• The Opportunity
• The Risks
• The Team
• WAX Community and Resources
• Final Thoughts

WAX (Worldwide Asset eXchange) ICO Analysis

WAX, or the Worldwide Asset eXchange, recently launched their ICO token sale which lasted from November 15th to November 29th, raising their full goal of $9.6 million USD.

WAX is offering a decentralized platform for a marketplace for online video game assets. Essentially, this marketplace aims to serve over 400+ million online players who collect, buy and sell exclusive in-game items.

Another notable component of WAX is that it’s the project of the founders of OPSkins, which is already the leader in the online video game assets marketplace world.

Key Details of WAX

Ticker: WAX

Token type: ERC20

ICO Token Price: 1 WAX = 0.32 USD (0.00067 ETH)

Fundraising Goal: 9,600,000 USD (20,000 ETH)

Sold on pre-sale: 45,500,000 USD (140,000 ETH)

Total Tokens: 1,850,000,000

Available for Token Sale: 7.4%

Know Your Customer (KYC): YES

Accepts: ETH, BTC, USD

The above information from ICOdrops paints a fairly interesting picture. With the vast majority of WAX sold on pre-sale (about $45.5 million worth), it’s no shocker that the project was able to raise a fraction of that during the ICO token sale.

The Opportunity

The sheer amount of worldwide gamers (over 400 million) that could make use of WAX is fairly astounding. If you’re not in the gaming community, the notion that people would be spending hundreds (or upwards of tens of thousands) for online gaming items might seem absolutely absurd. However, welcome to the age of the Internet. Gamers who spend a significant chunk of their day playing video games give in-game goods an almost esoteric value, where some items are seen as investments in and of themselves.

The trading of “skins”, the name for virtual goods that can customize in-game appearances such as characters and weapons, has been a part of the gaming community for a long time.

The exchange of these, however, was not without its problems. With no single marketplace for the development of a community and easy access to the sale of skins, the exchange often revolved around chance encounters or other online forums with questionable reputations. Even if gamers were able to find someone willing to trade, they required a high degree of trust as the exchanges were often done on different platforms.

For example, let’s say I wanted to buy a Blue Party Hat from you for $6,000 USD. We would first have to carry out an exchange where I send you $6,000 USD and then you trade me the item or vice versa. In that brief gap in time where half of the transaction is already completed, one of us could get scammed for our precious money or item. WAX aims to eliminate that gut-lurching sweat-bead-forming moment of anxiety on a decentralized platform that ensures the delivery without the need for an expensive third-party intermediary or an inordinate amount of trust.

The ability to trade gaming skins didn’t exist until 2011 when Steam opened up a Steam Trading Beta to great success. In 2012, Steam opened a market that gave skins vetted and legitimate monetary values for the first time. However, any money made in the Steam market could only be spent in the Steam market. This placed a limit on peer-to-peer trading.

The Risks

While the WAX platform has an existing user base, its utility is inherently limited to just that user base. Anyone else outside of the gaming community has no functional use for the token, but that shouldn’t be too much of a hindrance.

From what it seems, WAX isn’t trying to be the next big global payment system. The WAX platform is contained to the gaming community, and as more and more people use it, we’ll start to get a clearer picture of how functional this token really is.

However, by the looks of the roadmap provided in their whitepaper, we won’t get to see the functional use of the WAX tokens until the launch in Q4 of 2018.

However, since the project just seems to be somewhat of a migration of the already existing OPSkins marketplace into a blockchain solution, it’s not unreasonable to expect a very rapid onboarding of users after launch.

The Team

WAX was started by OPSkins, the largest virtual asset marketplace in the world. The OPSkins marketplace has been growing at a rate of 200,000 new users every month. The marketplace provides a platform for gamers to trade items with a low risk for getting scammed.

However, the platform itself has several limitations that a blockchain-based solution like WAX could mitigate.

WAX Community and Resources

WAX has received a ton of hype, which is worth noting.  

WAX also has a fairly large Telegram community, with over 23,000 members. Although the community only allows for WAX Telegram Announcements, it’s still not a bad means of quantifying the hype around the project.

You can also find segments of the WAX community on Reddit, Twitter (~7,000 followers), and Facebook (~200 likes).

Final Thoughts

The future for WAX in a post-ICO world looks promising. Although the WAX team won’t be launching their product until Q4 of 2018, it’s worth noting that the OPSkins community growing at 200,000 new registrations per month will be primed for adoption.

While we’ll have a clearer picture of any potential gains and losses from the WAX ICO once it hits exchanges, we’ll really start to see where the rubber meets the road once the product is released and users are actually using it.

To find out more about the project, check out its whitepaper here.