Race is ON!

It’s 2019 and the internet is everywhere. Our phones are smart, as are our contracts, watches and cars. The World Wide Web is so prevalent in our lives, you would be forgiven for thinking that the dominance of the internet was always deemed inevitable. Yet for the first 4 years following the launch of the world’s first website, the internet remained a niche invention used primarily by scientist and researchers to share information. It wasn’t until the Netscape web browser went live in 1994 that the internet became the ubiquitous connection tool it is today. Crypto is waiting for a similar ‘Netscape moment’ to catapult it past the infrastructure-building phase and into mass adoption. Out all possible use-cases, its is highly likely that the first decentralized application with over 100,000 daily active users (DAU) will be some sort of blockchain game. For one, gamers tend to be younger and more technologically-savvy — exactly the traits that personify crypto enthusiasts. Gamers, like crypto enthusiasts, live at the bleeding-edge where old technology quickly becomes obsolete. The natural overlap between the gaming and crypto communities sets gaming up to be the first mass-adopted use-case of blockchain technology.

Without further ado, let us take a look at some of the base-layer protocols on which the killer game could be built.

I did not include Ethereum here because, while Vitalik is nerd god, Ethereum’s scalability issues are one of the worst-kept secrets in the crypto space. Show me Eth 2.0 and then we’ll talk.

EOS

Token Price (May 16th): $6.63

Market Cap: $6 billion

Consensus Mechanism: Delegated Proof of Stake

My Favourite EOS Game: EOS Knights

I must admit I was thrown off by EOS at first. For starters, token holders don’t get rewarded for participating in the consensus process. Unlike Cosmos and Loom, which grant ordinary token holders a share of token inflation, 100% of the block rewards on EOS go to the Block Producers (BPs.) Furthermore, allegations of vote buying and collusion between BPs dominated headlines in late 2018 as Huobi came under fire for orchestrating a ‘quid-pro-quo’ system with fellow BPs. Yet, it is hard to ignore the most active blockchain as measured by Blocktivity, especially following the recent announcement that the EOS BPs had agreed to burn $160 million worth of tokens. After watching Narcos, I’m pretty sure cartels don’t burn their own money.

EOS was built to become the ‘home of the dApps’ — a scalable smart-contract platform that prioritizes free transactions and lightning-quick processing speed — and went live with its mainnet in June 2018. Since then, it has put up impressive numbers, with 63,000 daily active addresses moving an average of $103 million worth of EOS daily. 3 out of the 5 highest-ranking dApps by daily active users on dAppRadar call the EOS blockchain home, including EOS Knights, a mobile-based roleplaying game that has quickly become a fan favourite.

I’m still missing a few things before going full-on EOS fanboy. Firstly, despite its free transaction model, EOS has a number of ‘hidden costs’ that are shackling applications from reaching peak scalability. One such cost is the price of RAM, a database used to store smart contract information on the EOS blockchain. According to EOSX, a single gigabyte of RAM would cost a developer around 47,000 EOS ($253,800.) That’s just too much. Also missing is a standard for NFTs, similar to the ERC-721 standard on Ethereum, which would create dynamic in-game economies while allowing scarce game assets to be traded for each other or exchanged for real money.

Loom

Token Price: $0.077

Market Cap: $77 million

Consensus Mechanism: Delegated Proof of Stake

My Favourite Loom Game: Axie Infinity

When I say blockchain gaming, you say Loom. Billed as ‘EOS on Ethereum’, the Loom Network rose to popularity as the home of CryptoZombies, an interactive educational game teaching the next generation of Solidity developers. Loom is designed as a series of sidechains, each running its own delegated Proof of Stake consensus mechanism, linked to the Loom mainnet, known as the “Plasmachain” and from there to the Ethereum mainnet. Each game can decide whether to run on the Plasma chain, Loom’s mainnet, or spin up a its own dAppchain and connect to the Plasmachain using Plasma cash technology. This allows developers to not only have their cake, but eat it two by benefiting from both the speed of delegated Proof of Stake and the security of Ethereum-based crypto assets. In-game items are represented as ERC-721, allowing them to be traded on exchanges such as OpenSea.

A firm favourite of mine on the Loom Network is Axie Infinity. Leave your CryptoKitty at home, Axie Infinity lets you buy, collect and train adorable monsters and has a thriving community, including many who stream their Axie battles on DLive. Everybody knows that real gamers stream, so this is an encouraging step forward for blockchain gaming.

Cosmos (ATOM)

Token Price: $4.44

Market Cap: $846 million

Consensus Mechanism: Tendermint BFT

My Favourite Cosmos Project: None are live

The youngest chain on the block, Cosmos launched its mainnet in March 2019 as the first step to its grand vision of an ‘Internet of Blockchain.’ Also known as the ‘Cosmos Hub’, the mainnet will serve as a focal point to which a series of sidechains, called zones, connect. Consensus is achieved by means of Tendermint BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerance), a voting-based system resembling the Delegated Proof of Stake mechanism used by EOS and Loom. Validators on the Cosmos network are responsible for securing the network, reaching consensus and participating in governance within the Tendermint BFT-based system. They are selected based on the number of ATOM tokens ‘bonded’ to them by either themselves or ‘delegates’ — token holders who choose to delegate their responsibility to their choice of validators, who charge a commission for their service.

While there are no games currently running on Cosmos, it is a pioneer in a new ‘hub-and-spoke’ model that is being utilized by other chains such as Polkadot. As Ethereum continues to delay the launch of a range of scaling technologies, such as sharding and Casper Proof-of-Stake, attention is beginning to shift towards multi-chain networks which prioritize scalability. Games could choose to build on the Cosmos hub or spin up their own parallel zone chain which can then be connected to the hub using Interblockchain Communication.

Cosmos is looking good fellas.

In short, I’m not a betting lad but if I were, I’d put my hard-earned cash money on one of these three platforms housing the first massively adopted blockchain game.