AB de Villiers ventures into Web3

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AB de Vil­liers is a house­hold name in the world of crick­et, renowned for his swash­buck­ling bat­ting style and records in the short­er for­mats of the game. Per­haps less well known is his involve­ment in the Web3 and cryp­tocur­ren­cy space as he moves on from an illus­tri­ous sports career.

The 39-year-old South African sat down for a wide-rang­ing inter­view with Coin­tele­graph as he shifts his atten­tion to the world of Web3. From his love affair with non­fun­gi­ble tokens (NFTs) to an ambas­sador­ship with a Web3 invest­ment plat­form, De Vil­liers has famil­iar­ized him­self with the ins and outs of the wider cryp­tocur­ren­cy ecosystem.

As the South African explained in the first episode of Cryp­to and Sport, his per­son­al expe­ri­ence nav­i­gat­ing the cryp­to ecosys­tem has tossed up some test­ing deliv­er­ies to bat away. It has also led him to become an ambas­sador for a new Ethereum-based Web3 invest­ment plat­form look­ing to open up retail investor access to oppor­tu­ni­ties in promis­ing new start-ups.

Hands off my Mutant Ape!

De Vil­liers admits that he kept the cryp­to space at an arms’ length for a num­ber of years despite the best efforts of Web3 savvy friends and fam­i­ly to com­pel him to explore the indus­try as ear­ly as 2017.

Relat­ed: Plan­et of the Bored Apes: BAYC’s suc­cess morphs into ecosystem

While his broth­ers pressed him to invest in Ripple’s native XRP in those ear­ly days, De Vil­liers remained skep­ti­cal of the cryp­to ecosys­tem and kept his dis­tance, until he start­ed explor­ing trad­ing more seri­ous­ly after down­load­ing Trad­ing View:

“I start­ed to fol­low some of my favorite stuff. Obvi­ous­ly, the mar­kets as well, gold, com­modi­ties, the Nas­daq and S&P 500. I just found a bit of inter­est, start­ed read­ing a lit­tle bit about the mar­kets around the world and then obvi­ous­ly also cryp­to, Bit­coin, Ethereum, XRP were my first interests.”

A cou­ple of years lat­er, NFTs took off with col­lec­tions like Bored Ape Yacht Club scor­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in sales. De Vil­liers brushed up on the intri­ca­cies of the space with the help of a friend work­ing in the industry. 

A vari­ety of Mutant Apes list­ed on NFT mar­ket­place OpenSea. With a cur­rent floor price of around 9.5 ETH, each avatar of the 20,000-strong col­lec­tion is val­ued at over $18,000.

Get­ting to grips with Meta­Mask and its var­i­ous wal­let and net­work con­nec­tions, token swaps and blockchain bridges, De Vil­liers quick­ly became enam­ored with col­lect­ing NFTs. Describ­ing his expe­ri­ence as being lit­tered with highs and lows, the for­mer Pro­teas cap­tain was par­tic­u­lar­ly proud of being a Mutant Ape own­er, which also hap­pened to be his first NFT trade.

“I think I start­ed off with an amaz­ing bang. I bought an M2 mutant ape. Amaz­ing as a first invest­ment. I went straight for the big one. Obvi­ous­ly, it’s not over­board, but still, an M2 is a biggie.”

His dose of NFT dab­bling went on for some time, with De Vil­liers esti­mat­ing that his NFT tro­phy cab­i­net held over 300 dig­i­tal col­lectibles before an unfor­tu­nate inci­dent left him scram­bling. Enticed by a mali­cious NFT mas­querad­ing as a new Pudgy Pen­guin drop, De Vil­liers inad­ver­tent­ly gave a hack­er access to his wal­let by sign­ing a mali­cious con­tract more than a year ago:

“I tapped on it, it looked very legit. There was a $1 gas fee. The minute I hit that gas fee, it stalled. I hit it about five times, which ulti­mate­ly meant that I gave this guy access to my whole wallet.”

De Vil­liers end­ed up los­ing a por­tion of his col­lec­tion before send­ing the remain­der of his NFTs to anoth­er wal­let for safe­keep­ing. He admit­ted that the expe­ri­ence had made him rec­og­nize some of the chal­lenges of nav­i­gat­ing Web3 for newcomers:

“I made a cou­ple of mis­takes, and it cost me dear­ly, but that is some­thing I real­ly want to talk about. For any­one who wants to invest in NFTs, blockchain or Web3, it’s all new, and it’s com­pli­cat­ed, or it can be unless you sim­pli­fy it as much as possible.”

Leveling the investment playing field

The expe­ri­ence also led him to get involved with Com­mon Wealth as an ambas­sador. The Ethereum-pow­ered Web3 invest­ment plat­form aims to give retail investors ear­ly access to star­tups that are tra­di­tion­al­ly stonewalled for con­ven­tion­al ven­ture cap­i­tal investors. It “lev­els the play­ing field” for retail investors to invest in high-poten­tial ear­ly-stage Web3 projects, as De Vil­liers tells Cointelegraph.

The plat­form allows the aver­age investor access to ear­ly stage projects and com­pa­nies at seed and pri­vate sale rounds. Users are able to invest in a vari­ety of funds with cryp­to to access tok­enized shares issued as gen­e­sis NFTs .

Com­mu­ni­ty investors decide which projects to back through dif­fer­ent funds, with vot­ing pow­er pro­por­tion­ate to their invest­ment in a respec­tive fund. Fund NFTs can be sold, trad­ed or frac­tion­al­ized on the plat­form or oth­er mar­ket­places, which affords access to cap­i­tal that is typ­i­cal­ly locked up for long time frames in con­ven­tion­al seed invest­ment rounds.

For De Vil­liers, giv­ing the every­day investor access to an easy to use plat­form with a low finan­cial bar­ri­er to entry to tra­di­tion­al­ly exclu­sive ear­ly fundrais­ing rounds res­onat­ed with his views on finan­cial inclusivity.

He draws par­al­lels to the socio eco­nom­ic land­scape in South Africa, with its mul­ti­tude of cul­tures and a regret­tably large dis­par­i­ty of wealth, and the poten­tial for projects like Com­mon Wealth to tack­le inequality:

“I love the fact that the com­mon per­son, that’s why it’s called Com­mon Wealth, can get an oppor­tu­ni­ty along­side the most wealthy per­son out there, the guy who has been involved with this space for ten years, who knows all the tricks, the ins and outs, this just gives you a lev­el play­ing field.”

With some 9.5 mil­lion fol­low­ers on Twit­ter and more than dou­ble that on Insta­gram, De Vil­liers added that his align­ment with the project was assured by the pedi­gree of indi­vid­u­als behind Com­mon Wealth. Promi­nent team mem­bers include alum­ni from Google, Activi­sion Bliz­zard, Intel, Car­dano and Face­book that have built the Ethereum-pow­ered mobile-opti­mized platform.

De Vil­liers con­tin­ues to adjust to life after an illus­tri­ous crick­et career that saw him named ICC One Day Inter­na­tion­al play­er of the year three times. Broad­cast work is in the cards for the 39-year-old, while he admits that he’d like to con­tin­ue explor­ing the Web3 indus­try in var­i­ous capac­i­ties, whether it is appor­tion­ing invest­ments into Bit­coin (BTC), Ether (ETH), NFTs and oth­er promis­ing Web3 projects.

That comes with the usu­al caveat of cau­tion when invest­ing in the cryp­tocur­ren­cy space, giv­en a long his­to­ry of mar­ket volatil­i­ty and oth­er crit­i­cisms of the nascent sector.

Mag­a­zine: Cryp­to scor­ing big with Euro­pean football



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