The Future of WAX and Digital Assets
Unlike many assume, WAX is not OPSkins. Nor does it’s future lie in the gaming industry.
And this is a good thing.
WAX stands for ‘Worldwide Asset eXchange’, and it has a chance of becoming one of the crypto projects with the most significant impact on our daily lives so far.
OPSkins, the market leader of a 50 Billion Dollar industry, is the company behind WAX. And they want to bring their whole business on the blockchain. At this point, I feel the need to state the fact that the usual maker fee on every trade is 10% — we are talking 5 billion in revenues here! Assuming OPSkins will stick with gaming skins and crypto collectibles as soon as their Blockchain is live would be pretty shortsighted. This would be as if Amazon had stuck to books after they conquered the market. But in this case, OPSkins doesn’t only own the market already, they also got the first mover advantage with WAX.
WAX will be an EOS variant optimized to facilitate the trading of digital assets. The scheduled MVP Beta is close and with EOS going life we can probably expect it any day.
It will not only handle the stores, fiat pegged payment processing, distribution of fees but also be able to communicate with the Ethereum blockchain utilizing the WAX ERC20 as the bridge. It will come with full dAPP support without artificial limitations. This means you can technically run on WAX whatever you could run on EOS.
To take a look at the bigger picture we have to first dig into digital assets. Right now everyone is just talking about skins and crypto collectibles. Think about those what you want. But In essence, a digital asset is anything that can be stored digitally, and thus be traded digitally. Even though the 50 billion dollar market OpSkins is targeting seems enormous, it’s just the tip of an iceberg. Digital assets are everywhere around us. Combining digital asset trade with blockchain allows licensing on a whole new level. Think of eBooks, you could actually resell and the publishers even earning on your resell through the WAX chain if they want. Same goes for movies, television series, computer games, music, etc. pp.
It would ease the distribution of software licenses, be it for developers selling or companies/end-consumer using it. Both sides would always be able to tell how many licenses are in use and where. I spent some time in IT administration and believe me, the chaos of in-house license distribution is one of the worst nightmares there is.
Let’s take a step further and look at the first ‘direct’ real world connection. And no I’m not even at tokenization of real-world assets yet. Back in the 90s, we had copy shops and Internet cafes popping up everywhere until almost every household had it’s own printer and Internet connection. What is coming up right now, and I suppose many of you are as hyped about those as I am, are 3D printers. On WAX you could trade and run** limited use Blueprint**s for 3D printers, opening up a more or less untapped market that is becoming huge in the near future. I know that at least one major automobile company is looking into the utilization of blockchain tech to fight replacement part fraud by not shipping the replacement part to the other end of the world, but by just issuing limited use printing licenses. And I’m talking steel here! But who knows, maybe in a couple of years we could even buy whole homes on the blockchain and have ’em printed.
Then we have got the real real-world connection. Tokenization. Utilizing tokenization, we ultimately get an IOT chain. E.g., rental equipment, equip something with an RFID, QR code or whatever tag and link it. This could be used from cars to door keys; the only limit is your imagination.
So if you ask me, and I don’t care if you do, digital assets are THE market of the future.
Looking at the track record of the Team behind WAX, for example, Malcolm Casselle, who is not only the President of OPSkins, but founded Xfire aswell as numerous other successful business. Jon Yantis, who created and shaped the concept of virtual item trading and William Quigley the founder of Tether. You can bet they are aware of this.
Even without this market, the impact on the gaming sector beyond just item trading could be huge. I’m expecting crypto collectible and blockchain game toolkits. And I’m betting my ass on a Unity plugin, bringing crypto microtransactions and blockchain based games onto almost every smartphone out there, giving Google Play and the iOS store with their extremely high fees a run for their money. Genuinely bringing crypto to the masses, without most of the users even realizing.
As a vast VR nerd, I had to smirk a bit when WAX and Decentraland partnered. It leads to the assumption of WAX maybe becoming the ‘Linden Dollar’ of our Metaverse. Who wants boring credits anyway?
The pillars of WAX will be the ERC20 token and the WAX Coin, that will be distributed 1:1 later this year to every WAX holder. The specifics will be, as they say, announced ‘soon enough’. One thing to remember is that the whole system relies heavily on staking of the WAX coins while the token will mainly be used to process payments. We will end up with two different assets with different names and a considerable difference in circulating supply even though the total supply might be the same.
tl;dr
Technically anything that can be transferred, stored or sold digitally, can be brought onto the Blockchain. eBooks, Movies, 3D Blueprints, Games, (Software) Licenses, and the list goes on.
WAX is an EOS variant and can host any dAPP written for it as EOS does.
We will likely see WAX based blockchain games and microtransactions due to engine integration in smartphone games bringing crypto to the masses without them even realizing. First projects have already announced, that they will be switching from Ethereum to WAX as soon as it goes life. And you can bet many will follow.
Attach a dAPP with decentralized storage to WAX, and you can ultimately replace Steam with it, (Actually Robot Cache is doing that already ;)) host a decentralized Netflix | Spotify | Library | eBook | Movie | whatever store or rental and even facilitate and profit from peoples resells.
But for now think of WAX as a decentralized trustless combination of Amazon and eBay for digital assets.
WAX will be split into a token and a coin later this year, of which the coin will be highly incentivized to be staked, locked up and thus have a considerably decreased circulating supply.
Yes, I might come off fanboyish… but I hope now you’ve got a bit of an understanding why.
Kaefer out~
