Cartesi Incubator Spotlight-NFTs: SimThunder
Disrupting Esports with blockchain technology
As of 2022 Descartes has now been renamed as Cartesi Compute.
This week signals the final stage of the Cartesi Incubation Program; our 3 winning project teams will be showing off the hard work they’ve put in over the previous months on their projects, with the opportunity to receive an extra $20k through quadratic funding in our on-going matching round. After their 3 months of progress and building on Cartesi, they will be able to accept donations from the community via Gitcoin Grants to decide how the $20k matching pool gets distributed.
As part of the Cartesi Incubator Spotlight series, we are exploring the technology, models and teams behind the 3 innovative projects that won a spot in the Cartesi Incubation Program after submitting their applications and detailed development plans back in September 2020. Today we will be looking at SimThunder; a project looking to disrupt the esports industry with new and exciting ways to own and earn within the simulated racing world.
The Rise of Esports
The Esports industry is growing at a rapid pace and it is estimated that overall revenues topped $1bn in 2019, which is an increase of 27% from the previous year. The last year or so has seen esports explode with giants such as Comcast announcing that it planned to build a $50m arena to accommodate esports tournaments. Games such as Fortnite, which as of 2020 has 350 million registered users, and other games such as League of Legends, Counter-Strike and Overwatch also seek to take a slice of the highly lucrative but also competitive gaming landscape.
This year with the disruption of coronavirus seeing many people staying at home for weeks on end, there was a huge increase in esports coverage across the globe and with the second year of F1 Esports generating an audience of around four million, many of racing’s big names are looking to get in on the action such as Porsche, Nascar and McLaren. “Sim racing” is simulated racing online and has gained huge traction in the e-sports world of late, but the current models surrounding “free-to-play” e-sports games are not optimal — SimThunder utilises the power of blockchain technology to create more room for incentivised competition in the space and introduces a range of exciting new innovations that benefit both players and brands.
SimThunder is a sim racing assets marketplace that enables sim racers to exchange sim racing items such as car parts and equipment, as well as NFTs that represent ownership of digital cars in private sim racing leagues. With gamification a central part of today’s blockchain communities, the marriage of Esports and NFTs is an opportunity to expand upon opportunities within both markets and as virtual gaming grows.
The team behind SimThunder are avid sim racers as well as experienced software engineers and blockchain developers and the project aims to make sim racing more fun and dynamic by providing an incentivized market for NFTs, as well a racing management game that distributes prizes according to racing season results. There are already centralized services on the mainstream markets that give people the opportunity to buy and sell sim racing items, but there is a distinct lack of decentralized marketplaces offering immutable ownership of items and this is where SimThunder looks to penetrate the market.
Leveraging Cartesi’s Cartesi Compute SDK
The SimThunder Marketplace will use Cartesi’s Cartesi Compute SDK to ensure that user’s NFTs, such as advanced car setup files, are securely shared in a trustless environment without ever disclosing those valuable NFT contents to the public.
“Cartesi plays a fundamental role in our project because it enables two parties, who don’t trust each other, to securely trade access to private content data. By using Cartesi’s Descates we are able to make the transactions between the 2 parties verifiable and thus to make it possible to resolve disputes regarding the access to the private content data.” — Miguel Gomes, SimThunder Founder
This private content sharing marketplace shares data by encrypting it and uploading it to IPFS, using Cartesi Compute to ensure that the decryption key is adequately transferred upon payment. The concept was proposed by the Cartesi group, which has been and will continue to assist the project development of SimThunder with their extensive engineering and blockchain knowledge in the coming months.
As the world of Esports grows and the likes of Ready Player One become closer to reality than fiction, the Cartesi team is excited to be incubating a project that adds new value propositions to an already explosive market.
Read more about the $20k matching round now live on Gitcoin here and contribute to SimThunder here if you love their product as much as we do!
Cartesi’s Ecosystem Links:
Website: https://cartesi.io
Explorer: https://explorer.cartesi.io
Discord (Development Community): https://discordapp.com/invite/Pt2NrnS
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cartesiproject
Telegram: https://t.me/cartesiproject
Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/cartesiannouncements
GitHub: https://github.com/cartesi
