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By Igor Pesin, Partner, Life.Sreda
2017 is the watershed year for cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies, with the encouraging surge of Bitcoin and Ethereum prices as well as the ICOs that had raised significance of capital. However cryptocurrencies remain to be used by a relatively small population of tech-savvy users. Understandably, the technical skillsets and knowledge to set up a cryptocurrency wallet and executing transactions are not quite easy for many people.
The key to continuous progress of cryptocurrencies development inevitably lies in driving mass adoption. Many specialized blockchain projects are focused on applications for specific sectors. This is definitely the right direction, especially when some applications already have a ready-to-go audience that are tech-savvy to embrace disruptive technologies. One of these applications that makes sense would be the video games industry.
Gamers have spent over US$100 billion online in games just in 2016 alone. These transactions are currently made via traditional payment gateways and appstores that accept fiat currencies. The payment infrastructure in game industry is quite underdeveloped. This means payment transactions between game studios, marketers, gamers and other stakeholders are expensive and inefficient. There have been few attempts to fix payment infrastructure in games via cryptocurrencies. Perhaps none has taken off so far but NITRO would be a serious contender attempting this.
Making the market accessible to all
Having already raised $1.5M in private sales, the Nitro project, which is an online consortium that involves the creation of an electronic marketplace (“Nitro Marketplace”) embarking to issue new NOX (or “NOX Token”) Ethereum-based tokens.
The project is mainly focused on developing a platform where NITRO will fund game studios to develop game titles that will incorporate the use of NOX and gamers can purchase virtual goods in-game and in-platform using NOX. Gamers would also stand a chance to be rewarded with NOX by game studios if they perform certain activities such as game review, rating and social network engagement.
The Nitro project is supported by iCandy Interactive Ltd, which is publishing all the video-games funded by the Nitro project. iCandy Interactive Ltd is a Australia-incorporated and Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)-listed public company. Nitro is quite different from the regular ICO market players due to its backing from already established company with existing user base.
The Nitro project is built by the team with successful business track record in the IT industry. Nitro’s management is consisted of largely iCandy personnel. iCandy counts strategic institutional shareholders as its backers that include ASX-listed venture builder Fatfish Internet Group, Chinese Internet conglomerate Baidu and well known Japanese VC IncubateFund. This track record is a foundation for building a sustainable business.
An expanded user base of 348 million users
Adding to the existing 23 million smartphone user base, iCandy recently acquired a major game portfolio from Animoca Brands and with that it adds another 325 million smartphone users onto its game portfolio. iCandy has all its games to be ready to accept the NOX tokens as soon as possible.
The core benefits for game developers implementing this is to have a better payment mechanism to receive payment from gamers that will significantly improve their margin while also gaining a cost-effective channel to market their games directly to gamers via engagement on NITRO Marketplace. Marketing games online is currently a costly affair due to the dormination of marketing platform by large Internet corporates.
Funding of games and NITRO Marketplace
Nitro aims to fund game titles from the part of its token sale proceeds. Further, these funded games will share up to 20-30% of their revenues with Nitro up to a maximum period of 5 years from the date of funding.
This shared revenue is to be paid to Nitro in the form of NOX, to be purchased by game studios from exchanges, which will create demand for NOX. NITRO will use the received shared revenue for funding new games and also its operations. NOX can also be used in as a in-game currency by gamers to purchase in-game virtual items.
In addition NITRO has set up a Rewards Pool that should become a participation trigger for its marketplace users. NOX holders that play games, review games or participating in game tournaments have a chance to receive rewards in the form of NOX from the Rewards Pool via a weightage algorithm employed by NITRO. This should boost engagement at the NITRO Marketplace , creating a game network that all stakeholders in the industry will benefit from. In order to work properly, the marketplace needs to be transparent and efficient in transactions – making blockchain technology the ideal solution for it.
Conclusion
The future of cryptocurrencies is certainly unlimited. I believe we are at the top of the iceberg in terms of adoption. The majority of the world’s population have not used cryptocurrencies today. This should change as the adoption will be driven by specialized sectors that could best harness the decentralized and transactional abilities of the blockchain. Gaming industry is among these specialized sectors. It is obvious and I am eager to see how NITRO would potentially change the face of gaming in a few years time.
NITRO’s presale has started on 19th November 2017 and its crowd sale starts on 1 December 2017.
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The author Igor Pesin, is a partner of Singapore based fintech VC firm Life.sreda that is in the midst of launching its dedicated blockchain investment fund, BBFund. BBFund is an advisor to the NITRO project.