Esports Grant 3 Schedule & AXS Allocations!
Today we are pleased to announce the schedule and first round of AXS allocations to Axie tournament organizers for Esports Grant #3.
Greetings Lunacians!
Today we are pleased to announce the schedule and first round of AXS allocations to Axie tournament organizers for Esports Grant #3.
This grant is for 160,000 AXS and will support events through the end of June, 2023. Our primary goal with these grants is expand Axie Esports in a way that is fair, scalable, and global.
Tournaments on the esports grant will take place on the allow-list esports server that has runes and charms unlocked to ensure tournaments act as a decisive demonstration of mastery. Any player that participates in Axie tournaments on this grant will be given access to the server.
Esports Grant 3 - Schedule & Allocation
Without further ado, follow the button below to check out the full calendar and start signing up for events! For this grant we’ve also separated events out into 4 tiers, Challenger, Dragon, Bear, and Wolf. These tiers are an indicator of the prize levels and scale of the tournaments.
*Please note that this schedule is a living document and will updated as necessary. There will be more qualifiers added as organizers running events in 2023 finalize their schedules!
The Evolution of Axie Esports
The first two esports grants were effective in validating our model, where the majority of grant had to be allocated mostly to players in the form of prize pools. This grant system helps reducing risk for tournament organizers, both amateur and professional, while ensuring incentives to search for sponsors and maintain lean event budgets.
For this current grant, more than 80% of the budget allocated will go directly to players. The remaining budget will be used for event operations.
As the season progresses, we will continually monitor feedback from event organizers, players, and fans about this modeling and recalibrate as needed for future grants.
Grant Priorities
For this grant we received requests that totaled about 2.5x the amount of financial support than we have budget to provide. This is a great indicator of the interest in Axie Esports; however, it did leave us in a situation where we had to make some hard decisions.
One of the biggest challenges was balancing support for tournament organizers that have run events with us before on previous grants and those that want to enter for the first time.
We’re excited to see interest from outside organizations, but feel strongly about continuing to reward organizers that have taken risk with us along the way and worked with us on previous grants. Seeing growth and quality improvements between events is one of the key indicators we look for in trustworthy partners.
We have also made a specific effort to support a wide variety of events, including dailies, weeklies, leagues, and large one-off tournaments.
It is imperative that both players and tournament organizers have low-stakes entry points to participate in Axie Esports, as well as opportunities to level up as their skills improve.
Our strategy with esports has been to run small, strategic experiments and double down on what works, which so far has been effective in bootstrapping our competitive scene.
Updates
To close out this announcement, we have a few updates regarding requirements for event organizers that have been selected:
All events must use Community Gaming to host their tournament brackets and registrations
Tier 1 and Tier 2 events (most majors/minors) are required to broadcast their tournaments in English, as well as two other languages of their choice between: Spanish, Portuguese, Tagalog, and Japanese.
Tier 1 and Tier 2 events are required to have to 50% of their players sourced from global open qualifiers that are not specifically limited by region or country.
The remaining 50% of players can be sourced from country or region locked qualifiers.
Tier 1 and Tier 2 events with a physical, in-person finals must provide prizing to all participants that qualify and physically compete at the finals.
Remember to follow Axie Esports on twitter to catch the latest updates!