Ready for the next big thing in Web3 gaming? We’re hyped to announce that Matcha is now sponsoring the biggest and best players in the world through our partnership with Nouns Esports! 

‍Nouns Esports is a community-owned and crypto-funded Esports team that’s been storming the rankings in competitive games including Dota 2, Counter-Strike 2, Super Smash Bros Melee, and Street Fighter. With a roster of world-class champion players, Nouns has quickly risen to the top in every discipline.

“Esports is the culture of competitive gaming: what happens outside of the game. The love for competition; a pursuit to find out who’s the best.” - Peter Dager, COO at Nouns Esports

Matcha is taking on the challenge of bringing Esports fans onchain, by providing a simple and seamless experience as the DEX of choice for gamers making their opening moves in Web3. Across a series of educational initiatives, top-tier player activations, and Matcha x Nouns merchandise, this integration brings the crypto economy straight to the top of the leaderboard.     

Game and Matcha

We met with Nouns Esports’ COO and Dota2 world champion Peter “Peterpandam” Dager, better known as ppd, at ETH Denver 2024. This interview was filmed at the conference and lays out the current state of esports and how crypto can help teams build sustainable business models beyond their utter dependance on their Web2 sponsors.

We say, “if you can’t beat them, pwn them!”. Crypto gaming has long focused on creating new Web3-native experiences and failed, often due to imbalanced incentives. Nouns Esports takes a radical new approach to esports, by bringing Web3 into the global arena to prove its worth against old-money sponsors like Intel, Mastercard, Verizon, Coca-Cola, and more.

“At Nouns Esports we’re empowering our community through tokenization to play a direct role in our decisions”

There’s no token for Nouns Esports, and no play-to-earn tokenomics to distract from the competition. Just Nouns, a bootstrapped brand with full crypto alignment and creative commons (CC0) licensing that enables it to propagate the power of decentralized governance into every aspect of culture, no matter how elite.

Gamers’ portal to Web3

Matcha is the best way for newcomers to take advantage of all that Web3 has to offer, in a crypto-native way. We want to educate and enable players to get onchain and across chains with the least amount of friction. And all with full custody over your assets.

All you need to get started is a crypto wallet. Then, once you receive some tokens from fan airdrops, fiat onramps, prize money, or anywhere else, you can use Matcha to instantly swap for the cryptocurrency you need, even if you don’t have any gas!

Matcha always gets you the best value for money through deep liquidity and smart order routing, and we don’t add fees to swaps or cross chain bridging, meaning newcomers reap the full benefits of crypto from day one. 

While complexity remains a barrier to decentralized finance, we believe that by providing a seamless experience and spearheading educational work with Nouns Esports we can make it easier than ever to bring the next generation of gamers onchain.

How you can get involved

At the core of this partnership is a shared love for competitive gaming. Nouns Esports are bringing crypto to the mainstream and showing what the decentralized community is capable of, on a global stage - literally! 

“Tokenization, crypto, and NFTs can help endear people to digital IPs and products.”

Supporting Nouns Esports is as easy as following and sharing live matches, grabbing some merch (like the soon to be released Matcha Noggles!), and spreading the word. Your combined love for gaming and love for crypto will help them establish permanent roots in the big leagues.

Nouns NFTs

Nouns began as a generative NFT project, where one NFT is generated and auctioned off each day. Its characteristic 8-bit style, distinctive Noggles (Nouns glasses) and hardcoded daily mints has led to Nouns being one of the most sought-after NFT collections in crypto - and also one of the most sustainable, with a DAO treasury of over 5300 ETH ($17M). And yet, Nouns has always strived for inclusivity. 

 You don’t need a Nouns NFT to be part of the Nouns community or to take part in Nouns Esports. Nouns is a grassroots movement with no copyright, just a shared love for crypto. If you love the art, there are plenty of Nouns community projects across the ecosystem, including:

• Lil Nouns, small Nouns issued every 15 minutes. (Ethereum)
• Nomo nouns, Nouns that didn’t make the pick. (Optimism)
• Collective Nouns, Nouns for Yellow Collective on Farcaster. (Base)
• Gnars, extreme sports Nouns. (Base)
• Based Mingos, Nouns created for DAO workshops. (Base)
• Nouns 3d, Nouns with depth. (Ethereum)
• Lost Nouns, Nouns made from rejected traits. (Ethereum)

And dozens more! You can even build your own Nouns DAO, and certain Nouns are also eligible for Noggles token claims, a nounish cryptocurrency launched on Base. 

⌐◨-◨

Over 2 million viewers tune in to watch major Counter Strike 2 and Dota 2 tournaments, meaning Nouns can engage new audiences that are already on the frontier of the digital economy. If you’re a gamer, add the Nouns unicode Noggles ⌐◨-◨ to your in-game handle for some “we’re so early” credentials. 

You can also take part onchain by competing in or voting on Prop House rounds. These are community initiatives to fund anything from art contests to taking part in tournaments, or being an ambassador for Nouns Esports at major esports events across the world!

It’s game time!

We are thrilled to be supporting one of the premier crypto projects and some of the most talented pro gamers in the world through this partnership. There’s loads planned for the coming months, with plenty of prizes, player collabs, and other events which we’ll be announcing shortly! 

Keep on top of all that’s happening by following Matcha and Nouns Esports on X, joining the Nouns Esports Discord, and subscribing to Matcha Newsletter. See you in the lobby!

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