Millions of people worldwide consume esports content, including game clips and highlights, athlete interviews, live events, and posts from athletes. Even established sports organizations increasingly recognize the sector’s popularity and strength with events such as the eNASCAR Coca-Cola iRacing Series, which began in 2010 and is one of the longest-running esports racing series. Esports is a type of competition (both professional and amateur) between players in video games, often coordinated by special leagues, lists and tables, and tournaments in which participants receive individual sponsorships.
Technology helps develop better gaming equipment, such as keyboards, mice, and specialized headsets, which can enhance player comfort and performance, to say nothing of the fact that it plays a key role in creating exciting and memorable experiences. Blockchain, the technology that enables the existence of cryptocurrency, can empower players and provide fair rewards. Implementing this new type of technology can change the dynamic of esports, offer new ways to play games, and provide value to players.
Let’s take a close look at the top blockchain use cases in esports.
Verifying Participants And Preventing Fraud
Bitcoin doesn’t require any kind of ID, but cryptocurrency exchanges might require you to go through an identification process, even if you buy Bitcoin with a bank transfer, to maintain high levels of trust and security. With Bitcoin’s price recently growing, companies often collect sensitive user information and store it alongside routine business data. Regrettably, traditional identification systems are susceptible to data breaches and inefficiencies. Blockchain technology makes it possible to create and use digital identities via a combination of decentralized identifiers, identity management, and embedded encryption.
The gaming industry can use digital identities to ensure participants are who they pretend they are before they start playing. In-house identity management solutions can be complex and expensive to develop, so esports companies can shoulder the burden of managing multiple online IDs and passwords.
Blockchain verification improves trust, empowers control over personal information, and enables the seamless portability of credentials. It can also help detect and prevent fraud, which has been steadily increasing with the rise of esports. Common techniques include but aren’t limited to multiple accounts, credit card fraud, and exploiting promotions.
Incentivizing And Rewarding Fan Interactions
Esports game design requires a user-central approach to guarantee the experience is as good as possible. Gaming is a highly social pursuit in which players can meet, interact, and play with one another; social experiences can also occur via gaming forums, conventions, and online community pages. Challenges and rewards are the best ways to drive engagement and sustain player retention. Digital assets give players avenues to own and purchase additional items whilst unlocking interoperability. Functional items, bonuses, and stat boosts support the personalization of gameplay, which is critical as esports games evolve into social hubs and metaverses.
Some developers have experimented with play-to-earn, in which players are rewarded for their in-game achievements with assets that have real-world monetary value. Assets can be awarded for completing a quest, demonstrating loyalty, attending a virtual event, and so on. Rather than accepting blockchain technology as an inconvenience, we’re seeing it evolve to give players complete control over their in-game assets. By way of illustration, let’s imagine that a player wins club items, which can be sold as NFTs. The gaming platform can’t take those items away even if it wants to.
Allowing Esports Teams To Fund Their Own Training
For many athletes, the financial burden of training is bigger than ever, and they often live from paycheck to paycheck. Team and individual sponsors help pay for training and competition travel, along with fundraisers, but there can be better, there can be more. Blockchain technology can help streamline the fundraising process as it enables fan and community investment via secure, transparent, and tamper-proof transactions. As opposed to traditional fundraising methods, blockchain crowdfunding includes anyone interested in the project, ranging from small to large amounts.
Donations in Bitcoin allow esports teams to leverage a new set of potential benefactors. The blockchain is a decentralized digital ledger that minimizes undue influence from third-party systems and encourages peer-to-peer transactions. Initially used as the basis for cryptocurrencies, it’s now used in various industries to address long-standing challenges. Pretty much all the projects have transparency – all transactions and data on the network are available to everyone with access to the system.
Making Gaming Odds Transparent
Odds represent the likelihood of an outcome that you can take advantage of to calculate your chance of winning and your potential for returns. Both traditional sports and esports center around predicting outcomes guided by the odds that are established by bookmakers. Blockchain technology brings transparency, meaning there are no doubts regarding loot box percentages, tournament prize splits, and betting odds. Anyone can see and validate the authenticity of data on the network, so everyone can trust the information contained within the network; blockchain isn’t a trustless technology but rather a confidence machine.
Multiple factors can influence gaming odds, including but not limited to team rankings, the relative strength of the team, player performance, map selection, and the structure of the tournament. There’s no clear favorite or underdog in an esports game. It’s just your call on who wins. Live betting offers dynamic odds that can be capitalized on, while pre-game betting guarantees stability. Since 2009, the blockchain has continued to improve and evolve, and today, it stands on its own feet. Undoubtedly, the most important characteristic of blockchain technology is transparency: there’s no room for speculation or debates about what was done and what wasn’t.
Wrapping It Up
The future of esports is inevitably linked to blockchain technology because it enables the verification of participants, prevents memorabilia fraud, introduces the idea of tokenized assets, allows teams to secure funding, and makes gaming odds transparent. Technological innovations will continue to impact how players and fans interact with esports, opening up new horizons for the industry.
