When The Time Comes: Crypto-Gamification of Extractive Industry

The very conception of reality is changing with regard to the generations who cannot face life without the contemporary interactive technologies. Ask the millennials who do their business globally what the features should constitute some “must-have” set of capabilities of the truly emerging business idea of nowadays.

Among the variety of possible answers, one trend will inevitably be present — the Digital. It implies using the Internet, computers, and the entire scope of the available information technologies. And whatever “serious” task is performed in the modern digital workflows, it is gamified one way or another.

Both user interfaces and user experiences represented by the modern digital instruments are rooted in the entertainment industry from which the digital technologies started occupying the global audience.

Everything in the digital environment is gamified, take it or leave it. The king of the contemporary communication — social media look and work like a game. Every website behaves like a gameplay. Every communication channel beginning from email and up to mobile messengers makes us playing with taps and clicks on our gadgets.

We are continuously playing while working, shopping, communicating, and having fun.
Something similar taking place in the business environment of the 1980s is hardly imaginable. But “tempora mutantur” (times change) as the ancient Romans used to say. And together with the new generations who become more and more unlike their predecessors, the contemporary industries have to adopt the gamified patterns to stay compelling for the contemporary population.

Just take a look at what the space flights are today. People can watch a streaming broadcast from ISS around the clock as sci-fi movies. Elon Musk launched a Tesla car to space transforming the most science-intensive industry into a show. Leaving aside the romantic flair imposed on the entire space topic by Hollywood, we have to admit that such a real-sector industry as space exploration became digitally gamified. But who says that it was a wrong approach?

If digital gamification is the new times’ trend, why don’t we try applying such an approach to the other real-sector industries? How about the extractive industry?

Nothing prevents us from transforming the oceanic mining into an exciting online game. Moreover, we are going to add fuel to the fire with another burning technology of nowadays — blockchain. Let’s consider such an opportunity, let’s positively speculate about gamification of oceanic mining.

Hence, our idea implies three different phenomena that should be synthesized in order to create what we could call “Crypto-Oceanic Mining” including:

the actual deepwater mining activity aimed at extracting minerals from the ocean bottom. The submersible vehicles capable of collecting ferromanganese nodules from the depth of 6.000 meters are designed by Krypton Ocean Group. About 10 billion tons of renewable polymetallic deposits are generated on the ocean bottom annually. Zinc, gold, silver, platinum, nickel, copper, cobalt, manganese and many other minerals constitute the real tangible treasure the Krypton’s deep-sea harvesters can deliver to “the surface” without damaging the oceanic ecosystem.

a real-time strategy game (similar to famous World of Warcraft) which can be easily developed by one of numerous outsourcing software companies. The gameplay implies a wide global audience playing to explore, extract, and sell various deepwater minerals. In doing so, they will use the virtual analogs of the actual oceanic deposits along with the real extractive technology offered by Krypton Ocean. Moreover, both the user interface and user experience of the game should be created in accordance with what the actual deepwater miners do and feel in reality.

a blockchain-based layer of the project capable of combining both the real-sector extractive activity and the virtual game. Why should the distributed ledger technology (DLT) be implemented? The very nature of DLT excludes any retroactive alteration of the transactions between both the players and the oceanic mining company. Besides, the newest crowdfunding methods propagated among rapidly growing crypto communities can be applied to the project in order to make it even more lucrative.

What can be the main objective of such a combination after all?

The multi-source profits of the players, how odd such an answer may sound. The thing is that along with the purely virtual assets usually inherent in games, the actual real assets in the form of extracted minerals will be available. In addition, such an innovative financial phenomenon as crypto assets in the form of either cryptocurrencies or the so-called project tokens can add some “speculative” component to the project. Thus, the general agenda of the game can be described as follows:

A player should invest a certain amount of either fiat or crypto funds to be able to log in the game. Virtual copies of the actual deep-sea fields compose the game environment where the players can conduct a vast variety of actions associated with oceanic mining.

The whole scenario should integrate everything available on the player’s monitor with what actually happens on the working deepwater harvesters in real time.
A large number of options can be offered the players for extra investment. Thus, the primary fund flow moves from the players to the game in general and to the ocean mining company in particular.

Proceeding the deep-sea mining within the gameplay, every player will participate in the real-sector extractive industry. Knowledge, creativity, dedication, and non-trivial approaches will be required from the players to successfully compete in both virtual and real oceanic mining.

Hence, the leading players will benefit from two parallel sources when their virtual earnings will be supplemented with the actually extracted gold, platinum, silver, cobalt, and other valuable assets.

The more efficient workflows a player can arrange within the scope of capabilities of a real deepwater harvester, the bigger amount of both virtual and real resources can be finally capitalized.

In order to exclude any fraud from the whole process, the blockchain technology will be implemented. As is known, blockchain removes intermediaries from a peer-to-peer communication. Such a feature is essential for keeping all interactions within the game fair and transparent.

In addition, the blockchain-based crypto assets can attract a broader audience of the small “singular” investors who will foster the so-called network effect of the project. In its turn, the powerful network effect will significantly enhance the value of everything and everybody engaged in the game.

Thus, some kind of a self-sustaining multi-profit system will appear on the verge of the innovative oceanic mining, real-time strategy game, and crypto initiative.

Does the idea sound weird? Maybe, but the only reason for it is that nobody implemented something similar until today.
The core feature of such a project comes to a fusion of the real sector with virtual environments. In contrast to numerous bubble-type crypto initiatives that are fiercely criticized for their financial speculations, the “Crypto-Oceanic Mining” game will include two different levels belonging to the actual tangible assets, nevertheless.

On the one hand, the real-sector extractive activity will be run by some deepwater-mining operator. On the other hand, a unique software product in the form of a strategy game will cover a community of players. And the unhackable scam-free blockchain layer will integrate both previous ones making the project highly relevant to the contemporary world outlook.

Who can dare to develop such a demanding venture then? Krypton Ocean Group can. Sooner or later we will create such a “real-sector” game. We promise. Otherwise, the Extractive Industry 2.0 paradigm we propagate is meaningless.