A good CEO is always on the lookout for new ideas, and these innovations can come from anywhere. While decentralized gaming platforms might seem a bit of an odd thing for a business leader to study, blockchain gaming is a growing sector. More to the point, they do a lot of things that could give your business an advantage, and today, we are going to look at four of them.
1. Serve your base
When it comes to creating a worldwide customer base, online poker is one of the web’s biggest success stories, and, with the rise of blockchain technology, crypto-based poker playing is one of the world’s biggest online categories. Business leaders can learn something from the biggest. For instance, according to Jeffery McMillan’s Pokerscout CoinPoker review, the way the site has a rakeback rate – in other words, the opportunity to get back your tournament entry fee – of up to 33 percent is a major selling point. As a result, CoinPoker has become one of the biggest crypto poker sites, if not the biggest. If you are running a business, there is a lesson for you there. It makes sense to get people involved in the site and give them something back.
Loyalty programs work, but if you can do it in a non-obvious and innovative way, it can attract customers you might otherwise not reach. Perhaps more importantly, it can also generate repeat business and help create a real base of users. This base can, in turn, create a community, which is what you want from your customer base because they will help promote what you do organically. After all, word of mouth is still the most trusted referral method. Not only that, but with the site paying out some of its rakeback in its own CHP crypto token, it has given its cryptocurrency an actual use case, which is well worth keeping in mind if you want to get in on the blockchain finance action and create a tokenized ecosystem.
2. Go trustless, get trusted
Trust is a big thing in business, and it is something that automatically comes with decentralized ecosystems. Games on the platforms use smart contracts, computer programs that automatically execute once certain conditions are met, to help create a smooth gaming experience that doesn’t rely on a central authority. Similarly, the platforms will often use permissionless technology, meaning that you can carry out a transaction with another user without having to gain the permission of a central authority figure on the network. Not only that, but those key parts of blockchain technology also help enforce the rules and do it fairly and openly.
What does this mean for businesses? Well, the idea that customers can get on with things is something that could help out. There’s also the idea that, if people can see what is going on, which they can with so-called trustless systems, they are more likely to have faith in what it is that you’re doing, because they can see how things work and can be reassured that they are not going to fall victim to fraud.
So, you could always see about automating certain parts of your business, such as data flows and audit trails, with transparent information, or use open-source code for some things, which will allow customers to know how you work, so they can trust you. You could even, potentially, use distributed infrastructure, which can keep parts of your workflows safe, or see whether user-controlled wallets could reduce liability. Just remember that it’s easier to decentralize progressively, rather than all in one go.
3. Composability creates customers and cash
Blockchain gaming platforms are big on composability. This means that some things in the platform ecosystem, whether it’s services, assets, or tools, can be reused, entered into new systems, or combined easily, efficiently, and effectively. For instance, a blockchain-based, decentralized gaming universe can use its crypto tokens for in-game betting across the platform or for governance purposes, meaning holders can vote on changes to the network.
Similarly, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), rights to links to pieces of digital art, can be traded and used across a range of platforms and online marketplaces, while things like escrow contracts and random number generators can be made open-source and used by other game developers. This all adds up to something that can grow exponentially because people can build on a product, which leads to more use cases, which, ultimately, leads to more customers and can help developers get innovative.
If you’re a CEO of a business, large or small, you can learn from this. If you come up with a product, it can help both you and your customers if it can be plugged into other systems. Similarly, if you can make things interoperable, they can work beyond your products. For instance, if you have loyalty points, you can team up with other companies so people can spend their loyalty points elsewhere, and you can take them. This benefits everyone because it helps create an ecosystem of businesses, which, in turn, allows for some cross-promotion.
4. Spotting innovations
A lot of the time, business and technological innovation don’t start with big companies. Instead, it starts at smaller firms and more niche markets. If we look at decentralized gaming, we can see ideas being tested out at smaller, start-up businesses with a growing, but still comparatively small, customer base.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the ideas will stay fixed in one small corner of the internet. If we focus on poker sites, things like peer-to-peer staking, where players can help fund other players and get a share in their winnings, fully transparent onchain gameplay, and platforms where staking tokens also give players a say in how things are run may not have entered the business mainstream yet, but that isn’t to say they won’t at some point in the future.
A smart CEO might well look at the example of how some blockchain lending models have been used, at least in a limited way, by some major banks. Setting up teams to focus on edge cases, testing things in an invite-only environment, or working with start-ups could help you identify new technology and help bring it into the mainstream.
There you have it. Decentralized gaming platforms might be pretty niche, but whether it’s with their composable parts, technological innovations, openness, and customer-focused environments, there is plenty for a CEO to take inspiration from.
