We are happy to finally reveal Hiroba, which we have been working on behind-the-scenes over the last months.
tl;dr Hiroba is a verticalized NFT aggregator purpose-built for gaming NFTs. Hiroba aggregates in-game and 3rd-party marketplaces to provide players with the best discovery experience for gaming NFTs. Our white-label solution makes deploying a custom marketplace easy for game studios, who benefit from being in control (e.g. royalties, UX). And thanks to our aggregator, in-game marketplaces are no longer isolated from the rest of the market.
The current state of NFT marketplaces
For players
Players currently have two options: Trade on external marketplaces like Opensea or Blur, or trade on in-game marketplaces. Both are imperfect solutions.
❌ Generalized marketplaces are not geared towards gaming NFTs. They address a broad audience across PFPs, art, gaming, virtual land, music, and other NFT use cases. Therefore, they have to cater to the lowest common denominator. As a result, players looking for gaming NFTs can’t use marketplaces for discovery and won’t find any gaming-specific features (e.g. in-game data). Current solutions don’t meet their needs.
❌ In-game marketplaces usually only offer basic functionality and often see limited usage as discovery by new players is limited. Additionally, players won’t be able use one profile across games, blockchains, and wallets to build their on-chain reputation.
For game studios
❌ Game studios have to make a trade-off between control (in-game marketplace) and a user acquisition channel (external marketplace). A custom marketplace allows games to control key factors, such as royalty enforcement, trading currency, and user workflow. Players don’t have to leave the game to trade, which boosts trading activity. On the other hand, external marketplaces are the main trading venues for now and have the potential to bring in new players.
❌ As NFTs can be traded anywhere, the activity gets fragmented between in-game and external marketplaces in the worst case. This leaves users with an inefficient market - higher price volatility, longer time-to-fill, and overall more effort (e.g. search where to trade for the best price). One way to counteract this would be by implementing blocklists for marketplaces. This, however, goes against crypto’s ethos and we hope to build more market-driven solutions with Hiroba.
Both players and game studios can level-up their NFT trading with Hiroba.
The future of NFT marketplaces
Hiroba aligns itself with two upcoming elemental shifts: Community marketplaces and marketplace verticalization.
Delphi Digital covers the two trends in their ‘year ahead for NFTs’ report. Multicoin sees similar developments. Recommended reads.
Community marketplaces
We believe communities, in Hiroba’s case, games, want to own their marketplaces. The goal is to provide a better user experience and to strengthen their control and position against other market participants (e.g. Opensea, Blur), most notably in the royalty debate.
Games in particular should be interested in in-game marketplaces as they help boost conversion rates because of a better user workflow while increased control supports royalty-based revenue streams and is also essential to guide game economies.
That’s why we offer games a customizable white-label solution.
Marketplace Verticalization
The unbundling of platforms into smaller verticals has been a much observed development in web2, as described by a16z. Just look at this graphic about the unbundling of Craigslist.
The advantages of vertical marketplaces are manifold.
Focusing on one target group allows a marketplace to better satisfy users’ needs, providing a greater value proposition than generalized competitors. Additional user-centric features also open up new revenue possibilities.
Instead of solving the cold start problem across different verticals, effort can be pointed towards one niche for faster bootstrapping of network effects. The other way we address the cold start problem is by providing a white-label solution to game studios, which helps Hiroba bootstrap (exclusive) supply. In case you are a marketplace nerd, this resembles SaaS-enabled marketplace models like Opentable.
This is why Hiroba is purpose-built for gaming, to master the experience for gamers.
Enter Hiroba
Hiroba combines two elements:
White-label solution for in-game marketplaces (including an NFT launchpad)
Aggregator for gaming NFTs
These two components work in unison.
Hiroba syncs activity across its in-game marketplaces and multi-chain aggregator platform. An action (e.g. listing) on in-game marketplaces is made available on the aggregator (aggregation) and vice versa (mirroring).
The white-label tool allows us to bootstrap (exclusive) supply on the aggregator. This brings in users, which in turn means more eyeballs on the games. That motivates games to get their NFTs listed on Hiroba. A broader selection of gaming NFTs brings in users, and so on. A flywheel effect forms.
For players
✅ Convenient user experience: Players don’t need to leave the game to trade their NFTs and always find deep liquidity as trading activity is unified across in-game marketplace and aggregator.
✅ Home of gaming NFTs: Players no longer have to search where to find NFT collections and the best prices across fragmented marketplaces. Hiroba aggregates all gaming NFTs in one place, together with key information about the games, making discovery easy.
✅Town square for gamers: Hiroba is developing social features, for example player profiles and an achievement system, which help users build their gaming profile across games, blockchains, and wallets, & allow to connect to other gamers.
For game studios
✅ Liquid markets: Hiroba's aggregator builds on top of in-game marketplaces for unified liquidity.
✅ Network effects: Unified liquidity on the aggregator offers games a user acquisition channel, while in-game marketplaces directly benefit from the aggregator's adoption.
✅ Keeping control: Liquid, easily accessible in-game markets reduce the risk of 3rd-party marketplaces, and allow game studios to stay in control (e.g. royalties).
Our Vision
We believe that community (in-game) marketplaces are the future, in which aggregators serve as discovery channels.
To facilitate true discovery, marketplaces need to specialize in one vertical. For Hiroba, that’s gaming. On top of that, to provide the best discovery we will aggregate all NFT marketplaces, not just the ones using our white-label solution.
The town square for gamers where players can connect, discover games and trade gaming assets. We believe NFTs unlock the full potential of virtual economies, just like property rights drive GDP in the physical world. Hiroba, as a marketplace for trading, provides the foundation for the GDP of Gaming - the Gaming Domestic Product.
Built by experienced NFT infrastructure builders
Throughout the last 2+ years, we have developed NFT infrastructure together, from APIs, watcher & node management systems, indexers, media services, and backend databases, to frontends.
Our white-label solution is almost ready and we will announce our first partnership very soon. We will also share more info about our aggregator as we get closer to launch.
Make sure to follow us on Twitter to stay up-to-date.
very cool!!