Could Fortnite Use Blockchain? ‘Perhaps Someday,’ Says Epic CEO

Battle royale gaming titan Fortnite might make the most of blockchain sooner or later, Epic Video games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney mentioned this week—however cryptocurrency is not going to function within the sport.

“Maybe sometime,” Sweeney tweeted in response to Sport Fund Companions co-founder Jonah Blake, who requested the Epic head if blockchain might be utilized in Fortnite quickly. 

However this may not be in the best way that many individuals would assume, “as we’ve plainly mentioned many occasions we aren’t adopting cryptocurrency or NFT buying and selling or comparable,” Sweeney added. 

As a substitute, he’s extra within the “underlying thought” of blockchain, calling it “superior.” Particularly, Sweeney factors to utilizing the blockchain as a “decentralized resolution to distributed transactional evolution of simulation state computed amongst members in an open ecosystem.”

Put merely, this seems to imply utilizing the blockchain as a database various. An instance of this idea has been seen with crypto role-playing sport Pirate Nation, which plans to unfold transactions throughout a number of blockchains in the identical method {that a} conventional sport could use a number of databases to course of person info.

“For me, cash is type of the least attention-grabbing of purposes on blockchains.” Sweeney mentioned in a current interview with writer Matthew Ball, explaining through which methods the blockchain could also be used sooner or later. “Zero-knowledge proofs, the thought of cryptographic consensus protocols, and so forth ought to be a key part of numerous techniques,” Sweeney defined.

Sweeney has been a vocal supporter of the “open metaverse,” an concept that upholds the thought of decentralization and interoperability in digital experiences also known as metaverse worlds. In 2021, he mentioned that “no firm can personal” the metaverse, off the again of Fb’s rebranding to Meta.

Regardless of this, he known as to pump the breaks on the fantasy that an “open metaverse” implies that belongings from one sport might simply freely be dumped into one other one.

“There is a dream of interoperability, which is the concept you possibly can primarily drag and drop belongings from one sport into one other,” he mentioned within the Ball interview. “Which is sort of fairly seen as threatening and even type of insulting to individuals who spend their lives crafting stunning AAA video games. And it is also technically ridiculous.”

As a substitute, he desires to give attention to the truth of how builders can create an open metaverse that works by enabling interoperability throughout video games in a extra practical sense.

“I believe the way forward for the metaverse must be constructed on open protocols, open requirements, and interoperability of all types,” Sweeney mentioned within the Ball interview.

That is being completed by way of teams just like the Metaverse Requirements Discussion board—a corporation that Epic has engaged with—which is trying to deliver technical requirements throughout the business to allow interoperability.

With such a give attention to the tech, Sweeney defined that blockchain gaining reputation (or notoriety) due to cryptocurrency could have broken the expertise’s long-term popularity.

“It strikes me as very unlucky that it did not have one other couple many years to be nurtured within the purely nerd neighborhood earlier than it was adopted as a monetary instrument,” Sweeney mentioned. “The foreign money has been drastically undermined by hypothesis, scams, regulatory uncertainty, and so forth.”

Despite this, he nonetheless believes the expertise will prevail.

“I believe the world will find yourself on the proper aspect of blockchain expertise,” Sweeney completed. “Within the meantime, it is nonetheless a relatively ‘Wild West,’ so purchaser beware.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward