Forte, a company originally formed to accelerate adoption of blockchain technology in the gaming industry, has partnered with Xpring, Ripple’s developer ecosystem initiative. The partnership is forming a $100 million inaugural fund to support game developers and help to bring the core technologies of Forte’s blockchain platform to market with the application of Ripple’s open-source solutions, including XRP.
According to press reports, the fund will be overseen by Forte. In its press release of March 12th, Brett Seyler, Chief Platform officer, said that the company became involved in gaming through its belief that the $140 billion global industry needs solutions that can improve game economies, offering improved “multi-directional transactions between parties, greater player agency, minimised counterparty risk, multi-network contract interoperability, and trust-minimized computation.”
“We believe blockchain technologies offer a path forward, toward greater agency for players as valued participants in game economies and improved alignment with the creators of these game worlds and economies.”
Forte’s technology will be leveraging Ripple’s Interledger Protocol while XRP serves as a base pair settlement. A smart contract service called Codius will be used to support seamless XRP transactions across blockchains, the company explained:
“Our aim is to support the decentralization of these technologies, where open protocol networks support a wide variety of game economies based on what’s at stake. There is an amazing degree of research and innovation happening across the entire sphere of blockchain development today, and our goal is to use the best of breed solutions across the entire space, and to enable game developers to do the same so that they can focus on creating great games for their players. This desire to support the best of breed solutions across the entire blockchain ecosystem means we need to support multiple blockchains and empower cross-chain interoperability for developers and players. That is where our partnership with Xpring and the truly outstanding innovation they’ve created with both the open source Interledger Protocol and Codius come in.”
The vision, as expressed by Ethan Beard, the senior vice president of Xpring, when talking to Fortune, is to encourage take up of blockchain by game designers to help them facilitate a digital economy that can serve all types of players.
The fund will be distributed via grants allocated to game developers in the form of XRP, although it is expected that most recipients will convert XRP into USD because platforms such as Amazon Web Services still only accept payments in fiat currencies. Forte is actively seeking developers that meet its criteria for funding, targeting the fund primarily at game developers operating live game economies with over 50,000 daily active users.
