Coinbase, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange platform, backed Gods Unchained – an e-sports project. Gods Unchained is a trading card game powered by the Ethereum Blockchain, where the ownership of each card is guaranteed by a smart contract.

In an interview with CNN, Robbie Ferguson, the founder and COO of Gods Unchained spoke about the game, its launch on the Ethereum main chain, and the process of launching the application with backing from Coinbase.

 

 

HYBRID CHAIN SYSTEM

 

Fuel Games, the development company behind the trading card game, has previously developed and successfully launched Etherbots, a decentralized game that allows players to build unique robots. Etherebots operated as a full on-chain game, where every piece of data created within the game was sent to the Ethereum blockchain as one transaction.

However, the developers at Gods Unchained took a different approach by implemented a hybrid on-chain and off-chain system, allowing information to be processed in batches on the main Ethereum network. This prevents clogging of information on the main network and results in a seamless user experience.

In a comment, Ferguson said

“Although all the cards are immutably stored on Ethereum, players in Gods Unchained will only ever initiate transactions on the network when they want to purchase new cards or transfer their existing ones. All other events in the game will run off-chain, allowing gameplay to be indistinguishable from other games that don’t employ distributed ledgers while concurrently permitting millions of users to play without noticeably weighing down the network,”

The funding round secured by Fuel Games from Coinbase Ventures will be primarily used for development and deployment of the game. As emphasized by Ferguson, backing by the world’s largest cryptocurrency wallet platform was a self-validating factor for the efforts of the developers as well as the $50 billion in-game trading assets market, which is ripe for disruption.

“Receiving an investment in our equity round from Coinbase Ventures was validating, especially of our core belief that gaming is an industry where blockchain technology actually makes lots of sense. With over $50 billion turned over in in-game assets on marketplaces every year, current game publishers are essentially acting as central banks with absolutely no oversight or regulation – this needs to change.”

 

Ferguson went on to say that Gods Unchained will not have to rely on the completion of two-layer scaling solution such as Sharding and Plasma. Rather the development team will build its own unique system to cope with the current landscape of the Ethereum blockchain network.

“For Gods Unchained, I think the impact [of Sharding and Plasma] will be useful but not necessary for it to run well; trading will become a lot easier, but we’ve already made all the choices necessary so that gameplay will be seamless, whether Ethereum scales in the short term or not. (As a personal note, the Ethereum foundation’s timescale is very reasonable. Sharding and plasma shouldn’t be rushed, and it’s much better to progress the fundamental tech step-by-step than rush it and risk, what could effectively be, a run on the (decentralized) banks,” said Ferguson.

Currently, the Ethereum-based game has been limited to only a few collectibles, where the users can buy and sell these digital assets just like they would have baseball cards.