Karate (KARATE) is the initial token designed to govern and gamify a real-world professional sports league. Karate Combat is a quickly expanding professional full-contact combat sport that has 4.6 million followers, 100-200 million organic views per month, and around 100 exclusive professional athletes.

Founded by tech and crypto entrepreneurs, the league aims at a young, international audience via cross-platform distribution, quick stand-up fights, and 3D CGI backgrounds rendered in Unreal Engine. The league holds televised distribution on many of the world’s top sports networks, including Eurosport, Globo’s Canal Combate, BeIN Sports, CBS Sports, and ESPN Deportes. Events are streamed for free simultaneously on the league’s site, Karate.com, as well as Youtube, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and Kick.

The league features some of the top karate fighters ever and builds on the massive karate brand and lore, but its unique ruleset creates a new sport meant to entertain with a fast-paced, differentiated product. The UFC (and its copycats) are dominated by jiu jitsu, which relies on grappling, ground fighting, and submission holds. By contrast, Karate Combat’s unique ruleset supports a stand-up, striking-based event where winners are decided by punches, kicks, and throws. Fighters are limited to no more than five seconds of ground and pound on the pit floor.

Each event is filmed before live-rendered 3D CGI environments using In-camera VFX and Extended Reality technologies. The league is the only professional sport filmed in front of live rendered 3D graphics, producing a viral, live version of Mortal Kombat.

In 2022, the league’s assets were transferred in full by its crypto-native founders to an ownerless foundation to let the KarateDAO facilitate web3 governance and gamification. This structure enables a web3 game tailored exactly to the habits and interests of sports fans. Beyond real governance of the league, the primary initial utility for the KARATE token is to play Up Only Gaming. Up Only Gaming is a no-loss game built on smart contracts. When sports fans have a wager on an event, even a small one, engagement is an order of magnitude higher. However, most people inevitably stop betting on sports because they lose their money.

The innovative Up Only Gaming mobile and webapps allow token holders to frictionlessly pick their favorite fighters for the chance to earn more tokens with no risk of loss. For 48 hours before each event, token holders can vote for fighters using off-chain signed messages. Players can allocate all of their votes to 1 fight or split votes up amongst multiple fights. The more $KARATE tokens a player has, the more they can win. Players who vote for losing fighters retain their $KARATE tokens to play again next time. Over time active players and winning fighters slowly dilute inactive fans.

The league has also fully embraced a web3 open ecosystem go-to-market strategy through an incredibly permissive IP license, initially in the categories of NFTs & video games. The league will also be open sourcing its smart contracts and front ends to foster a vibrant ecosystem of applications built on top of the Up Only Gaming primitives.

To date, most fan tokens and sports NFT projects have relied on token-gated experiences to drive utility. This is table stakes, and with the entire league governed by the token, Karate Combat can do it 10x better. Karate Combat believes that a transparent public ledger is the perfect technology to enable a shared feeling of ownership of a cultural asset like a sports property and intends to utilize it in full.