CEO of MyEtherPony Collectibles DApp Believes Gaming Can Trigger Massive Crypto Adoption (Interview)

We have seen a plethora of different applications built on a blockchain until now, and gaming is no exception.

The tamperproof nature of blockchain technology has allowed developers to create trustless, decentralized games, which eliminates the need for third-party intermediaries.

So far, we have seen numerous blockchain-based games, spanning from traditional gambling games to trading rare digital collectibles.

MyEtherPony is a digital collectibles game built on the Ethereum blockchain, on which users can breed their favorite digital pony to compete against others.

Its team has just launched a new marketplace to enable users to buy or sell unique ponies in a bidding process similar to eBay.

This week we host Amir Irwan, CEO of MyEtherPony, a strong supporter of Bitcoin’s underlying technology who believes that blockchain is here to stay.

He gives his personal advice to new crypto-entrepreneurs and hopes that MyEtherPony will contribute its part towards the mainstream adoption of blockchain technology.

[blokt]: What is your opinion about the future of blockchain?

Amir Irwan: Blockchain is here to stay, no doubt about it from my point of view.

A decentralized environment with no single point of failure as well as distributing the cost of operation has been the main goal of many system designs and blockchain provides that solution.

Most importantly, the trustless nature of it removes the need for a costly 3rd party validator while rewarding the participants at the same time.

[blokt]: What solution do you think would work for the scalability issue of blockchain?

Amir Irwan: Blockchain is essentially a huge database. We can take a cue at the evolution of database technology in general over the decades and see how it can be used to improve blockchain. The term sharding, for example, made popular in crypto world by Ethereum is not something new in database technology.

Obviously, applying the tech to blockchain is not as straightforward as its implementation using Oracle or MYSQL.

The way we see it is, not everything has to go through blockchain for every single data that comes through for a particular use case. At MyEtherPony, we utilized both on-chain and off-chain transactions especially in our eBay like auction system.

The most important thing to us is, to leverage on Blockchain to provide the security and trust while ensuring the performance is as optimum as it can be for our application.

[blokt]: Do you think the consensus mechanisms used in Blockchain are fair?

Amir Irwan: Blockchain is still at its infancy. I think the developers working on them are aware of certain areas of improvements and looking at ways to mitigate them and introduce new mechanisms. The implementations would need to take into considerations many factors (time, cost, benefit, impact etc.)

The space will evolve for sure. I am not in the position to comment much as it is not something we are looking into yet at the moment, perhaps one day if we decide to build our own Blockchain.

[blokt]: What would trigger massive adoption of blockchain technology?

Amir Irwan: Adopting blockchain technology on the backend does not require the users to have any knowledge of it. But I think you are referring to massive adoption at user’s level rather than just the back office.

I think games industry can trigger this massive consumer adoption. The market size of the games industry is more than USD100 billion yearly with millions of users, and these users are mostly tech-savvy. It is an open secret amongst game developers that many technologies within games have been applied outside of its own industry.

Furthermore, game developers have always been looking at ways to make their games more user-friendly and intuitive to increase their own user base. It would be interesting to see how game developers take this challenge of making crypto and blockchain a mainstream technology.

At MyEtherPony, we are taking this challenge seriously, and we are looking at ways at making the user experience better especially to those who are not familiar with crypto/blockchain. Hopefully, we would be contributing our part to the introduction of blockchain technology and educating the masses in a simple way as possible.

[blokt]: What do you think about the future of Bitcoin?

Amir Irwan: Bitcoin and the rest of altcoins seemed to be playing musical chairs in the past couple of years. With the introduction of stable coins, this has changed somewhat.

I am not too sure if storage of value function of digital currency can play the role of utility very well at the same time. This means, increasing Bitcoin adoption across the board, may not necessarily be a good thing for Bitcoin or may not even make sense.

(We don’t use gold as currency in our daily life, but the value of fiat currencies are backed by gold, in theory at least).

Having said that, I think Bitcoin will continue to be the poster child of digital currency, but for how long, how valuable it will be or what role it would play in the future it depends on the market and the industry players themselves. My guess is just as good as anyones.

[blokt]: What is your advice to new blockchain start-up founders?

Amir Irwan:

a) Blockchain is not the silver bullet for every single problem in the world.

b) Be willing to educate the market or public about your project since blockchain technology is still new and many still think blockchain is Bitcoin (or cryptos in general) and no understanding of the underlying technology itself.

c) Be patient, the internet was not built in a day.

d) Focus on adoption and use cases and keep building, regardless of what’s going on with the cryptocurrency market. Pretty hard not to peek at CoinMarketCap, if you do, but don’t let it affect you.

[blokt]: Are there any more details that might be helpful?

Amir Irwan: MyEtherPony marketplace is unique as it allows for ascending price auction (English auction), just like on eBay.

So, essentially, it’s like eBay on the blockchain for games.

This essentially means that users who own ponies can have the potential to get a good price for their ponies if there are enough bidders – making it fun and addictive.