DP #34 MMOMarket: decentralized market for virtual currencies, items and ingame services

[Cloudpostru]

District name: MMOMarket / MMO District / Virtual Shop / VR Shop / MMOHouse Decentralized market for virtual currencies.

1. Introduction. Sorry for my English, not a native speaker. I'm familiar with the Virtual Currency market in online games for many years and have an interesting District idea. There are a lot of popular multiplayer games that allow to trade virtual goods (World of Warcraft, Lineage 2 etc.) and almost every multiplayer game allows to provide some kind of ingame assistance (boosting, private lessons). This is huge market and what is more important, computer gamers are potential crypto currency and crypto technology users, fast learning young people, confident computer users. Gamers can help mass crypto adoption and crypto technologies can solve many problems for gamers.

I. Quick overview of Virtual Items/Services sector. I can name 3 types of institutions for the operations with various types of virtual currencies and ingame services.

1. Forums. Seller and buyer meet directly. Forums sell pseudo currency that is used for buying/selling or varios forum services. Examples: https://forums.d2jsp.org/index.php - they sell "Forum Gold" (FG) for real money and it's used for all kind of trades, it's prohibited to use any other currency http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/mmo-trading-market/ - CoreCoins are sold for real money and are used for all types of advertising for sellers https://www.elitepvpers.com/forum/black-market/ - they sell "elite*gold" that can help https://www.epicnpc.com/forum.php

2. Marketplaces. It's some kind of a middle man service between seller and buyer that acts as a guarantee for both parties. They take commission from every sale. Examples: https://www.playerauctions.com/ https://www.g2g.com/

3. Shops. Resellers, generate profit by adding to price. Examples: https://titaniumbay.com https://www.fastwowgold.com/ Just few examples, there's lots of big and small online shops.

II. Problem.

All 3 types of institutions has their own advantages and disadvantages. 1. Centralization of the trading platform. Owners of the business can rule all the disputes in their favor, delete negative reviews (posts, fix reputation of the forum user), do not complete orders or offer low quality services. 2. Payment centralization issues. Most popular payment methods (from my poing of view) are Credit Cards (CC), Paypal, Skrill, Webmoney. Problems with the traditional payment methods: very high fees (some cross region PayPal payments require 5%+ fee, usually the fee is 0.8-2%), weak security, risk of locking payment account, risk of chargeback or stolen funds used, cross-currency exchange problems 3. Dispute problems. If something went wrong with the deal, it might be difficult to resolve the dispute. 4. Anonymity. Usually buyers has to disclose personal information to make a purchase of Virtual good.

III. Solution. MMOMarket/MMO District structure.

This solution is a decentralized hybrid between forums and marketplaces. -MMOMarket/MMO District is a Forum/List that will have many sections and will represent buy and sell mini-contracts (few parameters that are fixed by buyer/seller: price (fixed in Ether, for example), available quantity, delivery time, guarantee period). Every contract will include small fee (1-3% of a contract price) that will be a reward for the district participants’ activity (dispute voting, probably voting for moderator and moderator/middle man service activity). -The district will put the funds on hold until the buyer confirms that the contract is completed or until the guarantee period is over or until the dispute is resolved. -Disputes are resolved by MMOMarket/MMO District participatns voting or by moderator that is elected by participants. -There will be a reputation/trust system that will help to choose a good seller/service provider. -Participants can use any Ether tokens, they will be automatically converted to desired currency/token by 0x decentralized exchange solution, rate is locked when the seller and buyer start the contract.

This concept needs a lot of development. Possible to expand such district to more global Digital Goods market (cd-keys, computer program keys).

Slack name: cloudpost

[tfg615]

Hey! So would this district exist and be usable across all MMO platforms, or would individual districts have to exist for each individual MMO platform that buys/sells/trades virtual goods?

[Cloudpostru]

This will a district for popular games (similar to a forum with subforums section for each game) with a possibility to create new sections if they will get votes (new popular game (lets say Diablo 4) is released, somebody creates Diablo 4 subdisctict request, when it gets enough votes (popular game will be upvoted fast), it will be added.

[Alexand0x]

Commented on this in slack when it was originally proposed, but this is one of the more interesting ideas as it involves the trade of digital goods that CANT be easily replicated to the blockchain, but can still serve as a foundation for many of the services that can be built as modules (reputation-based escrow, prediction markets for exchange rates between various illiquid currencies, etc.) that can then serve the entire network.

[Bradymck]

I would love to see something like this. Can I ask why you want to make this a district and how it differentiates from other projects in the blockchain space?

[nueverest]

This is a multi-billion dollar industry https://dmarket.io, https://skins.cash/, enjin, steam and others are aiming at this space.

[notzoom]

I would LOVE to see this. The issue with platforms like dmarket is that the game maker has to sign up for this. I don't see why that needs to happen, we are playing the game, we are putting the effort, we are not stealing anything.

[nueverest]

@notzoom Enjin is also interesting as it seems their first product is working now. https://www.enjin.com/

They innovated by using a monolithic token contract similar to the proposed ERC-721 token standard for off-chain transactions. https://blog.enjincoin.io/enjin-coin-leading-innovation-in-blockchain-based-game-design-eb9cd44fd2e8

We could do something similar here.

[Bradymck]

Hey @Cloudpostru

I'm not sure if you're aware but we recently launched a new bounty to migrate your proposals to the actual District Registry: https://registry.district0x.io/

We're replacing the old voting app with the registry. Let me know if you need help but I would love to see you migrate this over so you can claim your DNT.

It does take a 10,000 DNT submit to submit your proposal but this gives you an extra 2000 you can stake in the registry beyond the deposit amount.

Hit me up on Telegram or Discord if you need help or have questions.

Telegram: https://t.me/district0x/75217 Discord: https://discord.gg/P9RQejv

PS, please excuse the canned response. I am encouraging everyone here to start migrating so they can claim their 12000 DNT.

[Bradymck]

Also, this could be a really important district with the right models that align incentives for creators. Right now it's tough for creators to dive into games, and VR because their rights as a creator are not always respected by other user or platforms.