Polygon invests in Hike. The Rush Gaming Universe will go on-chain in 2022
In just 12 months from launch, the RGU is now doing $50M in winnings (Gross ARR). The RGU community is battling it out in over 100M gameplays a quarter across 8 of India’s most popular casual games.
In 2022, this scale will be brought on-chain with Polygon and we’re excited to welcome them as an investor in Hike, the team building the RGU.
Kavin Bharti Mittal , Founder & CEO at Hike, said, “We’re entering a new era of gaming, where players will participate in a new kind of game economy. One where they are owners of the networks they help create. Gaming has always been an incredible source of entertainment, a way to bring joy to people’s lives, and now it will also be a means to provide brand new economic opportunities to the world. With Polygon, we’re going to bring The Rush Gaming Universe on-chain in 2022 on top of the vast and vibrant Ethereum ecosystem to deliver on this vision. We’re thrilled to have Polygon join us as an investor and partner.”
Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, comments: “Web3 gaming is one of the fastest-growing economic sectors ever and has the potential to be an important onramp for the next 1 billion users to come onto crypto. Hike’s Rush Gaming Universe is a hugely exciting development for the Indian market, with global potential beyond that, and we are delighted to be partnering to bring the platform on-chain.”
Off-Chain, then On-Chain (Web 2 & 3)
Projects tend to be bucketed in either Web 2 or Web 3. This is not very Consumer First, is it? (it’s VC first 😜).
Most consumers have no idea what these terms mean. They don’t need to know. That’s our responsibility. It’s our job to bring the latest tech to consumers that delivers enormous value to them in a simple & slick way.
The RGU as it exists today is a mobile-only platform + built off-chain with fiat currency. 3 reasons why →
- Mobile Crypto Infra is still in its early days. The wallet infrastructure today is built around a browser + chrome extensions and still needs to evolve to mobile
- Most Consumers ❌ Crypto Wallet so it’s important for us to build an experience that broadens our TAM and also be the reason why people are onboarded onto crypto
- Blockchain Scalability until recently has been a challenge. Now with L2 chains we can finally build scalable products
Where others see a challenge, we see opportunity.
So we ask why shouldn’t platforms like ours (and others) be the reason why the next 1B people are onboarded onto the blockchain?
Consumers as Owners
Our community has always been at the center of everything we do. The blockchain introduces a monumental paradigm shift in the way we can think about building products & communities. Through the power of smart contracts, we can now give players the opportunity to play games and generate digital assets based on the outcome of gameplay. We’re entering a new era of gaming, one where players will participate in a new kind of game economy where they are also owners of the networks and economies they help create.
Gaming to us has always been bite-sized entertainment and now it can also be a means to provide brand new economic opportunities to the world.
Why Polygon?
Polygon’s approach to scaling Ethereum improves the network’s transaction processing speed and tremendously reduces gas fees.
It’s the only scalability solution to fully support the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) making Polygon accessible and intuitive to use by the Ethereum community and those familiar with Solidity, an object-oriented programming language for writing smart contracts. By building on the Polygon network, we’ll benefit from Ethereum’s network effect without sacrificing its robust security.
Highlights:
- Improves on Ethereum’s limitations → Polygon offers quick speeds and extremely low costs
- Performance: 65,000+ TPS
- Low fees: $0.0001 per transaction
- Ecosystem → Rapidly growing ecosystems of users, developers, exchanges and liquidity providers for Polygon
- Ethereum compatible → Polygon’s compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) allows it to tap into the established community of developers who can easily migrate their work to and from the Ether network leveraging their existing tools.
- Partnerships → Polygon has managed to attract a large number of enterprise partnerships, which helps in growing the Web3 ecosystem.
- Technical Assistance → Inhouse developers for advice, trouble-shooting and best-practices on dedicated channels.
- Interoperability → The Polygon platform allows different blockchains to work together.
- Native liquidity → High tvl and liquidity access needed for a big player base
Over time we anticipate the need to move to a sovereign blockchain as scale grows and Polygon has a path to do that as well.
The Future
We believe Gaming & GameFi (not DeFi) will be an important onramp for next 1B users to come onto crypto. The UX will be key and we’re excited to have Polygon as a partner and to BUIDL with them and contribute our bit to the Web3 ecosystem
To stay up to date in real-time on the RGU, follow us:
- On twitter → https://twitter.com/RushGamingU &
- Join our thriving RGU community on Telegram here → https://t.me/rgutokenofficial
- https://www.rush.network/
