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digital
daily

digital daily: Roblox Bucks

Roblox Bucks: Gaming, the back door. That’s where crypto assets may find their way to mass adoption. Take Roblox as an example. It’s a gaming platform that allows users to create games and play games created by others. There are more than 50 million games in the Roblox library. Daily active users rose to nearly 60 million in the fourth quarter of last year, growing at an annualized 44% pace since 2018. Players spent a staggering 50 billion hours on the platform last year. That’s 6 hours per person in the world. It’s a real network with quasi-crypto features. Roblox was created in 2004, long before the start of crypto assets. It pivoted to embrace the metaverse and micropayment features of the digital asset ecosystem. The Roblox economy has its own currency – Robux, used to buy items in its metaverse and reward developers who pay nothing to engage. Roblox rode the wave of crypto assets, with its share price still more than 70% below all-time highs even after this year’s 32% rise. Naturally, investors want to know how the activity will turn into earnings – the company is still losing money, after all. You get back to their Web2 roots – advertising, licensing, royalties…and currency creation. Yes, currency creation. That’s the dominant source of revenue, which has surged nearly seven times in the past four years to $2.2 billion. Users sell US dollars to the company in exchange for Robux. It comes with a caveat – Robux is non-refundable, non-transferrable, and revocable. Not quite the central tenets of a decentralized metaverse! But Roblox is a definitive proof of concept. Build it and they will come, even if through the back door.

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