By
Mayowa Adebajo
March 12th, 2024
Focusing on emerging markets and ‘unbanked’ consumers, ALAX aims to bring fresh air to the gaming industry and merge mobile game experience with blockchain innovation.
Emerging markets have many unbanked participants of a mobile gaming marketplace. According to the statistics provided by World Bank’s Global Findex, over 2 billion adults do not adhere to any of banking services. However, they have an access to cash and 3G/LTE smartphones thus they ultimately become target audience for gaming developers. DECENT and Dragonfly team up to bring games to everyone including people who do not hold credit and debit cards.
The joint efforts of two giants within a gaming industry gave birth to ALAX, a mobile game distribution platform based on blockchain technology that intends of bringing fresh air to the gaming industry around the world. The main feature that makes ALAX stand out from the rest of mobile gaming platforms as well as continuously contribute to users’ benefit is open gaming and app purchases to millions of ‘unbanked’ consumers easily accomplished via fast transaction speed and reduced content’s price.
As it has been mentioned above, ALAX is not a rootless startup running by single motivation instead it is backed up by DECENT and Dragonfly that have already managed to set up working projects.
Dragonfly has pioneered an integrated mobile gaming application marketplace, which now reaches more than 100 Million of active users worldwide. Today it maintains consumer reach and steady growth with conveniently pre-installed mobile marketplaces on their channel partners’ devices listing Vivo, Oppo, Huawei, Gionee, True, Jio, MMX, Advan, Mito and many more.
DECENT, in turn, has created an innovative and customizable adaptation of blockchain technology, called DCore. It represents a digital content oriented blockchain with fundamental support of purchase and distribution of digital assets such as mobile games. Moreover, DCore blockchain architecture is designed to have high transaction speed, the ability to process a high volume of transactions and has a unique build-in feature that supports automatic revenue splitting based on predefined rules. DCore blockchain uses a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) mechanism, which is the most efficient, most decentralized, and most flexible consensus model available.
This functionality, plus the strong cryptography and trustless transactions native to blockchains, enable DECENT and Dragonfly to provide the sufficient underlying layer on which the ALAX infrastructure can be built on.
Why Do Users Need ALAX?
It is particularly true that in a situation when an unbanked end-user wants to purchase a game from a developer, a payment intermediary is able to set unlimited high processing fee. Since there is no alternative for both sides, they have to accept the terms that can amount to up to 70% of the price of the game.
This means that developer will make a lower profit and hence raises the price and the end-user has to pay more for the app whereas the increased difference ends up in reseller’s pocket. Similarly, the provider has a longer time to settle the payments to the developer that can take up to 6 months and the developer has no choice but wait. It does not look like bright future especially considering the predictions according to which the global mobile games market’s valuation is going to double by 2020.
How Does ALAX Work?
ALAX is going to issue two tokens – ALX and ALA. While the ALA token will be used directly in platform to pay for content, ALX will be used to acquire ALA tokens on the one-way ALAX exchange. ALA’s value will be pegged to FIAT and therefore only ALX can be accessible on public exchanges. ALA/ALX value will be set according to ALX/FIAT value on major public exchanges. To ensure market demand for ALX, there will be a 20% discount on ALA purchases using ALX tokens.
ALA tokens are going to be offered to end users via the app itself, or an existing reseller network such as brick and mortar store or mobile operators. End-users can purchase games or use ALA for in-app purchases and game developers can request payouts from ALAX, or use received ALA tokens as a reward for the players to motivate them.
After integrating the ALAX SDK into their app, the developers have a number of advantages. ALAX will take care of distributing their game through the existing pre-installed channels. After each transaction ALA tokens are transferred immediately to the developer’s account.
ALAX Expands Into Asia
Recently ALAX has engaged into several significant partnerships that firmly determine project’s confidence in its mission and full commitment to reach it. ALAX signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) with Gionee, one of China’s and India’s largest smartphone manufacturers, that will see ALAX’s platform pre-installed on Gionee’s new smartphones, with older models moving to the ALAX platform in line with regular updates. The agreement will allow app developers access to tens of millions of ‘unbanked’ users – particularly in Southeast Asia, China and India, through the blockchain-powered distribution platform.
Having the partnership with UTOO is another big step forward in bringing the ALAX platform to unbanked people. As ALAX will use a reseller network of brick and mortar stores, in terms of the signed agreement, UTOO’s network of 6000+ stores in Malaysia and 100000+ stores in Indonesia will be obligated to sell top-up cards charged with ALA tokens in exchange for FIAT currency.
Token Generation Event
ALX are going to be generated during the ALAX Token Generation Event (TGE). The TGE hard cap is set to 30 000 ETH. The initial ALX value is 1 ETH = 10 000 ALX. During the ALAX TGE, contributors will be able to purchase ALX for the most common coins and tokens such as BTC, ETH, BCH, LTC, DCT, SPHTX and other.
Solely ETH value is determinant. Start of the TGE is planned for Tuesday 17 April 2018. The duration of the ALAX TGE is going to be 6 days therefore it ends on Monday, 23 April 2018.