The past few days I had the pleasure to discuss with Ja Rouge from Silica Nexus and learn everything about the XR project under development from the Convergence of 4 Dimensions LLC lead by Andrew J. Prell.

A small introduction:

For those who don’t know about Silica Nexus, it is a Cross-Reality (XR) project that aims to connect devices, games and user experience under one umbrella. A future-proof concept that is way away of its time. While Silica Nexus itself is not a blockchain platform, the games and the marketplace will be, as well as DROID, the native cryptocurrency that will fuel the economy. Droid is currently on IEO Stage on LATOKEN.

Good day Ja, it’s great to have you with us today. Silica nexus seems ambitious and innovative the same way but before we talk about this, please introduce your self and tell me about your role in the project.

Hi George, thank you for the opportunity to discuss the Silica Nexus project. I am the Social Media Community Manager for Silica neXus. Like a lot of startups I wear a lot of hats. I post our social media, manage our telegram and telegram moderators, seek out marketing opportunities and game developers to partner with.

That’s great Ja. Definitely, there is a lot of work to be done in such a project across all fields. Let’s talk about Silica Nexus itself, what are you guys building?

The ultimate goal of Silica neXus is to create a complete digital universe that we saw in Ready Player One. Instead, of calling it the Oasis we call it the neXus. In this world, all devices will be able to connect from mobile phones, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, computers, simulators, etc. We call this Cross Reality (XR) because it connects all of these different devices. We will call our digital world Silica neXus.

To make the neXus possible there needs to be a software backbone that connects all the devices in an open framework. This is our ultimate goal.

This sounds great Ja, XR seems to be the future, in a universe of connected devices including VR, players will be able to become who they want! The first thing to come as I see in your roadmap is the Silica Nexus Marketplace. Can you share with us some more information about it?

The neXus Marketplace is for buying, selling and trading NFT’s. Here are some features our upcoming Marketplace will have:

Buy NFT’s directly from Silica neXus. Auction your NFT’s. Peer to peer trading of NFT’s. Ability to purchase multiple NFT’s at once instead of one at a time. Compatibility with multiple blockchains (Ethereum is first others will come down the road). Kiosks at physical video game arcades. You will be able to turn in your tickets won at the arcade for NFT’s.

Sounds great, the Silica Nexus Marketplace will fuel p2p transactions between players. What about the Kiosks? Silica Nexus will expand to Arcade and Theme parks, right? What are the core reasons you decided to take this path and how is this going to work for arcade and themed park players?

The biggest cost of making a video game is marketing. We think that when players in arcades can choose cool video game prizes (NFT’s) over traditional prizes like candy or plush toys that video games will win the day. If someone has a new video game item they will want to try out the game and play it. So all video game developers have to do is make NFT’s and we can onboard players through their kiosks. This will save developers millions of dollars!

Indeed marketing requires a lot of money for a game to reach players, I have to say that you are developing an interesting concept. This helps a lot of games and lowers the marketing cost. Give us some more information about the team behind Silica Nexus, we can see on your website that the team consists of gaming veterans and pioneers of VR in the 90s.

Our team has been active in video games a very long time and have worked on major projects like Atari and the Sims. Our founder Andrew Prell worked on Virtual Reality in the early ’90s and made VR for Wolfenstein 3D!

VR indeed needed a lot of years to reach the stage it is today. Are you developing your own blockchain? What are your plans for solving the current scalability issues blockchains have? A project like Silica Nexus should be able to handle thousands of transactions, if not millions, per second.

We are not developing our own blockchain. We believe there are already high-quality blockchains available. And that geniuses like Vitalik and Dan Larimer will figure out how to improve their blockchains.

We are solving scalability the way Binance solves scalability. Our Marketplace is an NFT exchange in a manner similar to Binance. When you trade on Binance it’s faster because it’s not actually going over the blockchain. The neXus Marketplace will do a similar thing.

We will also create API’s to make it easier for games to interact with our Marketplace and directly connect to us. This way players won’t deal with gas fees and slow down from networks like Ethereum. Of course, players will always have the ability to remove their NFT’s from the neXus and put them on the blockchain.

Sounds quite interesting, so there will be a “withdraw” from neXus feature where items are sent on the blockchain. The way I understand this, people will “deposit” their items in the marketplace to trade right?

That is correct. People will be able to deposit their items on the neXus where they can trade peer to peer or auction their items. They can also directly join the neXus by winning tickets in their local video game arcade and exchanging their tickets for NFT’s.

To move into our next question, based on the Silica Nexus roadmap, PAE (Player Acquisition Engine) will be available by November 2019, how will the PAE work and what elements will consist of this? What’s the ultimate goal behind this?

So we are shooting for the PAE to officially launch in November. I always point out that we will not launch the software unless we believe it is secure.

The Player Aquisition Engine is in fact our neXus Marketplace with the video game arcade function. We believe:

Players will choose video game items over traditional prizes like candy. If they win a video game item they will want to try the game. Players who acquire video game prizes will become new players.

Thus our Prize neXus where players win NFT’s will onboard a lot of new players for blockchain video games.

This sounds like a great way to get new players on board. The video games spend a fortune on acquiring and retaining new players. This should dramatically help games to find new players. Now, let’s stick to the roadmap, a year later, November 2020, XR (Cross Reality) should be live. Based on this, Silica Nexus will offer the same experience across all devices, How are you going to do this? Let’s take for example Ether Legends which you recently partnered for the marketplace, will the game be accessible through a variety of devices? And if yes, how will the game experience be?

The Cross Reality (XR) technology is proprietary software that Andrew Prell worked on in previous software projects (like Agora Interactive). It is not blockchain technology but is a completely different solution.

So Ether Legends would integrate into our XR system that would intrinsically make differing devices compatible with the same game. They would still need to develop the VR world vs the mobile world and so on.

Picture this: Ether Legends is a card game. Blockchain makes XR easier because all of your items are not stored directly in-game and can thus easily move in between devices. Imagine playing Ether Legends on your smartphone and/or computer in 2D and the next day playing it in VR. The VR version would have you in a hyper-realistic card tournament and you would see your avatar’s hands moving the cards around. You would look around and see other avatars playing the game. It would be like being in a physical card game tournament.

After playing VR you go to the airport and see a new tournament has begun so you get on your smartphone and play against people who are in the VR tournament with no problem. They still see the hyper-realistic avatar playing against them but you are able to play against them in a simplified version on your phone. That is the power of XR.

The concept sounds exciting I must say. Let’s talk about the DROID token and your IEO. As I can see on LAtoken, Silica Nexus has raised over 4,500 ETH. Is your project funded or you put your hopes on the IEO? What will happen if Silica Nexus doesn’t meet the funding goal?

There is a Daoist saying I once heard it goes “If you got popped it’s because you were a bubble.“

We are not relying on our IEO to get us off the ground. Silica neXus has been a volunteer community for a long time (volunteers that get paid in $Droids). If zero Ether is raised on LA Token we will carry on as we have for a long time. The neXus Marketplace will get made. It’s just about how long it will take to get made. Funding will obviously speed up development. But we are not a fragile project.

So to recap, Silica Nexus is an XR project aiming to connect devices and games into a single universe. A technology that is pretty much developed over the past years by the board members. All this is united under the Droid token which fuels the whole ecosystem right? Am I missing something here? Anything you would like to add for our readers?

Great summary. The main thing I always point out is that we have a series of smaller steps that will get us to the completion of our vision. The smaller steps themselves are developments badly needed for blockchain video games.

For instance, our first step is the neXus Marketplace. Having a system in place to easily hold and trade NFT’s is a component of Cross Reality (XR). If you have an easy way to store your video game items that is compatible with all devices that is a big deal. It would be like having a memory card that works with Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo! So whenever looking at our roadmap remember that it’s another step towards Cross Reality.

It was a pleasure to talk with you Ja, last question for today which I always like to ask in our interviews. Where do you see blockchain gaming in 5 years from now?

5 years is a long way out. Here is where I see blockchain gaming in 5 years: Mainstream. Popular games will utilize NFT’s because it will be an easy way to onboard new players. There will be a strong video game item economy and there will be a surprising amount of teenagers who make it rich because of the growth of blockchain video games.

Once again, I would like to thank Ja for being with us and sharing all this information with egamers.io We wish only the best to Silica Nexus project. See you in the Oasis everyone!

Visit The Silica Nexus Website