Interview with Richard Leach

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More Than Money: GameFi’s Richard Leach talks earning money through blockchain games

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Steve Kaaru

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Gaming is the one sector in the blockchain space that’s gaining attention, with the play-to-earn model changing the industry forever as it fuses gaming with finance. On the latest More Than Money episode, Patrick Thompson caught up with Richard Leach, the marketing officer for GameFi AG, a company that’s building an NFT-powered gaming ecosystem on BSV.

Zug, Switzerland-based GameFi AG is founded in 2021 “with very ambitious ideas in mind,” Leach stated. “We’re at the very least slowly moving towards the idea that it might just be BSV that’s going to enable us to realize these.”

GameFi is coming into a rapidly-growing sector targeting the gamification of finance. The company wants to create opportunities for people to make money doing what they love—playing games. It’s creating an ecosystem where participants can play a wide range of games and own NFTs.

Gaming has traditionally been a for-fun sector which many have looked at as purely recreational. With blockchain technology, this has changed, and play-to-earn games are quickly gaining prominence. As a bare minimum, users should be able to make a few bucks as they play, and for those who are really good at it, gaming can be a career that pays quite well, Leach told CoinGeek.

At GameFi, NFTs are at the heart of everything the company does. Its first project, available exclusively on the BSV blockchain, is Galactic Mice, a collection of futuristic NFTS that enable their owners to participate in all aspects of the company’s play-to-earn ecosystem, with the first game being Cyber Fights, “a play-to-earn beat-em-up style game.”

Taking inspiration from the massively successful CryptoFights, Leach believes that success for any blockchain game will lie in storing everything on-chain, which can only be done on the massively scalable Bitcoin SV. This gives everything in the ecosystem, from characters to even specific weapons used, a backstory, and one worth paying a hefty sum for.

The future belongs to pay-to-earn games, Leach believes.

“If you had two games that were similar, one of which affords you the opportunity to actually make money while the other one doesn’t, it’s a no-brainer, especially if the entry into it is relatively inexpensive,” he said.

There are obstacles, however. The first, according to Leach, is fees. If a player wins $10 and is required to pay $50 to withdraw it, then it’s not a feasible business model. Bitcoin SV is unaffected by such challenges, with transactions on the BSV network averaging 1/100 of a penny, making it economically feasible to build gaming applications on the network.

On-ramping has also been quite a challenge for many gamefi companies. To solve this, GameFi AG is in talks with Simplex to increase its onboarding options. It’s also working on integrating Fabriik Weave to increase onboarding options for their customers, which CryptoFights already did. 

While GameFi customers will get the chance to make money and grow, Leach believes the company will also be doing something bigger for the industry—bringing on more newcomers into the space.

“Gaming is going to be a really useful method of introducing more and more people to digital cash, through earning it rather than purchasing it. Once people have gotten a taste of it (gaming on BSV), they’ll be keen to use it more in [the] future,” he said.

Leach further believes that NFTs will become an everyday phenomenon that we use daily, most times not even being consciously aware of it. The use cases will become much more mundane but with increasing amounts of utility.

Check out the previous episodes of More than Money on YouTube.

New to blockchain? Check out CoinGeek’s Blockchain for Beginners section, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about blockchain technology.