Photo by Alex Haney on Unsplash

THE PAST

Anyone who developed an interest in online gaming over the past decade would most likely have come across the term “Pay to Win”. The term first appeared in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when game developers began incorporating in-game purchases into their free-to-play video games.

Today, Pay to Win has become an infamous term in the gaming world. Users and players are willing to pay a small fee to access features that are normally unlocked as the game progresses. This presents an unfair balancing issue within online games. Although competitive gamers didn’t welcome this development, it provided a means of monetization for game developers and studios.

In the same years, the controversy surrounding loot boxes hit all-time highs. Most games offered players the opportunity to buy loot boxes that contained special rewards. At the start, loot boxes gained some success as there was a lot of hype surrounding their opening. YouTubers gained more views for simply opening loot boxes in their videos, but this hype drew significant attention to the uncertainty of the contents in these boxes. Gambling was the word being thrown around as cases of people being dissatisfied with rewards they got after spending large amounts of money on these boxes began to spring up.

Then came season passes or what most people know today as a battle or game pass. Season passes were first implemented by Valve, the parent company of the popular online multiplayer battle arena game, Dota2. It wasn’t even called a Season Pass, but a Compendium. The company needed more money for its international event and this Pass was the best way of generating money without introducing a Pay to Win system into the game. The pass offered only aesthetic items like skins, emotes, voice lines, and so on and was spread out across a tiered system that encouraged players to spend more time completing challenges in the game.

The efficiency of this new model didn’t go unnoticed by other popular titles, and it wasn’t long before they started implementing it too. In 2018, Epic Games added one in Fortnite, when the game was in its second season and had a lot of new players joining. Needless to say, it proved to be very successful. Today, pretty much every online multiplayer title has some sort of Battle Pass, usually seasonal.

THE PRESENT

The future of gaming is undoubtedly moving towards blockchain games, and this future holds a lot of promises. The most important promise is an opportunity for gamers to earn money from what they love doing best. But the current landscape of blockchain gaming doesn’t seem to be moving in this direction.

Like the Pay to Win era of gaming, blockchain games today seem to be moving towards the loot box system. There’s so much uncertainty on what the future of these games could look like, yet we keep seeing huge amounts of money being pumped into these games.

After taking a detailed look at the top 4 blockchain games (Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, Decentraland, and Alien Worlds) based on market cap and active users, I found a couple of things that they all had in common;

1. Some form of entry barrier

Three of these games had monetary barriers, with The Sandbox having by far the highest. The company’s first public gameplay event went live on November 29th this year, with access to the event granted through an NFT ticket called the Alpha Pass. Alpha Passes were to be gifted to 5000 “lucky” individuals. One thousand of these were up for grabs in a raffle for Sandbox Landowners, and 2,250 more were to be given out to Sandbox account holders via daily social contests over a three-week period. Alpha passes at the launch of this event were selling for an average price of about 2.7 ETH and are currently selling for about 1.8 ETH at the time of writing this article.

Cross over to Axie Infinity next where new players are required to buy at least three Axies to take part in the game. The cheapest Axie on the games marketplace costs about $95 and remember, three Axies are needed, so it’s approximately $285 to get started in the game. The only other options players have when it comes to getting Axies is through guilds offering scholarship programs and I’ll tell you out of personal experience that getting a scholarship from one of these guilds isn’t an easy task.

Decentraland had no monetary entry barrier but it required users to connect their noncustodial wallet to access the game. In Alien Worlds on the other hand, players are required to stake upwards of 40–80 WAX ($20–$40) to play somewhat comfortably.

2. Land emphasis

All four of these games offer virtual land, allowing buyers to own some form of digital real estate. Over the past year, we've seen an explosion in the value of digital land and it seems like it's becoming a trend for blockchain games to incorporate some form of digital land into their gameplay even if there isn't any clear pathway as to how it may affect players and developers in the future. Land in these games seems to be drawing attention away from important features like actual gameplay.

3. Low coverage

Low coverage across platforms was something I came across a few times while looking at these games. On Twitch, the highest coverage out of all four games was Axie Infinity, but it only had an average of 1.9k viewers daily with the most popular streamer averaging only 573 viewers.

The Sandbox Alpha event is the best look at what the platform’s gameplay could look like and one would expect a lot of gamers to be covering this event on YouTube but this is not the case. I was only able to find one person (out of a thousand landowners who were given early access) covering the event on YouTube. This probably suggests that landowners in the game only bought land for investment purposes without the intention of playing the game.

I also discovered that most content released for these games was around topics like investment opportunities, not gameplay. This should bring up major concerns as gameplay should be the number one priority of any game.

It’s disappointing to see that like most things in crypto today, a larger percentage of benefits go to early investors. This shouldn’t be the case for games. Blockchain games today feel like DeFi applications; there’s so much emphasis placed on value generation for investors and not gameplay for actual players. You can’t scroll past four tweets on the Twitter profiles of these games without coming across land sale announcements. It’s unfortunately rare to see new gameplay features getting announced.

This has a lot of resemblance to the pay-to-win era of gaming. With entry barriers so high in blockchain games today, it sounds more like pay to earn, not the play-to-earn gamers have been promised.

THE FUTURE

For someone who feels video games are the path to mass adoption of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, I'm disappointed by what these games have to offer today. Many would suggest that we’re still in very early stages and a lot of work is yet to be done, but I strongly believe that what we have today is very far from what the Play-to-Earn era of gaming will eventually look like.

I believe the most successful games of the Play to Earn era will not be games that are built on blockchain like we have today but traditional games that merge the legacy gaming system with the blockchain sector. Games that utilize blockchain technology to create digital scarcity, tradable items (NFTs) on secondary markets, and cryptocurrencies inside the game. Free-to-Play games with an emphasis on gameplay and competitiveness to earn.

The peak of this promised era would be one where individuals are easily onboarded unto games can and earn value solely through skill and determination using technology understandable and accessible to them. Games that can provide value for developers without distorting gameplay balance. Blockchain gaming needs an escape from this current cycle, its form of “Battle Pass”, and this is where I see real value. I don’t know why but I see this coming from an already popular game, maybe Fortnite, Zelda, Warzone, whatever really. It could be anyone but the question is who is ready to take the risk?

• Thanks for reading. I’d love to thank Hillary Omitogun for her contribution to this article.

• Please, this is just my wild opinion and it could change at any point. I'm very open to hearing opinions from other people. Also, while you're here, please check out my previous articles.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Initially, this article was started off with the intention of looking at tokens that had seen significant rises in value while the markets were in decline and reasons why this was happening. I ended up going down this rabbit hole of amazing projects across different categories in the space. What I found was the astonishing awesomeness of what blockchain and Cryptocurrencies can provide.

I’ve narrowed my findings down to four amazing projects. They span across, gaming, integrated finance, payments, and crowd-sourced funding.

Some honorable mentions that weren’t included in this article are Golem Network, Ocean Protocol, livepeer, Ethereum Name Service, kyber Network, and Decentral Games.

1. ULTRA (UOS)

What is Ultra?

Ultra is a next-generation PC game distribution platform powered by blockchain.

Why is Ultra Needed?

In a market heavily dominated by one key player (Steam), Ultra wants to democratize game distribution by leveling the playing field for developers, players, streamers, and everyone in the ecosystem. If you’re not familiar with Steam, it’s the Google Play Store or App store of PC gaming. Steam is the world’s largest distributor of PC games owning about 75% of the entire market share.

This dominance comes with a lot of downsides. As things stand, PC game makers have few options for bringing their games to consumers. Smaller developers have few options other than to publish on a platform that may or may not meet their needs. The largest distributors i.e Google Play Store, App Store, and Steam charge a 30% fee for distribution. These platforms also have a lot of restrictions on what takes place on their platform, earlier this year, we saw an example of this when Steam banned NFT’s.

What Does Ultra Offer?

Well, where one door is closed here, Ultra opens another more inclusive, innovative, and explanatory door. Ultra, unlike other distribution platforms, uses the power of its EOSIO blockchain to empower developers and gamers. It allows gamers to truly own games and in-game purchases on Ultra. These can also be, sold, traded, or given away within the platform’s marketplace.

Ultra also gives creators access to a wider audience. Streamers can stream content right from the platform, engage viewers and receive donations through THETAtv.

Live streaming on Ultra

Ultra’s unique approach allows developers to continue making revenue every time a game or NFT is resold while charging just 12% as a distribution fee. Within Ultra’s platform, the Ultra token (UOS) serves a range of functions, both at the protocol (staking) and app-level (transactions). Users can buy games and NFT’s, donate to streamers, access funds got from sales in the secondary market, and many more things using Ultra’s wallet.

Purchasing a game using Ultra’s wallet

Ultra has seen a lot of progress since it started in 2018. Alongside launching its Mainnet the platform has also announced some very impressive partnerships this year. Gaming giants like Ubisoft, AMD, and Skybound Entertainment are expected to release games on the platform early next year.

• *You can learn more about Ultra *here

2. MASK NETWORK (MASK)

While scrolling through Twitter have you ever come across an NFT you liked, a new Cryptocurrency you weren’t familiar with, a DAO voting link, an initial coin offering for a new token, or even just wanted to buy bitcoin but you didn’t want to leave Twitter. If yes, then you might love Mask.

Mask is a decentralized portal that lets users use decentralized applications (DApps) like crypto payments, decentralized finance, decentralized storage, e-commerce (digital goods/NFTs), and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) over existing social networks without having to migrate, creating what is referred to as a decentralized Applet (DApplet) ecosystem. The Mask Network essentially is a protocol that acts as a bridge between the internet and a decentralized network running on top.

Social network users account for about 90% of all Internet users worldwide and social networks have evolved into an infrastructure that only a select few can avoid. Direct competition with these heavyweights appears infeasible. Rather than building a new platform, Mask Network wants to connect Web2 (the current web) and so-called Web3, allowing the general public to use the improved web within existing mainstream platforms.

Mask in its earliest version provided the ability for users to send and receive encrypted posts on Twitter and Facebook.

In its next major version released, Mask enabled payments. Specifically, it introduced crypto giveaways or what it refers to as “red packets”. This allows users to give out their Cryptocurrencies to other Twitter users who have the Mask extension installed. Here’s a quick demo of how it works.

Going along the payment line, Mask taps into the personal finance space launching its Twitter trading widget enabled by CMC and Uniswap. Allowing users to trade and swap cryptos directly on Twitter by simply hovering over any $+ticker symbol of their choice or searching it through the search menu.

Users will also be able to send payments, trade tokens, borrow, follow top traders, engage in public offers, issue personal tokens, gamble on current events, and get professional portfolio analysis without ever leaving social networks.

The potential of what can be done through Mask is truly astonishing. Here are a few more examples of some of the things that can be done using Mask;

• Purchase or bid for NFTs via OpenSea or Rarible on Twitter

• Participate in token launches through ITO’s (Initial Twitter Offering)

• Set any NFT you own as your Twitter Profile Picture (verifiable on-chain)

• Aggregate all your digital activities i.e writing history, NFT collection, POAPs, donation records, etc all in your profile.

Although there are still a lot of problems en route to mass adoption (ETH’s Sky-high gas fee and sluggish transaction, Smart wallet to eliminate the private key hassle) Mask is changing the way we interact with crypto and I'm here for it.

*You can get more in-depth info on what Mask offers *here

3. SEEDIFY.FUND (SFUND)

As we all can see, a completely new era is starting for the gaming industry, whereas gamers were just about having fun before, new gamers are making money from time spent gaming, earning items like NFT’s and tokens in-game.

Seedify is an incubator and launchpad for blockchain games and gamers. It’s a blockchain ecosystem that includes a community-run seed fund, a decentralized incubator, and a launchpad. The project broadens the scope of blockchain gaming for both players and developers.

With approximately 2.7 billion gamers around the world, the gaming industry market value peaked at 159.3 billion dollars in 2020. 2021 figures suggest an increasing demand and spending with 2.81 billion gamers and a market value of 189.3 Billion $.

Seedify provides curated IGO’s or Initial Game Offerings through its platform, supporting quality blockchain games to reach crowdsourced funding. Apart from funding, Seedify assists with community development and marketing, as well as providing an avenue for its community to obtain tokens for upcoming blockchain games before they are listed on exchanges.

Entrepreneurs can submit their projects to the Seedify DAO, get voted by the community, and get their seed fund as well as enter the incubation program. Funding allocation is based on a tiering system determined by the amount of SFUND an individual has staked. The benefit for SFUND investors includes early access to promising P2E projects as Startups give Seedify 3% of their total token supply to cover costs, with a portion of it going to SFUND holders as a reward. Token holders thus help support startups while also receiving a return on their investment.

Some completed pools on Seedify

It’s expected that blockchain gaming will bring millions of new users to blockchain while creating many new jobs, financial benefits, as well as increasing the adoption rate of blockchain drastically, and Seedify wants you to be a part of this.

• *If you're interested in learning more about Seedify check *here

• *Check **here *if you would like to know more on how you can get started investing in the future of blockchain gaming with Seedify.

4. REQUEST (REQ)

Request is a decentralized network built on top of Ethereum, which allows anyone, anywhere to request a payment. It is a payment system that enables anyone to make a payment request and securely receive funds. It does away with the need for third parties to deliver a more cost-effective and secure payment option that works with all worldwide currencies.

How does It work?

Anyone with access to the Request Ledger can create a Payment Request. The recipient who is monitoring the network can detect the request (via a wallet or via a financial application). If the user approves the request, it can be paid with only one click. The request is then completed, and the network is updated as a result. When a Request is formed, the trade laws that apply to its specific situation are considered, and taxes are calculated. Advanced payment terms can be set if necessary.

Request offers;

• Security, as no banking information is shared

• Simplicity, as all that is required, is a single button click

• Cost savings, as transactions do not require the involvement of a third party (eg. Paypal)

Where Request fits in

Although most payment requests created today are not as basic as the one proposed in the first example, the possibilities of what can be developed on top of Requests core protocol are truly boundless. Here are a few examples;

• Integration for Crypto-native and non-crypto native companies to easily accept payments in Crypto but receive fiat and the other way around

• Ability to create more payment request options e.g sharing payment requests between different people, escrow payments.

• Opportunity for easier management of Crypto transactions (payroll, invoices, expenses, and accounting) for businesses

• Cross-currency payments of which the invoiced amount is denominated in regular fiat currency like USD, EUR, GBP, or any other upon request. Whereas the payment of the invoice is fulfilled in cryptocurrency

This list could go on forever but the important thing to note here is the value that can be realized through data gotten from the wider adoption of this technology. Freelancers, small businesses, large companies, and government organizations can save time and resources as tools built with Request can help automate manually intensive processes like taxation, auditing, payment tracking, risk/fraud detection.

Request is making use of the already revolutionary railroads built by Ethereum to provide a gateway for creating more efficient, transparent, and secure payment systems.

Check here If you would like to know more about Request

The largest takeaway from all this is how this technology is changing the way we carry out different aspects of our daily life. It's changing the way we make payments, game, raise money, and interact with people around the world. Although we’re unclear of what Web3 or the Metaverse may eventually look like, the Fun part for this generation is it's getting built before all our eyes.

Photo by Moritz Kindler on Unsplash

Over the last two years, Solana has gained a lot of attention in the crypto space. With the problem of ever-growing gas fees and long transaction times being experienced within the Ethereum and Bitcoin network (currently at about 7&13 TPS respectively), Solana’s claim of being able to reach peak transaction times of over 65,0000 transactions per second and transaction fees as low as $. 00001 of a cent to be exact, make it pretty hard to ignore.

To recap, blockchain technology at its simplest is a trustless, peer-to-peer, decentralized network of computers that verifies transactions in a digital ledger. One of the most important features of a blockchain is its mechanism of reaching consensus which is simply a way different people around the world agree on what gets to be added to the blockchain. The problem here is that these different people are spread around the world with different time zones and everyone has to agree on the order of events before they can be entered into the blockchain.

Up until Solana previous blockchains required miners to communicate with each other to agree on the time and order of transactions. For example, imagine you worked in an office with about a hundred staff(miners) and your jobs were to confirm customer transactions and enter them into a ledger after which you earned a fraction of each transaction as commission. You and every other one of your colleagues had to confirm a group of transactions and this was done by writing all the transaction details on a sheet of paper (blocks). The first person to complete this task then had to submit a copy of this sheet to all of his/her other colleagues to confirm if they wrote the transactions in the right order and make sure there weren't any false transactions added (consensus) before it could get entered into the ledger (blockchain) and earn the worker his/her commission. This is a simple way of explaining how Bitcoin and Ethereums Proof of Work (PoW) is carried out. Yes, this process is as tedious as it sounds but more importantly it makes transaction speed slow and Gas (transaction cost) high.

This problem led to Proof of Stake(PoS) which is Solana’s actual consensus mechanism. So what is Proof of History (PoH)? and where does it come into play? Well, PoH is not a consensus mechanism but a historical record that serves as a kind of “global clock” which reduces the time validators spend communicating with each other before reaching consensus using Solana's actual consensus mechanism (PoS). The system does this by using a verifiable delay function (VDF) to cryptographically chain transactions or events in order of sequence, thereby creating reliable proof of the historical order of events.

For non-technical people, this might be a bit confusing so let’s break it down by understanding why time and order are so important in a blockchain. In our first example, we established that transactions had to be verified before they can be entered into the blockchain (ledger). Only after this does it become valid. This is important in preventing double-spending. Double spending is a case whereby a person spends a digital currency more than once. For instance, if James has two BTC and sends it to Anna but it hasn’t been recorded in the blockchain yet, then he can’t spend that 2 BTC again and Anna can’t receive it yet, but if Ann receives it without the transaction being recorded on the blockchain and James sends 2 BTC to another friend, he has double-spent.

Making sure each transaction is verified and entered into the blockchain (ledger) in the right order before it can be confirmed by the parties on both ends of the transaction is very important. The order in which it is entered is particularly important as it acts as a reference for miners when verifying transactions. For example, for a miner to verify James’ transaction of 2 BTC to Anna the miner needs to have past references to know if James has BTC in his account and that it is still there at the time he wants to spend it. But what if prior to James sending two BTC to Anna, he had received and spent some BTC and these transactions weren't stored in the correct order in the ledger, it would be impossible for the current miner to know if James has enough BTC to carry out the transaction.

This is why communication is important as it helps miners agree on the time, but, this is difficult because, in a blockchain, we have to remember that miners are different people spread out across different countries with different time zones, and don't know each other so it's hard to agree if a timestamp placed on a transaction by someone else could be considered valid, but what if it could? This is where PoH comes in.

Solana was designed for speed and it achieves this mainly by an amazing combination of PoS and PoH. In our first example, the worker(miner) who was able to finish writing down his transactions the fastest was the next person the enter his block into the ledger (blockchain), and we described this as PoW. It's a secure way of making sure workers (miners) do the right thing in the office(network) as they wouldn't want to waste energy just to get their block rejected, thereby losing their commission.

In Bitcoin, miners actually, solve mathematical puzzles using computers to show PoW. PoS removes this process by replacing miners with validators. A validator is simply chosen to confirm the transactions and then sends his or her block of transactions to all other validators for final validation (consensus) before its added to the ledger. For security, each validator has to stake his/her cryptocurrency in the network and the validator who is chosen to mine the next block (which earns commission) is chosen based on the value of cryptocurrency he/she has staked. This removes the stress of PoW and at the same time encourages honesty between validators as they could lose both the amount they staked and commission if false transactions were validated.

This is good but still leaves a problem as validators have to still spend time communicating with each other to verify the ordering of events on the ledger. PoH makes this easier by encoding the passage of time in a sequential-hashing verifiable delay function (VDF. A VDF is a function that takes a certain number of steps (thereby a certain amount of time) to evaluate but can be verified in less time than it took to evaluate the function. Hashing on the other hand can be described as converting a set of arbitrary data to a fixed size value. A semi-plausible example of this is with zip codes that map an area in America into an “envelope” (fixed-size value) of five numbers. Because this hash or “envelope” is also a set of arbitrary data on its own, it too could be hashed into another envelope and this could go on forever with each envelope containing its information, this is an example of how sequential hashing works.

Remember we said a VDF is a function that takes a certain amount of time to evaluate but can be verified quickly, now, let’s use an example to explain how it all comes together with sequential hashing. Imagine you lived beside Stamford bridge which is located in fulham, meaning that fulham’s zipcode acts as sort of an envelope or in this case a hash for where you live, going by this you would agree that London of which fulham is an area, acts as a hash for fulham and it continues in that way, England to London, Europe to England and finally the Earth to Europe. If I were to ask where you lived and your answer was “Earth” I would not be able to pinpoint exactly where you live (pre-image resistance). At the same time, if you told me you lived in fulham and then asked me to prove that fulham was on earth, I would have to trace upwards that fulham is in London, London in England, England in Europe, and Europe on Earth. This implies that if you were to give me this string of data starting from fulham and ending at Earth I could quickly verify that the string is correct. Now let’s assume that each time a computer was asked to do this it would have to go through all the areas in London to confirm fulham as one of its areas and, in turn, go through all the cities in England to confirm London as a city and continue in that manner till it reaches Earth. You would notice that it would take a certain amount of time to prove or verify this.

This is a little example of how a sequential-hashing verifiable delay function works on Solana. What it does exactly is that it takes a transaction and hashes it using a SHA-256 hash function which, unlike our given example, is unreadable and cannot be predicted. This generates an unpredictable output which is then used as the input for the next transaction. With this, a validator cannot predict the output of the function from a given input until the function is complete (and a certain amount of time must have elapsed), this output is pre-image resistant. like in our previous example this process must be done sequentially but can be verified pretty quickly.

This record acts as a cryptographic timestamp that provides an easily verifiable sequence of historical events and can prove that a given transaction must have occurred before another transaction and vice-versa, and also, that, a certain period in time must have passed verifying the transaction before another one could have taken place. The process significantly cuts down the time validators spend interacting with each other to agree on the state of the network before consensus. It also gives an undelayed opportunity for the next validator to start validating more transactions with a high degree of certainty that his transactions will eventually be entered into the blockchain and in the right order, unlike previous blockchains who rely on a sequential production of blocks that are hindered by waiting for confirmation across the network before moving forward.

Although Solana is just a part of a number of new blockchain networks which together with off-chain solutions are trying to solve scalability in cryptocurrency, it has gathered a lot of enthusiasts, as seen with the surge of its native currency $SOL, and more importantly an ever-increasing number of dApps being built on the network. Solana is also so early and I’m really excited to watch it all unfold in real-time.

• If you’re new to Solana, you can learn more about the network here