Crypto in gaming and what the future may hold

Even if you couldn’t give a very eloquent definition of what it is, you’ve probably heard about “bitcoin” on the news or read about “blockchain” in the newspaper.

In short, cryptocurrency is a digital currency. It doesn’t exist in a physical form and in reality, it has no intrinsic value. It’s decentralized insofar as there’s no central authority controlling the supply. So, no banks or governments can artificially inflate or deflate the value or limit how much is available.

But what has this got to do with the gaming industry? Well, more and more gaming developers and investors are linking the two together, some experts even suggesting that gaming is key to the mass adoption of cryptocurrency. Firstly, it’s an astute demographic to target.

Gamers — particularly Millennial gamers — are an excellent target market for cryptocurrency adoption because they tend to be a touch more tech-savvy than the average internet user so are more open to new ideas.

Try to picture a futuristic scenario where a gamer plays a game, defeats the level’s boss, and is awarded a virtual prize that has value online. If he or she then sells that item for a digital coin on a secondary market, before using that form of cryptocurrency to buy some new trainers on Amazon, we’ve created a whole new network of value that is liquid, fast, and global.

Actually, this isn’t the future. It is exactly what SuperOne, Axie Infinity, and Decentraland are doing with their new games. The game experience is being created by specialists who have been in the gaming and online retail industries for decades — master gamers, psychologists, and leading developers who know how to connect gaming to cryptocurrencies to online retail — with massive opportunities for advertising revenue along the way.

Sounds exciting? Well, there are skeptics too. There have been widely publicized frauds, scams, and hacks that have plagued individual investors and even major cryptocurrency exchanges.

Part of the issue is simply that the whole space is relatively new so security technology is still in its infancy. For example, the Japanese exchange Coincheck suffered an attack in 2018 which cost it 523 million NEM coins valued at about $534 million.

Similarly, the Italian exchange BitGrail was hacked in early February 2020, with team members suggesting that $195 million in the token nano was stolen.

While cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are incredibly exciting, crimes like these show that there are security holes that need filling in. However, the numbers talk. In 2018, the Crypto gaming platform recorded an amazing $137 billion in revenue which showed 13% growth from 2017. It’s expected that more firms in the gaming industry will invest more in using cryptocurrencies.

But while there is a lot of talk of “consortiums” and “test phases”, SuperOne is at the cutting edge of this new wave of games — and things you can do in them. This is what makes SuperOne so compelling for a lot of people, we’re at the threshold of a new gaming frontier.

Welcome to the future today!