



[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource GamesPress.]

ZUG, Switzerland – Aug. 15, 2019 – Waves Platform, an open network and decentralized environment for Web 3.0 applications, launches Item Market – a unique platform allowing game developers an easy way of introducing open economy to their titles and a secure way for players to trade their digital possessions. Any in-game item or currency can be tied to a blockchain token ensuring trustless confirmation of ownership and unrestricted trade. Except for the trade itself, tokenization brings new mechanics to games moving digital items as close to their physical counterparts as they ever were. In-game tokenization allows to change player-2-player and player-2-developer interactions, making them more interesting and attractive to players while improving monetization and user longevity. Throughout in-game tokenization ownership of game items is given to players. They can be sure that items belong to them and can be sold or traded securely. On the other hand, game developers can implement new monetization models, like taxation of player-2-player trades. Blockchain enables players to earn from their gaming. Players can buy and sell in-game items with the added security provided by the blockchain. Non-paying customers can gain access to valuable items by exchanging their time for money. “Blockchain shifts the centralized paradigm taking data monopoly away from enterprises. What is yours is really yours and anyone can prove it. This brings the relationships between gamers and developers on a new level providing an open economy in the sphere,” comments Sasha Ivanov, Founder and CEO of Waves Platform. “Today our team presents Item Market, a platform that brings a new life in the gaming realm putting players and developers on the same side!” Everyone remembers CryptoKitties. Each CryptoKitty is a non-fungible token (NFT) on the Ethereum blockchain. Waves Platform uses the same approach. And with Node 1.0 update it became possible to issue NFTs on the Waves blockchain. The Waves development team created an SDK to make blockchain integration easier than ever, enabling developers to plug NFTs straight into their games and providing seamless user experience for gamers. For additional information, please, proceed here. Item Market launches with two already available games. One of them is a collab with famed YouTube video ‘Nyan Cat’ – ‘Nyan Cat: The Crypto Race!’ from the Gamedelta studio, the creators of Ether Kingdoms. The new game is a racing game with open economy developed using Waves blockchain. The gameplay is simple: each cat has a portfolio with several leading cryptocurrencies. The goal is to distribute 100% of the portfolio to 4 cryptocurrencies in such a way that it is the one that grows the most during the race. All the information on each currency is taken from Binance or CoinMarketCap API in real time – open economy in action! About Waves Waves (https://wavesplatform.com) is an open source platform and decentralised environment for Web 3.0 applications, offering a wide range of purpose-designed tools for making the process of creating and running dApps easy and accessible. Launched in 2016 by Sasha Ivanov and a core development team, Waves has since released numerous successful blockchain-based solutions and has steadily developed into a rich and constantly-growing technological platform. Waves’ technology is designed to address the needs of businesses and technology companies that want to leverage the properties of blockchain systems – including their security, auditability, verifiability and the trustless execution of transactions and business logic. Waves Platform provides everything required to support the backend of Web 3.0 services. In 2017, Waves successfully launched its mainnet with LPoS, its decentralised exchange DEX and later the Waves-NG protocol. In 2018, the Waves development team delivered the first implementation of smart contracts. This was followed by the release of the RIDE programming language in 2019, a simple and powerful language for programming logic. Moreover, in June 2019 the mainnet of Waves Enterprise, a global private blockchain solution, was launched. All of this is complemented with a broad infrastructure: an IDE for sandbox development, tools, SDKs, libraries, frameworks and protocols for convenient and easy integrations.