In the summer of 2017, we began our journey with one founding question: how will the advent of blockchain change the future of gaming?

These were our answers, which have since become our pillars for blockchain game design:

True Digital Ownership

Through the power of blockchain, we can now build a world where players retain every coin, card, and collectable beyond their games of origin. These digital assets can be held in crypto wallets, affording players permanent and absolute dominion over their digital estates, unlocking a universe of interoperable gaming and economic potential. As true owners, players are free to sell, trade, or augment their digital assets however they want.

Provable Fairness

By its very nature, decentralized infrastructure is protected from malicious actors and external influence. Many describe DApps as being “trustless”, in that users don’t need to exhibit trust in each other since the laws of the DApp itself govern every interaction. Players can maintain full privacy of their identity, and only identify through a pseudonym tied to their crypto wallet address where their game items reside. They engage with each other in competitive play where the rules are open to all, match history is deterministic, and every player move is cryptographically signed for authenticity. Moves are impossible to forge and breaking the rules is easily detectable. The provable fairness of the network supports the robustness and health of the DApp’s ecosystem and the value within.

Play To Earn

Through the power of smart contracts together with cryptoeconomic design, we can now give players the opportunity to participate in gaming experiences that generate and distribute digital assets based on their outcome. We can create worlds in which winning battles, completing quests, and defeating opponents award digital assets securely. Whether players keep the rewards, trade them, or sell them for cryptocurrency is entirely their choice.

Interoperable Economies

Blockchain technology provides a standardized economic infrastructure for applications to build a network of players, goods and rewards. The interoperable nature of these systems affords players the ability to move between game economies with ease. In-game items, themselves a form of tokenized asset, can be traded and/or converted for other cryptocurrencies like ETH. Suddenly, all game economies can be connected, producing one massive, navigable ecosystem, offering greater network effects and value transfer between players and games. Gamers can play to earn currency in one economy and spend it in another.

Mass Collaboration

The economic value and business model of a blockchain game reside at the protocol level. The game items are what have value, not the software licenses or subscriptions. This means that blockchain video games can be open source and that players can modify and extend the games they’re playing. Communities will evolve video games in ways never before seen, which means that the games’ original creators and the players will contribute to the ecosystem, participate in and benefit from the economies. It’s a mass collaboration in which everyone wins.