With Axie Infinity, there is a sudden rise of play-to-earn games. At least the way I see is that the core idea is that financial benefits of in-game purchases accrue to the network instead of just the game studio. But most casual games have a very short shelf life of a few years.
Recently, I came across Nillion’s whitepaper. Nillion at its core is trying to be a new decentralized encrypted data-processing layer. Here’s how it works.
Money serves three purpose - unit of accounting, a medium of exchange, and a store of value. Cryptocurrencies have been compared to Programmable Money. Anything programmable requires an experimentation platform for iterations and improvement. Bitcoin seems to have won the “store of value” battle. Ethereum has the developer mindshare and is the preferred experimentation platform. Multiple cryptocurrencies are still fighting the battle to be the medium of exchange. The amusing part is that every cryptocurrency startup envies Ethereum’s developer ecosystem and is trying to attract developers. But there isn’t any real value capture being the experimentation platform. A successful product has a high chance of leaving Ethereum and migrating users to its chain. The real battle, I believe, remains in becoming the medium of exchange, being the programmable Visa & Mastercard equivalent. ...
Background There are three major types of financial exchanges Stocks and bonds Commodity exchange Foreign exchange (Forex)
All cryptocurrencies are eventually tied to a “private” key. You lose this key, and the funds are gone, forever. Millions worth of bitcoins have disappeared from the circulation due to lost keys. You can memorize the key by mapping it into passphrase consisting of memorizable words but if you forget that, like many others, the coins are unrecoverable. An alternative is to trust a centralized service like Coinbase, but then all the benefits of investing in a decentralized currency are gone. Lastly, one can use a hardware wallet, but again, if you lose the wallet, the key is lost. If you keep the key on your device, then a malware might target and try to steal it someday. Thus, even if you are bullish on cryptocurrencies, there are no good decentralized ways of holding a significant chunk of your net worth in cryptocurrencies. ...