Shortly after our research project failed, I paid Kyle to design a few graphics for a personal project. To my dismay he delivered an ugly set of icons but we ended up staying in touch and a few months later we were discussing ideas for a business and our group of friends converged on the idea of eSports betting. Kyle informed the group he’d come up with a few ideas and a few days later he delivered both a presentation and a PDF containing mockups for the entire UI of a potential app! Suffice to say I was gobsmacked! His efforts galvanised us and we started turning our idea into reality.

Tell us about your team and their experience

In contrast to a lot of other teams, we are actually just a two man outfit, but whilst we currently lack manpower, we do pack quite a punch!

My partner Kyle is a highly sought after graphics designer and UX specialist. Whether it’s designing a logo, creating an icon, producing and editing a video, designing a user interface or even drawing a storyboard for a video to entice John McAfee into doing a video with us, Kyle has got us covered! I’m forever thankful and flattered that Kyle rejected a very lucrative offer from IBM to work with me instead because IBM’s loss is Slips’s gain and that’s one sliding door moment I really lucked out on!

We share a similar drive for success, have the same work ethic and possess the same glass half empty yet still relentless optimistic outlook

As for myself, I’m a fairly competent programmer. I started my career as a full stack developer and then progressed to application development. Whilst I love long days spent in front of an IDE, I’ve always found that most of my pleasure is derived from entreprenual persuits and I have an aptitude for managing large scale projects from start to finish. It helps that I’m a meticulous planner and obsessed with details — who knew the things that make my closest friends crazy would come in so handy!

Anyway I have to say that it’s extremely rare to meet someone that you blend so well with. Kyle and I have complementary skills. He’s able to communicate our ideas and give them a polished look that bowls people over and I’m able to take our ideas and turn them into actual working prototypes. That we share a similar drive for success, have the same work ethic and possess the same glass half empty yet still relentless optimistic outlook is quite amazing. Our success together is more surprising when you consider the fact that we do not live on the same continent!

What is Slips’ competitive advantage?

Well first of all it has to be said that we do have a lot of competition! Goes with the territory of being in a hot niche. However we know about all of them and we pride ourselves on the fact that our intelligence gathering is so good that our competitors cannot even sneeze without us finding out about it!

The first thing that differentiates us from them though is the simple fact that we actually have a working product! Some of our competitors have nothing to show, months (and in one case a full flipping year!) after raising a huge amount of funds.

Our approach is different. For example we started building a resource / community for aspiring streamers — the effort and financial investment continues on delivering. It’s cheaper to reach aspiring streamers, just a chance to free pair of headphones is enough to get their attention! It’s also possible to get critical mass and go viral without spending a small fortune.

Why Ethereum Classic?

The cliche — what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is relevant here, ETC’s immune system is only getting stronger and that’s a good sign for anyone thinking of building on it!

Anyone that has worked for a company in the gambling or adult industry will know that banks and payment processors have an aversion to working with what they consider ‘high risk’ companies. As a consumer, if your country of residence does not support PayPal or they impose lots of restrictions on obtaining an account there — you’ll find yourself cut off from services that you should have a legitimate right to have access to.

It’s completely reasonable to want to work on technology that you believe in!

So firstly even though the main USP of Ethereum Classic is not “money for the world”; we do take advantage of the fact that ETC is fast, uncensor-able and has attractive, easy-to-use fiat on-ramps. Many cryptocurrencies actually designed to be used as money do not have ALL of these features! No matter where you live, you can use our services regardless of how a pesky middleman might feel about the idea! (as long as you are of age and it’s legal to gamble online where you live)

ETC also offers us turing completeness in the same package. It is one of the reasons (aside from high fees) that we did not end up using Bitcoin in our project. We could not build the parts of our app that uses smart contracts on Bitcoin (which intentionally hobbles application developers). Bitcoin Cash whilst more welcoming is mired in internal strife and instability.

Every project is only as good as the community that surrounds it and ETC’s community has a reputation for protecting the core tenets of ETC at all costs.

It’s important to note that we do not have decentralisation fetish unlike some in the cryptocurrency community! It is simply a means to an end for us and not something that we design the entirety of our app around. That is to say we do not store all of our data on the blockchain — every challenge on Slips does not get executed through a smart contract. But arbitrators do stake money via a smart contract and we do record the results of their arbitrations and the ratings they receive publicly because that’s one area where users would absolutely benefit from some transparency.

It goes without saying that most people are aware of what led to the creation of ETC. The decision the ETC community made a few years ago resonates well with us. Every project is only as good as the community that surrounds it and ETC’s community has a reputation for protecting the core tenets of ETC at all costs.

Whilst we appreciate the amazing work that gets done on the Ethereum chain, there’s a reason that Nakamoto Consensus and PoW was so ground breaking and ETH’s inability to transition fully to PoS is telling. We’re fully on board with ETC’s roadmap to continue with on-chain scaling with PoW. It’s completely reasonable to want to work on technology that you believe in!

It was fairly unlikely that we’d ever find ourselves in a similar position with that level of access to the Core dev team of any other blockchain project

What made you turn to ETC Labs for support, and what are your expectations from this collaboration?

Working on ETC would mean getting all the benefits of working on an Ethereum network. In addition there would be ETC-only projects like the recently released Emerald SDK available to us. There were lots of perks on offer including free office space, workshops, an extremely structured incubation process that leads to a demo day and connections to the rest of the ETC ecosystem (including DCG, IOHK etc).

A lot of the developers who were formerly working for ETCDev have been hired to work on ETC as part of ETCLabs. Startups in the incubator have access to the team and some of the devs actually work within the same office! It was fairly unlikely that we’d ever find ourselves in a similar position with that level of access to the Core dev team of any other blockchain project so this was quite a compelling reason for us to work on ETC.

In terms of what we expect from the collaboration. We have a single minded vision in terms of what we want to achieve with our business. But we’re also mindful that as first time founders, we have a lot of areas where we are inexperienced (business operations, legal, financial) and areas where a strong network and support system will be of real benefit to us (partnerships, introductions, fundraising).

We hope that participating in the ETC Labs incubation program will help us turn what is currently a promising idea and a working proof of concept into a business in it’s own right.