I first met the team at Consensus 2017. They went all out at the big blockchain event, hosting a bash that reminded me of the go go early days of the dot com boom and giving talk after talk.

But spectacle never interests me. I’m not fooled by pretty lights and pretty words. It’s the depth of ideas that matter.

And they had ideas in spades.

For the first time in crypto I saw a team trying to solve some of the real challenges facing the space, the ones I thought only myself and a few others had even remotely considered. With my Cicada concept project I spent a year at the whiteboard trying to find radical solutions to the hardest problems in crypto: scale, adoption, governance, identity, reputation, distribution and demand to name a few. I dug into old papers and ideas, hunting for hidden gems.

I also studied all the projects out there, mining them for their greatest solutions.

Yet more and more I found nobody solving the most pressing problems in crypto. Even worse, they didn’t even see the real issues.

If you can’t even see the problem, you certainly can’t create a real solution.

It’s like those long division tests you hated in grade school: If the first part is wrong, the rest of it is automatically wrong.

But the EOS team did see the big problems and the big picture.

For example, I’ve often said that for a crypto ecosystem to really flourish you need free transactions. It’s just a basic fact that some things in life have little or no value and they’ll never have value.

And yet everything on crypto platforms costs money.

It seemed so obvious to me and yet I hadn’t found a single team out there that understood that simple fact. Then I met the EOS team and they not only saw the problem they framed it better than I did.

“If you went to Amazon and it cost you three cents to load the page you’d never load the page.”

That’s it in a nutshell. If Amazon charged for everything, you’d never even get through the front door because you don’t know what’s on the other side!

You have to see the merchandise before you even consider buying it. Anything could be behind door number one. You might find Amazon’s beautiful cornucopia of products and elegant design or you find a disgusting scam site.

EOS was just one of the many projects at Consensus. It was an amazing conference all around, filled with incredible energy and possibility.

Go back and look and you’ll see that the real crypto buying boom started that very week, as projects announced innovation after innovation. Zcash rocketed to new heights as JP Morgan announced adoption of their privacy protocols. Dozens of other coins saw their valuations spike hard.

I left the conference drunk on wine and ideas, my head swirling with possibilities.

But it was EOS that loomed largest in my imagination.

And I was determined to buy into the project as soon as I could get my grubby little hands on their shiny digital coins.

Like most projects, Aleo’s tokenomics is designed to align incentives for all stakeholders in the Aleo system as easily as possible. That is, the tokenomics should incentivize participants to do some work in order for the system to work and users have the coins to use what Aleo offers.

It was conceived that the system that is involved in Aleo will perform the following functions:

1. The network’s own token represents meaningful value;

2. The system rewards participants for their contributions to the security of the network;

3. Incentives do not encourage dishonest or malicious behavior;

4. It promotes the development and use of useful applications in the ecosystem;

5. It promotes decentralization, so that no single user group can control the entire system.

The unit of account is Aleo credits. Aleo credits will be used to pay transaction fees and pay miners. Aleo credits open up access to a key next-generation computing resource: zero-knowledge proof computing. Aleo credits are a natural way for the market to assess the value of zero-zero-knowledge proof computing proof for any program. Consequently, the price of this asset should roughly reflect the overall demand for zero- knowledge computing proof technology.

One important difference between Aleo and other networks such as Ethereum is that fees in the Aleo network are calculated in advance. In Aleo, there is no concept of “gas per transaction,” which usually makes applications unpredictably expensive to run on Ethereum. Whereas in Aleo, everyone knows in advance how many Aleo credits it will take to run a particular application.

Given the number of potential applications for this technology, we can expect zero-knowledge proof to become a critical computing resource (similar to bandwidth, storage, etc.) for the next generation of decentralized, scalable networks.

At launch, Aleo credits will be distributed among early beakers (investors), developers and community members, as well as a foundation or other organization that will provide grants and ensure further development of the network. Starting at genesis, new credits will be minted and distributed to miners in the network through a block reward. The table below summarizes the details of the overall economic model (note: the current block time is approximately 20 seconds).

The Aleo inflation graph will encourage early network users. It will help achieve a high degree of network security more quickly. To achieve this, a relatively high inflation rate is set at the beginning, which is then halved twice during the first decade. After the ninth year, the final halving will result in an emission of 12.5 Aleo credits per block, which are paid to miners simultaneously to ensure the security of the network as well as the stability of the tokenomics.

The tables below show the inflation curve for Aleo over the first 15 years and the emissions over those years.

It’s a new year and we have some exciting updates to share about GamerGains!

Token Update

Growing our community and listening to our users will always be our number one priority. Users continue to earn $GAMER token and we have actively been listening to your feedback through our Discord server, community surveys and countless emails. We’re excited to announce that $GAMER token will be issued as an ERC-20 token.

You probably have a few questions which we can help answer below. We’ve also updated our docs with the new contract address here: https://docs.gamergains.com/platform/info/token-contracts

How much will redemptions cost?

We plan on initially integrating with Polygon for all $GAMER and USDC redemptions. Fees associated with these redemptions will be low. GamerGains intends to be multichain meaning eventually we’ll support redemptions on other blockchain networks.

When does $GAMER token go live?

Last year, we estimated that $GAMER token would go live in Q1 or Q2 of 2023. There’s a lot that goes into a token launch and we want to do it right for our users. We also believe it is vital to have a fully launched product that can support a sustainable token economy. All of that being said, we are targeting our token launch for the end of Q2 to early Q3.

GamerGains Desktop App

We’re excited to announce that in partnership with Overwolf, we will be launching a GamerGains desktop app! This will allow us to accelerate the development of our entire product roadmap. This includes adding more challenges to our game library, launching our skill-based wagering product and much more. This app will be built in a few phases and we’ll continue to share more with our users once we get closer to launching it.

Our team is always available. If you have any questions or concerns, the best way to reach us is through Discord by clicking the link here. For the latest updates, follow us on Twitter @gamergains_