Magic Cube is a NEO-based protocol designed to enable the creation of a decentralized entertainment ecosystem. This is achieved by asset-binding virtual goods and creating a token economy that drives the network effect.

The Magic Cube Foundation will begin with a focus on the gaming industry, due to having an existing presence in the space as Magic Cube LLC, a game development studio and publisher. Magic Cube LLC is a Chinese company with 23 games live and in active development. They average a monthly active user rate of 150,000 users per game.

Gaming Industry

As with most blockchain-based protocols, Magic Cube aims to sidestep the issues presented by middlemen. Typically, game developers will release their games through game publishers, who rarely provide developers with the required financial stability for long development cycles. Developers must also forfeit the majority of rights to their games in the deal.

Survival for a developer in this situation is based on the conversion of new users and the retention of existing players. Publisher advertisements have diminishing returns, partially due to the high percentage of fake accounts on-boarded through marketing channels. This results in a low conversion rate for real users. The developer is therefore dependent on a high retention rate of existing players.

The best way to retain users is to incentivize them through consistent game development and population growth. With insufficient funding, the lack of development causes a drop in user experience, creating a negative feedback loop where users have no reason to start playing or keep playing.

Magic Cube

Magic Cube aims to replace publishers with a token economy. Developers, who retain their own rights to the game, can crowdfund development through the pre-sale of utility tokens as an initial game offering (IGO) with the Magic Cube protocol. Utility tokens are provably scarce, and can provide benefits both in-game and outside of game. Magic Cube will also support non-fungible tokens, allowing users to freely trade in-game items.

Once an IGO is completed and the in-game utility of the token has been provably developed, it will become tradable on an open market with utility tokens for other games. This is intended to create a positive network effect, with users (early adopters) and developers being fairly rewarding for supporting, marketing or improving the game.

“I have long believed that blockchain technology will forever change the gaming industry, and Magic Cube is committed to being at the forefront of that change” says CEO Rudy Rong. “The Magic Cube team’s deep experience in the gaming industry and global reach should allow us to expand our operation from China to other large gaming markets, specifically the U.S.”

Users will be able to interact with Magic Cube through a mobile wallet/browser and will trade tokens over a decentralized exchange. The team is also working on The Cube Kit, an open-source template for MCC smart contracts, which intends to streamline the transition to blockchain for game developers.

The Magic Cube Foundation, which will be established in Singapore, is currently looking to on-board developers to hold their own IGOs. This is in addition to holding IGOs for existing games developed under the Magic Cube LLC banner.

US partner Andrew Bakst comments: “We’re making strong partnerships in the Indie game developer community in America. There a lot of synergies between small to medium sized game developers and ourselves, regardless of country. The game developers are the ones who make the ecosystem grow, and so we need to cater to them accordingly. Our recent partnerships with Whalefood Games, ORC Punk, and Gumbo NYC signal that we are moving in the right direction.”

According to the Magic Cube team, the project switched to NEO from EOS: “We were originally building on EOS, but our presence in Hangzhou and Shanghai convinced us that NEO is the logical first step, as well as the support that NGD is willing to give to help the ecosystem (which EOS lacks).”

Ecosystem Architecture

Magic Cube will create several token standards for Utility Token Offerings (UTOs). These token standards differ between the entertainment format, such as:

  • MCC7 – Mobile Game IGOs
  • MCC15 – PC/console game IGOs
  • MCC40 – AR/VR game IGOs

Future UTO standards will be listed for film, music and other entertainment media. Each token standard has its own proxy, which are governed through a generalized proxy. The use of proxies enables the ecosystem to remain modular, allowing for upgrades or additional modules to be added without any security risks or disruption to user funds.

The Magic Cube ecosystem will use a governance model that allows MCC token holders to dictate upgrades to the proxies on which the network operates, including changes to the MCC Exchange module.

The MCC Exchange is a decentralized solution that aims to minimize the number of on-chain transactions in order to allow transaction speed equal to that of centralized exchanges. Users will be able to trade MCC or utility tokens on the exchange, allowing them to profit from their investments. As a NEO-based protocol, all MCC token standards also follow the NEP-5 token standard.

MCC Token

According to the Magic Cube whitepaper, the initial utility token offering for the MCC NEP-5 token will be conducted in NEO or ETH, and then converted to NEO. The total supply is 20 billion MCC tokens, distributed as follows:

  • 65% – Magic Cube Foundation
  • 20% – Development Team
  • 15% – Strategic Private Investors

Approximately 85% of the tokens allocated to the foundation will be distributed to Magic Cube Exchange users in a profit sharing system. This is designed to incentive trading on the platform, and distributes the MCC token to Magic Cube users over time to ensure the protocol can decentralize.

Next Steps

The team has already secured an investment from NEO Global Capital, and is currently attending the San Francisco Blockchain Week. In Q4 of 2018, the team aims to launch IGOs for two existing Magic Cube mobile gaming applications using the Magic Cube mobile wallet. They also intend to launch an exchange on the Magic Cube wallet, allowing users to trade tokens that follow the MCC token standard.

The Magic Cube funding contracts and decentralized exchange are scheduled for launch in Q1 and Q2 of 2019 respectively. They will be fully implemented within the Magic Cube mobile wallet, and will act as the foundations for the ecosystem.

The Magic Cube website can be found here, and more details regarding the ecosystem, goals and governance/exchange models can be found within the whitepaper.

More information on Magic Cube can be found at the links below.

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