Frobots founder Jerry Chan talks battle robots and NFT utility on CoinGeek Backstage

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There has been a lot of talk about non-fungible token (NFT) utility and why these tokens must go beyond pure speculation. For Jerry Chan, this will only come about when NFTs have digital agency and “a little bit of life to them,” and with Frobots, he is kickstarting this movement.

Frobots, which Chan has previously referred to as “esports for coding,” came about as the former Wall Street executive was exploring general computation in Bitcoin, he told CoinGeek Backstage host Becky Liggero.

“It’s kind of the digital form of BattleBots,” he stated, referring to the robot combat competition televised in the United States with roots in Britain’s Robot Wars. “It’s a tournament-style game where you get to code your robot.”

But it goes much further than a mere robot fighting tournament, Chan said, adding, “…it’s also educational. I wanted people to learn how to write code in a fashion that’s amenable to be put on the blockchain.”

Frobots is an NFT game, and it’s the first step towards taking NFTs beyond speculation. Chan believes that for this to happen, NFTs must have some digital agency and “a little bit of life to it.” Once a user creates a Frobot, it will forever remain on the Bitcoin SV (BSV) blockchain and can’t be deleted. It can, however, be modified to become better at combat with other Frobots, making it more valuable.

“As the Frobot gets older, the idea is that it should accrue value, and this value now is not just speculative,” Chan noted.

In addition, Frobots engage in competitive battles where the winner gets to walk away with a set financial incentive. As such, while purchasing a battle bot, a user can look at its history and calculate how much money it can statistically make in the future, further going beyond speculation.

Chan chose to build Frobots on BSV “because we have to have a cheap solution to publish our transactions on the blockchain, but at the same time be absolutely sure that the data is going to have the best chance of still being there 100 years later.”

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