Gaming startup Playtron announced onstage at Sui Basecamp in Dubai that it plans to roll out a stablecoin on Sui that is specifically designed to be used for gaming.
Set to launch in Q4 this year, the Game Dollar will be used for purchases, subscriptions, and rewards across the Playtron GameOS ecosystem, including on the upcoming SuiPlay0X1 handheld console. Playtron claims that the stablecoin will be backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries as defined by M0, the platform behind the token.
A stablecoin is a crypto token that is pegged to a stable asset, usually fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar. They are often used by traders to secure profits into a token that won’t fluctuate in price, or for a less volatile way to pay for things.
Sui is getting a stablecoin designed for the SuiPlay0X1 handheld. Image: Playtron
As a result, according to CoinGecko, it has become a sector worth $241 billion with Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC both placing in the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. So why not just use an established stablecoin that is already out there?
“We believe stablecoins should be programmable at the use case level,” Playtron co-founder and CEO Kirt McMaster told Decrypt, explaining this can’t be done with the major tokens out there. “Game Dollar will unlock new economic models for developers and marketplaces, while enabling consumer incentives only possible via programmable dollars.”
As such, the Game Dollar will be custom-fit to serve the Playtron ecosystem in an attempt to “deepen [its] relationship” with its users by incentivizing and monetizing certain behaviors.
“Since the reserve compound of the stablecoin is accruing yield,” McMaster explained, “the gaming platform can use that capital to incentivize certain behaviors, give customers rewards, acquire new types of customers, etc.”
Playtron compared the Game Dollar to a Starbucks digital wallet that provides users points for buying coffee, with those points available to redeem for rewards. He added that the Game Dollar can be programmed to only allow for certain transactions.
“This differs from more commonly understood purposes of a stablecoin, which does not have the ability to incentivize niche use cases at scale,” McMaster said.
The stablecoin will be used throughout Playtron’s GameOS, a Linux-based operating system optimized to play classic games on Steam or crypto games through the Playtron Store.
The soon-to-launch SuiPlay0X1 handheld device—which will ship this summer—will use this operating system. The Game Dollar will be used for purchases in the Playtron store, called Playtron Select, and there are plans to announce incentives at a later date.
“GameDollar will be native to Playtron and used in our own marketplace in the future,” McMaster told Decrypt, “but as Playtron integrates other gaming marketplaces, the intention is for those marketplaces to use Game Dollar both within GameOS and in their own external stores as a payment option.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
