As news keeps dropping in from the ongoing Games Developers Conference in San Francisco, in terms of web3 one particular fireside chat has been in focus.
On Tuesday 18th March, Limit Break’s Gabe Leydon and YGG’s Gabby Dizon had a well-attended conversation about Apptokens.
Leydon, the ex-Machine Zone CEO and current Limit Break co-founder and CEO, particularly criticized unrestricted composability, calling it “a disaster” for crypto. The reason is that it’s made digital assets move from decentralized blockchains to centralized exchanges, and hence undermined the decentralized premise of web3. He especially pinpointed ERC-20 tokens as a problem, saying it’s generated wash trading and speculation rather than utility.
Due to the current structure, he said “centralized exchanges are at the top and traders are in the middle, while developers are at the bottom.”
Limit Break’s solutions aim to turn this around, ideally placing developers at the top. To this end, its ERC-721C token standard limits which platforms can trade the assets, as well as blocks exchanges that don’t enforce creator royalties.
The developer’s more recent protocol, the ERC-20C Apptokens model, comes with programmable rules such as fixed prices, minimum prices, spending restrictions, and pre-set trading pairs – all of which put creators in charge.
Notably, Leydon also presented the case that web3 is an enhancement, not a replacement, for web2 gaming. For instance, he argued that traditional mobile gaming is “fully maxed out” on monetization margins. Furthermore, he claimed web3 only needs to provide a 20-30% improvement in monetization to become dominant.
Of course, not everyone agrees with Leydon. BlockchainGamer recently gathered some of our Mavens to discuss Apptokens too, where an entirely different take was presented. Nonetheless, it’s quickly become a topic next to impossible to ignore as a developer in the space.
Illustrating this is one of the reactions to the Apptokens Mavens feature, in which industry veteran and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow CEO Chris Heatherly commented on LinkedIn, “You guys are telling us that we can’t have new, better standards because they aren’t compatible with the old broken standards that are rife with fraud and scams.”
“Gabe isn’t forcing anything on anyone. If you want to use the standards the way they are, they are there for you already. But virtually EVERY DEVELOPER in web3 I know is struggling with the same problems in building real non-financial applications on the blockchain, and the solution to that is not “put it in a database”. The solution should be decentralized and onchain.”
A more comprehensive summary of the fireside chat is available here.
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