You may have seen the recent news that the Peerplays Blockchain Standards Association (PBSA) has made a significant investment in India-based start-up Avalon Meta, which will bring the worlds of higher education and competitive gaming together for the first time.
At the time, PBSA President Jonathan Baha’i described the investment as a “no-brainer”, adding that he was excited to see the Peerplays blockchain powering “the visionary approach” of Avalon Meta.
For some time now, Peerplays has been known as the gaming blockchain, and our work over recent months is beginning to show how a wide-range of products can find a home on our blockchain.
We’ve seen the launch of decentralized sports betting exchange BookiePro, a blockchain-based 50/50 draw fundraising tool and the upcoming StreamersEdge, which lets broadcasters interact with viewers like they never have before.
Education, education, education
Education is another sector where we see huge opportunities for gamification.
You only need to look at the success of traditional applications such as Duolingo, the gamified language tutor which boasts somewhere in the region of 30 million monthly active users, to see the potential for growth at the interaction of education and gaming.
This is part of the thinking behind our partnership with Avalon Meta.
“Most courses barely manage a five percent user retention, which is why we decided to turn higher education into a game,” Avalon Meta CEO Varun Mayya recently told PC Quest. “Not gamify an existing solution, but make a full fledged, proper game.”
Avalon Meta is currently working on an app, which is in closed beta, which builds a competitive game around entrepreneurship while also consolidating the educational interactions of users.
Built on the Unreal Engine, the tentatively titled Battle Cup could be live as soon as December. Even more excitingly, it will be monetized via in-game purchases via the Peerplays blockchain.
It is no exaggeration to say that leveraging this technology to create a truly gamified education product could change the way people learn.
“The current education system dates back to the Industrial Revolution era, where information is dumped into us and we are expected to work like robots,” said PBSA President Jonathan Baha’i. “We learn best when we play games.”
Investing in the future
We see our investment in Avalon Meta as an investment in the future of education.
While we are hugely excited to see how the application of gaming mechanisms can transform the way people learn, we also see the potential for an even greater revolution.
Blockchain technology is designed to decentralize and open up, and there are more than a few areas across the education sector in need of such a process.
The Peerplays blockchain is well-suited for such a purpose, combining scalability, accessibility and incentivization to provide a truly global network.
While we may be the gaming blockchain, part of our mission is to show the world that this doesn’t mean we are restricted to casinos or Fortnite.
The success of gamification proves that gaming mechanics can bring tangible benefits to a diverse range of sectors. Education, as we are exploring with Avalon Meta, is just one of these.
Through programs such as Peerplays Grants, we are seeing on almost a daily basis that these applications extend much further, into areas we could hardly have imagined at the birth of the Peerplays blockchain.
That’s an exciting prospect, and the Peerplays team will be focused on delivering real-world use cases for our technology — one game at a time.
