‘The possibilities are endless’ as NFTs bridge gap between comics, gaming, and character universes

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“In our conversations we’d get trapped talking about all the things we could do with NFTs,” said Gary Ma of Epik. His panel discussion at CoinGeek New York with CryptoFights CEO Adam Kling and Joe Brusha of graphic novel empire Zenescope covered just a few of those possibilities, looking at ways properties from different media could cross over into each other’s worlds, while using the BSV blockchain to add value at the same time.

CryptoFights and Zenescope just announced a deal that would see some of the Zenescope universe’s famous and much-loved characters join CryptoFights as playable characters. Zenescope has over 300 characters in its library and owning an NFT to one of those character would give CryptoFights players the chance to take them out of the static comic book world and into something more interactive.

Brusha, in New York City for the first Comic-Con event in two years, admitted he “didn’t know a lot about NFTs” before the CryptoFights suggestion came. The deal was organized by Epik, which sees plenty of opportunities in NFT fandom. Ma’s firm is currently creating a digital strategy for other similar deals, or as he put it, “using licensing to push boundaries.”

Brusha presented a demonstration of the rich experience players could have with this deal and others like it—customizing detailed appearance and animation features for the characters. He mused on how it could lead to many people outside their traditional fan community becoming interested in those characters, perhaps encountering them first as players in a fight game, but leading the curious to learn more about their backstories in the Zenescope universe.

Epik’s deal to put those characters in a blockchain fighting game “was something really cool for us” in their efforts to leverage their properties’ value, he said. “The possibilities are kind of endless with what we can do.”

All three were quick to point out that the Zenescope deal with CryptoFights was just one example of what NFTs could do for their respective industries. “As we start to discover what ‘the Metaverse’ looks like in our life, we’ll discover what we can do with these,” Kling said.

He added that FYX Gaming, the company behind CryptoFights, was also “working on something that will really change the game (but) I can’t release any details of it yet.”

All agreed that it was BSV’s capabilities that make such a project possible. Other blockchains may be better known and have more hype, but ultimately, they hit scaling ceilings either in cost or capacity… often both.

The solution has been to move to “Layer Two” platforms that store most of the data off-chain and link it, often very tenuously, to blockchain transaction records. That simply wouldn’t do for CryptoFights, which famously joined BSV after first attempting to build their platform on Ethereum and finding it too limited.

NFTs that store data on IPFS, cloud servers and the like—will they even exist in a few years? CryptoFights’ player characters will exist forever on the BSV chain, and directly on-chain. BSV can hold all the data and metadata associated with a character, including all 3D models and animations, new motion captures, licensing and usage agreements, and any other data that character would accumulate over time by advancing through the game world.

That includes the possibility of characters becoming portable across multiple games, leaping not just from comic page to CryptoFights but into other worlds beyond. Even within one game, BSV’s capacity allowed for more sophisticated tournament structures, even as every move in every game battle is stored as a Bitcoin transaction.

CryptoFights has been responsible for a lion’s share of the daily BSV transaction volume since it came online, and although Epik’s Ma said his company could arrange deals with any blockchain its market wanted, Brusha and Kling are focusing entirely on BSV.

It’s just one more way BSV is helping to create a higher-quality NFT ecosystem, combining quality art with other experiences to produce something that’s never been seen before. Companies like Epik are helping to build bridges between their worlds.

Watch CoinGeek New York 2021 Day 2 here: