GXC envisions blockchain platform for game money

Decenter
Decenter
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

Gaming goods and items are traded through decentralized exchange

GXC chief technology officer (CTO) Yang Jin-hwan

Gaming powerhouse Korea’s game item trading market reaches about 1.5 trillion won a year. So the market for buying and selling game money for cash through such platforms as Itemmania and itemBay is huge. Game X Coin (GXC) envisions a world where game money can be traded for other game money or cash through its blockchain platform.

GXC chief technology officer (CTO) Yang Jin-hwan, 31, belongs to a generation of which people have grown up playing ‘The Kingdom of the Winds’ and ‘Maplestory’ from their primary school years. “While playing games from childhood, I liked not only leveling up but also making money or buying and selling items,” he said. Like many Koreans, Yang had much interest in “compensation,” a process converting game money into cash.

But he felt it quite inefficient to haggle over prices after uploading articles to websites where game money and items are brokered and then use the current P2P (peer-to-peer) scheme where direct transactions are made to exchange them. As an alternative to this, GXC, the blockchain-powered cryptocurrency, has proposed connecting gaming currencies through a single cryptocurrency.

GXC intends to play the role of a key currency between games. It also offers a platform in which gaming goods and items are traded through a decentralized exchange provided by GXC. All this enables gamers to own their hard-won rewards safely by putting them on the blockchain and game developers to embrace gamers based on this compensation system and cushion marketing costs inside games.

How will the exchange ratio between game money and GXC be determined? Yang said, “The price of every game money is determined by demand and supply.” For example, if demand for “Mesos,” MapleStory’s game currency, rises amid less demand, Mesos’ exchange price against GXC will pick up. Indeed GXC could serve as a sort of an exchange rate indicator between game currencies.

However, this is not to say that GXC will remain only as a medium for exchange. Players can receive newly created GXC or get it through various means. “We will distribute part of inflated GXC to gamers in compensation for their playing or they could obtain tokens in person inside games. This is intended to build a structure in which gamers can possess tokens naturally,” Yang said. To be sure, this formula will result in drawing more kinds of gamers into the GXC ecosystem and expanding the scope.

GXC has built its own blockchain based on EOS. It was conducted in the form of separating or “forking” from the EOS blockchain. “The DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) algorithm used by EOS is distant from decentralization in that 21 block producers create blocks. But we thought EOS will go well with games in consideration of their requirements for fast speed,” Yang said. After deciding to develop their own blockchain platform, Yang and other GXC developers scrutinized Ethereum and EOS from bottom to top. Noting that games need fast speed while processing vast amounts of images and other data simultaneously, he said, “We finally decided to create our own blockchain by forking the EOS blockchain, although we found that Ethereum best represents the characteristics of a public blockchain through our experiments with various blockchains.” GXC’s blockchain is most suited for games at a speed of 5,000 transactions per second (TPS) thanks to its forking of EOS and can be speedier because it uses the DPoS system to enable specific nodes to create blocks as block producers.

Blockchain-linked games, which are now powered via GXC as a pilot program, are GXCQuest, GameXJelly and GameXRogue. Gamers are able to convert game money into GXC if they obtain it at these games. “These are modified from existing open-source games and we actually realized a system in which tokens are obtained if specific goals are met,” Yang said, adding that “they still run as testnets and are different from the GXC put on the mainnet.”

Exchanging game money is possible through the Decentralized Exchange (DEX) formed by GXC. “Testnets for the three games and DEX are now in operation and we aim to launch their mainnets by the end of this year,” he said.

/Won Jaeyeon (wonjaeyeon@decenter.kr)
Originally published at: decenter.kr

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