OVERVIEW

EON (Entertainment Open Network) Protocol is a protocol for dgames (decentralized games, or blockchain games). It uses a layer 2 solution to help dgames run smoothly as if on traditional web hosting. It also provides an in-game wallet feature for game developers to support multiple cryptocurrency payments and the exchange of digital assets (non-fungible tokens). The focus is on enabling devs to launch dgames in much less time and at lower cost. The EOT token will be used within the games that run over its chain (in-game purchases, rewards, trading), and will be used as a staking requirement for devs to use and maintain their games on the platform. Dev adoption of EON will be driven by a labor/time cost savings and support. Both a free and advanced version will be offered. The free version will be light on features and support (it’s an appetizer). The advanced version will be paid for and include dedicated customer support, full access to features, ect.

Architecture:
EON will create a layer 2 solution with on-chain/off-chain architecture to run the games. It will use public chains as the base layer infrastructure for cryptocurrency payment and digital asset trading required in games, while the other parts of dgames will be put off-chain to make the games run smoothly as all blockchains are very slow.

SOME CURRENT PROBLEMS

• High entry barrier in connecting devs to blockchain based gaming apps: This means that game developers have to learn lot of new things (Solidity language of Ethereum that are usually not used in game industry) in order to integrate their games with blockchain.
• Current design and tps of existing chains make them impractical as a gaming base: While public blockchains (Ethereum, EOS, etc) provide an audit-able infrastructure for cryptocurrency transactions and digital assets (Non Fungible Token) trading, they don’t well support large-scale, logic-heavy dgames
• Third party wallets are required for current in game payments using blockchain: Currently, a lot of dgames use third-party wallets such as MEW or Metamask for in-game payments which provides a a barrier to entry for new gamers (because they have to learn how to use the wallet and deposit their money into the wallet esp. if they don’t own that specific wallet before).
• Chain based games require use of their specific wallet (not chain agnostic).
• Traditional games’ in-game currency can not be used outside the game.

EON PROTOCOL PROPOSED SOLUTIONS

• The entry barrier devs face in integrating games with blockchain is solved with the EON ‘toolkit’ that allows focus on game development. The need for a dev to learn smart contract programming is eliminated.
• EON uses a 2 layer design wherein the chain provides the base layer infrastructure handling tx, trading, payments, ect and the second layer is ‘off chain’ providing game functionality.
• SDK is the in-game wallet provided by EON to handle multiple currencies. The player won’t have a learning curve for third party wallets (myether, metamask, eos wallet, ect).
• SDK is chain agnostic. As stated, it will support multiple currencies. EON will use a dedicated server to handle cross chain exchange and payment allowing devs to simply call data sync API’s.

TEAM

Tao HU - Worked at OCULUS for about 1 year as a software engineer; built Oculus app store from scratch.
Sunny Sun - Worked at FACEBOOK for about 2 years as a software engineer.
Will Lee - Formerly with TIKTOK, the No.1 downloaded iphone app in 2018 (especially popular in China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, etc
Aron Lyu – Product lead at Bytedance, an Alibaba subsidiary and fastest growing startup with 75B valuation (even higher than Uber)); entered btc in 2012.

ADVISORS

Mike Zyda - Director at USC GamePipe Laboratory , No 1 gaming program in the world.
Anshul Dhawan - Former Product Lead at Zynga; Co-founder at Equally.
Feng Li - Early investor in Coinbase and Ripple.

BACKERS AND PARTNERS

They have some decent backers and partnerships which is always nice to see in a project like this. Notable ones include:

• Partnership with Merculet,
• Strategic investment from Bgogo,
• Strategic Partnership with CoinMex exchange
• Investment from Quarkchain, Fission Capital and partnership with SegmentFault

COMPETITORS

Enjin Coin , Loom Network, which uses ETH only.

MVP

They have a built a dgame called Crypto Alpaca. You can play it here. As per their claims, it is the second largest decentralized game with 1000+ users and 200k+ signups. The alpha version of EON Protocol (only support Ethereum for now) has already been integrated with CryptoAlpaca, and will be released by the end of the month(August). Developers who are interested can signup here.

ROADMAP

Roadmap looks pretty decent to me . EOT token will be integrated with CryptoAlpaca game by Q3 2018. EON Protocol alpha version will be released in Q4 2018 and the official version will go live in Q1 2019 with ETH and EOS support.

TOKEN METRICS & USE CASES

Ticker: EOT
Token Supply: 2.1 Billion
% of Tokens sold: 30%
Hardcap: 30000 ETH
Crowdsale: TBA
Token Price: 1 ETH= 21000 EOT
Note:
-The 20% held by the team and the 10% dedicated to team incentives will be vested for a four year period. This means they are secure enough in their funding and strategy to forego immediate gains.
-They’ve successfully raised $5m and therefore soft cap of 10k eth has also been achieved.
-EON token will be deflationary. The team will burn a set number of released tokens at specific milestones, eg. # of users reached, # of games developed, ect.

USE CASES
The demand for tokens includes the following parts:

• Payments for all digital assets within games using EON Protocol;
• Developers should stake EOT tokens to use EON Protocol. And the number of tokens required
  will increase as the number of players in the game increase;
• EON Foundation will purchase back specific amount of tokens at milestones (e.g., EON
  Protocol reaches 100k users), and burn those tokens;
• EOT will also be used in decentralized governance of the EON Protocol. People with more EOT tokens will have more voting power in deciding the direction of community

Final Thoughts

• Is gaming a good way to bring mass adoption for crypto and blockchain tech? I think so. Cryptokitties made the news around the globe and became famous very quickly for also crippling the eth network and making gas fees ridiculously expensive. They have now partnered with HTC to bring the game to their smartphones. We can definitely use more of this type of exposure in this industry.
• While the gaming industry as a whole is massive and worth billions, the blockchain gaming industry is still too niche and at its infancy with a minuscule number of users and games. Check this site out and see for yourself the average users in dapps and games currently. CryptoKities might have been really popular but Firstly, only people in blockchain industry were playing it. Secondly, they weren't "playing" rather "trading" it.
• One of Eon protocol's competitor is Loom Network which raised about $46m back in January 2018 during the bull run and gave investors a return of 10x during its ATH. While loom network can be classified as a competitor, Loom is more advanced because it comprises of dPOS sidechains that can scale dapps on ethereum while Eon Protocol consists of a lightning network type solution for payments and in game wallet sdk for digital assess as per whitepaper. I will say [enjin coin[(https://enjincoin.io/) is EOn's closest competitor.
• I think EOT could be among the front runners when blockchain games become popular and mainstream but that’s for long term and not short term as we currently haven’t seen mass adoption for crypto or the blockchain technology yet. However, I believe it’s just a matter of time for this to change, particularly in light of what EON and projects like them are doing.
• I am neutral on this project in the short term and also since its a bear market, i will not be personally investing (as indicated in my spreadsheet).

Some questions i asked the team during my research

Q) Why cant i find CryptoAlpaca in any dapp ranking site?
A) You can’t find it on some dapp store ranking, because we didn’t put all game logics on blockchain (so that they won’t track us). Actually, CryptoAlpaca is one of the first dgames supported by WAX, see news here .

Q) Can you tell me more about your partnership with Quarkchain?
A) We’re working with Quarkchain now to make CryptoAlapca the first game launched on QKC

Q) Your original goal was more of becoming a dgame distribution platform which basically puts you up against major players in the field such as dapp platfroms, apple store and google play store. Why did this change?
A) A major point is that we now focused on developing the EON Protocol (helping game developers integrate with blockchain easily and quickly), rather than the decentralized distribution platform (this is our original idea last December). The reason for us to change focus is as below;
During the development of CryptoAlpaca, we found that 40% of users didn’t hold cryptocurrencies before, and dgame is actually a very great way to attract people to hold cryptocurrencies. Through EON Protocol, we can help developers to build more dgames, and therefore attract more people to hold cryptocurrencies. We believe that the only way to bring us out of the bear market is to bring more people to hold cryptocurrencies, and dgame is the best solution. Although the market is niche, we still see huge potential (see our interview with FOMO3D team. Again, some of my friends purchased ETH in order to play this game. And they don’t hold any cryptocurrencies before.

Q) Why did you guys choose ETH and erc 20? instead of EOS for example?
A) good question, we actually considered to do token sale using EOS but most token funds only have ETH. EOS now has a lot of issues, the community is growing, but still smaller than ETH (EOS has 600k+ address, while ETH 40M+)

Q) Do you have plans to switch chains in the future?
A) That's an option, but we won't switch in the short term, until the switch is beneficial to the growth of EOT community and in EON Protocol, developers can choose which chain to integrate with. We provide the choice, and they make the decision.

Q) Is it right to say your competitors are loom network, enjin and wax?
A) loom network is more accurate and we are actually partnered with wax, their CEO is also from USC. For enjin, we're in conversation of partnership.EON & Loom are developer solutions, while WAX is virtual asset marketplace, ENJIN is wallet.

Q) What differentiates you from your competitors?
A) One of our advantage compared with Loom is that our solution is blockchain agnostic, we support not only Ethereum, but also EOS, NEO, QKC.

Q) Why do players use EOT, not ETH(or other cryptocurrency) as payment in dgames?
A) This is a challenge for all new utility tokens. Our strategy is as follows:

1. EOT will be supported by default for those games integrating EON Protocol, while developers can still choose to support multiple cryptocurrencies
2. give discounts if players use EOT as payment. The more EOT they hold, the larger discounts they may have
3. specific digital assets (Skins, Weapons, etc) can only be purchased with EOT
   and we’re always discovering innovative ways to facilitate the circulation of EOT in dgames.

Q) Does EOT reduce the barrier for holding cryptocurrencies (open exchange account -> buy ETH -> buy EOT)?
A. As you mentioned, the KYC/exchange barrier is actually a big headache for people to hold cryptocurrencies. Our solution is to support free-to-play games first. The procedure looks like this: play games for free -> earn EOT -> enjoy benefits of EOT tokens (e.g., discounts in payment) -> trigger KYC/exchange when players want to get EOT tokens instantly. This procedure allows people to hold tokens and try it first. People will have more motivation to pass KYC after they enjoy the benefits of EOT. We’re also working with some exchanges (e.g., BGOGO, Coinmex) to create a even better user experience for KYC process. And we’ll put this feature into EON Protocol when it is ready.

Q) What’s the incentive for developers to stake EOT tokens?
A) Developers will pay for EON Protocol, because it helps them to save time/labor cost. Instead of hiring a blockchain engineer to integrate all stuff for one month, they can now do it in 1 day without hiring blockchain engineers.
ETH/NEO doesn’t require token staking to do development, but game developers actually have time/labor cost if they want to integrate with blockchain. As for EOS, it now takes about $10 to register an account on EOS (they haven’t solved the RAM issue yet). So, EON Protocol actually help them save money.
We also have a strategy to be competitive on the price: we’ll have a free version and an advanced version. The free version will only consist of basic features and have limitations on number of players it can support. Its goal is to encourages developers to have a taste of EON Protocol. The advanced version will have more features, no limitations and better customer support. For paid version, developers have to stake EOT tokens as long as the game is running.
Of course, we can also pay devs to use EON Protocol in the early days. This is more kind of a temporary solution to expand the market. It will not be the final solution.

EON PROTOCOL SOCIAL LINKS

WEBSITE
TELEGRAM
TWITTER
WHITELIST

Disclaimer

The above information is not financial investment advice. Please do your own research before making investment decisions. This information is for educational purposes only.

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