Nonfungible Tokenized Gaming

Regarding the NFT gaming market?I've shared some thoughts over the years, given my?engagements with distributed ledger technologies for over a?decade, even previously partnering with proto-NFT platform?ascribe.io in 2015?(acquired?by Coinbase - founders going on to found the OCN protocol) via my portfolio-digitization startup, ArtSquare.

1. NFT Gaming protocols across various blockchain platforms (ETH/SOL/BSC mainly)?are?witnessing extraordinary growth in both users and volumes in recent months.?What?are?the main drivers of this growth?

Working in tech from startups to Fortune 1000 & private equity, I can tell you we've started seeing an exodus from trad-fi/tech/gaming into crypto around late 2017 - and that trend has never been more prevalent than it is now.

To call up a cliche - we're looking at a 1990s internet phase for distributed ledger technology. I bring this up because what CoinMarketCap shows us is less Bitcoin and its Alts, and more a spread of ISPs, Email Clients, VOIPs, aka differing and instrumental services, represented by their three & four-letter listings.

The risk in adopting the new framework for tech and finance now exceeds that of ignoring the opportunity it?presents.

2. Is there a specific leading blockchain network that is especially suitable for the NFT gaming domain?

What?are?the propositions of any blockchain network that make it ideal for this sub-sector?

I'm very interested in Hedera Hashgraph for energy efficiency, TPS efficiency, and security?+ large scale traction to date and on the horizon as a contender?to support the digital asset economy to come - beyond the odd & highly gas inefficient JPEG avatar or gif of a 3d render - pretty as they may be.

The burgeoning developer community and time-travel-secured Solana protocol actually looks really promising for being able to support massive digital asset creation, management and rapid trade - without compromising on security or decentralization.

As a bonus note - I would watch Loopring's wallet as being very well suited to holding and trading NFTs and digital assets in a secure but dead-simple ux.?The Loopring protocol?is one exception that is clever enough by half as a software solution,?and therefore highly convenient,?solution - that doesn't maintain its security by sacrificing UX to incomprehensible complexity, as many do.?

Loopring is a?zkRollup exchange & payment protocol?powering a mobile?L2 integrated Smart Wallet?& a web?L2 DEX. The?Ethereum Layer-2 scaling protocol allows for high-throughput, low-cost, non-custodial AMMs, orderbook exchanges & payment apps on Ethereum by leveraging Zero-Knowledge Proofs.

It has been reliable since 2017 at least with its?2017?v1?social seed wallet, which rendered mnemonic methods to recall and access wallets less than necessary. The?2020?v2?a couple years later?solved for ETH w/ open layer 2 solidity compatibility.

Now, excitingly, a?2022?v3?is on the way which will introduce?exchange-agnostic compatibility - starting with wallet support for?NFTs. Keep an eye out, things?are?developing quickly there.

3. Is there really a macro-market for games wherein users would need to spend hours on their PC to earn an NFT??Are?the games actually fun to play? Most serious gamers would rather play a fun game than grind for hours in a boring game for an NFT prize.

In short, yes.?

I'd like to state that the technology isn't very new here, it's the market that's catching up.?As far back as?2014, I was building a peer-to-peer navigation app, shopping around for an analytics service, finally visiting the office of Upsight, where they offered to have us participate in the private beta of their new feature. They could push pop-up content to users' phones based on geofences we could draw on a simple web map.?

I immediately wanted to pivot our business to an augmented reality, gamified version of the navigation app - to have our users engage with their environments both during the journey and at the destination. I told my cofounders,?"Think Pokémon meets Foursquare."?We didn't do it. I still love the idea. I think Waze is starting to incorporate similar features, as inspired, perhaps, by the example of Pokémon Go or its predecessor Ingress.

Very soon, we're likely to start seeing these XR consumer apps that mobilize and monetize everyday activity, involving a good measure of tokenization via crowd-produced work to 'unlock' experiences & tokens - both fungible & non - while mapping, tagging, mining, and participating in digital and physical spaces.

Just as a?Chromecast is made to plug into and augment the experience of a TV, Ring or a Nest is attached to a house to augment its security or 'user experience', a Salesforce app augments business intelligence on-platform -?AR can bring a visual, audio, or haptic boost to BOTH 'IRL' and digital experiences.

These augmentations that gamify the experience menial labor with a mining incentive for token - fungible or not, ie. tagging a map - or cells on brain-scan slides, make a massive about of very critical work accessible, simple, and decentralized enough to compress timescales on major technical progress via the mined data accessible -- and enough value generated to justify streaming remuneration on a global scale.

4. Any examples of such games that could attract and hold the attention of real gamers?

One team I've been watching since meeting them at Crypto HQ in Davos at the January 2018 WEF summit, is XP. They were one of the first and most competent pure-play projects aiming to gamify life and work experiences to yield token and digital assets. Currently running, 'Polkafantasy: The Chain of Realms', currently slated as 'Best Japanese NFT Marketplace & Multiverse Game' the team frames their work,?

"The most popular application for NFT today is confined to digital art, but PolkaFantasy is taking extra steps to explore the endless possibilities of the NFT space outside of simple novelties. With PolkaFantasy, special NFTs can be used within the game to battle and interact with each other. With our play-to-earn game mechanic and exclusive in-game rewards, we will form a strong ecosystem with partners to make owning NFTs a part of our daily lives in near future."

Bullish on this team, and the development of this space et al.

5. Is this sub-sector of the market still viable if NFTs turn out to be a bubble and go bust??

NFTs won't go bust. But - Specific NFTs' value most certainly will - and were designed to, a la Logan Paul's Dink Doink or CryptoZoo -- lazy cash grabs with rugs designed especially for pulling.

The technology in its own right, however, is another thing altogether - and to equate its value with its worst uses is very like equating the value of email technology to spam.

Nonfungible Tokens can effectively imbue objects, events, persons, and entities with interactivity, immutability, genealogy, temporality, extra dimensionality - in very real and physical terms. I feel sorry for anyone buying or operating outside the space under the illusion that this is just a?new-fangled pet rock.

Traditional - 'off-chain' - digital assets and data, central DBs, even on public clouds,?are?extremely vulnerable to complete wipe-out. As an example, we only have Toy Story 2 because a Pixar employee on maternity leave had one additional copy of the entire digital asset - the film and every file, image, and sound associated with it - on her personal laptop at home when the team accidentally deleted the master in-office.

When you have thousands of nodes globally upkeeping every asset, that kind of vulnerability is gone. This is the difference between Web2 and Web3's immutability. This is why they say, "blockchain fixes this" or, more broadly, distributed ledger technology fixes this.

There?are?not only oracles and protocols for restoring DLT digital assets, but also existing mechanisms for making loss near-impossible (absolutely something most other objects can't do) -- they're just not often utilized by most, as it requires more than single-click purchase UX -- though players like Loopring and applications like Swiss wallet?are?making the interfaces here more intuitive and user friendly (try and judge the efficacy of the internet based on 1980s interfaces).

The incepting point of blockchain technology and subsequent distributed ledger technologies is not efficiency - though, it arguably is more efficient, when we consider Hedera's lottery-driven protocols & Etherium's coming ability to shard work, fees, etc.

Solana's time-travel proof protocol also satisfies the same needs for scalability in digital assets and micro-transactional tokenized activity - without sacrificing trustless architecture underlying a heavily-trafficked network - hence the impressive roll-out of Fractal's SOL-based gaming NFT platform (kudos).

The point is to make activities possible that cannot take place without disinterested, immutable systems to guarantee information. You can trust your company's MongoDB caches because a gut Bayesian probability check would tell you that the incentives?are?too low and risks & costs too high to monkey with, say, innocuous platform analytics.

You can't, however, engage with countless parties to trade and collaborate anywhere and for anything when reduced to relying only upon private DBs & courts as your backup. The transactions haven't taken place before - they?are?now.

I love Bitcoin. There is more than one application for distributed ledger technology. It's not hypothetical, it's happening from gov & enterprise on down. NFTs?are?part of this evolution, and it's a veritable Cambrian Explosion.

6. Additional considerations re the present NFT Gaming landscape.

When asked about the application of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, I've always said one thing (and then too many things, being an annoying?evangelist),?'The technology is?unbelievably?well-suited to three major sectors: Finance, Healthcare, and Gaming.'

For finance, solving double-spend, huge swathes of fraud, global market trust with smart-contracted exchange --?are?disruptions worth quadrillions in releasing unprecedented dormant value in menial work-turned productive capital -- and making before impossible trade now possible by eliminating court reliance to initiate contracts.

For healthcare, not only?are?electronic medical records a larger problem in data theft, as noted by the FBI - who also pinpointed blockchain's immutability and encryption as a godsend - but also the legacy file storage, format, and sharing system render patient rights very difficult to enforce, but also medical research incredibly slow and expensive to conduct, with EMRs going for upwards of $1MM per copy. Blockchain can provide smart-contracted rights enforcement, eliminate loss & theft, and lower the cost of records for research by making them easier to access via permission -- possibly providing passive income enough to contribute to a global UBI from participating in medical research with your shared, secured medical data.

Gaming is already native to digital assets and their secondary markets as well as to tokenizing activity & fostering global collaborative work, creativity, and markets. Blockchain and wider DLTs bring a 3rd dimension - or a z-axis - ?to everything they're already doing, from validated achievements; provably rare assets that represent work, knowledge & experience; the easier elimination of cheats, fraud, and even predatory gambling algorithms.

The first two?are?some of the most regulated sectors of the economy. Though the reasoning is driven from a view of consumer protection, it's also resulted in bringing overwhelming stagnation to the respective spaces, regarding the adoption?of new technologies & procurement of disruptive new vendors - but gaming is the wild, wild west.?

Gaming will be the testing ground for every mechanic in Web3,?XR, or 'The Metaverse' and the post-covid economy.

>>,

Elizabeth.ai