While many of the applications being built on the BSV blockchain are aimed at addressing complex financial or technical issues, there is also room for fun and games. Enter Frobots, an online game built on the BSV protocol which incorporates elements of NFTs, micropayments, rapid transactions, and the Metaverse.
Users write algorithms for their Frobots, fighting each other to death for fun and profit. Frobots.io Founder Jerry Chan said the original idea behind the platform came about from a desire to explore the general computational capabilities of the BSV blockchain.
He added that Frobots is an ‘exploration of digital life’.
‘Now we have blockchain, we can let these things out into the wild. This requires a digital domain that these digital entities can exist on. This plays towards the idea of the metaverse.
‘The idea of Frobots is just a very small piece of functional code, that looks a lot like a Bitcoin smart contract, which is then stored on the blockchain and live. They can be modified, edited and grown – becoming better at the things they do and presumably start earning a revenue stream in digital tokens.’
Gladiators in a virtual arena
While these Frobots have a ‘digital life’, their singular purpose is to compete within the game and act as gladiators within a digital arena, Chan said.
While the move-sets of the Frobots are relatively limited, he noted that it is an opportunity for users to learn to program. ‘The cool thing about this is that once your Frobot is born 50 years later it is going to be the same Frobot and will have the same history. There is a real, quantifiable model by which you can value these NFTs tokens.’
This is very different from current NFT options which have an artificial rarity and scarcity attached to them and are based more on speculation, he said.
Users receive experience points by winning battles, or even just surviving, which will eventually allow Frobots to level up and continue developing. He added that users can also make additions and upgrades to their Frobots.
‘Imagine a future where you are not only the person who owns the Frobots but are a forger who sells upgrades to others. You can be part of the academy that way.’
BSV blockchain is a necessity
Chan said the decision to build the Frobots platform on the BSV blockchain was made because of how inexpensive it is and because it can handle the most transactions.
“The idea is that everything you do in this Frobots universe is going to be recorded on the blockchain, you are going to have to be frugal about how many transactions you write. I don’t want players to have to go out and buy cryptocurrencies to play the game.”
He added that the idea is not to have players be investors but that the two shouldn’t co-mingle and that developers should not make their platform decisions on the popularity of the blockchain but rather on what will work.
Chan expects to roll out a beta for Frobots before the end of this year and launch the platform in 2023.
