Cubiex — A new way of incentivizing eSports.

We held an AMA with Cubiex in our public Telegram channel on June 28th.

Cubiex aims to connect more than 400m players worldwide on a decentralized blockchain powered social network and crypto league for eSports. Users can find friends, connect with them, create teams and participate in our unique Crypto Battle League.

With features such as tokenized P2P matchmaking between single players or teams, every gamer now can generate income by placing tokens directly against another opponent and fight for the prize pool. Additional features within the social network such as content creation and livestreaming will be monetized through a unique upvoting system.

Cubiex is the first social network of its kind that enables gamers, content creators, and passive members to interact with each other and use our instant messaging chat app to stay in touch and plan their gaming activities.

Cubiex will be holding an IEO on a TBA platform in August 2019.

You can also visit the Cubiex Telegram channel or Cubiex website for further details.

Here’s what Cubiex’s CEO & Co-founder Pierre Chahine had to say in the AMA.*

*This AMA has been edited for clarity.

WC (Wolf Crypto Telegram Member)

Welcome to another edition of Wolf Crypto AMA, this time with social gaming platform, Cubiex!

Joining us from the Cubiex team is Founder & CEO Pierre Chahine.

Pierre, it’s a privilege to have you here today!

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of Cubiex, can you give us a quick intro on yourself and what lead you to creating Cubiex?

TEAM & TEAM GOALS

PC

Hello everybody! 🙏🏻👍

On behalf of the Cubiex Team we like to thank each and everyone of you for giving us the opportunity to present Cubiex eSports to your community. 😃

My name is Pierre Chahine, I am 33 and the Founder & CEO of Cubiex eSports.

I have been an amateur and pro-series gamer in Counter-Strike since 1999 and played for many years on a competitive level, until I finally started my career in ultra high net worth private banking, working for several banks such as Santander Private Banking & Private Bank Schilling where I worked alongside some of the top 20 wealthiest German families.

Since the very beginning of my own eSports career in 1999 I have experienced issues such as social connectivity and incentivization for the “average gamer” at home.

Therefore I had this idea of creating an all-in-one community for gamers for many years in my mind, until we finally started to execute on it in late 2017.

Cubiex was built from gamers for gamers and for me its about giving something back to the community, that made me enjoy eSports and gaming for so many years.

And well finally with our product release planned this year we are very close to the finish line.

WC

Pierre, what’s your favourite game of all time and the current games you’re playing?

PC

Counter-Strike — Especially Jump and Funmaps, when I am not playing competitively. I like to play and jump around in game and sometimes just do funny stuff in game 😃

WC

So are you a terrorist or a counter terrorist?

PC

I’d say I am a Counter-Terrorist, like to fight for justice and the right things. A typical sign of Aquarius I guess.

WC

Bomb defused.

PC

Affirmative.

WC

I read earlier you played pro Counter-Strike, was there a particular team or

franchise you played for?

PC

GAMEFACE — NGP Gaming.

WC

Can you also give us a brief elevator pitch on Cubiex and what you’re trying to achieve with the project?

PC

Cubiex goal on a high level is to bring more social connectivity and incentivization to the average gamer at home, since chances of becoming a professional and playing on a high level with a fixed salary are most likely very low for the average person.

Just like in CS you got like 50m gamers, but only a few teams really generating income with their passion. Cubiex mission is to change that and bring incentivization to the general public.

WC

Can you give us a bit of background on who’s building the business and tech?

PC

Currently we are 9 Core-Team members in our team including myself.

Our Core-Management team exists out of:

CTO: Marc Schroetel: CEO of Sanid GmbH, a Frankfurt based Software Company, leading company behind the development of Cubiex alongside our in house MVP Team.

Head of Communication: Tano Lopez: CEO Fleed International, Google Ambassador: Tano has been a pioneer in creating a social network for college students from around the world, enabling them to participate in exchange programs. Alongside his work with many universities around the world, Tano provides a strong network of our target generation and know-how in how to plan go-to-market strategies for such platforms. Besides that Tano handles our outside communication, marketing & PR. Tano is a double major with Bachelors in communications and marketing.

Head of Design: Axel Bergvist: Axel is a professional designer based in Sweden with years of experience in the esports and gaming industry. He has worked for major gaming related websites and is considered as one of the best in his area.

Head of eSports: Ruben Gutierrez: Ruben was the CEO of The Gamer Mundodeportivo — one of the largest Spanish online eSports news portals. With more than 40 million total visits per month mundodeportivo is #3 in the Spanish online market. Ruben has been a great support in terms of core eSports influencer outreach and widening our network with partners from our verticals.

WC

How many of your team are active full time members?

PC

As of today 6 Members are full time while 3 people are part time until our product release. Besides that we work with Sanid GmbH and Marc Schroetel and their developer base. After product launch we plan to expand our team and open offices in several gaming epicenters around the world, especially in Asia.

WC

Who are your advisors?

PC

Michael Kim: Michael has more than 18 years of work experience multinational in game and IT companies like EA, Microsoft, Blizzard, Wargaming and Havok. Advisor of The Abyss, Playkey.

Tugay Keskin: EX Pro-Series Player for Snogard Dragons and internationally well recognized mousesports clan. Pro-Series Player and Team-Captain for Space Soldiers, Top 20 CSGO Teams World wide.

Berkant Can: Berkant Cen is a famous eSports influencer from Turkey with an combined outreach of more then 500k Gamers. He and unlost TV hold the exclusive streaming rights for the Turkish Blast Pro Series

John Paul Thorbjornsen: Technology enthusiast, aeronautical engineering, former Air Force pilot, early Bitcoin adopter, Ethereum ambassador. Founder of CanYa Coin and Loki.

Kyle Baron: Kyle is the Managing Partner of BCW Group, a strategy and management consulting firm in the DLT space focused on creating a frictionless digital payments ecosystem.

THE CUBIEX PLATFORM

WC

With any social platform, there’s an element of “critical mass”, i.e. people will join up once other people they know are on there.

How are you intending to seed the platform with users initially?

PC

Cubiex is backed up by several strong eSports and gaming influencers, such as ThetaBetaplays, virreCSGO and many more have already signed up for Cubiex and will be announced over the coming months. With these influencers we plan a dedicated serious of videos, giveaways, i.e. digital marketing strategies to reach a combined follower base of more then 5m+ initially.

WC

When is your product launch and do you have a MVP?

PC

Our product will be launched in Q3 2019 and yes we do have a MVP.

You can take a sneak peak of our MVP in our teaser video —

I think this one give a good taste of what our upcoming desktop platform for gamers will look like and how it works 😊

WC

What components of the platform are currently working on Private testnet?

PC

All components of our MVP 2.0 are already working, the full social media aspect, the livestreaming part.

Currently we are working on the final revisions of your CryptoBattleChallenger, although this feature will only be launched at a bit later stage, since it firstly requires a solid userbase, before P2P matchmaking on similar skill levels really makes sense.

WC

Just to confirm, Cubiex will be both a desktop and mobile application?

PC

Yes, however the desktop application will have other features then the mobile app.

WC

Will the mobile app just be chat? Like Steam chat?

PC

No — it will have Livestreaming and the full social functionality as well as Cubiex.Market features.

WC

What games will be on Cubiex?

PC

Generally for the livestreaming part we support all games.

When it comes to the CryptoBattleChallenger and our first planned Tier 1 Tournament after product launch we will start with Counter-Strike Global Offensive, but also having our focus on Dota2, LoL, Fortnite, PUBG in the mid-term.

WC

What is CryptoBattleChallenger?

PC

It’s a Matchmaking software that allows you to place tokens against another gamer and then joining together with him on a dedicated server and fighting over the prize pool. There are instant random challenges that you can choose, or you can choose to send challenges to other gamers and wait for their acceptance.

WC

Damn that’s pretty cool. I assume this can be done in clan wars not just 1 v 1?

PC

For CSGO we are planning to release a 1 on 1 and 5 on 5 version — so yes team matches/clanwars over tokens are possible as well. 😊

WC

How hard is it to add a game to matchmaking?

PC

It depends on the game itself, the game publisher. For CSGO there are third party services, server hosters, but also tournament licenses that were through the open API of steam.

WC

What happens in a disputed match result or something similar?

(Dropouts, connections issues all the usual stuff)

PC

If a match is aborted (cancelled) by any of both participants on purpose there is a certain re-connection time that allows you to fix issues such as internet connection.

If you fail to reconnect in time, you have lost the match and your funds will go to the opponent, so of course its important to have a stable and good internet connection. 😊

WC

P2P Matchmaking, does this mean betting?

PC

NO! We do not encourage gambling or betting — it is the most unethical thing to teach young gamers and can turn into an addictive behaviour.

What we say is placing tokens and then you play YOURSELF with your skill and fight for the prize pool. Our mission is to encourage every gamer to use his talent to start earning an income for himself, rather then trying for 10 years to become a professional out of 50.000.000 gamers. Those chances are almost like winning in the lottery.

WC

Let’s talk about the marketplace. In-game items are obviously all the rage, but a lot of blockchain companies who are working on these are using NFT’s.

Are in-game items on Cubiex NFTs?

PC

No — virtual in game items are items published by the respective game developers and traded on third party market places. There is a variety of other reasons why we are using blockchain technology.

WC

Will it be possible to buy and sell skins and the like on the platform?

PC

Yes — trading virtual in game items is fine.

WC

Does the Cubiex marketplace have fees?

PC

No — it will be free of transactional commission!

WC

Can any user sell game items on the marketplace?

PC

Yes! Virtual in game items trading on a P2P Basis with a secure middle man as of Cubiex.

WC

Can you give us a little more details on the Premium accounts that you’ll be selling and your overall revenue model?

PC

Premium accounts enable gamers to watch livestreams ad free, participate in unlimited crypto battle challenger matches as well as free transactional commissions. They unlock for example additional services such as smilies, GIFs within the livechat of the livestream.

Our revenue stream will exist out of 4 pipelines —

Transactional Commissions Premium Accounts Ad Revenue Sponsorship's

WC

Ad revenue is an interesting one, what’s the plan there?

Something like Facebook advertising for gamers?

PC

We work with external digital marketing agencies that run ads for example through our livestreams or through our website in form of banners. What we do NOT like is that facebook for example is selling data. If you had the time to read our Whitepaper Cubiex business model is completely independent from selling personal user data, as we feel that the trend goes more towards self governance and your own private / data control, rather then through third party platforms that you use.

There will be a more competitive revenue split between partner streamers and Cubiex when it comes to ad revenue, that’s how much I can reveal 😊

WC

Speaking of data and Facebook, and being European, are you GDPR compliant?

PC

Yes. Cubiex is a German based and registered company that is acting according to the law and the latest GDPR updates from 2018.

WC

You mentioned Cubiex is like SteemIt, does this mean I can earn crypto for creating posts?

PC

That is correct. If you start publishing articles on your personal profile and the community likes those articles, i.e. upvotes them, you will receive Cubiex Power as a little incentive to start your journey within our ecosystem and you can use all different services.

WC

What other ways can you earn crypto on Cubiex?

PC

Cubiex does have a variety of services of how gamers can monetize their gaming experiences. In general Cubiex offers 4 options on how to monetize your gaming experience:

Content creation rewards (Writing articles on your personal profile)

Donations to Livestreamers

CryptoBattleChallenger

(P2P Matchmaking: You place $10 USD in tokens, I place $10 USD in tokens and then we play against each other for the prize pool of $20 USD).

(P2P Matchmaking: You place $10 USD in tokens, I place $10 USD in tokens and then we play against each other for the prize pool of $20 USD). Virtual in game items trading

WC

Users have to KYC to participate in the content creation process don’t they?

PC

That is correct. Yes — platforms like SteemIt have seen limited growth unfortunately for certain reasons, such as bots exploiting the platform with automatic upvotes and artificial “pumps”.

Obviously that is not the goal of Cubiex, since by the end of the day rewards in the long run are financed by the community itself through transactional commissions and premium accounts in regards to the other services we offer.

We want to protect our community from such activities and therefore prefer having a trusted environment, especially on the matchmaking part.

WC

Lots of gamers are very young, will you need to be 18 to KYC?

PC

No — the ID verification process can be started on a younger age as well. There are several trusted levels that we will implement from Trusted 1–4 that allow you to earn to a certain degree. Generally it is up to parents first of all to decide if they let their kids play certain games that do have age restrictions before we step in the next step.

THE CUBIEX BLOCKCHAIN & TOKEN

WC

So, why blockchain?

PC

The Cubiex platform will be empowered by blockchain technology and a blockchain based token. Currently we planned to build on Ethereum, but there might be a change in the future. Generally we designed a dual token structure with a parallel fiat on-ramp. Happy to share more details 😃

There are many reasons why we have decided to go with Blockchain technology. On a high level it is —

Security

Transactional speed

Trend

Target Audience

Financial Reasons.

Blockchain technology has proven to be a very secure way of storing value and transferring value within very short transaction times around the globe. It frees projects, startups from the boundaries of geographical limitations when it comes to launching your business in different countries throughout the world. Often you have national payment systems, national regulators, crossborder transactional fees, crossborder conversion fees, long waiting hours and many many more limiting factors. From an entrepreneurs perspective it does free projects from the traditional VC market, that for example in Germany is not very big, especially when you start telling them about virtual in game items trading ;-)

Last but not least gamers are most likely in the age range of 12–30 — an audience that has been used for many years to work with virtual in game currencies and already heard about crypto. If you think back about how long the transition from traditional cash to debit / credit card took, and then the transition from that to “online-banking” over to “smartphone” banking we are not that far away from mass adoption in crypto. It might still take a few years, but at Cubiex we believe that cryptocurrencies will be the future, in the one form or the other. They are unstoppable and the young generation, such as gamers, are the first ones to adopt them for real world use cases, such as on our platform.

WC

What part of your platform is actually based on ETH?

PC

Lets go a bit more into technical details:

Cubiex ERC20 tokens are utility tokens that grant users access to the Cubiex Power loyalty Points program. While deposits and withdraws are handled on-chain, within our ecosystem all transactions happen off-chain to solve issues such as scalability as well as ecosystem strengths.

Content Creation rewards for example are paid out in Cubiex Power with a certain vesting period, similar to the SteemIt concept, but with a more defined algorithm, before they can be reconverted into Cubiex ERC20 Tokens.

WC

Are Cubiex ERC20 tokens and Cubiex Power 1:1?

PC

Yes — You can only receive Cubiex Power if you deposit Cubiex ERC20.

WC

Is this a transparent process via a smart contact?

PC

On the Ethereum Blockchain every transaction is visible for the public.

WC

Will items on the Cubiex marketplace always be traded by the native Cubiex token?

PC

Indirectly yes — you have to deposit Cubiex ERC20 Tokens to actually receive Cubiex Power to trade items. So the use cases are the same.

WC

Do you have a fiat on ramp to be able to buy tokens on the platform?

PC

Yes. In order to make the transition from traditional fiat usage to crypto more smooth and the platform easy to use for our user base we have a fiat on ramp as well.

WC

How will these tokens be purchased on the backend?

PC

If User A cashes in 20 US $ with Fiat we will use the public API of our listing exchange and purchase tokens in real time for our user.

WC

So you’re always buying tokens directly off an exchange, not from a token reserve of your own?

PC

That is correct. Most of our tokens are locked anyway. Team does have a 2 year lockup period, foundation 3 years. The goal to create a stable and healthy ecosystem while at the same time attracting wide user base is through creating a smooth experience.

If User A had to go to

a) a fiat exchange to get ETH then

B) to an Exchange to get Cubiex and then to Cubiex to deposit Cubiex ERC20

he would go crazy, and that’s been the main factor while mass adoption (next to poor products) has not yet happened.

Easing that procedure to a maximum degree is the secret recipe.

WC

How does the peg work on real world dollar value, CBIX and POWER?

PC

Peg is between US $ if Fiat cash ins and US $ of CBIX in real time.

That is valid for cash in — cash out.

WC

Are you not afraid about the token ratio between max supply and users?

(Gaming tokens usually have a billion supply created for large potential users).

PC

No — having a very low token supply of 150m tokens with an increasing user base demanding tokens for our services will strengthen our ecosystem. On top of that we will commercial buybacks and burns of around 10–15 % of our yearly profits.

The actual token supply does play a big role in terms of market psychology, token economics, stability of your ecosystem. We do not support these large diluted market caps and token supplies. With my background as a ultra high net worth private banker I can say that we are pretty confident in our math :P

WC

Will there be any discounts for using tokens on Cubiex?

PC

If you stake tokens you will receive discounts on premium memberships, yes.

WC

How does staking work on Cubiex?

Is it just for discounts or is there something more to it?

PC

Discounts as of now. Since you deposit anyway to use our services all day long it actually is some kind of staking, because you need to deposit in order to receive Cubiex Power.

WC

Being ETH based, do you see any issue with scaling once you get a large user base?

PC

Yes we do see these issues and therefore we had been in talks with several DLT companies such as Hashgraph and others for potential migrations down the line, maybe even earlier with other popular and fast blockchains.

WC

Any that are actually on the market at the moment?

As far as I’m aware Hashgraph is still awhile off?

PC

We spoke to Hashgraph already 6 months ago and these were our concerns at that time as well, since they only had access to the testnet, therefore we denied a partnership at that point, but are open minded for the future.

Potentially we might even build our own mainnet, so right now we are still very flexible in terms of plans and are watching the space and how its evolving, especially on the infrastructure side.

COMPETITORS

WC

Does Cubiex have any competitors?

PC

Yes — there are competitors in the traditional and crypto space, but I would say none of them that really provides an all-in-one community like Cubiex does.

Besides that I don’t like the term competitors TBH as interoperability and partnerships are very important to use.

We believe only with other strong partners from our industry you can provide value for the community in the long run. Everybody who is contributing to encourage eSports and gaming to us is a potential partner, not a competitor.

WC

Is Steam a competitor to Cubiex?

PC

I wouldn't necessarily call steam a competitor. However they are the largest game distributor in the world and have been around for 20+ years. That fact can’t be disregarded.

It will be interesting to see how much gamers will prefer having a platform like Cubiex that actually benefits them compared to other platforms, that most likely don’t offer any of our incentivized services.

IEO & TOKEN SUPPLY

WC

Where will you be holding your IEO?

PC

I can’t reveal yet, I hope for your understanding. 🙏🏻

WC

What is the project hardcap and what will the circulating supply be?

PC

I may refer you to page 29 of our Whitepaper for all exact details.

Seed: $290 000 USD

Private Sale: $2m USD

IEO: $500 000 USD

Total: $2.79m USD

Initial Circulating supply: around 10 % (pretty low)

WC

Are your current token metrics structured for an IEO model token sale?

PC

Yep — its one of the best in the space, since we actually have the HIGHEST IEO price and we will not disappoint our private sale contributors who got in BELOW IEO price. A move a lot of projects have recently done and made their contributors angry.

WC

How much did you raise in seed and private?

PC

We raised back in August 2018 $290 000 USD in our seed round. That made us navigate safely through the bear market.

As of now our private sale is over pledged and we have placed around $920 000 USD in total.

WC

How long is your runway if you raise all the funds you plan to?

PC

We plan to be profitable from day 1 of our product launch. We will be covered for the next 3 years before we potentially enter a Series-A.

WC

Do you have any figures on your current burn rate and burn rate post raise?

PC

Yes — but that is normally sensitive internal company information that typically belongs to equity shareholders. I will make an exception: Burn rate is under 15k currently. 😉

Our balances sheets of our operating company are published on a yearly basis in the German commercial register. Its free and open for everyone to see once the yearly publish dates arrive. We are not in the Cayman Islands or somewhere else where you don’t have access ^^

What I can say is that we are currently working very tightly and have a very low cash burn rate, as most staff and Co-Founders work completely for free, as we feel we have a high responsibility towards our contributors NOT to burn through any unnecessary expenses. Just hard work and dedication.

Hard work, dedication, that’s what leads you to the goal, not all the money in the world, that’s why we are actually having a pretty low hardcap compared to other projects that collected like 50m in 2018 and now are broke…

WC

Impressive, I think that’s one of the lowest burn rates I’ve seen.

PC

Thank you, we almost worked one year just for free to build our product before we even thought about doing a seed round. Obviously this made us miss the good times in early 2018 but we believe in having substance rather then doing an ICO or IEO with just a website and a 1 year away product like many others.

Real world demand after TGE is our keyword.

WC

What are the vesting periods on team and advisor tokens?

PC

Team: Full 2 year lockup — no cash out possible.

Advisors: 6 months full lockup, then 1/6th per month over 6 months.

WC

Do you have legal advice you are a utility token?

PC

We do have legal advice and we even applied our ICO ( If we would have done a public sale ) to our German regulator. Our tokens are utility tokens. Commercial buy back programs through our company are not defined as a security at all, since they are legally not correlated to the rights token holders have.

PARTNERSHIPS, ADOPTION & ROADMAP

WC

What do you view as the potential barriers to the success of the project?

PC

The key to every new product is marketing. You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows, then you wont have users. The key will be to push very strong on the marketing side through influencer marketing, hosting online and offline tournaments as well as in more partnerships with cross synergies, shared traffic.

WC

Will you give away tokens to people to join the platform?

PC

These type of incentives typically are not very beneficial. What we do instead is giving away virtual ingame items to protect the token 😉

CSGO Skins to start with.

WC

Are there any particular offline tournaments you’d be looking to partner with early on?

PC

We want to most likely host our own offline tournaments. 😊

WC

Is there a big local scene around where you guys are based?

PC

Yes — Germany is the home of the ESL — the biggest eSports league in the world with very strong local tournaments once a year. Ive been a player at the ESL since 2004 myself and am very well connected within the networks.

WC

Will you have game pros at your tournaments?

PC

Yes — we will invite all top tier 1 pro-series teams for a first online tournament and will livestream that throughout the globe.

WC

Can you give us an example of what future gaming partnerships will be like for Cubiex?

PC

This is branded video we did with Theta a few weeks back —

Also with Kayla from Bravado Gaming (Female Pro-Series Player from South Africa) who beat him up pretty well in a 1 on 1 match reaching 100K views in a matter of days.

WC

Will you have any public beta or just go straight into a full public launch?

PC

We will go into a full public launch in around 12 weeks from now.

Since Cubiex has been mainly built from gamers for gamers we had several strong market surveys with our pro-series and amateur networks and are very confident about the product market fit.

WC

Yes — We might release some more exciting teasers and demos 😊

CLOSING THOUGHTS

WC

Where do you see the eSports industry in 10 years time?

PC

It’s going to grow even beyond our expectations. In China eSports is already an official profession.

There will be universities, schools promoting eSports as an official sports, hosting their own tournaments.

WC

Awesome, well we’ve enjoyed having you here today Pierre, thank you!

PC

Thank you so much for the opportunity to present Cubiex to the well known Wolf Crypto Community! I encourage every single one of you if you are a gamer, come and check our platform out, we will be soon live! 🙏🏻😃😎👍

Cubiex Resources

Website: https://cubiex.com

Telegram: https://twitter.com/CubiexEsports

Medium: https://medium.com/@CubiexeSports

Whitepaper: https://cubiex.com/download/Whitepaper_Cubiex_16-06-2019-V1-7.pdf

Wolf Crypto Resources

Public Group: https://t.me/WolfCryptoPub

News Channel: https://t.me/WolfCryptoAnnounce

Twitter: https://twitter.com/WolfCryptoGroup