The benefits to society are huge. Web3 gaming will change digital ownership. Robbie Ferguson, co-founder of Immutable, talks about how Web3 gaming could change how digital property is owned and how value is shared.
Robbie Ferguson was a big gamer as a kid. He played his favorite games for thousands of hours.
One day, he logged into Runescape and started a chain of events that would forever change his view on digital ownership and the world of Web3 gaming: “I logged into my brother’s Runescape account, which we shared, and went into the wilderness, where I lost all of his red dragon armor.
Ferguson told Cointelegraph at the Token2049 conference in Singapore in September 2022 how he, his brother James, and Alex Connolly, after their first attempts to build a decentralized game, went on to start the blockchain technology company Immutable in 2018.
Ether Bots, their first attempt at an Ethereum-powered game, taught the three of them what should go on-chain and what should go off-chain. It also laid the groundwork for what would become an infrastructure platform for building Web3-based games and nonfungible token (NFT) functionality.
Also, Ferguson was determined to change the way digital ownership of in-game assets worked:
With what they learned from their first try, the successful launch of a play-to-earn tactical card game powered by blockchain Gods Unchained was a big part of making Immutable, a place where blockchain development companies can build Web3 games that work with NFTs.
The company’s Ethereum layer-2 NFT scaling platform is called ImmutableX, and Immutable Studios is the part of the company that makes games.
In the first week after Gods Unchained came out, 50 million NFTs were created. This caused prices to go up because gas fees were high in the Ethereum ecosystem.
ImmutableX wants to make it easy for low-cost bands to trade common in-game items.
This raises the question of how profitable Immutable is and how it can offer free minting of NFTs, which is what its website says it does.
Immutable makes this possible by covering all the costs of creating NFTs by using zk-Rollups. This creates economies of scale that make it possible to bundle billions of transactions for a “reasonable cost.”
Giving back to the Ethereum network: Immutable’s efforts to solve the scalability of NFT minting to power blockchain-based games are thanks to Starkware, the Ethereum layer-2 platform that was the first to use zk-STARK technology.
Immutable can also say that it is carbon neutral because of this technology. Ferguson brags about being able to make 600,000 NFTs in a single proof that only takes up a fraction of a block in the Ethereum network.
Still, zk-Rollups and Ethereum’s Merge have laid an important foundation for infrastructure providers like Immutable to build for an increasing number of Web3-based games in the future: “We’re barely at a fraction of a percent of the scale of transactions per second that NFTs will eventually take.
Ferguson says that Immutable also helped come up with batched minting and deferred minting, which are two common ways to scale NFTs that are used by OpenSea and Nifty Gateway, among others.
Ferguson thought about this question carefully and said that he thinks digital users should have rights to the items and assets they get in any digital environment: “The mission should be to make a better game that uses Web3 under the hood so that people can have a better experience and have digital property rights.
Ferguson thinks that the sector is already doing well, pointing out that more than $9 billion has been put into Web3 gaming in the last 18 months.
Immutable, on the other hand, keeps growing.
The blockchain technology company in Australia has more than 300 employees and has raised more than $300 million from investors like Coinbase, Tencent, Galaxy Digital, and Animoca Brands.
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