vrtuhub - Empowering Communities To Do More

Projects struggle with brand-awareness. Vrtuhub addresses this by marketing through tech and eSports. Ambassadors leverage their skills beyond Discord to drive growth and revolutionise marketing.

Comment 5

Inspiration

Many crypto projects are stuck in a closed-loop, ineffective marketing system by promoting crypto with crypto & crypto to other crypto users. This does not help with adoption. Projects often rely on bots and fake followers, organising competitions to inflate their follower counts on platforms like Twitter, Telegram, and Discord. This practice creates an illusion of popularity but fails to build genuine engagement.

The current marketing strategies in crypto are broken. Teams are over-relying on bots and airdrop hunting, focusing only on those already familiar with crypto. Reaching and building a brand outside the crypto crowd is challenging, and influential non-crypto players and platforms are reluctant to promote crypto to avoid alienating their existing audiences and get accused of being a sell out or could harm their existing audiences.

With the current mainstream media, platforms and influencer are skeptical about crypto, building trust and credibility is challenging. Vrtuhub aims to change this by harnessing crypto communities to produce honest content whilst boosting the brand visibility and engagement of their project. What big platforms and influencers avoid, we can achieve together, disrupting the market and becoming a powerful force.

All the marketing crypto projects haven’t been able to do, projects can join us and together we can leverage all our communities and create a disruptive platform.

What it does

Publish tech reviews (video and articles), SEO optimisation, marketing and product placement, eSports and broadcasting.

Vrtuhub leverages the vast followers, teams & project ambassadors in crypto communities on Discord, Twitter, and other platforms. It puts them at the forefront to represent their projects.

Ambassadors and communities use their existing talents, hobbies, and professions to create original content such as blogs, tech reviews, and eSport events to promote their products through strategic product placement (e.g., branded merch in pictures) as well as banner adverts. This approach enhances SEO, brand association, credibility, and trustworthiness. You can imagine a Theta ambassador gets a tech item to review, records it wearing a Theta hoodie to represent the project in a positive manner and the written review has pictures and banner ads to go along with it. People looking for a honest product review of that item stumble across it, check out other reviews and trust the platform for future reviews. You shouldn't be marketing theta with theta, crypto with crypto but make a phone review and promote your project along-side it. That's going to get clicks, bring engagement and build your brand.

These tech reviews and blogs being published on the site by myself, other creators and the project ambassadors of other crypto projects makes us prime for organising eSport events with professional commentary that are broadcasted live . We will have crypto community teams compete in them.

By signing up more projects, Vrtuhub can produce more content, leveraging each other’s communities to build a global marketing hub managed by crypto projects and their communities. The more projects that sign up the more content we can throw out there and start leveraging each other's communities, to build a global marketing HUB managed by the crypto projects and their communities.

The Main areas of focus are:

  • Tech Reviews
  • eEsports
  • Blogs
  • With Music, DIY, dev journals and other fields coming soon.

Tech Reviews

Appear on search engines when people look for reviews without typing your brand

Tech reviews are a major focus due to their high SEO optimization, generating significant traffic through search engines and my YouTube channel. By concentrating on AliExpress reviews, which are rapidly growing but often lack proper reviews, my channel has seen substantial growth.

I plan to direct this traffic to my website, featuring written reviews accompanied by videos. By uploading to vrtuhub, I can control advertising and expand the platform. We will allow other crypto project ambassadors to review products, with controlled advertising and product placement.

Imagine your ambassador wearing a Theta hoodie, drinking from a Theta mug, and showcasing a microphone we provided, promoting their project while growing their personal brand. Banner adverts on written reviews also enhance your projects search engine visibility and these do not get detected by adblockers.

More projects onboard mean more reviews published, driving more clicks, views, and backlinks, helping us dominate the tech review sector. This strengthens crypto project through product placement and credibility while creating a reviewer and influencer persona for your ambassadors.

All of this strengthens crypto project through product placement and credibility and it also creates a ‘reviewer’ and influencer type vibe for ambassadors. This is the level of marketing the established players have all turned down and said no to, as they don’t want to promote crypto or get involved in crypto. There is a real opportunity to become the leading tech review site by embracing it and offering crypto a HUB that's open to them. The Ambassadors of all these crypto projects come together to post reviews and have control over product placement and advertising. Together, we can achieve this level of impactful marketing and industry disruption.

I know this sounds a bit strange, why should crypto ambassadors start creating tech reviews but this excites people, it is a perk. Be a theta ambassador and get free tech to test out, review or even keep afterwards. Once this catches on I expect many other projects to follow.

Content producers can upload videos directly to the site through the team dashboard or embed links from Youtube, Gleev & Odyssey etc. embedded links do not get indexed by search engines so I prefer people upload directly. I may faze out embedded links in the future, the VOD integration is a new feature I just added. (https://www.vrtuhub.com/tech/6633b5bf166bb6c2a187). For this reason only one tech review has a native player (rest and embedded) but the judges can upload their own and write their own review through the team dashboard. The page is dynamic so if you create a review and upload a video it will load it in :)

AI Enhancements

AI Review Generator from Audio File

Users can upload an audio file, such as .mp3 or .wav, up to 25 MB, containing the dialogue of their video review. Our system will automatically convert it into a template for a written review. Many YouTubers, especially tech reviewers, do not have a website for written reviews despite the SEO and RSS feed benefits. This is because creating and editing a video is time-consuming, and producing a separate written review can add several additional hours of work. Most have decided to focus on video content not only to save time but also because it typically generates more advertising revenue.

Our AI review writer simplifies this process by taking the audio from your video review and turning it into a well-structured and presented written review. This solves two problems for video review creators: converting their video reviews into written reviews and creating new advertising opportunities.

Currently, many AI-generated reviews are entirely automated and often fake, generated based on specs or marketing press releases without firsthand experience of the product. By using an original recorded review to create a written review, we ensure authenticity. The SEO traffic generated can be leveraged as a marketing stream for crypto projects.

I am looking to onboard YouTube reviewers into this scheme, where we pay them to sign up and convert their video reviews into written reviews using our AI. Crypto projects can then add banner ads to these reviews. This also isolates these written reviews from their main YouTube channel, so reviewers won't have to worry about promoting crypto to their existing audience and subscribers. I believe I'm onto something big here!

Theta Edge Cloud involvement

Video on demand! Using the team.dashboard subdomain, authorised users can directly upload videos to theta edge cloud and transcode them and have them play back natively on the website with search engine indexing and SEO.

eSports

Create matches, watch them win prizes and hang out chill through live chat

What We're Doing

We’re leveraging crypto projects to come together with their combined communities and face off against each other. This ties in well with our tech review side and could potentially even lead to sponsorship opportunities in the tech world, fostering connections.. By harnessing the passion and diversity of crypto communities, we aim to channel this energy into eSports, creating a dynamic and engaging marketing strategy.

Why It's Exciting and Beneficial

eSports is a rapidly growing industry with millions of viewers on platforms like YouTube and Twitch. Major brands like Redbull, Shopify, Mastercard, and Pepsi have already tapped into its marketing potential, but the crypto sector has largely overlooked this opportunity. Vrtuhub aims to change that by integrating crypto projects into the eSports arena, providing unparalleled brand exposure and engagement.

How It Works

Community-Driven eSports Teams: eSport Events with community teams and players

Instead of sponsoring existing eSports teams, we invite crypto projects to create their own community-driven teams. Community members can apply to compete in various games such as CSGO, SIM racing, and League of Legends.This grassroots approach encourages community participation and builds a strong, competitive spirit.

Collaborative Tournaments: Projects can organise friendly competitions with other crypto communities, fostering camaraderie and cross-community engagement. These events cost nothing but time and can be streamed for wider reach and engagement.

Virtual Tournaments: Host events like the "[Your Project] League of Legends Mini Series" on Vrtuhub. Projects purchase tokens to enter, with a portion of the fees covering expenses and the rest contributing to a prize fund. Vrtuhub manages broadcasting and commentary, ensuring professional coverage and maximum visibility.

Real Time chat: Real Time Chat in full screen mode

Real time chat functionally where signed up users can chat with each other in real-time whilst watching the live stream. It works it works really well, especially in full screen mode ;)

Sustainable Prize Pool: Entry fees from participating projects create a substantial prize pool. Winning players earn prize money, attracting professional gamers and raising the competition's profile. This system ensures that the cost for each team is minimal while providing significant incentives for top performers. Projects can also independently fund tournaments and invite other projects to enter for free, awarding out their Tokens as price funds.

Enhanced Brand Awareness: Broadcasting and highlighting clips from events boost brand visibility on platforms like YouTube. Social media plays a significant role in promoting these events, driving further engagement and awareness. By entering the eSports arena, crypto projects can tap into a vast, enthusiastic audience, building brand credibility and engagement in ways traditional marketing methods cannot. This innovative approach not only strengthens individual projects but also creates a vibrant, interconnected ecosystem where everyone benefits from shared exposure and collaboration. Together, we have a true shot at becoming a dominant force in the tech review and eSports sectors, disrupting the market and setting new standards for crypto marketing.

The Bigger Picture

By entering the eSports arena, crypto projects can tap into a vast, enthusiastic audience, building brand credibility and engagement in ways traditional marketing methods cannot. This innovative approach not only strengthens individual projects but also creates a vibrant, interconnected ecosystem where everyone benefits from shared exposure and collaboration. Together, we have a true shot at becoming a dominant force in the tech review and eSports sectors, disrupting the market and setting new standards for crypto marketing.

Why this is different

Others have tried integrating esports and crypto but have done it wrong, missing the bigger picture. They seek venture capital (VC) backing, build large teams without generating income, release a token prematurely, and then dump it, leading to disastrous results. They develop costly APIs and tech that create more problems than they solve, burning through cash. After early backers take their profits and leave, the founders are left with a wrecked project and a large team they can't afford to maintain. Their model is unsustainable, full of buzzwords aimed at attracting investment, which gets picked up by VCs. The combination of token selling, huge expenses, and large teams makes it impossible to sustain for long.

These projects would organize events that weren’t even streamed, benefiting only the gamers involved. They charged projects exorbitant fees for bespoke services while offering very little in terms of marketing or reach. They never built a community, had little to offer, and used their own token as prize money while charging to organize non-streamed community events.

Vrtuhub is putting community and marketing first! Esports need to be affordable and community-driven, without the need for VC backing, which can destroy the sport. Having multiple projects on board keeps costs down for everyone involved. Vrtuhub is 100% independently owned by me, so there are no VCs to destroy the community.

We are doing what works: organizing esports events and broadcasting them to build communities and engagement, turning crypto ambassadors into stars and having them face off against each other. The prize pool is in crypto, offering the benefit of near-instant payments, which is unheard of in the mainstream esports community.

As for tech reviews, as stated earlier, these generate significant web traffic and audiences. Existing content creators don't want to promote crypto in their tech reviews on their current platforms. We suggest letting your ambassadors do it! For the existing tech reviews (and ambassadors who prefer to make videos), we can use AI to turn tech review videos into highly SEO-optimized, well-written reviews for search engines and RSS feeds. YouTubers who sign up and agree to represent a crypto project in their reviews can be compensated with crypto banner ads under their reviews without isolating their existing audiences. This is a real game changer!

Theta Edge Cloud involvement

Live Streaming :D Events can be broadcasted with professional commentary so even those not playing can watch, support their community participants. This is working and can be tested out using the team dashboard but only authorised accounts have access to this. The thee judge account can test it out over at the team dashboard, after you have created a event, go to manage existing event.

Besides the main event, players that are competing may also be required to independently stream their gameplay for cheating prevention, inspections or for players that want a closer connection with the fans/community.

How I built it

I built Vrtuhub using SvelteKit, a developer-friendly framework with dynamic SSR, optimising for SEO and ensuring our tech reviews rank highly on Google search. Tailwind CSS was used for easy styling and a modern look.

Our backend is powered by Appwrite Cloud, an open-source, self-deployable SaaS solution for databases, authentication, and functions. Unlike services like Google Firebase, Appwrite is cost-effective and avoids vendor lock-in, supported by a strong community with over 100k projects. I utilised GOT and Node.js for handling functions and server-side requests, complemented by Theta Edge Cloud for live streaming and VOD. While Theta’s edge cloud is still buggy, it's a promising solution. For content creation, we use TipTap as our rich text editor. Though it initially had bugs with rendering and copy-pasting, most issues have been resolved, ensuring smooth text handling.

Challenges I ran into

Not much, edge cloud needs work and better docs. Live streaming does not have any accessible webhooks for stream.started and stream.ended and there is a limit imposed of a maximum of three live streams including inactive. This means anyone that creates a stream must delete it afterwards, which can be done from the vrtuhub team dashboard otherwise it can break streaming for others (limit reached). This prevented me from allowing players participating in matches to create their own independent streams. Once webhooks are here for live streaming and this 3 limit stuff is removed I can introduce this feature.

If the judges create a stream, once you’ve started return and click go live on the team dashboard and please remember to return the team dashboard and end the broadcast to delete it. Once webhooks arrive this will be automated. Additionally, live streaming from the UK has been laggy due to the lack of EU-based ingest nodes. Overcoming these hurdles is essential for the platform’s functionality. Other issues, getting this platform this far has been a challenge, there are a lot of scammers and crooked people out there. Story for another time!

Building Vrtuhub has been challenging due to the complexities of bootstrapping and self developing a business and also starting a youtube channel and tech reviews alongside this. Despite these obstacles, Vrtuhub Ltd, incorporated in the UK in November 2023, has made significant progress as my first business and hackathon entry. I am not taking any salary, I am working on this full time. This is something I am truly passionate about as I believe it addresses all the difficulties crypto projects are having with marketing and brand awareness.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud of owning 100% of Vrtuhub and its development. The platform and my tech review YouTube channel have come a long way. Being part of the AliExpress affiliate network, my channel generates revenue and healthy engagement. Now, it's time to integrate reviews on the website, onboard other projects, and tie everything together with eSports. A number of my tech reviews are on google, and youtube and are showing healthy growth including affiliate purchases. I have also had a handful of smaller tech brands reach out to collaborate.

What we learned

Transcoding is crucial for accessibility and smooth playback. The journey has taught me the dedication and effort required to bootstrap a business while keeping the bigger picture in mind.

What's next for Vrtuhub Ltd

I'm focused on fully developing and proving the platform’s usefulness and shake up the crypto space. am committed to developing this platform out fully and making it stable and feature rich. This is going to be big, I see a huge opportunity here in my vision and what I've built so far.

Token release is planned, but releasing this too early can harm the business due to an unfair and uneven distribution. The Vrtuhub community needs to grow, and more projects must be onboarded before introducing any token. Accessibility is key, and the blockchain deployment decision is yet to be made. I do have a really compelling plan for its utility but this all needs to come out at the right time.

I plan to trial marketing strategies with crypto projects by distributing free tech equipment, starting with proper mics for crypto ambassadors. They will test, review, and keep the equipment, creating content and affiliate links for me while increasing marketing and brand awareness for the projects they represent.

I also intend to reach out to existing tech youtubers and offer them incentives to upload their video reviews and have them converted to written reviews on this platform and allow crypto projects to put banner adverts on them.

I want to organise some eSport events for crypto communities to get involved in, with free entry and prize money that will be broadcasted live. I have some heavy hitters that are interested but they’ve never done something like this before. They’ve never tried creating a community backed esports team and have them compete against other projects. Although some discord admins on various projects love it, they've given encouragement and reckon it could have a snowball effect. Once it gets out there everyone wants to get involved. Right now, getting the attention of the core team that can approve such a event is difficult when they are impossible to reach. I have had a few projects discord teams including a big other offer to help bring this to market and they've got a host of contacts once my product is ready.

Could do with a CDN integration as images take a while to load currently, especially new uploads.

Winning this hackathon will fund these marketing events such as organising free esport events and tech reviews. Long-term, Vrtuhub will become a SaaS platform where projects pay a monthly fee to access and post content. Just need to let people try this for free and prove this works and tech reviews and eSports are highly effective marketing options, as its all very new to them. We’ll work with ambassadors to create tech reviews and explore categories like music and dev journals in the future.

The ultimate goal is to establish on-site hubs, offering regional project ambassadors a place to work, collaborate, and create content. Starting in London and expanding globally, these hubs will improve production quality and encourage high-quality content creation.

Whether this wins the hackathon or not the project will survive, I am keeping my overheads to a minimum and I am taking this to the top! I am really passionate about this as I believe I have the solution to the marketing, awareness and engagement challenges facing many crypto projects. I would love to have a chat with the Theta core team!

Gituhb repo

The Github repo is private, if any of the judges need access to it to review please email me so I can add you on.

Thanks for the opportunity! Regards Bilal Khan

Built With

  • appwrite
  • cookie-js
  • date-fns
  • got
  • hls.js
  • node.js
  • svelte
  • svelte-file-dropzone
  • svelte-french-toast
  • svelte-meta-tags
  • sveltekit
  • tailwindcss
  • theta-edge-cloud
  • tiptap
+ 3 more
Share this project:

Updates