Founders of OPSkins, a marketplace for trading video game virtual items or assets, have formally unveiled Worldwide Asset eXchange (WAX), a new blockchain-based decentralized platform for virtual exchanges. This news comes ahead of its upcoming token sale in mid-October 2017, with a detailed announcement slated for September.
WAX is a decentralized platform designed to power all virtual item market participants - listing and selling agents, item escrow fiduciaries, appraisers, affiliates, buyers and sellers - to exchange merchandise, apportion fees and settle transactions quickly and securely.
With WAX, OPSkins hopes to enable the community of over 400 million online video gamers to host their own secure virtual item exchanges on the blockchain, allowing for high frequency, transparent transactions at extremely low costs. WAX will give gamers their own exchanges, similar to OPSkins, without investment in hardware, security infrastructure or payment processing.
William Quigley, CEO of OPSkins, explained: “The current virtual item trading industry is fragmented across hundreds of mostly regional marketplaces, creating significant supply and demand imbalances. WAX solves this issue by creating a global virtual item platform accessible to anyone, providing a complete catalogue of all assets available for sale in real time. Such a repository, when coupled with a reliable and low cost settlement network, vastly improves price discovery, market liquidity and growth.”
Using a combined 20 years and billions of transactions of virtual asset sale experience from the OPSkins founders, WAX has designed a smart token for highly secure and automated transactions. The WAX platform allows the global pool of buyers and sellers to eliminate financial risks they might encounter from the prevailing consignment-based marketplace model currently in use. WAX tokens act as stored value for acquiring in-game assets and as smart contracts, which ensure secure and efficient buying, selling and trading of virtual assets.
