The Use of Blockchain Technology in Gaming Industry

Everybody knows about it, everybody believes in it, everybody wants to implement it. Blockchain is the main hero of the modern tech world, the innovation driving all entrepreneurs crazy and revolutionizing the way they do business within different industries. Today not only the financial sphere feels the effects of blockchain, but also gambling, retail, medicine, and insurance are also impacted tremendously. However, gaming is the industry which seems to be the most interesting for the application of blockchain technology. This field continues to win the love of a billion players worldwide, and it can get new life with the use of blockchain.

Blockchain has started to change the way people interact with games, by introducing a new gaming trend: blockchain-based games giving the possibility to earn for both players and owners. At the moment, these types of games are casual and built on collecting and exchanging operations. But, the potential power of blockchain for the gaming industry is enormous. In the near future we expect to get unique gaming experiences with constantly evolving characters and convenient in-game transactions between different games. We’ve begun to move in this direction, and the first significant results in this area have already been achieved.

Gaming Kings Powered By Blockchain

Although it’s a relatively new idea, introducing blockchain into the gaming industry has been seen in various examples of successful blockchain-based projects and has proved the concept to be highly effective.

CryptoKitties is one of the most promising players in the market of blockchain-based games. Its essence boils down to growing virtual kittens and their subsequent resale for Ethereum.

Each cat is unique in appearance, and in fact, blockchain is responsible for this feature. The cats can be bred. Each new “kitten” inherits certain characteristics of the parents and represents their unique combination. The CryptoKitties project uses the non-fungible token type ERC-721, which is critical for unique collectables. If you are wondering who pays for the image of a cat, here is the answer: one who is ready to give $100,000 for a crypto-kitten. The first cat in CryptoKitties was purchased for 115 thousand dollars, and in total, for one week, users spent almost $3 Million on new Tamagotchi.

Kittens can be bought on the internal exchange. Until November, 2018, every 15 minutes the system can generate a new pet. The animals appear only with the pairing of other individuals. The value of each of them depends on the characteristics that are inherited from their parents. For example, in the game, there are only 160 jaguars and 93 maine coons. You can find for sale rare species with the image of a vampire or a geek and cats created with the participation of Katy Perry and Elon Musk.

In the remaining cases, attention should be paid to the Gen indicator to determine the order of offspring. The younger the offspring is, the higher the income is. Another important parameter is Cooldown that determines how fast a cat can enter into new connections.

The good news is users can not only buy, but can also breed cryptokitties. To own kitties, players need to pay two thousand Ethereum. The money users receive for the bred cryptokitties goes to their accounts in MetaMask and can be spent or withdrawn through exchanges.

Another driving force in the gaming industry is the popularization of eSports. This constantly growing segment has become almost an independent industry, and now it generates millions in revenues. It has been practically demonstrated that blockchain drastically improves the eSports gaming process because of its transparency, decentralized structure, and token system.

The largest brands in the eSports world are striving to win prizes in tournaments, and gamers can fight both one-on-one and as teams, gaining solid rewards for winning tournaments and moving up career ladders in eSports. Thanks to blockchain technology, it is now possible to track the progress of games and resolve the misunderstandings arising between players.

Let’s take a look at the FirstBlood game as an example of a successful eSports project powered by blockchain. It is an eSports platform with the ICO purpose developed on the basis of Ethereum cryptocurrency. It allows users to check skills and bets with no need to transfer money (in the traditional way) without regulations and intermediary fees. Furthermore, it is completely invulnerable to hacker attacks.

Players can run FirstBlood online or on a PC. They need to choose an interesting game for themselves, have several platform tokens to start the game on a team or against an opponent and play their best game possible. The game process is supervised by FirstBlood participants, and the winner receives a reward in the form of tokens. FirstBlood ensures experienced players receive well-deserved awards. The platform uses several Witnesses nodes to check the game’s performance and prevent failures often associated with the API.

Received tokens are sent and stored through the smart contract system. When the match takes place, witnesses connect to the game API, analyze the results and transfer them to the First Blood smart contract system. Finally, the tokens, i.e. the winnings, are sent to the winner, and witnesses obtain rewards for the rendered service. However, if the result is disputed, it must be considered by the Jury Voting Pool (JVP).

First Blood’s aim is to make eSports absolutely transparent, thereby, attracting more people to the cryptographic community, As a result, their cryptocurrency is closer to the mainstream distribution. It is worthwhile to say, they realized this goal as during the ICO (25 September — 26 September, 2016), they collected 5.5 million US dollars and capitalized 44,266,275 tokens.

The next great gaming arena for applying blockchain solutions is streaming. The Play2Live project is vivid proof of this statement. The release of its MVP version was held on November 20, 2017, and the launch of the alpha version is scheduled for the beginning of the second quarter of 2018.

Based on blockchain technology, the Play2Live platform is a unique combination of interactive features and tools for monetization. This service for the video broadcasting game and cybersport content allows each participant, both streamers and common viewers, to earn.

Play2Live is based on three fundamentals:

1. A viewer earns tokens simply by watching the broadcast.
2. There are rewards for watching advertising.
3. The platform provides fifteen sources of revenue; fifteen ways viewers can spend their tokens. Please note, in Twitch and YouTube Gaming there are only five of them

The project uses the model of creating a decentralized autonomous organization, a blockchain-ecosystem for streaming and gaming projects with a Level UpCoin token for transactions within the system. The obvious advantages of Level UpCoin are the speed of transactions and the low cost. It is planned to use Level UpCoin not only in Play2Live, but also in other projects created on the Level UpChain blockchain system, as well as to free conversion of tokens to/from other crypto currencies of other gaming platforms.

Play2Live is implemented on the Graphene platform making it possible to process a large amount of data and providing full privacy, high speed of confirmation and signing of transactions. The interaction system is based on the consensus algorithm, Delegated Proof Of Stake (DPoS). Thanks to Graphene technology, the Level UpChain transaction rate is more than 50,000 transactions per second. Blockchain accelerates the time of transactions within the platform and the withdrawal of funds compared to similar sites where it can take 2–3 months.

During the pre sale and the main token sale, Play2Live collected more than $30 Million confirming the incredible potential of this ambitious streaming platform and strengthening our belief in the power of blockchain for the gaming industry as a whole.

Needless to say, the blockchain-based leaders of the modern gaming industry have ICO purposes with their internal token systems because it is a great way to draw investments and give devoted players an opportunity to earn real money. This is the new era of gaining profit through games, and we’ll definitely tell you more about this monetization issue in our next articles.

Projects That Have Not Reached The Pedestal Yet

Gaming and blockchain are two fields at the epicenter of a new wave of the competitive technological innovation. The race to pioneer new technologies or to apply existing technologies in ingenious new ways is fierce. Companies constantly strive to stand out from the crowd, and the quickest way to differentiate themselves is to deliver the best user-experience or implement new unusual features. That’s why today, we see many ongoing projects in the gaming industry relying on the power of blockchain.

The basis of this modern science is rooted in a few ideas the gaming industry finds preferable. First, it provides the anonymity of a public ledger both for funds and for identity; players don’t need to show globally their private data to pursue risk-based activities. Secondly, blockchain benefits are quick, readily noticeable payments. The less-known perks include incentives like no taxation on cryptocurrency transactions. It plays a particularly important role in different online casino platforms.Let’s take a look at some ongoing blockchain-based casino projects that haven’t met their original goals yet.

Taking the blockchain into real-world casinos seems like an odd idea at first, but SmartPlay.tech proved otherwise. This is a European Roulette game with a fair smart contract for the game itself. It is run on the Ethereum blockchain and is easily viewable for anyone to read.

The game features an actual machine with a display and a version of the game currently being tested in a land-based casino. But, the online version is up and running, and users are free to play. Although the project isn’t quite there yet and needs some improvements, blockchain casino machines might be the norm on the casino floors in years to come.

Another interesting example is Edgeless casino. The company has launched a blackjack game with dice, poker, and sports betting apparently in the works. The platform is based on the Ethereum blockchain using smart contracts.

That all sounds very grand, but how it makes money isn’t simply a pet project, it’s an actual business. This is because it’s a game of luck and skill (unlike, for example, roulette, which is pure luck). This means players who are less skilled than great or perfect players make mistakes costing them games overall. So the house wins. For perfect play, a player can break even over many millions of games. However, for imperfect players (and most users are amatures who are playing for fun and haven’t studied strategy), the housel has an edge over time. Of course, they do not have perfect results and great success. Edgeless hasn’t given up on their plans for Edgeless casino games and strives to win fans who they believe can stay on for sports betting (which has a 4% ROI for overall wagers).

The next instance is Funfair. This company has taken blockchain as a technology and has capitalized on when it came to online gaming. Funfair is building a complete suite of slots and table games and transferred to casino licensees This is known as white label online casinos where people have a turnkey solution.

By offering these solutions, it allows anyone to start their own online casino. It is unique, and because it’s run on the Ethereum blockchain, it’s cheaper to run and fairer to play.

Funfair has raised over $26million to date, and its initial product was published at the end of March, 2018.

Blockchain technology is helping online casinos to be safe and secure. Because the costs for running the systems are fairly negligible, casino providers can do things like run an edgeless system. Using the blockchain for both online casino games as well as all real-life casino floor games is a fairly likely future scenario, given the benefits this technology offers.

Something Impossible

The gaming sphere is the most popular and profitable from a financial point of view in the entertainment industry. After the Internet appeared, many gaming projects moved online. However, the level of security has always left much to be desired. Some have tried to solve it through blockchain algorithms but have not always saved the situation.

In the past few years the world has seen some interesting blockchain projects, and most of them managed to earn great income during the time of crowdsale. The triumph of these projects contributed to an increase in the demand for blockchain technology in the sphere of gaming. However not all companies could achieve the desired results.

One of the first online platforms was DAO.casino. The advantage of this casino is the participants don’t necessarily have to trust each other. But, at the same time, the operator is obliged to prove his honesty to his clients.

Through the use of the special protocol, operators are given access to a wide range of games they can choose to install in their casino, and thereby, prove their integrity because they work on the basis of smart contracts.

Special attention should be paid to random generation. The creators set the goal of obtaining PRNG (an algorithm generating pseudo-random numbers) exclusively from Blockchain-networks without resorting to the use of third-party suppliers of random servers or servers. However, this task is not easy and requires huge knowledge, time and necessary skills.

PRNG generates random numbers by using mathematical formulae or precalculated lists. Using one corresponds to someone rolling a die many times and writing down the results. Whenever a user asks for a die roll, he gets to be the next on the list.

PRNG is efficient, meaning it can produce many numbers in a short time, and are deterministic. This means a given sequence of numbers can be reproduced at a later date if the starting point in the sequence is known. It is typically also periodic which means the sequence eventually repeats itself. While periodicity is hardly ever a desirable characteristic, modern PRNG has a period so long it can be ignored for most practical purposes.

Another popular example of PRNG applications are simulation and modeling applications. PRNGs are not suitable for applications where it is important the numbers are really unpredictable such as data encryption and gambling. That’s the reason DAO Casino faced difficulties working with this algorithm.

Practically every online casino/website and poker game faces this massive problem since they rely on Pseudo-Random Number Generators. These computer mechanisms and similar methods cannot produce truly random numbers. Therefore, the user often encounters many scenarios during his or her poker game where outcomes seem too ‘extreme’ or ‘rare.’ These systems are also open to alterations which can cause major security issues.

In addition, there are some problems for third-party testing. Although these pseudorandom sequences in PRNGs pass statistical pattern tests for randomness, by knowing the algorithm and the conditions used to initialize it, called the “seed,” the output can be predicted. All this means although the poker site users are playing on claims to be tested by third parties, the machines used are not producing truly random numbers.

Since computers are unable to truly generate random numbers, most traditional online casino and poker games are severely lacking in innovation when it comes to game fairness and integrity. Many regular players simply accept bad beats and continue playing while many others quit due to money lost unfairly in incredibly rare scenarios that keep occurring.

The Future of Blockchain Gaming

It is too early to make serious statements about the future of blockchain technology since it’s just starting to demonstrate its hidden possibilities. However, cool blockchain-based projects are gradually appearing, and their advantages like full transparency of in-game transactions, opportunity to earn when playing, privacy and safety of accounts, effective communication among gamers are obvious. Everything depends on whether the world adapts to cryptographic issues. The only sure thing is blockchain gaming is inevitable, and the opportunities emerging at this point are truly incredible!

In this article, we opened the door slightly to the world of blockchain in the gaming industry. Our goal is to enlighten you about this hot topic in every detail in the next publications. Hopefully, you enjoy this series and share your meaningful thoughts with us. What is your opinion on blockchain implementation in gaming? Have you ever tried blockchain-based games or purchased a cute kitty? Leave your comments to make us know you catched the wave!

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