Chainlink is the blockchain industry’s leading oracle network, providing secure price data and decentralized services such as verifiable randomness, trust-minimized automation, and a cross-chain communications standard that developers are using to build innovative web3 applications.
In addition to cultivating talented teams through its widely attended hackathons, Chainlink Labs launched the Startup with Chainlink program to connect promising web3 startups with the resources they need to turn their vision into reality.
Recently, Chainlink Labs’ managing director of corporate development and strategy, David Post, caught up with David Bennahum and Christina Macedo from Ready Games Network, a Startup with Chainlink project that’s building a distributed web3 gaming ecosystem and creating key infrastructure for bringing existing web2 games on-chain.
Bennahum said web3 unlocks new ways for people to become owners and participants in gaming. Ultimately, however, bringing the playability and sheer entertainment value of web2 games to the world of web3 is mission critical.
“Without that, players won’t come,” he explained. “So coming up with systems that support the way mainstream people are accustomed to playing games today as we go on-chain was really our challenge.”
Macedo, Ready Games’ COO, said the platform’s objective is to create a bridge between web2 and web3 for developers and players alike. This means providing education about web3 fundamentals like owning digital assets and creating virtual identities that follow players from game to game in a decentralized metaverse.
Recently, Ready Games successfully raised $3M through the sale of its purpose-built utility and governance token. The raise, led by BITKRAFT and Hashed, also included Tribe, IOSG Ventures, Spartan, and Mapleblock Capital, as well as infrastructure providers like Polygon and GSR.
“Setting out to build a web3 ecosystem is beyond the scope and capability of any one person or any one organization to achieve,” Bennahum said. “I don’t think you can successfully build distributed ecosystems without the right partners involved, so part of our funding priority was identifying those partners.”
He believes the future of gaming is a fusion of web2 and web3. “It’s not either/or; it’s both,” he said. “That’s how you’re going to get your mainstream adoption that’s going to take the scale of blockchain utilization 10x, 100x, 1000x beyond where it is today.”
He said participating in Startup with Chainlink provided vital insight into establishing partnerships that blend “deep experience in blockchain and crypto” with the Ready Game team’s expertise in the technology driving popular games.
“Chainlink has been awesome in giving us advice and guiding us through this process,” Bennahum said. “We wouldn’t have achieved some of the partner outcomes we’ve gotten without Chainlink’s advice. It’s exciting to get to this point and exciting to keep working with Chainlink as we go forward.”
Learn more about Startup with Chainlink and apply here.