The anniversary of the chain tour, Binance’s bottom of the game ecology layout

Intro

Blockchain game is not a new topic for a long time. From fomo3D years ago to various “spinach” dapps in the most scenic era of EOS and wave field, the first track to be “empowered” by digital assets as a virtual value carrier is naturally the game field with the same virtual attributes.

Rome was not built in a day, but the rise of the chain game as a crypto industry on par with DeFi and mining is the greatest story of the crypto industry in 2021, enough to make this year the year of the chain game.

After the success of Axie Infinity, the attitude of traditional game developers towards blockchain changed from arrogance to aspiration, and they brought out their existing “capacity” — whether it was project reserves, development capabilities or base users — to quickly iterate their game products. — They quickly iterated their game products to realize cash. Among them, the most representative ones are Farmer’s World, which was launched after the EOS public chain WAX, and “Coin Hero”, which plummeted to zero after the fire.

After each representative project becomes popular, 3–5 imitators will be born to “take advantage” of its hot inertia, and most of these imitators are short-term projects. What happened in the web2 era tells us that the game track is not an island of one project, but a continuous update of content + traffic horizontal linkage with big factories and big IPs as the core.

“If something has happened, it will definitely happen again”. When Axie was approaching its first anniversary, we reviewed the current blockchain game industry, aiming to find which projects have formed a complementary and mutually reinforcing “industry” as mentioned above.

We found that Cryptocurrency is really ahead of the other platforms in this field.

Of course, Binance has the flow advantage and capital advantage that most other platforms and VCs do not have, which makes it easy to complete the “downgrade” of other institutions. The story of chain game has just started, and the market is far from a fixed pattern. This article aims to objectively show Binance’s actions and layout in the game field in the past year, the market is dynamic, and the conclusion should be dynamic too.

0x1 Binance Game Ecology Layout

After the chain game concept came out of the circle, many game project parties aimed at the Coin Smart Chain (hereinafter referred to as BSC). On the one hand, it is because the transaction cost here is low, and through the previous development of DeFi ecology, enough users have been deposited; on the other hand, BSC has a large number of Asian users, and this user group is the main user of the head chain game represented by Axie, so there is basically no need to pay education cost.

Therefore, we should not regard every game project deployed on BSC as “Binance system”. The projects that really have a relationship with the official Cryptocurrency Security should have at least one of the two characteristics: receiving investment from the official VC platform Binance Labs, or receiving official traffic support from Cryptocurrency Security Exchange and pancakeswap.

According to this standard combing, the games of Binance (and the layout of the basic industry related to games) are roughly divided into the following categories.

1、Game projects, representative projects: star sharks (star sharks), binaryx (Cyber Dragon);

2、Game distribution platform, representative projects: MoBox;

3、Metaverse immersion platform, representative projects: Space, SecondLife;

4、Game infrastructure, representative projects: Binance NFT market, Wombat wallet (it is worth noting that it was not originally a game track);

5、Backup capacity reserve, representative projects: Xii Braves.

The above samples are all products that have delivered at least version 1.0 and have an interactive interface. From this layout, Binance has at least this plan for its game empire.

1, There must be something to play, and the supply of products can not be broken — especially in the case of many peripheral teams, “dirt dog” teams are still constantly iterating the product, grabbing users.

We can see that star sharks’ game worldview design is highly similar to Axie Infinity, while binaryx is closer to a team PVE, very initial game, with mining attributes even higher than game attributes. In terms of playability, they are “passable products” rather than explosive ones.

The token economics of the two games are also designed with a strong “Axie style”. Each game launched no less than two internal passes (SEA/SSS for star sharks and BNX/GOLD/CRYSTAL for binaryx), playing the roles of governance tokens and instrument tokens, respectively, against Axie’s AXS/SLP.

To learn from the lessons of SLP’s spiral plunge, they set up various mechanisms and scenarios for tool tokens that exacerbate destruction and limit output. In addition, star sharks built their own shark rental market — a secondary market that was run by the YGG union during the Axie era and is now an official one-stop solution.

Judging from the current performance of the coin, these anti-plunge operations are working, with neither the tool tokens SSS nor GOLD experiencing SLP-style plunges, and the daily chart of BNX has even been heading upwards recently. Based on the transaction information detected by the block browser, all of these coins have active transactions at the minute level.

All in all, the games currently available in the Binance matrix are indeed reminiscent of pancake’s upgrade of uniswap and venus’ integration of compound and aave in terms of product design logic. This kind of “micro-innovation standing on the shoulders of previous generations” is also a common thing in the crypto industry.

Looking back at the history of games in the web 2.0 or even 1.0 era, we can see manufacturers who became famous for their games (or gaming hardware), but there are very few individual games that have lasted forever. In the background of an overheated market and play-to-earn users mostly focus on earning rather than playing, “having products” is indeed more important than “good products”. In order to retain users, let users always have something to do. The investment of binance labs is like a golden signboard, which makes people who play to earn more confident to participate.

The best way to ensure that the product is not stalled is to have your own development team. Game development is a relatively high threshold field, the technology to do the exchange, may not adapt to the game. Therefore, Binance labs acquired Xii Braves, a Singapore-based game studio.

Unlike other high-profile projects that have announced their participation in the “Binance Matrix”, this studio has taken an unusually low-key approach to Binance’s investment. On the current official website (https://www.xiibraves.com/), there is still no trace of Binance or even blockchain.

Instead, they showcase their self-developed projects and reserve projects, emphasizing that they are the first 3A game team in Singapore (authority to be confirmed), currently running a turn-based tactical game “Oath of Holy Light”, and two other games in development. Neither of them is a “chain game” for now.

This should be the next step of Binance: instead of investing in third-party projects at a high price after game developers have awakened and realized the value of P2E (this is how star sharks came about), we should have our own development team and a package of reserve projects, and then expand this team to explore high-quality chain game 2.0 products while making chain changes to our inventory. In the current market environment, as a game layman, Binance must do so, and can only do so.

2、To export the project, and more importantly, to be the publisher of the project. This logic, a little Internet common sense or game experience, are able to figure out. We can even more easily find two benchmark products in the web2 era: steam and tap tap, the former is the world’s largest game distribution agency that has been flourishing for 20 years, and the latter is the independent game distribution platform that has come to the forefront and is known as the paradise for entrepreneurs at the waist and below.

If we talk more deeply and realistically: every game project has its own life cycle, and many of them will be like meteors that are red at first but cool quickly, or even die before they are ready. But these endless products will eventually lead to a distribution platform — if they are all distributed from one platform.

This is the story that digital asset exchanges are most familiar with. More than 80% of the coins from the ICO era have been retired from history, but the success of the top exchanges, represented by Binance, was officially founded in that era. Users came to the exchanges in pursuit of those short-term assets and stayed, forming the cornerstone of the exchanges’ value.

Binance’s layout for a game distribution platform falls on Mobox.

Mobox has been in contact with the two parties since before it officially took ownership of Mobox, and before it started mining in April 2021, Mobox publicly stated that “we completed alpha testing on the main ethereum network and finally decided to come to BSC to deploy the official application, with the intention of combining our gaming experience with BSC’s DeFi ecosystem ”.

Three months later, BSC’s official Twitter account announced the second round (MVB II) of the Coin Accelerator program, and Mobox was on the top of the list:

The importance and support of Mobox is significantly higher than that of independent gaming projects, which will be expanded in the 0x2 section.

At present, Mobox’s own token MBOX mining and NFT mining have been going on for a long time, the main purpose is to complete the distribution of its own tokens and NFT, and it is expected that these assets will become the common assets of the games released on Mobox in the future.

As for Mobox’s “main business” — game distribution, there are currently 4 games on line such as chainz arena, none of which are projects directly invested by Cryptocurrency. It seems that it will take time for the linkage between the “Binance system games” and the “Binance system distribution platform”, and Binance officials hope that Mobox will develop independently for a while.

3、Improve the NFT transaction scene and strengthen the chain tour infrastructure. This involves a headache that keeps NFT away from the mainstream wealth of NFT: the incompatibility of OpenSea with the Binance chain.

The legendary NFTs such as crypto punk and bored ape were born on the ethereum mainnet and traded on opensea. Since the “Summer of NFT”, the ETH burned by opensea transactions alone is as high as 230,000 ETH, so you can imagine how active the transactions are and how huge the amount is.

Unfortunately, all of this has nothing to do with Cryptocurrency. OpenSea is so far compatible with only two chains, polygon (former matic) and klaytn (EVM compatible public chain developed by Korean social giant KAKAO, known as “Korean Ether”), in addition to the main network of Ether, and a few days ago there was a rumor that it was suspected to be testing the compatibility of Solana. The news of Solana compatibility has never been extended to BSC.

Many chain tours pre-sell their game equipment in the form of NFT, and the premium skins and heroes played through the game rely on this method of circulation — an important part of play to earn’s “earn”. If a chain tour is excluded from this huge NFT wealth flow pool, it will have to be forced to build its own trading market, and it will be difficult for users to reach exponential levels of broken circles.

So, Binance must solve this problem.

The good thing is that it has a bigger flow pool than opensea: its own centralized exchange.

Moreover, trading on this exchange has a unique advantage for OTC newbies — especially those who are familiar with the game but not the blockchain: because it is centralized, it eliminates OpenSea’s cumbersome wallet login, which is difficult to understand. The operation to dissuade newcomers such as pending order authorization.

Binance has a built-in “Binance NFT Marketplace” function in its app, and supports both the main ethereum network and BSC chains. Unlike opensea, where anyone can issue/show NFT, the Binance NFT market has a certain vetting mechanism for assets on the shelves, which follows the soul of the “centralized exchange”.

The current tradable assets in the this NFT marketplace include the artist NFT and the game mystery box. The aforementioned “Binance” games star sharks and Mobox NFT Momo can both be found on this marketplace. NFT transactions here only charge a 1% fee, significantly lower than opensea’s 2.5%. Although it is still difficult to reach the heights of opensea in terms of transaction amount and phenomenal products, the emergence of this trading platform has at least opened up the circulation of NFT and game asset values within the coin ecology.

Another interesting case is the cross-chain wallet project wombat, which was selected for the third phase of the 2021 “Binance Acceleration Camp”. But after it entered the Cryptocurrency camp, it was branded as a gaming wallet, and the keywords in Google search became “best gaming wallet”:

Wombat even has a built-in game board for easy mobile access to chain tour dapps through its app, automatically uses wallet addresses created or imported by users at wombat, and puts its technology for managing stablecoins across chains to use for multi-chain NFT:

The reason is that the chain game market is still very elementary, and the chain game market outside of ethereum is even more elementary, just like a theater that has to wait for more good plays to start before it can show its importance.

In addition, the above applications and scenarios, both the game itself and the distribution platform of the game, are not free from the product form of web2 era. Is there a possibility that, after further breakthroughs in blockchain technology, the production and interaction relationship between the traffic distribution platform and the project silo will change?

At least “my world” and sandbox have tried a new possibility, the game and the game can “string” and interact with each other through the online three-dimensional world. Coin has also laid out a similar track, represented by Space and SecondLife.

These two products have a similar sense of interaction. Take SecondLife’s interface as an example, the user generates an online image and walks through the virtual space, and the different sections of the product are visualized as different devices in the virtual world. From the current operation, it is reminiscent of CS from years ago, except that gunplay has become social.

0x2 The support Binance provides for GameFi

Coin is a master at making deals and making investments, but an amateur at the game. Based on this starting point, the most feasible way for it to intervene in the industry is to invest. Investment includes capital investment, but also resource investment.

The resources that can be invested in the whole Coin Security system include exchange centralized resources and BSC on-chain resources. The former’s core value is coin uploading, in addition to the NFT market trading portal built into the exchange app; the latter’s value lies in the rich DeFi scenario and massive users, the pancakeswap exchange traffic whose daily trading volume has exceeded the sum of uniswap and sushiswap, and PancakeSwap’s infusion tools: “Pancake Farm”.

The so-called “Pancake Farm” is a benefit given by PancakeSwap to high-value tokens on the BSC. This can be interpreted as the official support and recognition of the selected coins by PancakeSwap — and its representative, bsc, and even CoinSec. .

We have examined the above mentioned “Binance” chain projects and found that the resources invested by Binance for them also differed significantly. Some of them are almost all in, hoping that their sons will become dragons; others only give one or two resources, obviously not wanting to let the rise and fall of the secondary market of digital assets consume the project’s vitality too early.

The most favored by Binance is Mobox. It landed on the Binance exchange in August 2021 (that is, around the time it received Binance capital support), opening at 1.9usdt, once hitting a peak value of 15.7usdt, and still has a price of 2.4usdt and has never broken. Meanwhile, Mobox’s NFT blind box is also continuously offered on the Binance NFT marketplace.

On the decentralized network, PancakeSwap opened the Mbox-BNB LP token farm for Mobox’s token Mbox, issuing CAKE rewards for liquidity providers, and properly the pattern opens up:

In return, Mobox also launched three BNB and stablecoin liquidity pools in one go, offering Mbox for “free distribution”, showing their affinity with Cryptocurrency (of course, mining is now over):

RACA has the backing of the Musk family, and although it has also released a version of BSC, it has a complete cross-chain meta-universe logic and will soon launch its own public chain, USM, all of which Coin Security does not want to see.

In this context, RACA is selling its NFT “meta-beast” on BSC at a high price, which seems to be almost like a kicker to Binance. Therefore, although pancake has “politely” opened a farm pool for RACA-BUSD LP, it has not yet allowed RACA to register on the Binance exchange, refusing to open its largest traffic to it.

Compared to Mobox, no other chain project has been given the same “son and family” treatment yet. Coin On has opened the NFT market for star sharks’ blind box within the app, but its token SEA/SSS, like other game tokens, has not yet been registered on the main Coin On site, nor has it received CAKE farm support at pancake. And the tokens of projects such as space have only announced distribution plans and have not yet been put on the market.

Cryptocurrency is clearly aware of the wealth effect that will come from including the tokens in the main site, as well as the subsequent sell-off and fallout. The official seems to hope that after these games themselves have been iterated and enriched for a few more versions and expanded to a larger number of users, they will then offer up the ultimate traffic killer — on coins — to benefit as many participants as possible and leave a good name for their game ecology.

Therefore, we can foresee that, in the future, Binance will not be stingy in supporting early stage projects, but will not let these “little angels” fly too high at once.

0x3 What will happen next?

The prologue of the chain game story has just been unveiled, and the products that people can see now are just the beginning of the great story of this industry in the next 10 years.

Innovation always comes in the form of never-before-seen products. Just as the Internet users in 1995 couldn’t imagine Twitter and discord, we can’t assert that chain game will 1:1 replicate the product form of traditional game circle. But it will definitely follow the basic demands of game users and solve the existing problems of the current game industry.

Let’s take a look at what elements of the chain game world are missing in the game matrix of “Binance” system. And, what are the segments of the game ecology that are still missing in the current chain game circuit?

Axie’s success is inseparable from YGG guild’s push, and the money and flow of gold playing guild has become the object of many waist chain games. However, as of now, no layout of CoinA in guild has been seen.

The head gaming guilds of the moment — such as YGG, Good Games Guild and GuildFi — are generally located in Southeast Asia. Coin is no stranger to this region, as CZ’s early investor, Xiangfeng Investment, is a VC owned by Temasek, the state-owned capital of Singapore.

However, some of these guilds have already issued coins and commanded extremely high premiums, while others have switched to DAO operations, all of which are no longer suitable to receive investments. Binance is probably still waiting to see what happens, and a deeper guess is that it may not want its future guild to have only play-to-earn pure profit-seeking users, but wants to increase the proportion of real game users.

This involves the playability and watchability of the game, as well as one of its sub-industries: competition and live streaming.

It goes without saying how much wealth esports and its broadcasting business has already created in the web2 era. We can see that some chain tournaments are already planning their own tournaments internally, and while they are currently just tools to pull in new activity and proliferate airdrops, it is clear that practitioners have taken note of the industry’s laws.

What we want to emphasize is that the anonymity + credible payment attributes of blockchain networks may allow the competitive twin, gaming spinach, to gain a new piece of development space. In the near future, e-sports spinach fans will not have to put up with the poor quality racing games recommended by “those kind of websites” full of shady operations, but can openly vote for their favorite players/teams on the chain with stable coins, just like FTX did during the Euros.

So, where to watch the game? Who will be the DOYU/HUYA of web3?

Some may think of a streaming project that is also invested by Coin: Audius (token is AUDIO, already on Coin), a streaming project running on the solana network. It currently serves only music producers, and is expanding to youtube’s video producer community. Will it one day become a decentralized webcasting platform?

Instead, we think that the broadcast of the chain game competition may be completely different from the web2 live streams we are familiar with. Don’t forget that the metaverse is a parallel universe of equals, breaking physical boundaries, and in theory there is no geographical barrier between you as a viewer and a competitive player.

“My World” and sandbox, already allows players to travel through the game universe, traveling between different game scenarios. In the future, the audience is likely to be “in person” to watch the game. Imagine, you are standing under the crystal tower of King of Glory, watching the heroes of both sides fighting in front of you, what an experience upgrade!

Which product in the “Binance system” is likely to realize this scenario? We think it’s space.

At present, many web3 communities have already abandoned the zoom meeting room and opened a room in space to discuss projects live by voice. People who have used it say that its instant messaging function is quite smooth and much simpler to use than zoom, and they can also customize a 3D virtual image to run around, which is very punk and very web3.

After space has finished accumulating the first batch of live users, its future possibilities are opened up. If its 3D model can be inter-read with other chains’ models, and if a chain can be allowed to open a room in space with its own map model and be allowed to join freely, the “watching under the crystal” scenario will not be difficult to realize.

Of course, this requires a set of front-end 3D standards as great as ERC20/ERC721 for hundreds of game projects. And behind it, a strong, vibrant platform and community is needed to support it.

Cryptocurrency, as of now, is still one of the most promising platforms to make this happen.