The rapid growth of the eSports industry has ready caught the eye of some of the world’s most prominent firms and investors like Tencent, Amazon, Alibaba, USM holdings and even Warren Buffet. With potential for surpassing $2 billion mark in the next year, it was only a matter of time before someone took the opportunity to merge this rising industry with blockchain technology. World of Battles (WOB), an Ethereum-based streaming platform, aims to take hold of 50% of the eSports market in the next few years.
Partners and Stakeholders
The merger of blockchain technology and eSports is one of those moments in the world of innovation where it is so intuitive that it makes you wonder, how has it not existed before. WOB is the crystallization of the clash of the two worlds.
The WOB development team comes with solid experience from working on projects like GNOME, OpenVZ and FreeBSD. They have partnered up with heavyweights like Civic and the leading game streaming service Twitch. They are cooperating with the world’s largest international eSports federations like WESA and leSF in coming championships and some of the top-rated eSports teams. Not to mention, they are intending on becoming the main partner of the 2022 Asian Games.
What is WOB offering?
The founder Makoto Takahashi confidently dismisses other eSports platforms as unworthy competition after the WOB team managed to develop a finished product in a year and a half. It is easy to see where he is coming from. The WOB project already has $3.7 million in total investments, their Alpha testing round was completed earlier this year and they have close to half million users already registered. They are anticipating close to $85 mlln in annual revenue from advertising and hosting tournaments alone.
WOB is an excellent case study of how distributed ledger technology (DLI) can change an existing industry. The value added by building the platform on the blockchain is enormous. Downtimes and errors are eliminated, power over results is distributed, third-party financial institutions are cut out and the probability of hacking and fraud is lowered significantly. In short., decentralization resolves many existing problems traditional platforms suffer from.
The fully automated WOB platform is eSports heaven, a fair and secure space for amateur and professional gamers who can currently play 5 of the most popular online games out there: Hearthstone, League of Legends, Dota 2, CounterStrike: GO, StarCraft 2. As you can imagine, the WOB team has plans to expand beyond that.
How is WOB different?
Where WOB stand out is its match determination mechanism, as the development team has created a structure that makes the process of determining results not only inclusive and automated but also fraud-proof. Witnesses and jurors are randomly selected from a pool of registered users to weigh in on a contested result. Players will be able to concentrate on the game and rest assured that the process is entirely fair. Not only that, but in terms of placing bets, there are no waiting times and no concerns of fraud and embezzlement. Much like what they did to the financial industry, smart contracts take the power out of the hands of the institutions, in this case the platform owners, and place it in in the hands of the users.
ICO
With so many ICOs out there, it is a rare occasion that you stop and say this is the real deal. With a hefty investment from its founder, $3.7 million in total investments, a completed Alpha testing phase and half million users already on board, WOB is the real deal. Their ICO starts tomorrow and will go on for another 4 weeks after, with an increasing rate of the WOB token against ETH. 100% bonuses will be applied within the first hour and the development team is anticipating that ICO will close within that first hour.