White Star Capital Digital Assets Fund - newsletter #120
Polygon and Immutable X Announce Partnership for Web3 Gaming
Polygon and Immutable X Announce Partnership for Web3 Gaming
White Star Capital Digital Asset Fund - newsletter #120
Web3 gaming developer platform Immutable announced at Game Developers Conference on Monday that it is partnering with Polygon Labs to create a network for Web3 gaming. They will collaborate on the creation of Immutable’s zkEVM, a new scaling network for Ethereum that will pair with Polygon’s anticipated zkEVM technology.
Immutable will therefore power its platform products using Polygon’s zero-knowledge technology to simplify the game studio and developer onboarding process. This strategic alliance aims to provide an option for businesses ‘that accelerates time-to-market and gives them access to an ecosystem that will be one of the largest and most liquid for end users’, according to the press release.
Both Polygon and Immutable X are scaling networks, however they have previously competed to lure in developers, brands, and users alike. According to Polygon Labs, the team responsible for the decentralized Polygon protocol, Polygon has collaborated with gaming companies such as Square Enix, Neowiz, Midnight Society, Plai Labs, and Tilting Point. The adoption of its layer-2 scaling solution has been significant, with tens of thousands of decentralized apps deployed, over 220 million unique addresses served, more than 1 million smart contracts deployed, and billions of total transactions processed since its inception.
Immutable has also steadily been adding games to their portfolio. Already including such notable games as Gods Unchained, Guild of Guardians, Illuvium, and Ember Sword, Immutable has recently added Chainmonsters and MetalCore to their ecosystem. It also introduced their Passport as a way to seamlessly onboard new players by making the sign-in and management process easier.
Immutable co-founder and President, Robbie Ferguson noted that despite their past competition, both Polygon and Immutable X aimed to scale Ethereum rather than compete with it as a layer-1 rival. This shared goal of expanding Ethereum's capabilities, instead of creating a new custom network to surpass it, also gave them a common foundation to build upon. He commented that ‘for us, this is the endgame. This is how the next billion users will be onboarded into Web3.’
‘[That] made it a very easy philosophical alignment" Ferguson added, ‘once we looked past the intense competition we’d had on the gaming front over the past couple of years.’
In the end, both believe that Immutable zkEVM offers the best of both worlds - a network that employs Polygon's next-generation scaling technology while leveraging Immutable's gaming infrastructure. This could make it an attractive location for developers to establish themselves as the Web3 gaming industry grows.
‘By combining the number one Web3 gaming platform- currently serving hundreds of game studios and millions of players- with Polygon’s best-in-class zkEVM technology, we are building an Ethereum-centric gaming ecosystem that is poised to take Web3 mainstream and bring digital ownership to millions of people around the world, said Ferguson. ‘Billions of dollars of skins are sold each year with no rights for players- we’re changing that so players are in control, and ownership is the expectation’.
The announcements noted above may point toward growth in the web3 gaming industry; more brands entering the web3 gaming space could grow the larger decentralised gaming market, resembling how integrations between Web 2.0 companies have historically helped grow their own reach.
“Gamers just want to play great games; it’s that simple,” Wyatt, president of Polygon Labs, said. “You really just got to get to a point where you’re abstracting the crypto and jargon away and then have just a really exciting game. And that’s what’s coming on the horizon.”
🔦 White Star & Portfolio Spotlight
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🏦 Enterprises & Institutions
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⚖️ Government & Regulation
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💰 Funding & Exits
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🚀 Project Launches & Updates
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🔥 Other Bits We're Excited About
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