Adam Kling & David Case on ‘Hashing it Out’ Episode 6: NFTs and the gaming industry

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“NFT” is the new buzz word and professionals within the gaming industry are searching for ways to take advantage of this buzz ASAP. The problem is that most people do not fully understand NFTs and the NFT projects that are currently under the spotlight are using blockchains that cannot scale.

When it comes to NFTs, the gambling industry in particular is talking about Zed Run, a digital horse racing platform built on Matic/Polygon layer 2 (Ethereum), Sandbox, also using Ethereum, a “metaverse” where you can buy and rent land, create NFTs, upload them into a marketplace and integrate them into games and of course NBA Top Shot on the Flow blockchain, where the NFTs are cards containing licensed video highlights. While these are all amazing ideas, they are limited by their platforms.

On this episode of Hashing it Out, we hear from Adam Kling, CEO and Founder of FYX Gaming, and David Case, CTO and Chief Architect of FYX Gaming. FYX Gaming (formerly known as Kronoverse) is an esports platform, portal and marketplace (think “Steam”) built on the BSV Blockchain and CryptoFights—built from scratch by Kling and Case—is one of the games you can play on the platform.

CryptoFights has been making waves in the esports and BSV blockchain space, reaching over a million transactions in the first month of its open beta, using NFTs as a core building block of everything they are doing, providing immutable data to betting platforms and many more esports industry firsts.

CryptoFights & NFTs

Unlike the NFTs associated with Zed Run, Sandbox and NBA Top Shot, with CryptoFights, users do not have to buy the NFTs, they can actually be earned. When asked how CryptoFights takes advantage of NFTs, how players can use them and how they get them, Case explained how CryptoFights NFTs are so much more than “just a little collectable” and that they “grow and change over time.”

“When you have a character, it is an NFT. When you have weapons and armor, they are NFTs…and when you win a battle, you actually win the battle object…and then as you play, we drop new weapons to you and those weapons can be traded or sold or melted down for the BSV that’s stored in them. So a very flexible world,” Case explained.

“What David’s alluding to is really the foundation of what the future of a real metaverse will be. Sandbox or these other ones are still somewhat siloed, especially when you talk about private blockchains like Flow,” Kling added.

Having NFTs that can interact with other NFTs using logic in an open economy is what Kling believes will “usher in” the first stage of a true metaverse.

“Hopefully in the next couple of years it’s going to start and we’re going to be one of the leaders to do that,” Kling predicted.

BSV vs other blockchains

Case caught the blockchain bug about three years ago, spending his first year working with Ethereum and his past two years with BSV. When asked why he decided to make the switch, Case said its pretty simple…the BSV blockchain is the only one that can actually do it.

“Like you mentioned, we put a million transactions through in the last month. There’s just not any other blockchain that can handle that. Or if it did, if it could, the cost would be so prohibitively high that we would have no way to be able to actually do that,” he explained.

“We’re here. We can pay for the transaction fees for thousands of interactions per client and it really is something that is not going to break the bank, and it works fast and it’s reliable and it’s here now,” he added.

When Case and Kling started working together on the FYX Gaming (then called Kronoverse) and Crypto Fights project they were using Ethereum. It quickly became obvious why they needed to make a platform change, regardless of the headaches involved in moving to another blockchain.

“We just didn’t have a working product in Ethereum. We were 90 percent of the way there, but the last 10 percent was proving very, very complicated. And every time we’d solve that, there’d be another 10 percent that was still missing. You never could get to a point where the whole system just worked,” Case revealed.

“I’ll be completely honest, it does take a different outlook on how you develop software and how you architect a system to work in Bitcoin than it does in Ethereum, but at the same time, Bitcoin just provides a much broader world,” he explained.

“The power is not very much [with Ethereum]. You have to stretch it, with every tool you’ve got, to even just get simple transactions to happen and so the type of logic that we’ve got in play, it just wasn’t workable. It wasn’t going to work,” Case added.

Kling pointed out that all the side chains popping up to solve the shortcomings that platforms such as Ethereum are plagued with will likely cause problems in the future. With all these side chains, what’s the point of using a blockchain in the first place?

“I think we’re really in the early stages where we’re all trying to figure out who’s going to be the winner in the race for market adoption but on the technical side it’s so much simpler for us. A lot of these other projects have to worry about their layer 2 network and then they have to worry about reporting that to Ethereum and vice versa,” Kling explained.

“Who knows if there’s to be a layer 3 and 4 and 5 in the future to do that. So that’s a big unknown, I don’t know how it’s all going to work out, but it is a complexity that we won’t have because we’re done. It’s all layer 1. We’re done. And BSV takes care of us at that point,” he added.

The future metaverse

Another reason why FYX Gaming’s use of NFTs stands out from the crowd is because the assets that the NFTs represent are actually stored on the blockchain and will remain there forever, despite the future of FYX Gaming. This is only possible on the BSV blockchain, because of its ability to scale massively and support large file storage at a low cost.

“With our platform, with file storage, which what’s unique, is that we can do that on chain. So if we think of this special item, all of the 3D models, the assets, the textures, all that can actually be stored on chain to where that, like you said, if we take off and we’re no longer in existence, the people that have the NFT still have all the files that go with that,” Kling confirmed.

“When you think of long term in the future with the metaverse, is that if games start to adopt these items and then 10 years later that studio is no longer together anymore, it’ll still work because they don’t have to host those images anymore,” he said.

“I think that’s, again, another foundational thing that the metaverse needs is where it’s all in this blockchain/database or whatever you want to think of it as and it just exists and it’s just there forever. I think that’s a big difference for people to start understanding,” Kling added.

NFT Marketplace & interoperability

In order to gain significant traction with NFTs on the BSV blockchain (vs. your Ethereums or Flows) the key is adoption and market share. Kling elaborated on the importance of having an economy that is fulfilling and able to grow, one of FYX Gaming’s top initiatives.

“I’m working a lot on adoption, pulling people in. You don’t have to worry about crypto wallets to come in here. It’s just a username and password…I think when it comes to this you just need to sign in and not need to worry about all the complexity of the crypto market. And that’s what we’re doing,” he said.

“I think as time goes on, it’s just a race. I just feel like we’re in a big race to get the most people essentially…we’re very early stages, but I think we have a really good solution that will build upon to make it very easy to start using this on BSV without all the complexity,” Kling added.

CryptoFights, betting & data integrity

FYX Gaming announced a strategic partnership with UNIKRN in March and the initial stages of this collaboration will feature betting on CryptoFights outcomes on the UNIKRN platform, a big step forward for betting on esports as all of the CryptoFights data is stored on chain.

“Our arrangement with UNIKRN was simply to provide a new way to tap into what’s going on within our ecosystem easily over there. We can send the data. We can actually render the battles from the data to send the videos to where they can show it on their site and then people can bet on that,” Kling elaborated.

“It’s a really nice system because we don’t have to create APIs and connect each other like in web 2.0. We all look at the same place,” he added.

Data integrity is guaranteed as well, removing the need for operators to aggregate data and analyze if players are colluding or cheating, a super expensive and time-consuming process. Instead, regulators can simply access the data via the public blockchain and see for themselves.

“If we have a world where all the players are using BSV and all their moves are there, we can start to look for suspicious patterns…it’s just going to be so much easier and more streamlined, I think, in the future,” Kling added.

From a CTO point of view, having all of the data on the blockchain removes the need to think about the security aspect of things and Case describes it as a “data mining gold mine.”

“You end up with a point where essentially every bit of data is attested by an identity and that identity doesn’t necessarily need to be known, but it can be known and it can be revealed in such a way to prove that all those different interactions were done by a certain real person,” Case explained.

“You have so much visibility into how everything connects to everything else rather than the black box of trust…you end up getting to this future world where you don’t really have to just trust talking heads. You get to a point where everything proves everything else and the fact that the logs are there, so anyone who’s got the gumption can query them and figure it out,” he added.

In closing…

FYX Gaming is paving the way in esports and blockchain and I classify Kling and Case as innovators and early adopters. They “get it.” They are already doing it. They have first-hand experience with Ethereum and already know it cannot scale, but BSV can. What they are doing with NFTs and gambling data is a peek into the future and this is only the beginning of their powerful plans.

“I will say we have a lot of really cool things that I just can’t wait for us to get to. There’s some ideas with Crypto Fights that I think are going to be coming out pretty soon, hopefully before the end of the year. And just stay tuned, keep playing. And I think you’re going to be surprised at what we can do with BSV,” Kling concluded.