Aleksandr “Shurick” Agapitov, the man behind the multibillion-dollar enterprise Xsolla, announced the launch of his new project, X.LA Foundation, in February 2022.
Aleksandr “Shurick” Agapitov, the man behind the multibillion-dollar enterprise Xsolla, announced the launch of his new project, X.LA Foundation, in February 2022. The primary objective of X.LA Foundation is to ensure the concepts of web3 are within everyone’s reach.
X.LA Foundation wants to make sure creators have a better chance of securing their positions and monetary rights for their contributions in all relevant fields. According to Shurick, lack of legal representation creates a roadblock for creators when it comes to protecting their work. Also, we see a disparity between revenue spreads between producers and distributors of a venture and the contributors who are as important to the success of a project as anyone.
The goal of X.LA Foundation is to level out the playing field for creators far and wide and allow them the opportunity to become equal beneficiaries for their work. As a means to this end, X.LA Foundation is capitalizing on blockchain and web3 technologies and is about to introduce revenue-sharing smart contracts that creators around the world can avail to secure their rights of ownership without spending a lot of money.
Shurick Agapitov trail blazed the gaming industry with a solution that ensured sustainability of game developers when the Internet was just evolving. Internet banking service in the early 21st century was the prerogative of a handful of consumers of eminent banks in the US. But for the rest of the world, it was still unattainable. When Shurick founded Xsolla (then 2Pay) that tied in local payment servers and methods like cash kiosks, prepaid cards and money orders to help gaming companies receive in-game payments, it made a lot of difference.
Xsolla was a success in Russia and in 2009, Shurick took his idea to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. What these game developers saw was a low-priced solution that gave them the opportunity to optimize game creation and monetization. The rest is history, as today more than 1100 games, including Roblox, Fortnite and PubG use Xsolla’s payment gateway, billing and marketing tools to keep things running.
Xsolla has created its identity as the pioneer of video game commerce but it’s more than that. With Shurick at the helm, the company always stayed ahead of the curve. In 2015, Xsolla with its advanced analytics, reporting and chargeback management tools opened its gates to small and medium-sized e-commerce businesses enabling cross-currency transactions for small merchants.
Information technology and advanced programming have taken resource distribution to a whole new level creating jobs and opportunities in developing economies. Up until now we have seen payment gateways that enable cross-border payments, job portals that offer trans-border recruitment and social media enabling worldwide connectivity. But from here on, we will see the decentralization of this whole machine and tech evangelists like Shurick are leading the shift from the forefront.
Shurick stepped down as the CEO of Xsolla to start a new venture in the web3 space with X.LA. Why web3? Because, according to him, that’s the imminent future of the internet. Not because web3 will offer people the next-level of entertainment in the form of a 3D virtual world, but because it will develop a stream of revenue for everyone and anyone who will interact with it and create a value in this space.
Shurick says “creators are natural visionaries who are seeing the opportunities in the Metaverse and web3 applications in this whole new ecosystem as interest in NFTs, cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies grow.” X.LA’s revenue sharing smart contracts will help securitize and streamline these opportunities for creators and companies.
We can consider web3 as the successor of web2 set to provide solutions to a specific problem of web2, which is centralization. web2, despite its multifaceted benefits, suffers from the walled garden syndrome, meaning users of web2 do not have autonomy over their data, content and transactions. web3 applications empowered by blockchain technology began its journey by decentralizing finances, and the ultimate goal would be to decentralize the internet.
We are already witnessing how web3 applications built on the blockchain are making it possible for people to own their data in peer-to-peer networks, conduct transactions bypassing intermediaries. NFTs have made it possible for creators to own and sell their content without having to side up with agencies and middlemen. web3 has given birth to a new genus of gaming that has created earning opportunities for players, something that was missing earlier.
It is true though that transactions on the blockchain are slow and blockchains exist in silos at present. However, soon these limitations will be a thing of the past with projects like Solana and Polkadot driving scalability and interoperability.
Metaverse can be considered a component of the web3 ecosystem that will allow all its beneficiaries to interact in an immersive setting courtesy of avatars and VR/AR tools. We are already seeing the intermingling of web3 applications, which run on the keynote of decentralization, and metaverse in bits and pieces though projects like Decentraland and Sandbox. However, it’s only a matter of time until you find your avatar interacting with the world in an otherworldly, permissionless dimension evoked via holographic projections and 3D form factors. Remember Ready Player One? In short, web3 will be the building block of Metaverse.
Shurick believes that web3 offers an enormous opportunity for entrepreneurs today. “A single entity cannot own web3; it is all about community,” Metaverse or “meta sites”, as Shurick likes to call them, will be developed by an eclectic mix of people with various levels of expertise contributing as per their capacity and receiving recurring benefits out of those contributions. Since these meta sites will be built on the blockchain, there will be complete transparency as to the creation of assets, ownership of assets and transference of ownership. A revenue-sharing smart contract can be applied to every stage of a product’s journey from creation to the transfer of its rights to use, thus addressing a very intricate profit-sharing model. Shurick presents X.LA as a transparent and efficient blockchain system which not only guarantees revenue distribution but also eliminates the need for costly legal services that creators and distributors often seek out to prepare such contracts.
The X.LA community welcomes contractors, creators, influencers, thinkers, inventors, and many others to bind together and define, shape, and develop the new future of the web3 economy. As a community-driven enterprise, X.LA Foundation plans to highlight those who shared the journey from the very beginning. As a teaser for the major roadmap reveals, X.LA Foundation is in the process of dropping a unique NFT collection. If you can gather these NFTs, you will receive–among other benefits–an invite to the private Telegram chat and AMA sessions with the X.LA team, not to mention being incentivized for your contribution.
After the success of the first round of the NFT drop, X.LA Foundation is giving participants a second and third chance for collecting more rewards. The second round kickstarted on 23rd March and the team is accepting submissions. If you are a creator, submit your creation — memes, sketches, music, videos, even cool stickers — we are accepting contributions from all around. Join the Telegram announcement channel to get the full picture.
With that said, a third round of NFT drops is also happening in the Discord community. All you need to do is invite new members to X.LA Foundation’s Discord server to win the NFTs. Learn more about the referral program here.
For more information, visit X.LA Foundation’s official website.
