Green Beanz — Bringing the Spirit of Sustainability into P2E Gaming

ZILHive Accelerator

Green Beanz — Bringing the Spirit of Sustainability into P2E Gaming

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10 Feb 2022 

 

The environmental impact of blockchains, particularly those using energy-intensive “Proof-of-Work” (PoW) consensus mechanisms to validate new transactions, has been one of the cornerstones of popular critiques levelled at the industry. Even Elon Musk, the controversial darling of the crypto community, was quick to make a sharp about-turn, citing concerns over its impact on carbon emissions – just a month after announcing to much fanfare that Tesla would accept Bitcoin payments around March last year. 

The responses by industry players have ranged from pointing to the significantly greater environmental impact of the present banking system running on Web 2.0 payment rails to promoting “green” blockchains that don’t rely on energy-intensive consensus mechanisms. 

But the founders of the fledgling play-to-earn (P2E) startup, Green Beanz, might have a better idea. They hope their blockchain-based game can reward environmentally-friendly behaviors in real life – all while running on the Zilliqa network, an energy-efficient blockchain whose carbon footprint is so low; it’s been estimated only one country on Earth emits less carbon than Zilliqa: the island nation of Tuvalu with a population of about 12,000 inhabitants. 

One missing piece of the sustainability puzzle is the problem of incentives. Simply put, there is often no money to be made for individuals or companies if they produce less waste or engage in other “green” behaviors. In fact in some cases, it may even cost more. For instance, switching to a biodegradable packaging material for food simply eats into restaurants’ margins. 

No one is more familiar with this problem than Chunhui Suen, one of Green Beanz’ co-founders. Suen is both a tech industry veteran and a passionate advocate for reducing our waste and carbon output. Since 2018, he has been running Kindred Community, a non-governmental organization in Singapore that rallies the community to clean up public beaches and parks. But he quickly realized that many startups and NGOs in the sustainability space often lacked a viable business model to finance rewarding people for participating in such activities. “If we can just get 5% of the global population to change their behaviour, we can dramatically reduce our impact on the environment. But to do that, we need a robust incentive system that can reward people for doing so”, Suen explained. 

With over a decade working on cloud computing, big data infrastructure, and distributed systems at companies like IBM and Visa, Suen was intrigued by the potential for blockchain-based games to be that missing puzzle piece. He noticed how P2E games like Axie Infinity were skyrocketing in countries like the Philippines, where its in-game tokens are increasingly being accepted as currency in real life. Suen also drew inspiration from Pokemon Go, the augmented reality (AR) game that succeeded in convincing large crowds of sedentary urban dwellers to go forth into the real world. 

That’s when the idea for Green Beanz was born. Suen hopes that by building and growing a community of gamers around a fun, Axie-like P2E game, they will be eventually able to link the minting of in-game characters, or the mining of in-game currency to real-world behaviors that reduce waste or carbon emissions. That way, players who love the game can pay miners to make a difference in real life. 

Suen had known about Zilliqa since 2018, having met with its early team members while teaching blockchain at the National University of Singapore as an adjunct professor. But he was hesitant about trying to learn Scilla, the smart contract programming language, on his own. So when he received an email invitation to join the ZILHive Incubator in 2019, he jumped at the opportunity. “Scilla, like other functional programming languages, has a syntax that can be harder to read and understand. So having a structured programme and instructors that can really help you when you run into problems is invaluable”, Suen said. 

Being accepted into ZILHive was also instrumental in helping Suen bring his idea for Green Beanz to life. For one, that’s where he met his co-founder, David Jian – an environmental engineer who had also joined the Scilla developer course. Along with Jian, Suen also found other like-minded teammates interested in using blockchain for good. The ZILHive Incubator brought together a team of highly experienced professionals with diverse and complementary skills needed to build a business: from front and back end developers, marketing, and even game artists. 

Jian says the mentorship and masterclasses during the Accelerator programme were incredibly valuable in guiding them through the business side of running a blockchain project like regulations and fundraising mechanics. The project has already seen traction since graduating from the Accelerator program in Feb 2022, with a total of 2.2M $ZIL and 8.7 $ETH raised and 2039 NFTs minted in their presale. 

Looking ahead, the Green Beanz founders are determined to grow a base of sustainability business partners while building a community of gamers that can finance rewards for sustainable behaviors. They talk excitedly about the possibility of a guild system that can drive people to organize around hitting collective sustainability targets to gain access to events or exclusive products and services offered by sustainable businesses they partner with. The road ahead to a zero-waste, zero-carbon world may be a long and winding one. But like their project’s namesake, Suen and his team are just getting started. To learn more about ZILHive’s programmes, visit https://zilhive.org/.

This 30-year-old Serial Entrepreneur is Building the Plaid of DeFi

ZILHive Accelerator

This 30-year-old Serial Entrepreneur is Building the Plaid of DeFi

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27 Oct 2021


Founded in 2013, $13 billion fintech giant Plaid revolutionized open banking. The company was one of the first to enable applications like Robinhood and Coinbase to connect with users’ bank accounts through open APIs.

Serial entrepreneur Tengku Muhammad Shah, who goes by the moniker “Moe”, hopes his latest venture can bring that same concept to the world of decentralized finance or DeFi.

Following the successful exit of a previous startup in Malaysia, Moe saw an opportunity to bring open banking to the region. Sensing a gap in the Southeast Asian fintech landscape, he started HeyAlfred in 2019 with the hopes of introducing the open banking concept pioneered by Plaid to local banks. Drawing inspiration from the billionaire vigilante’s butler, he hoped that HeyAlfred would become the go-to personal finance platform.

The startup initially secured seed funding from a few angel investors and a venture fund in Amsterdam to bring the idea to life. But after a year of trying to woo traditional banks, Moe quickly realized that banks in the region were less enthusiastic about the prospect of transparency. Moreover, they balked at the cost of having to revamp their legacy systems to support open APIs.

Moe and his team decided to rebrand to HeyAlfie last year, focusing on serving the needs of DeFi communities and platforms instead. Despite being a rapidly growing asset class built around openness and transparency, Moe saw few tools for people like him to manage their digital assets easily.

“I found it difficult to manage my assets across various DeFi platforms, wallets, and exchanges. That’s when I thought to myself: why don’t we apply the same principles of open banking to the DeFi space?” said Moe.

Today, HeyAlfie is on a mission to make DeFi easy to access by retail investors unfamiliar with decentralized exchanges or liquidity pools by providing a one-stop gateway to interact with smart contract platforms, as well as crypto exchanges.

HeyAlfie hopes to allow users to go beyond just helping users visualize and manage their portfolios. Moe explains that the team is working on features that will help users compare and find the best rates on different decentralized exchanges like Uniswap or ZILSwap.

Though the platform is still in its pilot stage, Moe is eager to see the team bring the product to market through the ZILHive Accelerator programme.

To learn more about ZILHive’s programmes, visit https://zilhive.org/.

Meet Two College Kids Using NFTs to Fight $1b in Ticketing Fraud

ZILHive Accelerator

Meet Two College Kids Using NFTs to Fight $1b in Ticketing Fraud

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27 Oct 2021

 

From flights to music festivals, having a ticket gets you on a plane to your holiday destination or into a concert hall with your favorite bands. Tickets are representations of temporary, exclusive access rights to services and events.

As a rationing device, tickets are scarce by design. There are only so many passenger seats on an airplane and only so many people that can fit into an entertainment venue. Once sold out, people desperate for access must turn to resale markets in hopes of paying a premium to acquire a ticket for themselves.

All this makes ticketing a lucrative industry – especially for scalpers and fraudsters. Scalpers artificially inflate ticket prices using bots or networks of bidders to purchase tickets en masse to resell for profit, leaving genuine customers waiting in line empty-handed. Worse, resale tickets may not even be authentic. In 2018, as many as 11 million people were victims of concert ticket scams alone. Interpol estimated that the airline industry’s losses from the fraudulent online purchases of flight tickets had reached close to USD 1 billion per year.

Two college students from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) think blockchain technology can change that. Krithik Roshan and Mihir Mohan hope that their startup, Access, can help event organizers combat fraud and prevent ticket scalping by issuing tickets as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

“Tokenized tickets can allow buyers to authenticate genuine tickets before they are purchased and make it possible to flag suspicious activities from fraudsters’ wallets. We can also flag scalpers whose wallets engage in the persistent reselling of tickets”, said Mihir.

The idea for Access was born when they both joined ZILHive. Through design sprints with the ZILHive team and advice from experienced professionals they met during the incubator, the pair saw how NFTs could transform ticketing. Senior executives at large nightclubs and integrated resorts they spoke with helped to expand the idea for Access beyond just fighting fraud and scalpers.

“Tickets can be so much more than just an access pass with an expiry date. Like a well-stamped passport of a frequent flier or fans flexing their concert tickets on social media – tickets can also serve as identity markers. That makes them excellent tools for building brand loyalty”, Mihir explained.

Despite the global pandemic, which has dealt a devastating blow to the travel, events, and entertainment industries, Krithik and Mihir remain undeterred. “Thankfully, we were not operating when the global shutdown hit. That has allowed us to focus on collaborating with potential customers to refine the product, so we are poised to launch when the situation recovers”, Mihir said. The team is currently developing the NFT infrastructure for a large-scale event with over 100,000 attendees, which will occur in late 2022.

To learn more about ZILHive’s programmes, visit https://zilhive.org/.