WAX Token ICO – Building A Decentralized Game Skins Market

olyup (55)in #gaming • 7 years ago

Every day, millions of gamers log on to their favorite games and clock many hours of game time – earning skills, levels, and of course – loot. But for every hard-core gamer willing to team up and spend hours acquiring the rarest and most powerful items in the game, there must be a dozen lazy clowns who would sooner eat sand than grind like that.

Game Skins Market Currently Worth $50 Billion Annually

Working that loose math, it becomes obvious that the market is HUGE for buying and selling in-game weapons and similar items, aka game skins. In fact, the current worldwide market for game skins is on track to top $50 billion transacted this year.

That huge market is split up among literally hundreds of isolated, centralized marketplaces for game skins exchange. The exchanges facilitate game skin transactions. Like all legacy institutions, they require users to trust the exchange itself.

None of the exchanges talk to each other to share facilitate trades across exchanges. That limits access to items. Price discovery is difficult to achieve because of multiple closed markets, most with a take-it-or-leave-it offer model.

The exchanges fill a need because they offer a trusted environment in which buyers and sellers can transact with confidence that one person is not cheating the other. Trying to trade items via forum posts often ends badly. There are simply too many ways for the trade to end in fraud when there is no recourse.

Trusted third party exchanges solved this problem. The exchanges handle payment, escrow, and verification for buyers and sellers. But now there’s a better way.

Decentralized Game Skin Exchange by WAX

What WAX does is change the current paradigm of game skin markets by decentralizing the whole operation. Blockchain settlement eliminates the need for a third party referee. Trade can truly happen peer to peer.

The decentralized WAX exchange has a few inherent benefits that a centralized exchange simply cannot offer:

Globally accessible marketplace for game skins
Trade items across multiple games using a native currency with real-world value
Blockchain settlement for reliable trustless transactions – no 3rd party, no 3rd-party fees
Bidding market for game skins provides more transparent price discovery
Permissionless network makes countless new business opportunities possible

But who came up with this exchange anyway? Is anyone really going to use it?

WAX – From the Founders of OPskins

[OPskins is one of the largest centralized game skins exchanges around. They have millions of current customers, with another 200,000 signing up every week. OPskins exchange offers game skins from popular games like CS:GO, DOTA 2, H1Z1, and more.

The founders of OPskins realized the potential of a blockchain solution for the game skins market. For years already, they’ve offered bitcoin as a payment option for cashing in and out of the OPskins exchange, alongside more traditional methods like PayPal or Skrill.

DOTA 2 International 2015 Seattle, by Zilsonzxc

Now they’re building that decentralized solution, with WAX token funding the development and marketing, as well as acting as the native currency for trading skins on the exchange. WAX (the Worldwide Asset eXchange) will be implemented via Ethereum smart contracts.

OPskins recently added Ethereum to its payment options, in order to make it easier for current exchange customers to be a part of the token sale. OPskins plans to offer most (or all) of its current inventory of game items for sale via WAX. It also wants to encourage traders on its centralized platform to make the transition to the new decentralized platform.

Participate in the WAX Token Sale

The WAX token sale goes public on November 15.

Right now, there is a gamer-only WAX token pre-sale offering current OPskins customers a 50% discount on WAX tokens. Just log in to your free OPskins account to register for the pre-sale.