Battle of the Frobots: Jerry Chan unveils new BSV-powered battle bot platform

“Do we really need another financial intermediary, another token exchange or DeFi platform? How about we build something interesting on Bitcoin?” Jerry Chan, Founder of Frobots asked.

This search for something new, innovative, and interesting—which at the same time leverages Bitcoin’s capabilities—that led Jerry to founding Frobots. In an appearance on the Brittany Bitz podcast, the former Wall Street executive shared what his new battle bots platform is all about, how it integrates NFTs, and why he believes it will lead to the rise of a Bitcoin developers’ army.

Battle of FROBOTS! Jerry Chan Announces His NEW Battle Bot Platform on Bitcoin!

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Frobots is an “esports for coding.” Users get to write algorithms for battle bots that fight each other to death for fun and profit, all on the BSV blockchain. Jerry drew inspiration from Robot Wars, the hit robot combat competition that was broadcast on British television (and later in the U.S. as BattleBots). However, with Frobots, the combat happens virtually, and the owners of the robots get to earn income from the exploits of their robots.

Frobots is as unique an idea as they come in the Bitcoin space. As Jerry told host Brittany Faslun, it all stemmed from his exploration of “the generic computation capabilities of Bitcoin. What I mean is Bitcoin can be a global computer.” This is only possible on BSV, with the restoration of the opcodes, which made it Turing-complete, Jerry observed.

With Bitcoin’s computational capabilities in mind, combining it with gaming was a no-brainer. This industry has already proven that there’s a market for paying users when they like the content. In particular, Jerry liked the Roblox model as it has an internal economy where users build the games for the other users. With 1.1 billion monthly active users, Roblox is the biggest proof that user-generated gaming content is gold.

As with many blockchain gaming platforms, Frobots is incorporating NFTs. However, Jerry wants to distance himself from NFT gaming as it comes with a connotation of NFTs being pure collectibles with no other use. 

With Frobots, the value of the bots comes from their fighting history, ownership record, earnings, and more.

Do we really need another DeFi platform?

Before he ventured into Bitcoin, Jerry was a Wall Street executive, serving as the Vice President of Goldman Sachs FICC Technology and at JPMorgan Forex Trading Tech. In his time in the space, he has noticed that almost every other developer is out to build the same old products, with a bias towards those that make money quickly. This monotony is ironic, especially given just how much more Bitcoin can do.

“Don’t you find it ironic that Bitcoin set out to remove the trusted intermediary and then an entire sector of the crypto industry has spent the last eight years building intermediaries? The fact that you’re building a decentralized one doesn’t change the fact that you’re just building more middlemen,” he noted.

For Frobots, the value goes beyond simply beating your friends in a robot war and even making some bucks. Jerry believes that the platform will spark an army of Bitcoin developers when their skills are most needed.

“I’ve structured Frobots so that you’re effectively writing a Bitcoin contract. If this game becomes crazy popular, my wish is that in five-ten years, you have this whole cohort of people able to program Bitcoin.”

In addition, Jerry is targeting the non-developers through tools that allow them to program without necessarily having to learn the coding languages, kind of what MIT’s Scratch does for kids. 

Frobots have the ability to last for decades. This is because it involves playing against dynamic players who can modify their code and thus their strategy on the battlefield. This is one of the key reasons why games such as Chess and Go have lasted for several centuries, with the latter being around for over 2,500 years.

Jerry has been working on Frobots since September and expects to roll out a beta this year and launch the platform early next year. He has been building the token economy on the STAS protocol “for the ability to put a lot of the logic on the Bitcoin layer. It allows us to do some low-level logic like royalty payments.”

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