He shoots, he scores! Akshun man passes excitement of Premier League to Web3
Richard Kieswick, CEO and co-founder of Akshun, talks to Jillian Godsil…
Web3 is a wonderful cornucopia of people from all walks of life, sharing passions and looking at the transformation world of blockchain, NFTs and AI to create new experiences and adventures.
Fitting right into this eclectic mix is former playwright, rugby player, sustainable food mogul and TV presenter Richard Kieswick.
In his adventures along the way to Web3, he peaked hard. His play has run on the WestEnd to critical acclaim, he played semi pro rugby (his sisters played even higher), his sustainable food business was to develop into one of the first compostable coffee pod companies which was valued in excess of £10million and, yes, he was the face for a TV shopping channel, BidTV, talking to hundreds of thousands of viewers every evening for six years.
Oh, and he founded an alcoholic sausage company called Dickie’s Big Boozy Bangers which has a great line on Bloody Mary bangers amongst other flavours. Interestingly, this company gestated from a perchance for boozy bangers but is importantly a data-driven business.
And he is very funny.
“I played pro rugby but when I realised I wasn’t going to make it, I made the natural transition to musical theatre.”
And to top it all he has a huge physical resemblance to not one but three celebrities – John Travolta, Jamie Oliver and Harry Enfield. He has a lifelong ambition to meet his hero John Travolta, and see once met, if the world ends.
As a student in the Guildford School of Acting, attached to the University of Surrey, while said transitioning was taking place, he was given the ultimatum from the arts side to choose – black eyes were not allowed on stage. He chose the arts. Choosing the more economically challenging arts was satisfying on a personal level. His brain races from topic to topic, Kieswick quotes Hemmingway but really means to quote Steinbeck who famously said: If you’re in trouble. Or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.
Even when he moved into commerce, it came from a place of change. He was working in South America and fell in love with coffee and coffee people but was frustrated by the non-recyclable coffee capsules. He created the first compostable coffee capsule for Nespresso machines. It began life as a company in his old bedroom in the family home, grew to a monster with revenue of £10 million and earned him a number of high-profile business awards along the way.
He has since exited the business, but is still involved in the coffee trade with Blue Turaco, the first African farmer-owned coffee brand ever to be on a retail shelf, and whose aim is to feed 12,000 schoolchildren in Uganda. Kieswick kicked this off with listings in Waitrose and Co-op to an initial value of £250,000.
Blockchain, Web3 and NFTs manifested in his next company – The Unseen Agency.
“I got really interested in NFTs and how they might be used in sport,” he says.
“I’ve been around sport for a long time and indeed some of my close friends are sports agents. A group of us came together to explore how NFTs might be used in sport.
“We were providing the creatives but often our consultancy would result in commercial managers taking the idea, executing them quickly and in hindsight they launched basically cash grabs. There was no real thought behind the initial sale, no utility and that backfired in a number of high-profile sporting NFT flops for them.
“We, as creatives, wanted to produce something meaningful and sustainable. We also knew that sports agents drive really hard bargains so we needed to find something IP-free.”
This is where Kieswick’s love of sport, alternative solutions and data began to draw a creative arc into Akshun. And it begins life with the Premier Football league in the UK.
“We identified the moment as the thing: the moment when a player touches the ball,” he explained.
“We pick the top 100 players in the league, then we assign 100 touches to these players as NFTs called ‘Akshuns’. When people purchase they don’t know who they are getting, it’s all in the reveal.”
These Akshuns (touches) last the entire season and are drawn from the official data harvested by OPTA. While 100 Akshuns are minted at the start of the season, if a player exhausts this number, the clock is then set back to zero and another hundred touches start over.
This is data driven by the Premier League’s official partner,so there is no IP involved. It is all in the emotional excitement of the action. Akshun uses multiple APIs and AI to track these moments, mesh the multiple datasets and convert them into NFTs.
In addition to purchasing the NFT, Akshun users are enrolled into a private members club, a membership that lasts for life. This allows Akshun to run a private members’ lottery in assigning prizes for the top NFTs. Holders of these NFTs are also able to sell or trade them on a secondary marketplace.
“People may keep or sell the NFTs based on their emotional attachment to a club and player or in the hope of financial gain.”
Akshun has built a system where each club is represented, some with more than others depending on where they sit in the league.
In addition to the hero creatives, the Akshun team is strongly populated with key players including the co-founder, CPO and Web3 OG Ben Appleby, top CTO Matej Zrimsek, experienced compliance officer Mathew Norris, treasury and tokenomics expert Nik Pletikos, Binance’s ex head of sports and NFTs Ryan Horn,Outlier Ventures previous head of NFTs Robin Janaway and the powerful Jill Kaur heading up accounting and tax.
Asked how such a strong team has come together in a bear market without outside funding, Kieswick is very clear.
“As I said before about some of those cash grabs, we are here for the long haul. We’ll all still be here in ten years’ time. We all have choices about what we might do, we choose to be here. Life is too short not to work with people who are not committed, passionate and caring.”
It’s now game time. The Premier League launches on Friday August 11 with Manchester City hosting Burnley. Akshun launches ten days earlier with the first wave of NFTs and membership for sale. Pricing for the 200 OGs is 0.04 ETH, for the 1000 VIP NFTs is 0.05 and the public mint is 0.06. There are two tiers – with the top tier hosting the top 25 players.
It’s also important that all payments, prizes and voting is transparent and on the blockchain. Everyone who owns an NFT can vote on how the remaining money is spent after the prizes are allocated. They vote and it could be anything from a box at Old Trafford to running a charity gig for a local club. It will all be driven by the community.
One nice takeaway from Akshun is that despite it running on one of the most expensive sporting leagues in the world, all the monies remain in Akshun, nothing goes to the Premier League. Kieswick sees it developing into the real second screen used while watching sport.
It’s a beautiful game after all.
The Akshun platform is set to launch in August and the team are entertaining pre-seed investment round shortly after, please visit akshun.xyz to stay informed.
To get involved, potential members can join the Akshun community to earn future airdrops, giveaways, prize pools, whitelist opportunities, quests and earn XP rewards, should join on this url https://zealy.io/c/akshun/questboard?invitationId=7AwK1hLF_pxMd_E-iRkBE