Blockchain gaming company Vorto has received a grant from the NEAR Foundation to develop its main application.
The Swedish company will use the funds — 25,000 NEAR tokens + $10,000 in cash — to build its gaming platform on the NEAR protocol. This, it is hoped, will allow it to build a platform that allows for greater scaling.
Gamers Begin Playing to Earn
One of the first of its kind, Vorto allows players to make money by playing games with the use of blockchain technology. It is actually set to be the first publicly-listed company with a tradable token. Think of it like an ‘eBay’ for players of the games: time spent gaming is rewarded with the network’s native token.
Gamers getting paid for the time they spend playing sounds like a good idea, right? There’s one issue: scalability. Blockchains can often become clogged due to overuse. NEAR, an open source platform that accelerates the development of decentralized applications, will come to the rescue in this case, say Vorto, and allow for the network to expand and run healthily.
Kristaps Vaivods, CEO of Vorto Gaming, said:
"It’s undeniable that blockchain gaming, despite its promise and excitement, has seen slow adoption in recent years. We think there are two main reasons for that: bad UI and UX, and an unscalable blockchain infrastructure. We solve for the former, while NEAR for the latter."
Vorto Gaming’s Mission
Vorto wants to make an extremely user-friendly blockchain platform for gamers — regardless of whether they are interested in cryptocurrency or not. The idea is that anyone can get involved and rewarded in crypto, without having to connect a wallet and having to know about how the complex world works.
Right now there are games running on Ethereum and other platforms but even if they have a decent UI, they can be pricey — such networks often have high fees due to a congested network.
Where NEAR Comes In
Vorto says that working with NEAR makes things cheaper: its network has a 10k lower cost per transaction than Ethereum, in turn bringing more people to its platform.
With huge amounts of funding — $3 million so far from ConsenSys, Yang Bing Kok, angel investors and now this grant — Vorto says it has the tools to take their product to the next level.
NEAR Foundation CEO Erik Trautman said:
"NEAR Protocol is made for developers just like Vorto Gaming. NEAR provides abstractions to hide as many of the underlying scalability solutions as possible, offering a high-performance sharded blockchain that looks and feels like a traditional smart contract platform."
The NEAR Foundation’s token, NEAR, was at the time of writing trading for $5.29—up 2.9% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap data.