At Origin Protocol, we are driven by a desire to build decentralized marketplaces where value from rent-seeking middlemen is redistributed to individual buyers and sellers. Our core mission is to reduce transaction fees and promote free and transparent commerce to communities around the world. Together with our marketplace partners, Origin envisions a future in which highly specialized marketplaces will allow users to have peer-to-peer (P2P), personal digital asset trading experiences on Ethereum. With blockchain making inroads in the mobile gaming industry, there have been interesting changes on the horizon and this is no exception for Origin.

We are thrilled to announce our very first ERC-721 Non-Fungible Token (NFT) partnership with Metaps Plus this month. This marketplace partnership will change the current sharing economy landscape in Korea to build a decentralized P2P game character marketplace for Cryptokitties-like mobile character mining game, Dig Star. Metaps Plus will build an ERC-721 exchange on Origin’s platform to enable game makers to trade digital assets on a decentralized marketplace. This marks the very first ERC-721 partnership for Origin, and it is an important early use case for Origin’s decentralized, open source platform.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with ERC-721, it is the standard interface for Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) which are characterized by their individually distinctive and unique features. No token is the same as another, and NFTs are used to create digital scarcity that is verifiable within the ERC-721 network. Under ERC-721, a set of protocols on what each NFT can do with regards to initiating movement, defining ownership and storing information about non-fungible items is defined. In essence, NFTs are unique and distinctive tokens that you can find on Ethereum in the form of ERC-721 tokens that have individual identities and properties. At Origin, we believe the strength of NFTs stems from the very fact that every token has distinguishable properties where this uniqueness provides every user a personal experience within the network.

About Dig Star & Metaps Plus

Flowchart of Dig Star & ERC-721 Game Item Marketplace

Dig Star is a mobile character mining game built on Ethereum. With the launch of the character game item marketplace, users can play mining games and exchange digital character items all in a single platform. Only the creatures that are traded on the exchange will be able to access special minerals called Cp, which can be refined back to the ETH on the exchange. On October 19th of this year, Dig Star will be launched on Google Play, the App store and the web. In addition to the Android/iOS version, a PC version of the game will also become available.

Focused on connecting cryptocurrency into everyday-use with existing platform and mobile infrastructure layer, Metaps Plus is a leading fintech & blockchain platform in South Korea. As the Korean subsidiary of Metaps Group listed in Tokyo Stock Exchange, Metaps Plus targets to form and create supportive infrastructure for digital currencies to be integrated on various platforms and mobile apps. In January 2016, the company acquired the mobile commerce company ‘SMARTCON’ and became the largest mobile Fin-Tech company in Korea.

Metaps Plus will be able to interact and connect with other blockchain game partners by building ERC-721 game item exchange on Origin Protocol for the first time in Korea.

— Seungyeon Kim, CEO of Metaps Plus

Future of ERC-721 & NFT Marketplaces for Origin

With a mission to build decentralized, open source P2P marketplaces on blockchain without traditional intermediaries, Origin is excited to support the future implementation of ERC-721 and growth in the NFT network through this partnership. 2018 has been a great year for the NFTs, with many new groups releasing games and collectibles like Cryptokitties. The Cryptokitties market alone, which made its first introduction to the world in late 2017, generated 12 million dollars in two weeks after its launch and reached 25 million dollars in aggregate. This unleashed an unprecedented interest for NFTs within the global blockchain community, signifying a great potential for NFTs. Since the Cryptokitties were introduced, we saw a rapid growth in the NFT marketplaces globally and new applications of the ERC-721 technology in various forms of ‘collectible items’ emerged. The uniqueness of each NFT offers a personal experience for the participants, which is fundamentally different from ERC-725, and we see a great potential in the NFT marketplaces that can be built on top of ERC-721.

At Origin, our mandate is to build great technology with our marketplace partners to ensure we deliver meaningful value to our end users of our platform. We allow permissionless development to our marketplace partners, which means we do not have to explicitly allow someone to build on our technology. We encourage anyone and everyone to build on top of Origin, and our partners are choosing to build on Origin Protocol as we help them get their product to market effectively, and the “shared network effects” of building on our platform offer great benefits in optimizing their user base. It is our honor to have many great international projects partner with us, and we are determined to launch Korea’s very first crypto game marketplace on Origin’s decentralized, P2P open source platform with Metaps Plus.

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