Coinbase has been in the news a great deal lately, largely due to its attempted expansion into Wall Street. Today, however, Coinbase is making headlines for a lighter reason: the exchange has partnered with Fuel Games to launch the first competitive E-Sports game on the Ethereum Network.

Gods Unchained is a new free-to-play fantasy card game, which came into development after a reportedly significant investment from Coinbase.

“Receiving an investment in our equity round from Coinbase Ventures was validating, especially of our core belief that gaming is an industry where blockchain technology actually makes lots of sense,” says game co-founder Robbie Ferguson in an interview with CCN. “With over $50 billion turned over in in-game assets on marketplaces every year, current game publishers are essentially acting as central banks with absolutely no oversight or regulation – this needs to change.”

Gods Unchained comes designed with a number of e-sports features aimed toward offering users a complete multiplayer experience. The game is predicated on players collecting and trading cards used to compete in multiplayer competitions. With cards being bought, traded, won and lost in battle, Gods Unchained will offer skilled players the opportunity to generate income through play.

“The cards are stored on the Ethereum blockchain, however players in God’s unchained will only initiate transactions on the network once they purchase cards or transfer existing ones,” Ferguson explains. “All other gameplay elements will run off-chain, which will allow gameplay to be indistinguishable from other games that do not utilize distributed ledgers. This will permit millions of users to play without any noticeable waiting down of the network.”

Despite the obvious draw for blockchain game creators to want to build on the world’s most popular DApp platform, concerns about Ethereum’s slow transaction speeds and high Gas prices have been raising increasing concern among developers. Ethereum’s network issues have recently led other gaming DApps like Etheremon to switch over to other blockchain platforms like Zilliqa.

In response to these concerns, the Ethereum team has been working hard to implement new technologies like Sharding and Plasma to improve network speed and lower Gas prices. Despite Sharding and Plasma potentially being a long way away from implementation, Ferguson and the Gods Unchained team are confident that their new trading card game is already prepared to offer players a smooth gaming experience.

“For Gods Unchained, I think the impact [of Sharding and Plasma] will be useful but not necessary for it to run well; trading will become a lot easier, but we’ve already made all the choices necessary so that gameplay will be seamless, whether Ethereum scales in the short term or not. (As a personal note, the Ethereum foundation’s time scale is very reasonable. Sharding and plasma shouldn’t be rushed, and it’s much better to progress the fundamental tech step-by-step than rush it and risk, what could effectively be, a run on the (decentralized) banks,”

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