Games company Animoca has partnered with Hedera Hashgraph to develop two gaming projects on Hedera’s public distributed ledger. The partnership also involves Helix Accelerator, which offers guidance, investment funding, and mentorship for solutions built on Hedera Hashgraph. Animoca recently acquired Helix.
The first project is a game focused on tradable non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for football clubs with licensing deals with Animoca Brands. Currently, the company has a partnership with City Football Club, which includes Manchester City, New York City FC, and Melbourne City. Animoca also commercializes an NFT collection from FC Bayern Munich.
NFT owners will be able to “sell” their NFTs back to the platform for a fixed amount of HBAR, the Hedera network’s cryptocurrency. This will be the first time that commercialized NFTs will be redeemable for a guaranteed amount of crypto assets.
The second project Helix Warp is an online gaming platform targeting developers to create hacker-resistant leaderboards for games. The platform will be based on a server-side simulation environment to record in-game results.
Both projects will make use of Hedera’s Consensus and Token Service. The Consensus Service is an additional layer of trust that creates an immutable log of messages. The Token service enables the management of NFTs (and fungible tokens) without the costs and risks of smart contracts. These features have been used to promote Hedera as a payments platform.
“We are very excited to work with Hedera Hashgraph, which offers some highly appealing uses for gaming, particularly in the area of high-transaction scenarios,” said Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu. “We believe this partnership will result in more efficient validation of play-to-earn activities, including addressing issues such as the multi-billion dollar problem of cheating in games.”
Notably, Animoca is limiting the NFT game with Hedera to football. The company has a strong presence in motorsport with its F1 Delta Time game amongst others but has limited penetration in football. And companies like Sorare already offer digital collectibles for the biggest teams in Europe. It seemed that when premier league champions Manchester City partnered with Animoca, it was looking for a more “game-like” initiative. Animoca recently raised $88 million at a $1 billion valuation.
As for Hedera, the network announced ChainLink Labs as the twenty-first member of its governing council. Other members include global law firm Dentons, South Africa’s Standard Bank, and Google.
