Today we are delighted to announce that we have engaged in a mutual investment partnership with Animoca Brands, a publicly traded developer and publisher of internationally recognized mobile games and brands including Beast Quest, Ben 10, Garfield, Doraemon and Astro Boy.

Animoca has recently emerged as a leader in blockchain gaming through their commercial relationship with Axiom Zen and Dapper Labs, the creators of CryptoKitties, and their acquisition of Pixowl, who are launching a blockchain version of their hit game Sandbox.

At Harmony, we share Animoca’s vision that gaming will drive large scale adoption for blockchain technology. Gamers have been early adopters and drivers of new technology trends through internet gaming and graphics cards, and we believe it will be the same for blockchain. After all, gamers are already familiar with the concepts of virtual currencies and digital ownership.

Blockchain enables new features for games such as true ownership and transferability of in-game items and currencies, and provably fair game mechanics. Moreover, these features can be deployed into games with existing user bases for immediate adoption rather than starting from scratch. Sandbox is one great example of this approach.

However, as gaming drives mass adoption of blockchain, it will also drive demand for scalable infrastructure. It is no coincidence that CryptoKitties was the first DApp to clog the Ethereum network and demonstrate the need for a more powerful network. That is where Harmony comes in.

Imagine this game hosted on Blockchain. Image credit: Activision Blizzard

Harmony can provide the low-cost, high-throughput consensus platform that game developers need to power their blockchain based games. We are building a protocol that enables on-chain hosting of fast-paced game mechanics—so fast we could host even game logic that requires low latency and high APM, a topic we plan to explore in future posts—and cross-game NFT item ecosystems with thousands if not millions of users. This means that we will be ready to support game developers with large user bases from the get-go.

However, just building a fast blockchain is not enough. We need to understand the problems that game developers face so that we can better design Harmony to suit their needs. This partnership will enable us to learn from an industry leader so that we can be ready to power games that Animoca and others develop in the future. By working with Animoca, we will be well positioned to capture the opportunities that blockchain gaming presents for scalable protocols like Harmony.

If you are building a blockchain game and are interested to work with us, please get in touch at hello@harmony.one. We would love to form more partnerships in this growing space.