for Ludo Labs community members to interface with players as a group. It covers things like the Twitter Spaces and Discord chats that we organized with players such as Patrice Evra, Bacary Sagna, Diogo Dalot, and Miralem Pjanic (with Dejan Lovren even joining in spontaneously!)
One-On-One Player Experiences And Personalized Memorabilia
A key pillar of our mission was to facilitate intimate one-on-one experiences for fans with their favourite players. We worked hard towards this and are delighted that we were able to deliver many amazing memories including:
Sending nearly 30 of our collectors and their friends to some of the biggest games in European football as VIP guests of players (including the epic PSG vs Real Madrid and Man City vs Real Madrid games in last season’s Champions League - in the latter case as guests of Eric Abidal, even getting to meet other legends like Luis Figo in the VIP area!). Most of these match tickets came through our Ludo League project, a prediction contest for the Champions League in which collectors with the most correct predictions in the competition would win free tickets to any CL games of their choosing!
Distributing dozens of personalized shout-outs and jerseys from our footballers to a slew of collectors who unlocked prizes by using their NFTs or by participating in community activations such as skill challenges and meme contests.
Our collector Fiago and his mate go crazy while watching City vs. Madrid. Catch the full video of his experience here.
Community Rewards And Deliverables
In addition to facilitating interactions with our footballer partners, we also conducted more than 60 community activities such as Trivia Thursday, Meme Monday, and Flex Friday. We even took ownership of a club in Footium for our community to collectively operate - Wobury Tord!
Through these activities, we disbursed thousands of USDC in prizes in addition to community coins which our collectors used to unlock special benefits such as Discord Nitro and bespoke football jerseys.
Lastly, we were also able to contribute to a very very important goal through the project - donating to Common Goal, one of the most inspiring and effective charitable organizations in football 🙏 It is a mark of pride for us that this was Common Goal’s first ever foray in crypto and that we could help them set up a wallet and get familiar with this exciting new ecosystem.
Path Ahead And Steps Forward
The purpose of reiterating our purpose and subsequent achievements was to align for both ourselves and our various stakeholders (namely players and collectors) the arc that this project has taken until date.
As a team we are very pleased with what we have been able to accomplish, both in terms of building a brand and template for football in Web3 but also, more crucially, in terms of giving real delight and connection to football lovers all over the world.
We have held countless conversations with collectors, community members, and even with completely unrelated people from the football ecosystem who have heard about Ludo Labs and told us their appreciation for what we tried to build here.
Of course, there have also been several setbacks, challenges, and learnings for us at the same time. Those learnings ranged from technical learnings (who can forget our notorious minting error and subsequent ‘re-roll’) to operational and market insights (namely the poor esteem of NFTs in the wider football fanbase and the need for simple messaging and marketing when putting together a concept).
We hope we have taken all those learnings in our stride and we continue to be open to any feedback from the community. After all, we have always prided ourselves on our transparency and commitment to be forthright.
And so, based on this same principle of candour, we would like to announce that the Ludo Labs project will be winding down for the time being.
Why and what does this mean?
When we came together to launch this project almost a year ago, we came together as a group of enthusiasts with a lot to learn. We didn’t know how the project would turn out and we didn’t know what it would take from all of us to make it successful. As mentioned previously, all of us also came into the project while holding jobs and external responsibilities.
After a year of working on this idea, we feel as though we cannot take Ludo Labs forward in its current form and with the current team. Some of us have put a lot of resources into the project and are forced to return to our full time duties, while other members of the team wish to re-evaluate the structure of the project before potentially reviving it in a new form.
What is unanimous however, is our desire to do right by our community. So this is what will happen to the current Ludo Labs NFTs and experiences in the interim:
The minting contract will be frozen so that no new NFTs can be minted. In the event that Ludo Labs comes back in a new form, all holders of the current Genesis Collection will receive preferential benefits befitting their true OG status!
All unredeemed utilities which have accrued to Ludo Labs Elite Collection holders will be fulfilled on demand - this can be done by contacting our Captains on Discord or via any of our social accounts.
All Discord leaderboard coin holders will be able to redeem their coins for rewards. If you are within 500 coins of earning a reward, you will be rounded up to the nearest eligible reward!
As for the Discord server, we will transition to a community model wherein the server will be manned by community moderators and admins. It will continue to be a place where we can all discuss the beautiful game, but the role of Captains and Ludo Labs will take a back seat to general football discussion. Community members will still be able to participate in the running of Wobury Tord in Footium and receive updates about any new developments in the Ludo Labs universe, but we cannot predict such developments at this point in time.
If you would like to join the community moderation team or share any feedback with our Captains, we would be delighted. While we cannot say at this point if or when a successor project to Ludo Labs will develop, we do have some team members interested in doing this. What we can say with certainty, however, is that in any successor project, community and transparency will once again be at the forefront of what we do. If you are interested in becoming a part of the community server as a mod, please reach out to Captain UAV on Discord (uav1869#0728).
Lastly, we would like to state that that our players have unanimously agreed that it was a pleasure to interact with and share a community with all of you. Each of them believes that this model of fan-player engagement has a future and they stand behind us as we re-evaluate the way to make this dream come to life in the right way. When we started this project, we knew that we wanted to only work with players who harboured a genuine desire to learn about Web3 and build true connections with fans. What we can say is that our crop of 10 player partners have gone above and beyond our expectations. We are so proud that we were able to work with them and so grateful for the heartfelt affection and generosity they showed to our community. We would like to give each of them an honourable mention because they have all been fantastic:
Paolo Dybala 🇦🇷💎
Miralem Pjanic 🇧🇦🪖
Edin Dzeko 🇧🇦💎
Bacary Sagna 🇫🇷💪🏿
Diogo Dalot 🇵🇹🏍️
Mahmoud Dahoud 🇩🇪🦸🏽♂️
Jeremiah St. Juste 🇳🇱⚡
Mohamed Elneny 🇪🇬🥷🏽
Patrice Evra 🇫🇷🦇
Eric Abidal 🇫🇷🦁
So from all of us here at the Ludo Labs team, we would like to offer our deepest thanks for all the support and goodwill you have shown us ever since we floated this community. We hope you have enjoyed the ride as much as we have and we look forward to the next leg of the journey with you!
Goodbye for now from the Lab 🧪👾⚽
