A Singapore-based company Egretia is aiming to combine HTML5 - a technology to structure and present content online - with blockchain to create the world’s first HTML5 blockchain engine and platform. The new technology could increase blockchain apps popularity, Egretia team believes.

New hardware upgrades and rapid development of the Internet were needed to prepare HTML5 for a mass adoption. Now, when roadblocks as performance and traffic have been eliminated, the technology is widely used in games, marketing, video, media, and other industries.

Using the power of mobile social networking, HTML5 content has been applied in mobile apps and created entirely new business models. According to Egretia, click-and-play, viral transmission, user engagement, and other characteristics of an HTML5 game make it a perfect fit for current market demands.

“Currently, users of HTML5 games already account for 47 percent of all mobile game users,” the company said in the white paper. “In terms of the business model, in-game payments, instead of advertising, has become the main source of revenue accounting for 68 percent. Combined, HTML5 games already have an independent commercial profitability.”

Is the HTML5 market set for growth?

In 2017, the market size of HTML5 games in China exclusively exceeded 10 bln yuan - more than $157 mln - and continues to grow. Peter Huang, Egretia’s founder, believes that by combining blockchain technology with HTML5, developers will be able to rapidly come up with new blockchain applications.

“Creating a blockchain gaming technology service provider seems relatively early, but we feel that this is a promising direction to take,” Peter Huang, said in an interview published on the company’s blog. “Four years ago, our opinion regarding the development of HTML5 games was that HTML5 gaming certainly could have better performance on the mobile platform. Now Tencent, Facebook, and other internet giants all have a HTML5 game line.”

For example, Google launched Progressive Web Apps (PWA), the Chinese search giant Baidu came up with the concept of “light apps”. Facebook released HTML5-based Instant Games with more than 1 bln daily active users. In January 2018, Tencent WeChat released a series of mini-games, some of which gained over 100 mln daily active users.

It seems that, after all, HTML5 is becoming one of the global Internet technology trends, the company says.

What are the benefits?

HTML5 technology works across platforms so users do not have to download HTML5 games or apps. They can simply click on the link and start playing. A link can be easily shared, providing other users an access to games.

According to Egretia, that is one of the reasons why HTML5 games go viral on social media platforms. Because of those characteristics, HTML5 games and apps can attract millions of users. By using this new emerging technology, blockchain apps could gain more popularity, Egretia founders believe.

Egret Technology, the startup’s strategic partner in China, has been focusing on developing HTML5 powered solutions for over the past four years. The company has already developed 14 products, such as the engine, a visual editor, animation tools, and cross-platform packaging tools. All tools can be used across different platforms and support both Windows and Mac devices.

In 2014, Egret Technology became the first company to develop Catch the Crazy Cat, the world's first HTML5 game on Wechat that gained more than 100 mln users in three days.

Worldwide community

The startup already has a huge community worldwide, the founders say. Egret Technology has been focusing on HTML5 for more than four years and currently has 200,000 developers across the globe. The content powered by Egret’s solutions is used on 1 bln mobile devices so the startup has a lot to add to the existing global blockchain ecosystem.

“There are a lot of instant games on Facebook powered by our solutions” company representatives claim. “We are bringing blockchain to the existing 200,000 developers and 1 bln mobile devices.”

In the future, developers would be able to use the system’s digital token, Egreten, in their own games. The platform is also planning to assist with games distribution, advertising, trading, storage, and communication.

Egretia’s team consists of passionate game industry veterans, professional developers, investors, blockchain technology advocates, and entrepreneurs. The startup’s founder Peter Huang, a former technical manager of Adobe Flash Platform, has 18 years of development and management experience in internet applications and game projects.