BLVKHVND, THE WORLD OVER
tldr
BLVKHVND BECOMES A MEME: ESPORTS FOR THE CULTURE, OWNED BY EVERYONE.
Description
BLVKHVND is a path-breaking esports DAO building a gaming culture where competition and community go hand in hand. → Zora Zine (2022)
BLVKHVND Building Esports for the Culture
PROLOGUE
In our initial prop, we applied for funding using the BuilderDAO Prop House: DAO Incubator. During that time, we launched BLVKHVND ($HVND) through BuilderDAO. While we did not win that prop, we were encouraged by other members of BuilderDAO to apply directly to the main treasury. In doing so, we transitioned from seeding our DAO's inception, to seeding its presence within the Nouns Builder infra as a conduit to push forth more competitive DAOs in our wake. In this prop, you'll learn about BLVKHVND's history, our work with Nouns, our future plans for the DAO, and our commitment to building infrastructure for web3 gaming.
BLVKHVND is creating an emerging ecosystem for onchain esports organizations. Our mission is to be the center of competition no matter where it lives. To do so, we represent the best esports talent by offering them web3-native tools that build them greater opportunity in equity, monetization, access, and promotion. We’ve proven ourselves on domestic and international stages, and we’re just getting started.
BLVKHVND Pokemon Unite World Champions
6 TEAMS. 2 REGIONS. GLOBAL IMPACT.
- 1X NA REGIONAL CHAMPIONS (Pokemon Unite)
- 9X TOP 3 PLACEMENTS IN EU (Halo Infinite)
- 4X SUMMER CHAMPIONS (Apex Legends + Rogue Company)
- 1X WORLD CHAMPIONS (Pokemon Unite)
BLVKHVND DAO Timeline
BLVKHVND x NOUNS
We've been really excited about the possibilities of the Nouns DAO model for esports. This led us to working with Nouns on Prop 91: an expansion for Nouns Esports which resulted in the first DAO v DAO world championship in esports history. In addition, BLVKHVND helped Nouns acquire a championship Pokemon Unite team and proliferated "Nounish" branding throughout events, jerseys, and creative content. Based on the success of our initial exploration of the Nouns ecosystem, we took the steps to evolve our organization as a "Nounish" DAO.
LAUNCHING BLVKHVND ONCHAIN
BLVKHVND has grown into a force within the esports competitive arena. Our application of Nouns Builder is tool and opportunity to bring BLVKHVND fully onchain. This move puts our brand into a permissionless environment where it has a chance to be owned and stewarded by everyone on the internet. So far, we've proliferated BLVKHVND through a steady mix of merch, editorials, social content, IRL sponsorships, and NFT drops. Our daily auctions allow us to onboard new and existing contributors as well as capture value from our meme and competitive success.
When we started, we went from an essay, to a crowdfunded DAO via Mirror in August of 2021. The unexpected but incredible gift of funding allowed us to experiment and explore the esports at its fullest–sponsoring 6 competitive teams in multiple regions, traveling around the world to gather research on IRL event programming and league development, sponsoring events and public goods initiatives, as well as incepting our vision for a connected, transparent, equitable esports industry. Our first year presented many challenges from player negotiations, delayed pay from event hosts, financial market failures–we were put through the ringer. And yet, to make history, bring home a World Title, and show the industry that web3 is viable in their world made this journey worth the trouble. And now, with those lessons, we are clear in what our next steps are.
The inclusion of BuilderDAO created an open pathway for fans and other enthusiasts of BLVKHVND to get involved in a much clearer and concise way than our initial approach. Funds from our auctions and this current prop aid in our efforts for signaling, bridge building, and brand networking to onboard new and emerging talent as well as cultivate an enriching environment for current pro players and org owners alike to help build BLVKHVND into the largest community owned esports org on the internet.
DAO ARTWORK
Additionally, this move helps us create onchain infrastructure for the esports ecosystem such as STADIUM -- The Web3 Gaming Protocol. STADIUM is the world's stage for open competition for any game. Combined with our partnership with PARAGONS DAO, STADIUM is poised to imbue players with sovereignty over their competitive and casual gaming data through a unique, composable, scaling identity protocol from our Player Card NFTs.
STADIUM Banner
ALLOCATION BREAKDOWN
We are asking for 30 ETH to route funding toward 3 key goals:
- Become the largest community owned esports org on the internet
- Create an equitable framework that new and existing orgs use to become profitable and self sustaining entities in a Nounish way
- Develop a superior gaming culture brand through merch, funding esports teams, and unique storytelling with content creators, broadcasts, and event programming through mints via the DAO
With the support of BuilderDAO, our proposal continues to point to DAOs deploying Nouns Builder contracts for their communities, support initiatives that expand upon the development of the Nouns Builder ecosystem, and evangelize Nouns Builder as a catalyst for BLVKHVND's growth and development as a DAO. We’ve been very excited to see props from our friends at Forefront, Purple, and Public Assembly, make great use of BUILDER funds and/or tools that integrate BUILDER into their communities.
To ensure chain of custody, any prop we propose directly to $BUILDER or BuilderDAO Prop House will always route to our DAO treasury thehvnddao.eth (we assigned this ens to the nouns smart contract).
Based on our current support of a competitive team (Apex Legends), and the direction of our community, if our proposal passes, here are some of the initial ideas we seek to propose to our community:
- Compensate our creative team for the DAO artwork
- Sponsor Competitive Teams in games like Apex Legends / Parallel / Halo Infinite
- Launch BLVKHVND Prop House to fund intra-community led projects
- Proliferate the #heavyistheHVND meme
Compensate our creative team for the DAO artwork
The DAO Artwork compensation will be delivered to sirsu.eth, co-founder dillonatm.eth, collaborator darthjarjar.eth, as well as a small gift to the Shields project for implementing their CC0 elements into our work.
Launch Competitive Teams in games like Apex Legends / Parallel / Halo Infinite
Our current Apex Team is on track to qualify and compete in Split 2 of Pro League. Upon qualification of the Pro League, those players will represent BLVKHVND during the second half of the pro season. Similarly, our former Halo EU team wants to represent BLVKHVND to kick off the first major of the Halo Championship Series (year 2). Through governance, we can encourage other prospects to directly pitch to the DAO for support rather than the DAO scouting for talent.
We are investigating compensation models that leverage both proposal/onchain governance, and also faucet funding mechanisms that can be dynamically applied to proposals that require a longer time horizon to deem either successful or unsuccessful. This enables us to fine tune the fidelity of the DAO’s support of competitive teams with the flexibility to adjust a given proposal’s allocation based on performance and other factors.
Launch BLVKHVND Prop House
We applied to create a Prop House for BLVKHVND to issue grants toward unique projects birthed out of the BLVKHVND community, provide funding mechanisms to support and onboard esport talent to compete, and a means for anyone to contribute to BLVKHVND and our growing ecosystem (STADIUM Protocol & Broadcast Media).
An initiative we are currently investigating:
- BLVKHVND Terminal. We started this process last year with one of our core contributors druzy.eth to build a UI of BLVKHVND’s onchain activities. Based on the work Public Assembly has also done with Nouns Builder, there’s potentia to finalize the Terminal work that we’ve worked on and combine it with the work the Public Assembly team have set up for nounish DAOs and push an open repo for other DAO’s to utilize.
Proliferate the #heavyistheHVND meme
We’ve seen the examples many nounish communities have shown as it relates to memeification, culture signaling, and active participation through open mints and most recently, the DAO itself creating, minting, and selling their artifacts to the community and audiences abroad. While the current esports landscape prevents most organizations from minting incredible gameplay moments, there’s so much more to gaming culture that can be explored.
Here’s a few ways our community has been thinking about this:
- Deploying merch and collaborating with other DAOs to building bridges between communities with meaningful gear
- Viral marketing via beverages (Red Bull but onchain)
- New music to complement our “Heavy is the HVND” theme song
ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS
Partners:
- Zora is a founding partner. They’ve worked with us since our inception to help us achieve our goals using Zora’s ecosystem: drops, ZDK, NounsBuilder.
- ParagonsDAO is a founding partner to help us build STADIUM and an accompanying broadcast network to create content around web3 competitions in esports and other sports.
Memeification:
- BLVKHVND WORLD CHAMPIONS NFT
- BLVKHVND Editorial
- HEAVY HVNDED Merch Drop
- HEAVY IS THE HVND Theme
- HVND Gameplay
Articles:
- Camaraderie of Competition: How BLVKHVND Saw the We in Esports
- Building the future of Web3 Esports with BLVKHVND
- What Does Crypto Bring to Games?
- Pokemon Unite World Champions BLVKHVND On Going Undefeated At The WCS