Celer Network, a project focused on monetizing blockchain gaming and the third to have hosted its token offering on Binance Launchpad, welcomed its “alpha-mainnet” on Ethereum on July 8th.
The mainnet, dubbed Cygnus after the famous northern constellation, comes as part of its builders’ mission to actualize the platform as the first “Generalized State Channel Network” for decentralized apps, particularly mobile games, in the cryptoeconomy.
In contrast to relying upon on-chain transactions, the Celer layer-two scaling platform can achieve “real-time and zero-fee” micropayments by being leveraged between a blockchain, e.g. Ethereum, and a dapp.
Big congrats to the @CelerNetwork team on their Ethereum mainnet launch! If you're curious about their L2 solution, be sure to check out my talk with @no89thkey on Into the Ether.https://t.co/ehiEIsgG6Q
— eric.eth (@econoar) July 8, 2019
As the network’s capabilities are explained in the project’s FAQ:
“Off-chain transactions in Celer can be arbitrary fraud-proof state transitions such as generic conditional payment, multi-party game move, second price auction bid, high-frequency token exchange, etc.”
Accordingly, these functionalities have been tailored to allow public blockchain tech to become a practical home for apps that need practical power. In Monday’s announcement, the Celer Network team argued that their project offered such via its flexibility, affordability, and speed:
“In summary, the mainnet offers smart contract programmability on layer-2 blockchain technology, provides 100 percent free transaction, accelerates smart contract interaction latency by 10,000 times industry standards, provides a powerful abstraction of ‘conditional payment,’ and heavily optimizes on-chain state channel costs to the lowest level.”
Of course, since the Cygnus mainnet is still in its alpha stage, its builders have plent of upgrades planned for the network in the coming months.
A Layer-Two Platform for a Gaming Hub … And Beyond
Upon the mainnet activation, the first version of Cygnus now underpins CelerX, the network’s “premier gaming hub” and layer-two gaming app.
And with that activation, the Celer team have opened up the Celer eSport Gaming SDK to developers. The kit will allow users to monetize HTML5 games by adding as little as two lines of code, with any HTML5 game being capable of the mesh.
As part of a bootstrapping effort, Celer has partnered with Dai stablecoin creators MakerDAO to form of a pool of 10,000 Dai to be given out while supplies last to users who download the CelerX app.
On the news, Celer co-founder Dr. Mo Dong Dr. Mo Dong commented that the network’s prospects in the gaming industry are only the beginning of the platform’s wider prospects, which can extend far beyond just mobile games. Dr. Dong said:
“Gaming is low-hanging fruit for blockchain and is the fastest way to test the capabilities of a platform. If we can show game developers the manifest benefit of blockchain, make it easy for them to participate and scale to manage their transaction needs, our success will quickly translate into other industries.”
As far as other extended use cases for Celer, its builders have cited car insurance based on usage rather than flat pricing, micro auctions, peer-to-peer WiFi, and more.
One of the First Binance Launchpad Alumni Around
Celer Network was among the first projects to leverage Binance Launchpad back in March when it sold 597,014,925 CELR tokens for the equivalent of $4 million USD on the platform, all in just under 20 minutes.
Notably, as part of the Launchpad terms, CELR tokens could only by purchased with Binance Coin (BNB). When the offering occurred, one CELR token was worth 0.000434 BNB, meaning a single BNB fetched just over 2,300 CELR tokens at the time.
Since then, the BNB price has more than doubled, rising from around $15 in mid-March to its current position above $33 a few months later.
Before the Celer Network, Binance Launchpad had only hosted the token offerings of BitTorrent token (BTT) and Fetch.AI (FET). These projects will be eyed by cryptoeconomy stakeholders to track if the Launchpad’s earliest projects end up being booms or busts.
