Every world-changing technology has its own story. An obscure beginning unravels into a thunderous first act, a cautious middle, and then a victorious end. The blockchain is no different. In fact, if we were to write it out scene-by-scene, it’d go something like this:
Scene 1. Rumblings in the kingdom. A steely-eyed savior arrives to challenge the Lords of the castle.
Scene 2. A valiant battle is fought. The savior is given a name: the blockchain. But the Lords fight back. The savior retreats, for though lionhearted, their strength is not yet enough.
Scene 3. The savior journeys into the mountains. It rains. It snows. Through a long, hard winter they train—preparing, discovering, learning—for the war is not over, and without strife, there cannot be victory.
Scene 4. TBD.
While the blockchain toiled in obscurity during its early years, tentatively watched and nurtured by early enthusiasts and tech pioneers—who turned Satoshi’s vision into a reality—it’s since come of age, as much the future as AI and self-driving cars.
But the fight is far from won.
To supplant institutions, as well as the functions and services they provide, the blockchain needs to be better, stronger, and more capable. It needs to scale to thousands of transactions per second, be more secure and private than existing solutions, and be usable by everyone.
It’s under these conditions that we present Emotiq—as a scalable, private, natural blockchain. Emotiq is inspired by stories—and specifically, by Zork.
Emotiq and Zork
Zork is one of the earliest interactive fiction computer games. Written using Inform 6, Zork is a dungeon adventure experienced and played entirely through text. Players input via commands to interact with objects—such as a ‘sword’, ‘bow’, ‘chest’ or ‘troll’—journey to destinations, and smite enemies, wending their way through pages of narration, detailed scenarios, and verbose puzzles.
Let’s call this Lego-box storytelling. Zork tells a powerful story in a controlled environment, with preset conditions, variables, and outcomes. A new object cannot be introduced if it does not already exist in the program, and the possible outcomes in any given scenario are finite. A player may not choose to turn left—and survive—if survival is only possible by turning right, as ordained by the fiction’s creators.
Zork was (and is, should you have a love for retro gaming) fun. It wasn’t easy, but it was easy to use—and, with Inform, easy to program.
The HTML5 Industry Welcomes a Global Boom
From stand-alone machines to the Internet, from online user game to web games, from web games to mobile games, every time the game industry experiences a platform revolution, enormous opportunities have been brought to the game industry. In the current “Red Sea Era” where the mobile game market is fiercely competitive, and head resources are increasingly centralized, HTML5 is emerging as a new technology with transformative values. With its robust cross-platform capabilities, click-to-play virus propagating features and continuous improvement in engines and tools, an entirely new race track has been opened up for developers.
In 2014, “Catch the Crazy Cat” produced by Egret Technology took the social media by storm and initiated the first year of HTML5 games. After four years of development, the HTML5 game market has grown from the $50 million in that year to the $6 billion of today, achieving a 120-times growth and validating the existence of a vast blue ocean market for HTML5 technology.
At the same time, Internet giants have also publicly embraced HTML5 technology. For instance, Facebook has released its H5 technology-based instant game in its Messenger with more than 1 billion daily active users; Google has launched PWA, which advocates the concept of search and application and applies HTML5 technology to apps and search. HTML5 technology has been recognized globally as a cross-platform, cross-terminal and cross-industry solution. Its annual global market scale is expected to reach $100 billion US dollars.
HTML5 Industry Embraces Blockchain. Both Opportunities and Challenges Exist
While the HTML5 industry has been rapidly developing, we notice that there are still many obstacles regarding its business model, user size, and market size. For example, there is a lack of copyright protection mechanisms and fairness mechanisms to protect games and applications, and a lack of unified and secure trading platforms for virtual assets. The reason for this is because of problems such as the vulnerability of HTML5 game code to plagiarism, the lack of transparency in the probability drop rate in-game tools and the difficulty of circulating virtual assets between games. Blockchain technology is highly respected for its decentralization, security, transparency, non-destructibility, traceability and other characteristics and is naturally suitable for solving the pain points of the HTML5 industry.
However, a seemingly perfect answer still has many problems that reality must confront. The existing blockchain has disadvantages such as low performance and high technical barriers that hinder the integration of HTML5 industry and blockchain technology, and these are preventing HTML5 developers from creating applications that can widely distribute on the blockchain. Egretia Lab is a platform created for the era of blockchain + HTML5. It will solve the fundamental pain points of the HTML5 industry and bring practical, far-reaching significance to the development of the industry.