FirstBlood, an online platform that lets amateur PC game players connect for competitive tournaments and earn rewards for playing, has announced plans to launch a blockchainblockchain called Dawn.

Built on the Cosmos Network, Dawn will allow FirstBlood users—currently numbering more than 200,000, according to the company—to wager cryptocurrencycryptocurrency during online battles. The DAWN tokentoken will debut alongside the blockchain itself, and will be used for both staking and governance.

The discovery that led Jae Kwon to build the Cosmos blockchain

It so nearly didn’t happen. Even though Jae Kwon loves a technical challenge, in 2013 he was ready to give up on his mission to build an alternative to Bitcoin’s energy-guzzling proof of work consensus mechanism and had begun to work on a cryptocurrency exchange. But then a serendipitous discovery turned things around—and not just for him. Kwon is now CEO and cofounder of Tendermint, which was the first company to introduce byzantine-fault tolerant (BFT) algorithms into the blockchain space. H...

NewsBusiness
8 min read
Adriana Hamacher

FirstBlood currently works with Valve’s popular MOBA game, Dota 2, as well as PUBG Corporation’s battle royale hit, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG). PUBG Mobile is also supported on Android via a mobile FirstBlood app, but is only currently available in India.

“Dawn blockchain allows FirstBlood to provide a more seamless UX for users to interact with cryptocurrencies. What’s more, a simpler user experience means less friction,” FirstBlood CEO Joe Zhou told Decrypt. “Secondly, we are also in the process of creating a new, unique, and rewarding experience for FirstBlood's most loyal users by utilizing Dawn’s new staking feature—an entirely new capability.”

The Cosmos Network is designed as the “internet of blockchains,” and is designed to allow for interoperability between different blockchains. Dawn uses the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint consensus protocol, but also has a bridge contract to the Ethereum mainnet. According to the company, this will allow for speedy processing and completion of transactions, plus ERC-20 tokens can be moved to and from the Dawn blockchain.

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