Social media startup Hike has raised an undisclosed amount of investment from Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution startup Polygon to collaborate on transitioning Hike’s Rush Gaming Universe from web2 to web3 technologies.
The rush gaming universe is Hike’s play-to-earn (P2E) gaming platform that claims to be doing more than $50 Mn in winnings (Gross ARR), with over 100 Mn gameplays in a quarter happening across eight popular Indian casual games.
“We’re entering a new era of gaming, where players will participate in a new kind of game economy where they’re also owners of the networks they help create. Gaming has always been an incredible source of entertainment, a way to bring joy to people’s lives, and now it will also be a means to provide brand new economic opportunities to the world. With Polygon, we’re going to bring The Rush Gaming Universe on-chain in 2022,” said Kavin Bharti Mittal, founder and CEO at Hike.
According to Mittal, players will be able to leverage smart contracts to play games, generate digital assets bad on their skill and gameplay, and become owners on the network.
P2E games refer to games that reward their users by paying them. Gamers earn digital assets like NFTs by participating that can then be sold and exchanged on different marketplaces.
But at the same time, gamers need to buy NFTs in order to participate in the game in the first place. This new approach to gaming could potentially disrupt the gaming industry and change the way it works.
According to Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, 90% of the games in the market will be P2E games in the next five years.
“Web3 gaming is one of the fastest-growing economic sectors ever and has the potential to be an important onramp for the next 1 billion users to come onto crypto. Hike’s Rush Gaming Universe is a hugely exciting development for the Indian market, with global potential beyond that, and we are delighted to be partnering to bring the platform on-chain,” said Sandeep Nailwal, cofounder of Polygon.
In Kraken Intelligence’s annual crypto report, it had underlined the massive implications of P2E gaming, “The implications resulting from this model are revolutionary for gaming, particularly in an age where users spend real money on in-game assets such as in Fortnite which has generated billions in revenue. Not bad for a so-called ‘free-to-play’ game,” the report said.
Last week, Web3 gaming startup IndiGG had raised $6 Mn in seed funding from Sequoia Capital India, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Variant Fund, Play Ventures Dune Ventures and Jump Capital among others.
IndiGG is a sub-DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation)of YGG that aims to create a blockchain-powered play-to-earn gaming guild on the Polygon network. A DAO is an ‘organisation’ that is controlled by (usually transparent) rules encoded in software. Currently, DAOs exist in a legal grey area in the country.
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