An attempt at bridging Crypto and Dota 2

Jake “SirActionSlacks” Kanner recently submitted a proposal on the Nouns DAO about hosting a new Dota 2 event. Dubbed the NOUNSVITATIONAL, the proposal features collaborators WePlay Esports and Kyle “melonzz” Freedman.

THE NOUNSVITATIONAL

The proposal came as simple post on the Nouns discourse, where Slacks outlined his initial idea.

The NOUNSVITATIONAL will span five days, inviting ten top teams across the world to play in the first LAN tournament since the International 11 (TI11). The proposal is asking for a generous 799 ETH budget or $958K at the time of this publishing. It’s spread across various accounts to run the NOUNSVITATIONAL, such as staffing, venue, broadcast teams, accommodation for teams, and of course the prize pool itself. Even so, the prize pool is only 166 ETH or $200K, which is a testament to how much funding goes into hosting a full-fledged LAN tournament.

The suggested event timeline is from Feb 14-18, but considering this is merely a proposal, best not to mark the dates yet.

How does Noun DAO work?

Getting approximately $1M in funding is a difficult feat without WePlay as sponsor. This brings us to the actual sponsors of the NOUNSVITATIONAL, the Noun DAO itself. The Noun DAO is a treasury run by its stakeholders, who are users with a ‘noun’ NFT. These NFT owners will vote on whether $1M should be allocated from their treasury worth 28550 ETH or $34M.

Should Nouns DAO host a million-dollar Dota 2 tournament?

The crypto industry has contributed much to get some presence in esports. For instance, Nouns DAO itself, has their own Dota 2 division, Nouns Esports. Then, there’s also FTX, which was formerly sponsor of TeamSoloMid’s Dota 2 division too.

Unfortunately, since FTX’s fiasco, there has been negative sentiment on crypto, especially when it comes to investing and money. Securing a million dollars in funding from a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which is essentially a council of folks who own the non-fungible ‘nouns’, is a tough pill to swallow.

Considering the large funding required to host a tournament, Nouns still have good reasons to do so. Notably, attracting and educating esports audience about crypto, specifically for Noun DAO, will be beneficial.

Esports tournaments are expensive to host, which these days, only betting sponsors could afford it. When PGL hosted TI11 with betting sponsors and advertisements, it received massive backlash from the Dota 2 community. Getting NFTs and the crypto industry involved instead may have a similar effect. At least with WePlay’s state-of-the-art AR tech, we have high hopes for the NOUNSVITATIONAL’s phenomenal production value.

The live Nouns DAO Discourse is open to questions directly to the proposers.