DeFi, so far, has focused heavily on taking traditional solutions such as insurance, loans, and banking, with the aim to decentralize them. That’s all well and good, but the industry is still looking for innovative solutions that make DeFi more accessible, such as a DeFi wallet that is jargon-free.
One such company is Spielworks, which combines a DeFi wallet with the massively popular world of mobile games, opening up some interesting future possibilities.
Spielworks has announced that it has secured partnerships with leading EOS DeFi networks Defis.Network, Defibox, and Pizza Finance. for its Wombat wallet. Wombat already integrates with Vigor, Organix, and DolphinSwap, adding on top of its existing integration with Newdex and Equilibrium. Coming only a month after the company’s integration with eosfinex, Wombat is already looking like a significant wallet solution.
The company claims that removing jargon, and making DeFi more accessible, is the answer to broad adoption. It’s a heady claim, but the company has already added hundreds of thousands of users to its wallet and mobile game service.
“There are a variety of ways in which we make DeFi more accessible,” Adrian Krion, CEO at Spielworks, told me. “The first way is through the account creation process and cost. It’s a familiar sign-up procedure that isn’t much different from non-blockchain apps. Second, we remove the necessity to understand the crypto jargon. Normally, people need to be aware of technical concepts, be it CPU on EOS or gas fees on Ethereum.”
Part of the puzzle is to make things more understandable to consumers.
“Since our Wombat wallet provides free transactions every day, users have a fully functional DeFi wallet without having to understand how exactly blockchain works,” Krion said. “We made blockchains with human-readable account names as our entry points for everyone new to crypto and replaced mnemonic phrases with encrypted backup files. That way, users don’t have to rely on their memory for blockchain addresses or account recovery passcodes.”
Spielworks other major service is Womplay, which allows users access to a large array of mobile games (and a few desktop titles, too), with the promise that you can earn tokens in return by playing them. Of course, mobile games have had their own in-game currencies for years, so why is blockchain a better solution?
““Blockchain is a natural next step for the gaming world,” Krion said. “Game developers have been tackling the challenges of game design, be it technical limitations, lack of post-game content, or pushing the boundaries of game design. To me, it feels like true ownership and interoperability is the next big industry challenge like that. There are already some mainstream studios that answered it. Take Epic Games and Fortnite, which enables people to play their favorite characters from other games, series, and movies; or Hazelight Studios, which continuously makes cooperative titles that only require one copy for multiplayer play.”
The benefits include protecting the in-game items consumers have purchased.
“Unlike in mainstream games, no ban or forgotten password can revoke the ownership of such currencies, skins, and items,” Krion said. “Moreover, with Ultra enabling developers to tokenize game copies, thus making them unique, piracy will take a serious blow, making space for a secondary gifting and game rental market. Think of all the possibilities that could arise from gamers being able to sell the items they bought or earned in a game on a secondary market.”
Tying in DeFi with a jargon-free wallet and the highly lucrative mobile gaming market could bring the industry – which is skyrocketing at present – to a much wider audience. So what’s next?
“We truly believe that, in three to five years, there won’t be a single new game without a blockchain component enabling the user to own digital assets, which will result in the convergence of off-chain and on-chain assets in games,” Krion said. “More importantly, NFT marketplaces are gonna be big – really big – especially in the gaming world, which is loaded with prizes and unique tradable items.”
And that opens up some truly intriguing possibilities.
“In the end, it’s all about integrating digital assets from games seamlessly into an ecosystem wherein users can play for, buy, or trade NFTs and use them toward collateral to borrow cryptocurrency or fiat currency,” Krion said. “This is Spielworks’s vision. How many gamers can you see right now able to take out a loan with the sword they won on Final Fantasy? The answer is none. But we want to make that one of the opportunities available to the gaming world.”
