A new decentralized marketplace called DMarket announced its intention to become the first service to allow users to trade virtual items between game worlds.

Using distributed ledger technology, also known as blockchain, DMarket intends to allow game developers and publishers to bring their games onto a global marketplace. Although virtual game items can be traded within games themselves, there are almost none that exist that allow for item trades between games.

“With DMarket, gamers will be able to make their virtual items available on the global economy, creating a new billion dollar market,” said Volodymyr Panchenko, founder and chief executive officer of DMarket. “We are utilizing blockchain technology to act as matchmaker between virtual and real economies.”

The industry for multiplayer games has long focused on allowing players to earn or create in game items as part of their gaming experience. Part of the play is building up objects in the game world from things such as clothing, cars, swords, guns and spaceships among a multitude of things.

Many games, such as Team Fortress 2, World of Warcraft, Diablo and Destiny not only allow players to earn items but also trade them within the game. These exchanges build in game economies where some players earn virtual money and then trade that for the items that they want with players who were lucky enough to get a rare item during play.

That industry, Panchenko says, represents almost 2.2 billion people, many of whom are locked away from one another, corralled within closed economies. In 2016, the video game industry reached $100 billion in revenue and it is estimated that some 6 percent of that market raised an estimated $3 million through in-game items.

DMarket’s vision is to link these separate economies and players to allow game publishers to open up what is essentially foreign trade. Two players who play both Team Fortress 2 and World of Warcraft could hypothetically cross-exchange the value of a sword in Warcraft for a hat in TF2.

Currently, this exchange would be fraught with difficulty. Player one with the sword would have to send the sword to player two in Warcraft, while player two would send the hat to player one in TF2. Since these two games are totally disconnected, there would be no way for either to trust the other would follow through with the exchange.

DMarket hopes to solve this problem by providing an application programming interface (available on GitHub) that game publishers can implement, which would encode these transactions on a blockchain using smart contracts. As a result, upon the execution of that contract both participants would see the exchange happen without the worry that either could back out. The DMarket blockchain would log transfer of ownership and automatically exchange payments using the DMarket token, which could be followed up by the game platforms themselves to complete the transaction.

Most game publishers don’t legally permit this sort of trading, but it happens anyway on forums and websites set up to put players with items together with buyers. Because these transactions are extralegal, game publishers do not see any of the money raised in transactions and cannot track it.

With DMarket’s implementation, separate game economies could tap into that untapped revenue stream and at the same time gain critical stats about how players use and exchange game items.

A similar project was recently launched by Jon “Neverdie” Jacobs and Richard “Lord British” Garriot that creates interoperable currencies between game worlds called Neverdie Coins and Teleport Tokens. The Neverdie project is focused more on economies, whereas DMarket is a marketplace. But the enmeshing of separate game worlds and the use of blockchain makes them much alike.

The marketplace website launched on Tuesday and the company intends to begin a 72-hour crowdsale of its own tokens on Aug. 17 to raise capital to kickstart the whole thing. The currency, named DMarket tokens, will be sold in exchange for other popular cryptocurrencies. During the first stage Ethereum and Bitcoin will be accepted. During a second sale, running Nov. 1-15, the crowdsale will add Ethereum Classic and Litecoin.

Image: DMarket