In-Depth ICO Review: BitGuild
After looking at 242 token announcements this week, we’re picking BitGuild as our ICO of the Week. BitGuild is a blockchain gaming platform.
Competitive Advantage – Gaming Industry Experience
BitGuild is a blockchain gaming platform which aims to take the true ownership element of CryptoKitties and apply it to the extremely popular and profitable free-to-play game segment.
Cryptokitties – the cat-based game that clogged the Ethereum network – revolutionized gaming by introducing the concept of true ownership. Whereas in most games, buying an in game item means you can only use that item in game, you probably can’t trade it legaly, and you probably don’t even technically own the item, in Cryptokitties, buying a cat means you buy a non-fungible, unique token representing that cat which you truly own.
You can then store, transfer, or trade that cat just like any other real world item. Once you have your kitty in your wallet, AxiomZen no longer has any ability to take it away or dictate what you do with your kitty.
It’s a small change on the surface, but a revolutionary one that helped CryptoKItties rocket to crypto-fame.
BitGuild is trying to take that concept and apply it to the free-to-play gaming space. Rather than focusing on one game, BitGuild will build both a platform for games with true ownership, and an initial game also called BitGuild to prove the concept works.
There have been cryptokitty imitators before, but BitGuild distinguishes itself by building not just an imitation of Cryptokitties, but an entire ecosystem, including an item exchange, and wallet for holding these non-fungible in-game items.
For the ecosystem to work, the games have to be fun to play. Luckily, the team behind BitGuild has proven success in the mobile and web-based gaming markets. The CEO Jared Psigoda founded Reality Squared Games, a Shenzhen-based publisher of mobile and web-based games. The COO Curtis Chu worked at Kabam, another very successful mobile game publisher based out of California. This all-star team means that whatever games BitGuild produces have a strong chance of being commercially successful.
Risks
As strong as the team is behind BitGuild, there are still some risks and challenges they will face. Notably, Cryptokitties was known for clogging the Ethereum Network, and if BitGuild succeeds, it will have similar scaling issues since it currently plans to use Ethereum. Network traffic can be mitigated by keeping transactions off-chain as much as possible, so this issue may not be a dealbreaker, but is certainly something to keep in mind.
The team seems to have also considered this as they mention the possibility of switching to another blockchain if needed, but switching blockchains is difficult and risky.
Summary
BItGuild is a promising looking project that aims to bring the magic of CryptoKitties to a much wider variety of web and mobile-based games. The team behind it is quite impressive, with strong relevant experience in the gaming market. We believe they should be able to produce some fairly successful games.
The token economics on this one are quite good as it has a fairly low cap of 14,000 ETH. There’s also quite a bit of hype around this project, with a large number of social followers and good media coverage.
We see a lot of short and mid-term growth potential for this ICO, and if they can deal with scalability challenges, good long term potential as well.
Bitcointalk | Whitepaper | Website | Telegram | Twitter
ICO of the Days
Saturday 3/10/2018: DML – Decentralized Machine Learning
Friday 3/9/2018: BitGuild – Blockchain Gaming Platform
Thursday 3/8/2018: FIC Network – Bonds on the Blockchain
Wednesday 3/7/2018: Bubbletone – Blockchain Telecom Provider
Tuesday 3/6/2018: ICO Preview – Pin Protocol
Monday 3/5/2018: Yggdrash – Multi-dimensional Blockchain
Sunday 3/4/2018: none
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