What is Karate Combat (KARATE)?
Karate Combat is a rapidly growing professional full-contact combat sport with 4.5 million followers, 100-200 million organic views per month and approximately 100 exclusive professional athletes.
The league has televised distribution on many of the world’s top sports networks including Eurosport, Globo’s Canal Combate, BeIN Sports, CBS Sports and ESPN Deportes. The league’s events are simultaneously streamed for free on the league’s own site, Karate.com, as well as Youtube, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and Kick.
The league, which was founded and funded by tech and crypto entrepreneurs with nearly $30 million of their own capital, targets a young, international demographic through fast, stand-up fights, cross-platform distribution, and 3D CGI backgrounds rendered in Unreal Engine.
With a vision to be the first professional sports league governed and gamified by a crypto-native community, the founders sold all of the league’s assets to an ownerless foundation in 2022 to enable the launch of a web3 platform. To facilitate the transition, the league recently closed an $18 million private round SAFT from leading web3 and web2 investors and angels that was announced on April 19th.
What makes Karate Combat (KARATE) unique?
Web3
$KARATE has 100x the utility of any sports token or NFT issued to date.
There is no other professional sports league in the world that is governed and gamified by a token. Karate Combat’s assets were transferred in full by its crypto-native founders to an ownerless foundation to enable KarateDAO to facilitate web3 governance and gamification.
The new structure enables a web3 game tailored exactly to the habits and interests of sports fans. Beyond real governance of the league, the primary initial utility for the token is to play Up Only Gaming.
When sports fans have a wager on an event, even a small one, engagement is an order of magnitude higher. However, the reality is that most people inevitably stop betting on sports because they lose their money. There needs to be a better way for a league to prioritize sustainable engagement vs. upside to drive long tail value creation via fandom. Hence, the birth of Up Only Gaming: no loss, no betting, just fun.
In comparison to regulated gambling, Up Only Gaming is a no-loss game embedded into the mobile and web applications deployed by KarateDAO contributors that would be impossible without web3 technology. The innovative Up Only Gaming app allows token holders to pick their favorite fighters for the chance to earn more tokens with no risk of loss.
On May 10th, the game will be available to token holders via the league’s iOS app and web app. The league’s iOS app has already been approved by Apple and the apps will launch the same day as the $KARATE tokens. The more $KARATE tokens you have, the more you can win. Over time active players and winning fighters slowly dilute inactive fans.
Furthermore, the league has fully embraced a web3 open ecosystem go-to-market strategy by way of an incredibly permissive IP license, initially in the categories of NFTs & video games. Approximately 10 web3 partners are now building on the league’s IP, including the Karateka game from GameOn. The league will be open sourcing its smart contracts and front ends, to foster a vibrant ecosystem of applications built on top of the Up Only Gaming primitives.
Combat Sports
Karate Combat directly appeals to a younger generation of fight fans through a fast-paced ruleset, cross-platform distribution and immersive 3D VFX settings.
- Fast-paced ruleset. Within MMA, Karate Comabt’s unique ruleset prioritizes a fast, exciting pace by eliminating wrestling and featuring shorter rounds and scoring that favors aggression.
- Distribution. Karate Combat has world-class televised distribution on many of the world’s top sports networks while concurrently streaming all events for free.
- Unreal Engine. Karate Combat’s real fights are held in unreal worlds rendered in Unreal Engine. Here is a link to a behind the scenes video produced by Unreal Engine and featured as one of their case studies on the Unreal Engine website.
DAO Maker Launchpad
For the first time ever, league fans and web3 enthusiasts can purchase $250 of branded Karate Combat merchandise and receive $KARATE tokens for free. Eligible purchasers will receive a non-transferable Karate Combat NFT redeemable for merchandise including:
- Special edition Karate Combat x DAO Maker Hoodie
- Special edition Karate Combat x DAO Maker T-shirt
- Special edition Karate Combat x DAO Maker Karate Bandana
- Karate Combat Hat
- Karate Combat Belt
- Up to $50 of fees and S&H
Redemption of the Karate Combat NFTs will be enabled within 3 months, to allow time for production and distribution of the league’s special edition merchandise. The NFTs are non-transferable and redemption will not be available within restricted geographies.
What is Karate Combat (KARATE) roadmap?
The product roadmap is subject to launch feedback and community guidance. However, we expect all of the following to be 2023 priorities for the core contributors to the Up Only Gaming system within the Karate Combat community:
- Android app - June/July 2023
- Open source - Q3 2023
- Leaderboards & ownership packages - Q3 2023
- Pool rewards and play with friends - H2 2023
- In-app card game - H2 2023
Karate Combat’s next two events are on May 20th and June 24th.
Karate Combat (KARATE) revenue streams
The Karate Combat league currently generates nearly all revenue from sponsorships. The league intends to generate revenue from other sources within the Karate Combat mobile application.
The Up Only Gaming system, which was developed by core contributors in the Karate Combat community to grow the sport’s global fanbase, is not monetized.
How does Karate Combat (KARATE) work?
Sports League
The Karate Combat league’s core product is monthly televised and live streamed professional sports competitions. The league has 100+ fighters on multi-year exclusive contracts and has held 38 events to date. Typically each event has 8-10 fights including at least 1 title fight.
The league, which owns karate.com and employs some of the top karate fighters of all-time, has been built on top of the massive karate brand and lore, but its unique ruleset creates a brand new sport designed to entertain with a fast-paced and differentiated product.
The UFC (and its copycats) are dominated by jiu jitsu, a sport based on grappling, ground fighting and submission holds. In contrast, Karate Combat’s unique ruleset facilitates a stand-up, striking-based fight event with winners decided by punches, kicks and throws. Fighters are limited to no more than five seconds of ground and pound on the pit floor.
Karate Combat is UFC without wrestling, boxing plus kicking, and a modern version of kickboxing with smaller gloves plus throws.
Each of the league’s events is filmed in front of live-rendered 3D CGI environments using a combination of technologies called In-camera VFX and Extended Reality. The league is the only professional sport filmed in front of live rendered 3D graphics. The end product is a viral, live version of Mortal Kombat.
Up Only Gaming
On May 10th the league is launching the $KARATE token alongside a mobile app that embeds a non-custodial wallet and a webapp accessible using wallets such as Metamask and Coinbase Wallet. Karate Combat will be the only sports league fully governed and gamified by a token.
Together, the $KARATE token and Up Only Gaming app gamify the live viewing experience for Karate Combat events with an innovative game that allows token holders to pick their favorite fighters for the chance to earn more tokens with no risk of loss. At launch, the game will be available to token holders via the league’s iOS app and web app. The iOS app has already been approved by Apple and the apps will launch the same day as the $KARATE tokens.
For 48 hours before each event, token holders can view fight matchups through the Karate Combat app and vote for fighters using off-chain signed messages. They can allocate all of their votes to 1 fight or split votes up amongst multiple fights. The more $KARATE tokens a player has, the more they can win. Players who vote for losing fighters retain their $KARATE tokens to play again next time.
A fixed prize pool is established for each event from the Up Only Gaming treasury reserve. The event prize pool is allocated amongst each event’s fights based on aggregate vote weight. For example, if all $KARATE token holders only vote on the title fight, 100% of the event’s prize pool will be allocated to that fight.
Odds & payouts per fight are set pari-mutuel. For example, if fighter A gets 10x more votes than fighter B, then winning players who vote for fighter A would need to share the designated prize pool with 10x more players than winning players who vote for fighter B.
10% of each prize pool is allocated to fighters. Therefore Karate Combat fighters, above & beyond their contractual fiat earnings, have on-chain winnings in $KARATE and are, therefore, directly incentivized to build a bigger fan base and more hype around each fight.
What is Karate Combat (KARATE) marketing strategy?
Traditional
Contributors to the Karate Combat community designed the $KARATE token and Up Only Gaming applications to appeal specifically to sports fans. Karate Combat has approximately 4.5 million social media followers and generates 100 to 200 million organic views on the internet every month. The league’s live events are broadcast globally on many of the world’s top sports networks including Eurosport, Globo’s Canal Combate, BeIN Sports, CBS Sports and ESPN Deportes while being simultaneously streamed for free on karate.com as well as Youtube, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and Kick.
Web3-Native
In contrast to most sports crypto projects to date, the league has fully integrated crypto marketing directly into its core broadcasts, including physical and digital signage, segments, and call-outs. The league also recognizes the importance of web3-native marketing strategies. Recently the league has formed partnerships with web3 communities and personalities like the Kanpai Pandas and Gabriel Haines. Both were prominently featured in the league’s last event, KC 38.
Growth Marketing
We plan to push the envelope on the marriage between “airdrops”/small dollar token giveaways and data-driven, iterative growth marketing. Tokens were supposed to be the new CAC, but everyone seems to have forgotten during the bull market.
What technologies does Karate Combat (KARATE) use?
The Karate Combat tech stack consists of three main parts. Core Client Services, Operations and Backend Services.
Core Client Services
In the center of the Core Client service architecture lies completely in-house developed Solidity smart contracts on both Hedera and Ethereum. These contracts are the sources of truth for all services at KC.
Both contracts facilitate the Up Only Gaming system by calculating the owed rewards on chain based on the predictions of $KARATE token holders and the total aggregated votes. As a result, these contracts necessitate KarateDAO delegates (fight judges & other contributors) to reach consensus on the outcome of a fight event. Consensus is reached when a number of signed votes from KarateDAO delegates surpass the predetermined threshold, as determined by the deployed contracts. On successful consensus, the result is committed on chain.
To further facilitate the Up Only Gaming product, through a similar means of consensus, the voting period commences when a fight event is announced on-chain, emitting a blockchain event to the Up Only Gaming clients.
The web Up Only gaming clients are written in React while the mobile client is built in Native iOS, largely using Swift.
These clients communicate directly on-chain through Infura and Hedera’s nodes directly. Off-chain, they communicate to Snapshot for Up Only Gaming and the Backend Services for general client data support.
Both the iOS and Android clients have an SDK integration with our partner Blade Labs for their embedded wallet solution.
Operations
The means by which KarateDAO delegates complete these operations occurs through the web3 Operations client built on React and NextJS. The NextJS services are hosted in Docker containers to guarantee performance and scalability on AWS.
This client allows KarateDAO delegates to manage activities such as adding members, managing member roles, managing oracles, managing fighters, completing treasury operations, and adding event information.
The aforementioned Ethereum and Hedera smart contracts is the database for this client.
An IPFS backend further supports onchain resources in provision of various metadata (including fighter images, fighter stats, member information, event images, etc.) while maintaining a transparent and decentralized standard.
Backend Services
The Up Only Gaming clients connect to backend services for two reasons. As a means of sending signatures off-chain in the case of Hedera (the in-house Hedera Signature Service; the Ethereum web client is integrated with Snapshot directly) and secondly to access cached data such as IPFS data (through a Cloudfront CDN) and Blockchain events which includes Up Only gaming and Fight Event information.
The Hedera Signature service performs the same behavior of Snapshot with the same IPFS infrastructure for offchain voting on Hedera. This is also a containerized service which exists on AWS.
Another Backend Service exists to connect with Firebase in order to provide push notifications of blockchain events to the mobile clients.
Finally, an important Backend Service is the Oracle service. The oracle service moves off-chain signatures from IPFS and Snapshot on-chain so their signature can be verified by the contract when a client claims Up Only Gaming rewards. It also moves fight event outcome information from the Ethereum chain to the Hedera chain.
Like all services this is an AWS containerized service. However, for security reasons, we also separate the signing process by the Oracle into a separate hardened service.
Summarization
Mobile:
- Native iOS (Swift, Obj-C)
- Blade Labs SDK integration for Hedera wallet features
- Snapshot SDK
Backend:
- AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS), NodeJS, Cloudfront CDN, In-Memory caching, Firebase, Snapshot, Infura, Hedera Mirror Nodes
- Solidity (Hedera and Ethereum)
Web:
- React
- NextJS
- ECS
- RainbowKit
What are Karate Combat (KARATE) token utilities?
$KARATE has 100x the utility of any fan token, sports token or sports NFT issued to date.
Real Governance
Karate Combat is a rapidly growing professional sports league in its fifth season that was built and funded by crypto native founders. This past summer the founders sold all of the league’s assets to an ownerless foundation. The prior equity entities are now worthless and being wound down.
The KarateDAO will roll out governance functionality involving $KARATE token holders over time, from decisions involving real world fighter and matchup selection to budgeting and supplier selection to IP licensing and tokenomics. The league believes it will be highly improbable, if not impossible, for other sports leagues to replicate this crypto-native governance structure any time in the near future. Governance votes will be cast directly through the mobile apps, webapp and snapshot.
Up Only Gaming
Beyond league governance, the primary initial utility for the token is to play Up Only Gaming. The founders transferred the league to an ownerless foundation to enable KarateDAO to facilitate a web3 game tailored exactly to the habits and interests of sports fans.
When sports fans have a wager on an event, even a small one, engagement is an order of magnitude higher. However, most people inevitably stop betting on sports because they lose their money. There needs to be a better way for a league to prioritize sustainable engagement vs. upside to drive long tail value creation via fandom.
In comparison to regulated gambling, Up Only Gaming is a no-loss game embedded into the mobile and web applications deployed by KarateDAO contributors that would be impossible without web3 technology. The innovative game allows token holders to pick their favorite fighters for the chance to earn more tokens with no risk of loss. At launch, the game will be available to token holders via the league’s iOS app and web app. The iOS app has already been approved by Apple and the apps will launch the same day as the $KARATE tokens.
The more tokens you have, the more you can win. Over time active players and winning fighters slowly dilute inactive fans.
Licensing & Ecosystem
The league has begun to license its intellectual property, initially in the categories of video games and NFTs. For the first time ever, licensing of an entire sports league’s IP and athlete likeness, will be accessible by agreeing to straightforward contract terms. Approximately 10 projects have already begun to build applications incorporating the league’s IP.
In the immediate term the league is utilizing new web3 tools to provide the access, ownership and interactivity demanded by younger sports fans that grew up with social media and gaming culture. In the medium term, the league is embracing an open decentralization model featuring unprecedented transparency and fan-controlled intellectual property to foster a broad and emergent Karate Combat Universe built by the community.
Over time, we anticipate that Karate Combat community members may be interested in building applications on top of Up Only Gaming & $KARATE in additional areas such as:
- leveraged game play
- composable parlays
- revenue-backed fighter tokens or fighter NFT’s
- social graph tournaments
- passive game vaults
Token-gated experiences and content
To date most fan tokens and sports NFT projects have relied on token-gated experiences to drive utility. This is table stakes, and with the entire league behind the token, Karate Combat can do it 10x better.
We believe that a transparent public ledger is the perfect technology to enable a shared feeling of ownership of a cultural asset like a sports property, and we intend to utilize it in full.
The league holds marquee, televised events monthly. The community will work together to design ownership packages that reward token holders will have the first access to VIP tickets, athlete & executive access, merchandise, etc.
In addition to meta-governance and Up Only Gaming, it is very important that the league prioritizes the feelings of ownership that come with the $KARATE token. We’re excited to drive home this feeling of ownership through:
- whale profiles
- whale honoraries
- IRL & digital token gated experiences
- Up Only Gaming leaderboards
- vip ticket experiences to large holders
- token votes on who fights who