Ayre Ventures Makes Another Significant Investment, This Time in NFT Sector

Written by:
Alejandro Botticelli
Published on:
Mar/29/2022

  • Rad well positioned to dominate the VR content streaming space

  • The BSV blockchain’s commitment to large blocks also allows creators to include a greater amount of NFT metadata on-chain

Ayre Ventures, a venture capital firm for real people like you and I, as opposed to say friends of Warren Buffet, has just announced its latest investment.  This time they are focusing on the explosive NFT space.

Rad NFTV, the innovative content distribution and NFT streaming platform, is the lucky recipient.

From CoinGeek:

Rad began life midway through the last decade under the name Littlstar, a streaming network with a focus on virtual reality (VR) video content. Littlstar was a launch partner on all the major VR devices and headsets, including PlayStation VR, Oculus and Google Daydream. Littlstar also had content deals with major film and TV studios, including Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal and Viacom.

While Littlstar was able to build trust on the content side with these companies as well as a respectable customer base via its consumer-facing app, Rad CEO Tony Mugavero told CoinGeek that the VR content produced by the studios at the time was largely exploratory, and the companies began scaling back or shutting down their VR operations around the end of 2017.

Rad was a little before its time however as the Virtual Reality space still needs a little more time to develop.  Let's face it, back in the early 2000s, some of the more brilliant minds in the online gambling space would tell us year after year that mobile gaming would one day be "a thing".  We just snickered and went about our business.  Deep down we knew they might be right.  It only took another 15 years.

Fast forward about ten years later and we were mocked by a sister website of Sportsbook.ag for suggesting that one day cryptocurrencies would be widely accepted within the online gambling sector.

"That will be the day," sarcastically remarked Atil Singh of Carbon Sports.

Cryptocurrencies now make up somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of all transactions in the more restrictive iGaming markets  (that's more than half the world).

Having been an early adopter of Bitcoin and other major digital assets, Mugavero began studying the potential advantages that blockchain technology could offer, in particular smart contracts.  He even wrote a white paper on the subject back in 2017.

That was only four years ago.  Nobody knew what an NFT was.  Today, digital renderings of blind apes sailing around in yachts are selling for millions of dollars through blockchain.

Rad would utilize the BSV Blockchain, which holds the same appeal for creators who face the costs of minting hundreds or even thousands of individual NFTs to launch their own collection.

“If they have the option of doing so at x price and 100x price, they’ll naturally gravitate toward the cheaper option.”

The BSV blockchain’s commitment to large blocks also allows creators to include a greater amount of NFT metadata on-chain.

VR and Online Gambling - The Next Frontier

Virtual-Reality-Gaming-032922.png

Aleksandra Arsic of Arpost.co wrote back in 2020 that "Virtual reality promises to take online gaming to new heights as it delivers an immersive interactive experience to gamers around the world".

Here in 2022 we are mostly still waiting, but can taste it.

He wrote:

VR companies are developing hardware: helmets, sensor gloves, hand controllers, and more. Game developers are increasingly writing software that uses the hardware to give players a more immersive in-game experience. Players encounter realistic simulations of events that could never happen in real life.

Last week it was announced that the NFL had inked a deal fo an annual VR video game for Meta Quest and PlayStation VR.

The new game will provide a first-person experience, allowing fans to play the game through the eyes of characters on the virtual field. 

"Virtual reality gaming is rapidly expanding and our partnership with StatusPRO allows us to explore a new immersive version of NFL gaming with support of the two largest VR platforms within this emerging space," Joe Ruggiero, SVP of Consumer Products at the NFL, said in a statement.

The move marks one of the biggest new expansions into gaming for the NFL beyond its existing relationship with game maker Electronic Arts.

GStyle on this day featured a piece on how augmented reality will transform mobile casino gaming, while admitting this new technology is still years away from being implemented into the sector.

One of the main limitations of online casino website operators results from the feeling of being outside the gambling hub. Even the most exciting games fail to meet their full potential when players feel like outsiders in the online casino. Augmented reality is likely to remove these obstacles and provide players with a much more immersive digital experience. This is something that online casinos have tried to accomplish ever since live dealer games were introduced to their collection.

AR technology also provides players with the opportunity to customize the gambling environment and interact with the games in an innovative manner, GSStyle notes.

They are anxiously waiting for the moment they will be able to take a virtual walk-through of a casino room and choose their game of choice. The prospect of enjoying 360° views of the roulette, blackjack, or baccarat area is surely exciting. Even slots enthusiasts will appreciate the opportunity of exploring the entire portfolio of games in this manner.

In Vanessa Ruiz' March 29 piece "What is Metaverse Gaming and Its Future?", she explains how the virtual domain is highly scalable and considered by experts to be the next leap from internet and smartphones.

Indeed, video games are par excellence in the scenarios where the Metaverse philosophy is best understood.  The Metaverse, together with blockchain technology, has given way to a new economic model, play-to-earn, which increased the player's interest during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mugavero says “there’s an interesting opportunity there as a source of truth across the ecosystem. That could potentially be done on various different chains but that’s where the low cost and potential larger amounts of metadata capabilities come in on the BSV side.”

Calvin-Ayre-032622_0.png

Why The BSV Blockchain for the Metaverse

"Bitcoin SV is a massively scaling immutable ledger; every single transaction or piece of data is stored and verifiable giving every user or business total transparency," Calvin Ayre of Ayre Ventures explains.  "There is nothing that can’t be built on the BSV chain. Every type of data storage and indexing you can think of and many you cannot can be done economically and with real value attached to all the date on BSV.

"The extremely low transaction fees will save companies big and small fortunes — transaction fees are the hidden killer of so many businesses. This is only possible because of BSVs patent protected scaling technology.

"Most importantly, we can build and brand new type of internet on the BSV blockchain — the metanet. The metanet is built on a system of microtransactions (say $0.0002, or less, to post or comment or ‘like’). This model eliminates trolls and bots, nobody is harvesting and selling your data, no advertising as the model is self-sustaining. You may ask why would somebody pay even small amounts when they can have it for ‘free’ with the current model? It’s a ‘what goes around, comes around’ system: you pay, say $0.0002 to post something others then pay a similar amount to like or comment — you are know earning from your content and if somebody wanted to troll you, they have to pay for it! That’d be kind of satisfying, right?"

As for Rad and its NFT project, Mugavero says BSV’s ability to manage “the guts of the business” will have strong appeal for entities looking to bring a greater sense of order to the burgeoning NFT sector, including his own.

Rad is already building on BSV and will soon be minting NFTs on Testnet, and Mugavero expects to have a cross-chain single ledger of transactions in place within 12 months.

- Alejandro Botticelli, Gambling911.com

Video News News

CFP Championship Game Betting Preview 2024

America loves an underdog story, but the majority of the United States is rooting against the “dogs” (Washington Huskies) in Monday’s CFP National Championship game.  Michigan has been hovering between a -4 and -4.5 favorite.

Senator Mullin vs. O'Brien Fight Odds Now Up

It's not often we get to cross the intersection of sports and politics, but on Tuesday that's exactly what happened when a congressional hearing devolved into an angry confrontation between these two men.

iGaming and Blockchain With Becky Liggero and LilBit

Long time friend of the Gambling911.com website Becky Liggero sat down with the frontline voice of BSV Blockchain, Handcash, Champions TCG and newcomers LilBit to discuss, among other things, the world of iGaming and how blockchain and micropayments can impact the space.

Syndicate