Decentralized Gaming Exchange - WAX Token

What's up everyone, my name is Michael and welcome to Box Mining. So gaming and the blockchain is a huge topic on my channel and I talk about it a lot because of two reasons. One is because I have a background in the gaming industry and I want to share my experiences. And also more importantly is that blockchain and gaming is a perfect match. Gaming is all about digital items, guns, knives, gold and more. And blockchain is about tracking digital items. So recently I've done two topics. One is blockchain and gaming overall and then blockchain adoption. Why don't we have widespread adoption of the blockchain technology in gaming? And I think a lot of people have realized this. And recently there are a lot of projects that are trying to combine blockchain and gaming. Whilst they might seem to have the same ideas, they are approaching this quite differently. And I want to explain to you guys what Opskins and WAX is trying to do. The thing is to understand that we must really kind of look at and talk about why skins are so important. I think this is something that a lot of people that have been watching my other videos that aren't into gaming don't essentially realize why these skins are so important. Why there's such a massive market generating millions, if not billions of dollars just on skins alone. And that might seem very foreign. So I'm going to explain that. Then we'll explain what Opskins is because they're one of the biggest websites for exchanging skins. And then we'll talk a little bit about the project and how that's actually quite different from what we have so far. So let's talk about why people like these skins anyway. So this page is a page of CSGO skins. You know, they're just these fancy spray paints or different things that make a weapon feel cooler. And it's important for a lot of people that come from not this industry to realize why gamers love this. Why they're willing to pay $60, which is the price of a full price game. If you think about it, latest game launches do cost almost $60 to $70. And that's for a whole game. So why would people spend what costs, you know, a whole game or even more of this emerald knife that costs $2,000 something US dollars on one of these weapons and why that is logical to these people. So I want to say one thing is that CSGO is about, is a shooter game. And it's a very popular shooter game. So this is a live stream of shooters. I'm on playing CSGO and you run around and you shoot people. Well, that's fun and all. But one thing that you have to remember with shooter type games is that you want the game to be balanced. You want the game to be fair. And to do so, all the weapons are balanced. So really, when you have a skin, you're only changing the cosmetic aspects of a weapon. So that's the only real part you can really customize and kind of develop and grow in that game. You know, gamers, from my experience, and I love this too, is that when you play a video game, you want to grow in that game. You want to increase your stand. You want to show your love for that game. And this is why the skins are important. Because skins not only are important for the gamer, but they're also important for the gaming company too. So while CSGO does cost money to buy the game, it's relatively cheap. And in the long term, Steam makes a lot of money on these chests that open up and you can get new skins from. And it costs money to open a chest. So when you get one of these skins, it's by pure luck. And some skins are worth more than others. Other gamers know exactly how much these things cost. So even on Steam, it's quite on the open how much these items cost. And if you hold one of these out and you're playing with your friends, you're like, whoa, wow, that's a cool knife or something like that. So this is why there's so much value in these items. And that's why an Emerald knife can cost up to $2,000 something. So there are people who are willing to buy them because they want to personalize, either show off or show the experience in this game. So this is why the market exists. The market exists because game developers wanted to exist. And this is one of the only ways that game developers can make money or make good money on these shooter games. And the other thing is with skins is that they give you personality. So the gamers love them because you can express yourself through these weapons. You can have a whole red set, a whole green set. And it shows off how cool you are. So the steam platform provides a marketplace for everything. And they take a cut off these transactions and trades. The thing is, of course, that there are some limitations to that because they take a bit of fees. Some gamers don't like that. And also they can't give you out cash. So they can give you credits, but they don't give you out cash. And this is an important difference. So now we move on to op skins. So because there are some limitations on trading on a steam platform, on some fees, gamers have now gone to platforms like op skins. So op skins handles a hundred million dollars of kind of exchanges per year. I mean, that's mind boggling huge already. The thing is, these things are very, very popular. And I'm going to show you very quickly how this works. So this kind of scans your inventory for items and you can list it up for sale. So in this situation, I'm going to sell my crate. So the crates were for three US dollars. So why not click into the cell? And what's going to happen is that it's going to go and collect the item off me. It's going to offer to open my steam client, which I'm going to do now. So now after doing that, I can click the button and open this trade in steam. So now I can confirm the trade. It is a gift and I traded. Oh, now the trade has been completed. I have confirmed my email confirmation and now the bot has my item. So now that I have given it to the bot, I pretty much surrendered the item to op skins. Now op skins can help me sell the item, find a buyer. The buyer pays op skins and op skins pays me. The thing is that process is centralized because we have to trust op skins. And this is where options wants to improve the process. And that's where the wax platform comes in. So I'm going to discuss very quickly how that works. And then I'm going to discuss what I think about this project. So instead of sticking with a centralized solution, which they have now, they want to build a new exchange called worldwide asset exchange. And that's for all digital assets. And they want to do this in a decentralized fashion. So they want to decentralize skin trading. So what op skins wants to do is to create an entirely new platform called worldwide asset exchange. So worldwide asset exchange is exclusively for digital items. And what it's going to try to do is it's going to try to make what they have now, the current business model into a decentralized business model. The reason for this is that being decentralized means that there is a reduced amount of risk. You know, they don't have to be the central authority that controls everything. And all the players feel a bit safer because now they're dealing with a decentralized network. So in this situation, what they want to do is they want to build a new platform and they want to build their own blockchain. The blockchain is based on dedicated proof of stake, which is very similar to what we have with Bishares and Steemit, but it's their own custom version here. Not only do they want to handle trade requests, but they want to handle the transfer of items as well. They're going to have something called a transfer agent. So the transfer agent is not a central authority, but they have to stake a certain amount of tokens first. So they stake the tokens down that kind of acts like a collateral in the event of something going wrong. And the transfer agent will collect it off a player. It's just like how the bot clicks it off me, and then they'll deliver it to the buyer. So in this way, the exchange platform kind of creates and matches the buyer and the seller and transfer agents will not be in charge of transferring the goods in every step. There is no central party. So now it's all done in an automated process, which reduces the amount of kind of risk involved in the trade. And of course it gives a little bit more transparency as well. So the transfer agents will now be responsible for delivering it. And if there's an issue, then a dispute can be raised and resolved in a decentralized fashion as well. So the wax tokens will kind of be used for the currency of transfer and also for staking for these transfer agents. And they're holding a token sale to sell these tokens. Now, the interesting thing about this is that they're building wax with the current team that built Opskins. So they definitely know the system and know how this kind of industry works, the ins and outs of the industry. They also have quite a few partners that are huge names in the blockchain space. For example, Pantera, they also have Fumbushi as well. So they have a lot of people already invested in this project and they kind of want to open that up to the public. What I do want to discuss is that not just the people, but the idea as well. So why go through all this fuss? Why do we have to build our own exchange and why is there a need for a decentralized exchange? Because we talked previously about projects that want to integrate directly into video games. And now this project is about building an exchange for this. So what is the difference of why do we have to do this? Well, the reason is that not all video games want to support the blockchain. And in fact, it does take a long time for them to adopt it. So what WAX is trying to do is it's trying to work with the existing infrastructure. It's going to try to work with the existing business model and existing games. So in the example that I've showed you above, Opskins works with the steam trade system to kind of use that to facilitate a trade between a buyer and a seller. And in this situation as well, WAX will try to do so, but in a decentralized fashion. So it's leveraging what is a already successful model. This way, developers don't have to rewrite the game or change anything. The game itself is going to be the same and they can keep doing what they're doing. So one disadvantage of such a thing is that if you're working with an existing system, that means any changes on the existing system on steam's front will drastically affect your exchange as well. The thing is steam doesn't change their system very often, but if they do, they might drastically affect how items are collected, how items are exchanged, and there must might be a huge scramble to change everything up. And to make that sure that this decentralized exchange is used and is successful in the long run, the developers must be on their toes to any changes in the steam network. Of course, I think one thing about WAX and the way it's set up with the user collection agents, the agents that collect items from people and distribute it, means that they can do it for multiple games, any games that support trading of items. And one thing is that it might be the case that other games will be opened up to this as well. And that might go outside of steam as well. So it's going to be interesting to see how that agent plays out. It'll be a little bit different from just passing your item to a bot. You have to rely on external services, but by doing so, you reduce the risk of an account ban, because sometimes steam does ban accounts or freeze accounts, and that affects the agent, but not the whole platform. Of course, another public disadvantage of this is about item trading in general. Every new game has different policies with regards how items are traded. We do have CSGO being one of the most popular games with a huge longevity. But of course, in the future, we don't really know what's going to come next. Some games don't support item trading and that market might depend on the market size of the skin trading market depends on which games want to use this model. So what do you guys think about wax? Do you think that this approach or with working with an existing system and refining that and building a decentralized exchange for it is good? Or do you want to approach it from the developer's angle and make sure developers integrate into the blockchain? So I'd love to hear your comments below and what you actually trade in games as well. Do you play CSGO and do you think buying a $3,000 dagger is really worth that money? Guys, thank you guys so much for watching this episode. Remember to subscribe to my channel and hit that notification bell to be updated with the latest videos. Thank you guys so much for watching. See you next time.