Written by: Haotian
Recently, @Balance_Fun launched a Key Node sales activity for the upcoming TGE, and I won't elaborate too much on the rights, investment returns, and necessity of participation that node holders enjoy. I mainly want to discuss what Balance actually does, why a16z has invested heavily twice, and how to connect the web2 'play companion' platform with the large web3 gaming industry.
1) Balance is a blockchain gaming experience platform launched by the E-PAL gaming companion platform. In the web2 world, play companions have become a huge market where users find people to enhance gaming skills, seek social companionship to improve gaming experiences, etc. Ultimately, these individuals come together to create platform scale effects, becoming potential audience groups and brand reputation amplifiers for other game developers and operators, thus revealing greater economic and commercial value attributes.
In other words, users in the play companion market are naturally part of the 'online earning' group, familiar with various points, growth incentives, and so on, which can naturally lead them to become potential incremental users of web3 games and Tokenomics, thus inherently possessing Mass Adoption attributes.
Balance is E-PAL bridging the gap between web2 and web3, designing a web3 Native gaming service platform based on blockchain. With E-PAL's 'play companion' platform's millions of user base, any game applications and services linked to this gaming service platform can find good commercial value, including cultivating early loyal users for them, establishing early gaming communities, and building a free and open player trading market, among others.
2) YGG (Yield Guild Games), as a DAO gaming guild organization, has left a deep impression on everyone with the GameFi boom driven by the Play-to-Earn model in the last cycle. Everyone has witnessed YGG's former glory and market performance.
The operational logic of YGG is also quite simple; it invests in some web3 game NFTs and related assets based on the player base of the game guild and then generates a positive commercial flywheel through core asset leasing, $YGG token incentives, and other means, ultimately making it a web3 game traffic entry platform full of imaginative space and an early gaming community incubator.
Personally, I feel that Balance's market and brand positioning is very similar to YGG, and in some ways even superior to YGG, considering its global user scale, product service coverage, and business imagination space, all of which are more outstanding. However, YGG has capitalized on the wave of NFT, GameFI, and the metaverse, while Balance is still waiting for the wind to come. Moreover, the initial investment in YGG by a16z has been quite fruitful, and now a16z has doubled down on investing in Balance, making its intentions and ambitions quite clear.
Although the gaming track is mostly unremarkable, there might come a phenomenon-level game that ignites the market, which is the highlight moment that platforms like Balance are waiting for.
3) From what I understand, many platforms, including @Orbiter_Finance cross-chain bridge, @carv_official gaming identity data protocol platform, @sophon RPC node service platform, etc., have adopted the node sales strategy. Node sales itself is also the result of web3 platforms commercializing their prospects after Tokenomics.
Based on this, it can achieve goals such as rapid financing, binding core users, and forming a community of shared interests. It can be understood as an 'internal public sale' before the TGE, suitable for projects that have a clear commercial closed-loop path and certain accumulations in potential user base and market resources.
Balance has accumulated $30M in financing, with investment institutions being top-tier in the industry such as a16z and Galaxy Interactive. Its platform has 12 million registered users, over two million daily active users, and has already established partnerships with more than 80 web3 gaming companies, supporting over 180 games, etc.
Clearly, it is these solid operational data and growth situations that have led to the current node sales plan and the subsequent TGE. As for what kind of answers can be delivered and what heights the secondary market can reach, it depends on when the gaming track can attract the main bull market surge.
