WAX Overview

The full name of WAX public chain is Worldwide Asset eXchange. Its mainnet was officially launched in June 2019 and is based on EOS transformation. WAX continued to lay out in 2019, accumulated experience in 2020, and made great progress in 2021. In 2022, it ranked among the top five NFT public chains. Alien Worlds, Farmers World, and other popular chain games in 2021 are basically on WAX. As of now, according to official block browser data: there are 14,261,416 WAX wallet accounts in total; the circulating market value is 270 million US dollars. In late January 2022, the total NFT transaction volume on WAX reached 366 million US dollars, making it the fifth largest NFT star public chain after ETH (18.9 billion), Ronin (3.89 billion), Solnan (1.01 billion), and FLOW (873 million).

How does WAX attract blockchain games?

1. WAX follows the EOS Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism to support the high throughput required for games while attracting blockchain game developers. WAX's theoretical TPS is over 3,000, and its gas fee is much lower than ETH.

2. In addition to building the underlying technical architecture in the NFT field, WAX also attempts to lower the threshold for users to participate in NFT, and the way to achieve this is through its original NFT creation protocol AtomicHub. With AtomicHub, users can create their own NFTs in 4 simple steps. Later, WAX upgraded this protocol again to vIRL®NFT that supports dynamic display functions, further improving the user experience. This also brought considerable drainage effect to the WAX ​​public chain.

3. In addition to lowering the threshold for NFT creation, WAX is also committed to building the MarketPlace platform to create high liquidity for users to buy and sell NFTs. Users can understand it as the WAX ​​version of the OpenSea platform. 4. However, what best reflects WAX's leading position in the NFT field is the commercial cooperation resources outside the crypto world. Major League Baseball (MLB), sports and entertainment trading card provider Topps, Capcom, the game production company behind Japan's "Street Fighter", Hollywood star William Shatner, and classic movie IP Godzilla have all cooperated with WAX to issue NFTs.

To sum up, WAX will definitely attract a large number of blockchain game developers to participate.

How WAX attracts users

1. One-click account creation

Users can create a WAX account using Google, Facebook, Steam, or Kakao.

2. NFT Marketplace Accepts Fiat Currency

dApps running on the WAX ​​Blockchain enable users to buy and sell NFTs on WAX’s NFT marketplaces like OPSkins, AtomicHub, etc. using credit cards and other fiat methods or cryptocurrencies.

3. Fast and free transactions

WAX uses DPoS as its consensus mechanism, which means 500 millisecond transaction speeds and free transactions. What’s more? WAX accounts are free.

4. Alien Worlds, Farmers World and other popular blockchain games at the time were all deployed on the WAX ​​public chain. In August 2021, the total number of transactions of Alien Worlds reached 427 million per month, and the number of active users exceeded 1 million.

5. Generous rewards for initial activities

10 million NFTs will be distributed free of charge to the first 10 million accounts that complete registration.

WAX's Economic Model

As a platform focusing on NFT and blockchain gaming ecology, WAX’s DeFi (decentralized finance) attributes are slightly inferior. In order to make up for this shortcoming, WAX has injected the economic value created on its public chain into the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem. That is, it has created an economic model and tokenization process based on the WAXP-ETH cross-chain bridge, WAXE-ETH liquidity token pool, WAX Economic Activity Pool Smart Contract (WEAP) and three Ethereum-based tokens (WAXE, WAXG, WAXE-ETH). The following figure summarizes it:

 

The Problem with WAX

The quantity of GameFi applications on the WAX ​​chain is greater than the quality. As of now, according to DappRadar, there are as many as 151 chain game projects on WAX, but only 11 of them have more than 1,000 daily active users, and the number of users of most chain game projects is close to 0. The popularity of the top-ranked Alien Worlds and Farmers World is obviously not as good as before, and they cannot empower the entire application ecosystem. On Twitter, many users are complaining that the newly launched chain game projects on WAX are not playable enough and highly speculative, which is bad for the sustainable development of the ecosystem.

In addition, the surge in data on the WAX ​​chain cannot change the price and total market value of its utility token WAXP, which has been sluggish since the end of 2021. I personally think it is related to the theft of coins from the second-ranked Farmers World project on November 7, 2021. According to official information, it may be that the address where the user staked WAXP is not the official address of the game, or the user's staked address was changed by the game's "plug-in" script, resulting in the user's inability to obtain RAM resources. According to statistics, the economic losses caused by the incident totaled more than 100 million yuan. An unexpected event in a game can have such a profound impact on its entire token economic system, which shows the fragility of its economic system.