In the wake of Valve’s announcement it’s killing OPSkins’ access to Steam on 21 June, the in-game item marketplace has hit back, pointing to its aggressive leveraging of blockchain in the form of emerging marketplace WAX.
In an impassioned blogpost, OPSkins stated that while it has expected this decision for some time, “One company cannot kill the digital items trading industry”.
The irony of the situation is that under Steam’s terms and conditions, OPSkins’ activity has always been ‘illegal’.
Yet given the liquidity the secondary market has provided, particularly for players who want to trade Counter-Strike: Global Offensive skins, the assumption has been Valve has turned a blind eye.
The particular trigger point for this situation, however, was OPSkins’ ExpressTrade service, which enables players to instantly trade Steam items, circumventing Valve’s new seven day cooldown period for trading CS: GO items.
In response to its ban, OPSkins commented: “The future of digital item trading is instant, free, peer-to-peer trades, and that’s what WAX will provide.”
Announced in late 2017 and still being build out, WAX – full name Worldwide Asset eXchange – is a EOS-based decentralized item marketplace designed so that anyone can integrate it into a game, app, web page or internet-connected service.
Or as the blogpost puts is “WAX is being built to support a post-Valve trading economy”. Ouch!
You can read the full article here.