Top Podcasts
Eran Elhanani & Constantin Kogan Of BullPerks & GamesPad, Plus: VESA With Utility Stacked NFT Art Cars, And More…
Eran Elhanani and Constantin Kogan are the co-founders of BullPerks and GamesPad—the world’s first holistic gaming, NFT, and metaverse ecosystem. In this episode, they share with us their big vision of creating a vertically-integrated gaming ecosystem. With different studio partnerships and decentralized deal flow, Eran and Constantin have an ambitious and creative project in their hands. They also share how they go the extra mile to care for their employees worldwide. BullPerks and GamesPad are surely to watch for! What is more, VESA joins the conversation and shares his latest work in Dubai with NFT Cars as well as Egyptian Pyramids and more!
Listen to the podcast here
Eran Elhanani & Constantin Kogan Of BullPerks & GamesPad, Plus: VESA With Utility Stacked NFT Art Cars, And More…
This is Eran Elhanani and Constantin Kogan, the Cofounders of BullPerks and GamesPad, the world’s first holistic gaming, NFT, and metaverse ecosystem that incubates the most impactful crypto gaming projects. We are on Edge of NFT, the show that brings the most impactful NFT projects to you. Stay tuned.
Stay tuned for this episode and find out about GamesPad’s silent partner and K9 friend, Caesar, plus how the GamesPad team goes the extra mile to care for employees in fifteen different countries like their family, and how VESA’s incredible artwork is shining light throughout the world, plus hamsters, Egyptian pyramids, and stellar giveaways. All this and more on this episode. Don’t forget, we put together a gathering at NFT LA just a few months back that brought out thousands of the world’s most innovative doers in the NFT space. Head to NFTLA.live to get tickets to our bigger, better, bolder, but also just as an intimate and impactful event happening in Los Angeles from March 20th to 23rd, 2023. See you there.
This episode features Eran Elhanani and Constantin Kogan, the Cofounders of BullPerks and GamesPad, the ultimate gaming, NFT and metaverse ecosystem. Eran is one of the Cofounders of BullPerks and GamesPad. He is also the Founder of Part One Capital, a crypto investment firm, and an advisor on multiple crypto projects. He’s a serial entrepreneur, seasoned Angel investor, speaker, and previous venture partner in a boutique VC. He holds a BSc in Medicine, Computer Science, and Math.
Constantin is the second Cofounder of BullPerks and GamesPad. He’s also a partner at BitBull Capital, Founder of Adwivo, as well as a former Managing Director at Wave Financial. He is an entrepreneur, meta-connector, influencer, blockchain technology enthusiast, and digital asset investor. A top thought leader in hedge funds, IT startups, and venture capital, Cogan holds a PhD in Sociology and an MEd.
GamesPad is a holistic gaming NFT and metaverse ecosystem. It is a one-stop shop for everything GameFi, metaverse, and NFT that brings together a gaming incubator, game-specific multi-chain launchpad, decentralized venture capital, NFT aggregator and marketplace, plus has in-house gaming, production studios, and much more. GamesPad is the culmination of years of expertise, research, and passion of the professional team committed to propelling blockchain gaming to the mainstream. Constantin and Eran, welcome to the show. It’s great to have you here.
Thank you for having us.
Thank you. We’re glad to be here.
We had the pleasure to participate in some of your media programs affiliated with your projects too. We appreciated the invite and we had a lot of fun. You’re running a professional operation in that respect. It was a pleasure to participate.
Likewise. You also participated in the research paper that we released regarding the metaverse.
It’s a very cool project.
Let’s dive into it. Since you mentioned it, what’s going on with that research paper? How did people respond?
It caught up a lot of publications and press. People respond differently. Some of them are exciting because it’s targeting people who are looking at the metaverse and NFTs for the first time. Others are pretty negative because of what’s happening with the secondary market. They’re saying, “It’s not even worth talking about.” There’s not enough interest, but it’s good. They have an opinion. We respect all types of opinions about something.
Creating an ecosystem as you have done here is being inclusive of all types of feedback. You have a big vision with this vertically-integrated gaming ecosystem with all these different studio partnerships and decentralized deal flow. It’s ambitious and creative. Can you tell us how this project came to be?
The first project was BullPerks. Constantin and I met through a mutual friend. We noticed that we had similar visions. We invested in some similar projects and hit it from the beginning. We wanted to help both retail people. Until then, there weren’t any options to invest through a platform that is trustworthy and public. You had pools that were anonymous people, and people that didn’t come from investment backgrounds. They were just taking fees from people. That was their own interest.
We decided, based on our investment background, that we know how to do due diligence projects. We will do it for the community, and then provide a platform that is trustworthy and public where they know who is behind it, as well as help young founders or founders that are coming from different backgrounds that don’t know anyone or anything in the crypto world.
We wanted to help them also with marketing, connections to exchanges, influencers, and how to build communities because it’s a different world. That’s how BullPerks started. In April 2021, we launched it. We worked on it a few months before, and then we launched a few projects in the gaming, metaverse, and NFT space. We noticed the trend for most, to be honest, which is why we started working on GamesPad, which is the gaming metaverse and NFT ecosystem. It has been great.
That date sounds very familiar, Eathan. We started this show at the very end of March 2021 around the same time.
The first episode went out at that point. It was a couple of months of generating ideas and putting things together, but everything wrapped together pretty quickly. We do have a guest dog on the show. What’s your dog’s name?
Caesar.
Is it Julius Caesar or some other Caesar?
He came with the name from the shelter but he behaves like Julius Caesar.
He’s got a lot to say. I resonate with what you’re talking about. You briefly mentioned the doxed versus undoxed thing that goes on here. That has always been something that has been uncomfortable for me. There’s something appealing about being anonymous but I’ve never felt comfortable with that. I always want to be like, “It’s me.” I want people to know who I am and what I’m doing and rest on my reputation as it were.
It makes me think of carnivals in various countries in Latin America, Europe, and so forth where you put in a costume. You get to be someone else and be anonymous. That’s great but those things are good for a day of the year but not necessarily a lifestyle. Let’s talk about BullPerks’ team. A crypto launchpad from our records here has reached 7,355% all-time average high returns on all the deals. It is pretty incredible what you have been able to put together. Tell us more about your team and how you’ve achieved what you have been able to.
I’ll first make a disclaimer. It was during the peak of the market, to be fair. We want to be very open and transparent. This is not a stable or constant thing like investment advice, but if you’re talking about an all-time high, we reached even more. I don’t want to brag, but it was about 9,000% or something like that, but it’s a subjective metric by itself. The average one was more important, which was around 4,400% during the peak of the market. Now, it fluctuates. Sometimes it’s positive.
I’ll be frank with you. In aggregates, the average return from all the projects is about 40% or 50%-plus, depending on how you calculate. It can be different because of market fluctuation. To make sure we’re on the same page, the way it’s calculated is from the ideal price, and then it calculates the difference between the current price of the token in aggregate from all the projects. You can imagine that it’s a dynamic figure by itself.
What is the aggregate now?
The average would be -34%. If you think about it from all the hundreds of launchpads, we are number 5 or 6 in the world out of the hundred, depending on the day. When people hear minus or even a small minus of 34%, they’re like, “This is a negative investment.” In reality, if you think about it, that makes you consider that there are projects that did extremely well that are still positive from the time you invest. There are projects that are probably nuts that did well. Maybe some of them are already bankrupt.
That’s also the reality of venture capital. I’m sure all the people who ever invested in early-stage startups understand that 70% to 80% of them are not going to succeed. That’s the nature of the game. If you’re not ready for this, you probably should not be investing in early-stage projects. Our job is to make sure we try to filter and pick the winners to the best knowledge and the best intention that we can.
Regardless of whatever numbers that we’re walking through, you’re talking to them. You’re someone that in any market is participating in the conversation and trying to lead the way. It reminds me of someone that we collaborated with. They’re someone from Sandbox. I checked their LinkedIn profile. It said, “Survivor of two crypto bear markets.” It’s a useful thing to point out because those folks that stick around in these times that we’re in now are the ones that are laying the foundation for the future, building probably the real outsized returns over the long run, and doing things that are creating meaningful value.
To put that into additional perspective, the overall market is down substantially more than that 30%-something. That’s an additional context that’s important to understand. You have outperformed the market as a whole. If you were attentive to your choices, you probably have had some nice wins along the way. Participating in the gaming economy for a financial return is not for the faint of heart.
It’s something that you should do with a percentage of your portfolio though this is not investment advice. It’s just our thoughts on that side of things. The bottom line is you created a holistic ecosystem. That’s interesting to us. We’re all about co-creation and communities. What’s so special about Web3 is how you integrate gaming, NFTs, and the metaverse altogether. You’ve taken a fairly unique approach. We would love for you to elaborate on that a little bit for our audience.
We have a lot of pieces, whether it’s the decentralized VC and the launchpad or whether it’s the gaming studios, NFT marketplace, and metaverse. It sounds like there are a lot of things but at the end of the day, they all fit together like a puzzle. For example, based on the deal flow that we get as a VC and as the launchpad, we know better than most what are exactly the trends in the market, what’s missing, and what project strengths or weaknesses.
We see opportunities for the acquisition of projects or studios, which is what we did. We acquired three studios to build it, and then we absorbed them and building them in-house. That also brings us to strengths with metaverse or the NFT marketplace because we have all those other portfolio companies that we invested in or launched. We can link them together and bring their collections, for example, to the marketplace and their assets to the metaverse. We can collaborate with them. At the end of the day, it might sound like a lot of different things but they all seem to work together.
To add to this as you asked before, Eathan, to talk a little bit about our team, we now have more than 110 people in 15 countries. Most of them are decentralized. We have only the studios that we acquired. They have offices because that was there before, but the core team, which has 60-plus people, is completely decentralized, which we’re also proud of. It was not easy. You’re talking about different time zones, cultures, and mentalities, but that’s the fun part. That’s the nature of crypto. People come together and have the same vision and the same mission.
BullPerks: You’re talking about different time zones, cultures, and mentalities, but that’s the fun part. That’s the nature of crypto. People come together and have the same vision and the same mission.
It’s fun and beautiful. They try to interact. We build several communities with different languages. Another strength of ours besides English is we have very strong communities in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Turkish, Russian, and many other languages. We’re trying to help others to invite members and to even educate. Not all of the members of the communities are token holders. Maybe they invest. We produce a lot of educational content just like you guys. We probably manufactured 100-plus different basic videos on how to set up a wallet or how to put this chain.
We may get into doing this at some point. We’re such deep nerds that we only want to talk about the more advanced stuff, but it’s worth pointing out that that’s hard work. Even though it’s simple stuff, a lot of people need to learn and sit down, especially when you’re working on more advanced things, and put together a system to put that type of content together. There are rewards to doing it. It’s not easy to do. Kudos on doing that stuff. I want to shift the direction a little bit over to the launch of your NFT lottery on your NFT marketplace. What are the specifics of that lottery? How can people participate? Can our audience participate in that? How does that work?
The idea of the lottery is that any person can buy some tokens and make a bid between $5 to $10. That’s your bid. For the rewards, we offer NFTs that are worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. You make a bid of $5 to $10. The person who puts the bid that is the closest and first wins that NFT. We finished a lottery with Goblintown. The winner put in a bid of $5 to $10. You can win a Goblin that is worth probably $1,500 or more at this point.
Let me clarify what you mean. Is this like The Price is Right where there’s a number between $5 and $10?
Yes. You don’t know what the price is. It’s set in a smart contract. It’s not random.
It’s like, “Guess how many jellybeans are in the jar.” I like it. That’s fun. Those are always fun.
We do believe those are innovative ways how to attract attention because if you think about it, the marketplace right now is the regular auction model. It’s a little bit saturated where you have so many marketplaces. The differentiator is the actual product or the NFT. We thought about, “How can we bifurcate? How can we change something so that it will be more attractive to participate and so that it will be more fun?” That’s another differentiator.
We try to think about things like models that are innovative, and even the fact that people can participate. We can talk about our NFT locker system and even the marketplace. That was one of the first that we did in the world probably where people in the GamesPad launchpad should hold tokens and NFTs. That’s probably one of the first experiments in the world that has that. After that, we realize that we also need our marketplace as proof of concept for a secondary market.
That’s innovative. I was in Vegas. They had this cool NFT quarter machine. For 0.08 ETH, you spin the machine and get a Deadfella worth quite a lot of money or an NFT that’s not worth so much. I did not fare well on my first go but it was exciting. You mentioned your NFT marketplace. Let’s dive into the details there on what you’re doing on the new frontier in that area.
It was created in the beginning by demand. We have a very vibrant community. We sold successfully a lot of our NFTs. We realized that the first utility was to participate in the deals. We promised and committed to our community that there will be more utilities. You need to provide people with an opportunity to trade it. We quickly realized that even though people talk about interoperability, composability, and other beautiful features, we couldn’t have listed our NFTs on OpenSea, Rarible, or other marketplaces.
We had to create our own. There’s not even a choice because this is on the BSC chain. To transfer it is a separate technical nightmare. We realized that first of all, we have to provide that. That’s our commitment to the community. Secondly, we realized that we have so many partnership opportunities. We invested and launched 70-plus projects. A lot of them are listing NFTs, and they need not only listing on OpenSea, and there will be debt in the waters with millions of others.
They need some activation campaigns. They need people who would trust this concept and its utility. They needed our advice to even build this utility. That’s how we try to build different partnerships with small collections. We’re thinking about those and also big brands. We realize that it’s better to launch less but with better utility. That’s how we’re building those different mechanics and models. I’ll let Eran comment more.
It’s better to launch less but with better utility. Click To Tweet
You’re asking about the innovation in our marketplace. One of the things that we’re doing is bringing real-world collections. It’s coming up. We also did INOs, which are initial NFT sales on our platform which led to the marketplace. We are planning to do land sales as well on our platform. We keep on innovating and adding. We’re already supporting all the EVM chains. We are about to add Solana, Flow, and some more. We keep on upgrading and improving. We’re starting to bring more collections. It’s good for the collections and those communities as well as for our community. It’s a win-win in that sense.
I remember early on in the show of production. It’s funny to say this at this point, but we were learning about the ecosystem as we started the show to have all these amazing guests on and hear their perspectives. We became fast experts. It was surprising to us. One of the things that were said that was interesting is the room for NFT marketplaces in the world and the technology space.
People have said, “There could be as many NFT marketplaces as there are websites someday.” Whether that’s the case or not, it’s about the niche and the audience that you support and recognize. You have a very specific client avatar. You’re focused on serving them. I see you’re doing that. You have a specific direction you’re going in.
You are doing such fun stuff. I appreciate that. There was a show here in Chicago where I live. I was in high school. I did one called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. It was a midnight improv show. I don’t know if anybody has done some crypto yet, but you would roll the dice to see how much you would pay to get in. It would be two dice. It was somewhere between $2 and $12. I love those ideas. What ideas are you integrating into the metaverse that you feel are original and interesting? Can you dive into that a little bit?
There are multiple ideas besides the land sales themselves. We are trying to create different experiences. We do realize that it’s still very early. If you look at the numbers of people who are participating generally in VR experiences, the numbers are still small. It requires a lot of education. We realize that the combination of factors does not only have to be amazing 3D graphics. It has to be the mechanics, the token economy, and the token design. The mechanics that will attract people is number one.
Caesar is the one behind it all.
I met quite a few.
I was busted very quickly.
Eran, what about you?
Dog food for Caesar.
Was it digital? Did it come with an NFT?
Not yet. I’m working on it.
Thank you.
Is there any specific experience?
Maybe.
A yacht is nice.
Empathy.
Eran?
Those two go together.
I’m cheating.
It’s probably being impulsive.
You’re running with the right crowd here.
Maybe.
Pull out your wallet. It should be good.
I’m thinking about moving to Dubai.
Welcome, as they say over here.
That’s what it’s all about.
We should talk.
That’s perfect. I would love to.
Thank you for having us.
Thank you, Eathan and Josh.
Important Links
-
VESA - Previous episode
-
Brittany Kaiser - Previous episode
-
Instagram - VESA
-
@ArtByVESA - Twitter
-
Anastasia Drinevskaya - Twitter
-
@ConstKogan - Twitter
-
@EE_Profile - Twitter
-
Spotify - Edge of NFT
-
iTunes - Edge of NFT