Jun 16, 2021
Protocon and Metaverse
Hello, everyone. It’s Team Protocon.
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Recently, there is a high level of interest in blockchain technology in various industries.
Blockchain technology has developed and matured, expanding its use to various industries such as logistics, distribution, manufacturing, public service, society, and culture, and has emerged as a next-generation technology that is receiving the attention of government agencies and various companies in each country.
Blockchain, which is used in various fields of utilization, has something in common, such as securing reliability and reducing transaction fees through establishing a “transparent supply chain” regardless of the field. However, there are several challenges as a base technology that must be preceded for blockchain to permeate all parts of society. Professor David Shanoff of Harvard Business School argues that the degree of unfamiliarity(newness) and complexity determines the speed at which the technology is introduced throughout the economy and society. The more unfamiliar, the longer it takes for people to understand, and the more complex, the more conflicts of interest arise between parties who need to cooperate through the technology.
In other words, in order for blockchain to be practical across the industry, it is necessary to provide an environment that is more accessible to the public, away from the unfamiliarity or repulsion of technology. Protocon plans to focus on blockchain and games, games and metaverses as dApp services to build on its own in the early stages.
Protocon aims to secure practical use of blockchain by providing dApp services specialized for this by combining games and metaverses.
Before we get into blockchain-based games, let’s first understand what a metaverse is.
Metaverse is a compound word of ‘meta’ meaning virtual or transcendence and ‘universe’ meaning the real world, meaning a virtual world connected to reality.
Classic metaverse include services such as Animal Crossing, Minecraft, and Google Earth. And metaverse that are becoming a hot topic include Roblox and Zepetto. Today’s metaverse can be seen as a more advanced concept than existing platforms, where user participation is higher and economic and social activities such as profit generation are also actively occurring.
Then what are the characteristics when blockchain is applied to the game?
When games and blockchains are combined, items acquired in the game and game history can be recorded and stored on the blockchain even if a particular game ends operations, and transactions that occur in the game can be safely carried out. Also, thanks to the high security of the blockchain, it can prevent transaction fraud that occurs frequently in the game. This will protect the assets and rights of game users which have been marginalized, and further create a new digital economy ecosystem in which digital items produced on games and metaverses are distributed on the basis of trust.
Currently, various ways of combining games and blockchain are being tried in the market. Representatively, the first game to apply blockchain is the digital cat collection game “CryptoKitties” created by Canada’s Dapper Labs in late 2017. CryptoKitties, which is applied with Ethereum-based NFT technology, has not only been a pet collection game in the past, but also gained a lot of commercial attention, adding new and diverse fun to market value after creating a new cat. Each cat has its own value and has a different appearance, and there’s a cat that costs more than 100,000 dollars and more than 100 million won.
WeMade created the blockchain platform “WEMIX” and released the blockchain game “Bird Tornado for WEMIX” on Google Play Store in 149 countries last year through its subsidiary WeMade Tree. Users can obtain game tokens called ‘Tornado’ through the game and keep and transfer them to their digital wallet, ‘WEMIX Wallet’.
We are developing “Block City (tentative name)” that incorporates blockchain technology into Minecraft to demonstrate the industrial availability of Protocon and build profitable mainnet business models.
Minecraft is an open world indie game developed by Markus Alexej Persson and published by Microsoft Game Studios. As of 2020, it is the best-selling video game of all time, with more than 200 million copies sold on all platforms, and it is one of the most popular games in the world with an average number of active users surpassing 126 million.
The first sandbox-type game that allows users to enjoy various genres of games such as survival, architecture, hunting, and farming. Also, it has the advantage of being able to enjoy the game by establishing an independent game server arbitrarily. Block City, which applies blockchain technology to Minecraft that has a solid global fandom, will officially open in the first half of 2022. Afterwards, Protocon plans to launch its own game with metaverse, leading the blockchain-based metaverse game market.
Today, we briefly explored how Protocon will combine blockchain technology with games and metaverse to improve blockchain practicality. Please continue to show your interest and look forward to our next research.
