Misfits Gaming Group, an esports company containing professional teams for League of Legends, Rocket League, Overwatch, Call of Duty, and Valorant, has made its first step towards blockchain gaming. They are partnering with Tezos and creating the platform Block Born.
What Is Misfits Gaming Group?
Misfits is a well-established esports organization that not only hosts multiple professional gaming teams, but has content creators with a combined reach of over 70 million and an eclectic mix of partnerships, from Intel to Ellesse (yes, the Ellesse you’re thinking of.)
Misfits has also launched an MGG x Tezos gaming incubator fund of $10 million ready to support any bright ideas; a common concept in tech and particularly within crypto.
“MGG Tezos Gaming Incubator offers a path to success for innovative esports, gaming and blockchain companies. We are launching a $10M incubator and seed fund, ready to support startups looking to take their business or idea to the next level.”
What Is Block Born?
Block Born will be a blockchain gaming-centric platform based on the Tezos blockchain and it is set to launch in August this year.
With this new technical partnership, MGG is launching a dedicated blockchain gaming community called Block Born. Blockchain gaming is an exciting new space for the gaming industry and MGG believes this is a significant opportunity to be part of this movement. Block Born will be MGG’s blockchain gaming arm, dedicated to supporting and growing the blockchain gaming space, as well as supporting the community through content, tournaments and signing professionals as the space begins to emerge. What’s more, all Block Born tournaments will be carbon neutral, which means that each tournament removes more carbon from the atmosphere than it produces.
These are the only details we have presently, but it sounds as if it will attempt to rival Twitch founder, Justin Kan’s, all-encompassing platform, Fractal.
What Is Tezos?
Tezos is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS — though it’s technically DPoS, Delegated Proof-of-Stake), open-source blockchain launched in June 2018. The blockchain refers to itself as “security focused” and like other chains that offer an alternative to Ethereum with many of its benefits like smart contracts, it has low transaction costs, energy efficiency, and more transactions per second.
Final Thoughts
There is a fast-growing trend of esports organizations and teams interacting with crypto in various ways. We have teams dipping toes in NFTs (to highly mixed reactions) and Coinbase has secured multiple sponsorship deals with the likes of ESL Gaming, Team Liquid, and Evil Geniuses.
The move by Misfits Gaming Group to partner with Tezos is an interesting one. I like Tezos and it’s a project I’ve followed for a while, but it seems a somewhat strange choice when there is plenty of blockchains purpose-built for gaming with far higher transactions per second.
As we have seen with viral games crashing blockchains, scalability and speed are two essential characteristics of any blockchain hoping to house games; Tezos’s 52 TPS (compared to Efinity’s 1,000, Solana’s current 2,000, and WAX’s 8,000, for instance) doesn’t seem likely to cut the mustard, long-term.
Nevertheless, it’s another billboard partnership between a major esports organization and a major crypto organization, which only helps to move the blockchain gaming boat forward.
