Dreaming of your kid becoming the next Lionel Messi or helping young athletes shine on their journey to stardom? Atleta Network is here to make it happen—and even turn your support into a rewarding investment! Andrei Nalichayeu, DevRel at Atleta Network, recently unveiled exciting innovations behind this groundbreaking platform in an AMA session on LetsExchange Spaces. Here are the key highlights you don’t want to miss!
John from LetsExchange: Andrei, welcome to the space. What do you think about the market today?
Andrei: Hello! I think it's a funny time when you can't waste time waiting. You have to do something, maybe some trades, but better build something. I think the next few months will be a great time to launch your own project. Maybe your dream was to develop a project in the last few years and you're just waiting for the perfect time to launch it. So, I think that, for devs, the next half of the year will be the best time in this bull market.
John from LetsExchange: Can you share a bit about Atleta history and how long it took for the project to be in the place it is now, pre-token generation?
Andrei: Okay, yeah. I just want to share my idea about the future of crypto in the context of Atleta Network. I truly believe that, in the next few years, we will see much more connection between the real world and blockchain. In the near future, institutions will try to use blockchain as a technology to improve some of their internal business processes. It also means blockchain will be used as we normally use email now. So, in the near future, blockchain will have more and more use cases. And Atleta is here to provide one of those use cases.
Our idea and aim is to open an investment market for the sports industry to let anyone invest in the next Messi (Lionel Messi, a world-famous footballer). For example, imagine that you live somewhere in Latin America and you're a big fan of football. And you want your young son to join a club. But you don't have enough money to even buy some sports stuff. So, we are here to create an investment market for individuals. Because if you're a big player and represent some big companies, you definitely can support some sports schools directly. You can just provide them some grants or do stuff like this. But if you're an individual and you want to support them somehow, you definitely want to get some profit out of it. So, we create this market, an investment market for individuals. That’s the biggest thing.
John from LetsExchange: It's interesting. It is like investing in some content creators; you watch their first YouTube reel and you feel like ‘Okay, this guy is going to be popular.’ So, you can invest in those projects. I think you do the same.
Andrei: The same stuff, but for sports. We try to build upon this idea, and we’ve tried our best for more than a year now. We have a pretty big dev team, more than 60 specialists. Not all of them are dev. Some of them are in the marketing team and others in the business development team, but it is a pretty big tech team. And because of it, we decided to build our Atleta network as an answer, which provides the infrastructure for this idea. We can call it ‘technization.’ Yeah. So, we provide the infrastructure for this technization of some agreement for the players and the young child who wants to become the next Messi.
John from LetsExchange: So, Andrei, can you talk a bit about tokenomics of the Atleta coin for people who might be interested?
Andrei: I think we should start from the point that we created our own blockchain. I'm sure all of you are familiar with the Polkadot concept. So, we decided to create our own Polkadot. We created our own relay chain and, sooner or later, we will add a few more parachains for more business cases. We built our own chain on Substrate and made it fully EVM compatible. It means that any Solidity smart contracts may run on our chain. So, our idea is to become an infrastructure provider for any of the crypto projects related to sports, first. And second, and maybe even more important, it is the part about technizations that I described before.
So, $ATLA will be our native cryptocurrency. Users will pay gas fees in the ATLA token. And maybe you know how the Nominated Proof-of-Stake concept works. It's similar to Polkadot. That's the first use case for our token. Also, on our chain, there will be some classical DeFi projects like lending protocols, DEX protocols, and even different smart contracts. We expect that from the very beginning of our chain, all these projects will be available for the end user. Users will be able to stake their ATLA tokens with the nominated approach. A user can decide ‘OK, I trust this guy,’ then take their ATLA tokens to participate in the consensus algorithm and get additional profit. And the ATLA token might also be used in the normal DeFi.
John from LetsExchange: What's your surprise interaction with your community members that there's no someone you expect in the community or something?
Andrei: It's a cool question that goes back to the major topic. Why do we need our own blockchain and why did we decide to do it in such a complex way? We did not want to onboard Web3 initially. I mean, a lot of Web3 communities will be on our chain. But we also expect that the typical football fans will join us. It means that we must fully remove the technical barrier, because I am not sure regular football fans know how to work with private and public keys. And for this, we will implement a lot of additional stuff like account abstraction. If you want to build something for the sports industry in the context of cryptocurrency, you will face the problem of onboarding typical football fans who don't know what blockchain is. We want to simplify the process for them.
John from LetsExchange: I think you just finished the onboarding of 250 Ambassadors. Can you share what qualities you are looking for?
Andrei: We assess all the applicants based on a key metric. It's definitely like engagement and a follower base. But after ambassadors are selected, we test our cooperation to align their contribution with the goals.
John from LetsExchange: Are there any plans for partnerships with the sporting community?
Andrei: From our side, we try to build a solution for individuals from the very beginning, someone like a young star, not for the famous clubs. We have a real integration with the sports industry first of all. We work with a blockchain in sports, and they have agreements with some football schools in Brazil. We will provide the infrastructure to tokenize the agreement between a player and his school.
John from LetsExchange: Do you have audit certificates or are you working to audit your project to make sure it's reliable?
Andrei: Yeah, definitely. We have a lot of agreements with an auditing company. We must have an audit, but it's much more difficult to find auditors who can check your network rather than just the Solidity smart contract. But yes, we will show our auditing report on our website.
John from LetsExchange: You had a testnet, right? So, can you talk about that?
Andrei: The testnet is live! We check everything before the mainnet. So, we run our own protocols I mentioned before, like DEX and the lending protocol on the testnet. And we provide some tasks for the community: to check our network. We also have a grant program for devs, we let them build an application on the testnet, which will be next on the mainnet.