For Adam Kling, the path less taken has been lined with thorny obstacles, branches of ridicule, and — at last — an ocean of success. The founder of Fyx Gaming, a pioneering game studio that uses blockchain technology to build its products — including the popular CryptoFights title — turned his back on the Ethereum network in 2018 at a time when many were rushing to be affiliated with it.
Instead, Kling chose a route with Bitcoin SV (BSV) as the foundation. The decision to do so was made after Kling realized the limitations of the Ethereum chain and observed the dynamic hash war that ended up severing the bitcoin chain, which led to a BSV network separate from the better known but flawed Bitcoin Cash (BTC) network.
“After BSV split from BTC, we looked at the landscape and at the time we were frustrated with Ethereum. We had worked on it for about a year and we were trying to really innovate the blockchain crypto space but there was friction in creating a better user experience. When the hash war took place, it was timely because what resulted was the BSV network. We looked at it and said, ‘This solves a lot of our problems.’ Then we decided to alienate ourselves from the Ethereum community and go to the black sheep, BSV,” Kling summarizes.
Fyx’s departure caused waves in the Ethereum world and Kling remembers that the decision to leave “really upset many people because we were one of the games that was supposed to be featured on the ecosystem.” The change in networks also resulted in heaps of additional work for Fyx. It needed to retool its infrastructure and many of its key operational components. “It delayed us but it also offered us a solution for long-term success,” he adds of the choice to go with BSV.
In May 2021, the company launched Mainnet testing on the BSV chain for CryptoFights, a role-playing game with similarities to Dungeons & Dragons. It has grown its player base to more than 100,000 and is anticipating doing “millions of transactions very soon” on the BSV network. Many of CryptoFights’ transactions cost less than $0.01, making it incredibly attractive for gamers across the world.
“That is the unknown advantage of BSV. Transactions are cheap and fast, and they’re kept on chain, which adds to the trust factor that is important to players. We have the Layer-1 concept, which many games don’t and that’s because we use BSV. There are a lot of things about BSV that make our decision very wise in retrospect,” he says.
Kling likens CryptoFights’ short-term prospects as similar to Axie Infinity, one of the most successful games on blockchain. The decentralized nature of the BSV network makes its transactions more and more attractive. Kling reports that CryptoFights has been doing 10 transactions per second on WhatsOnChain, which is operated by TAAL. Using TAAL’s resources helps Fyx meet the demand for server volume and transaction processing scalability.
“TAAL has the hash power and they’re able to connect with the other miners, which is necessary. We definitely want and need a processing company to help us scale and mitigate the problems that can happen when there’s demand for data volume, and TAAL is that for BSV,” Kling says.
Among the next steps for Fyx is to scale up its own infrastructure to help handle the volume it forecasts. The BSV network also provides a sense of added reassurance, Kling points out.
“We rely on BSV and the entire network takes off a lot of the responsibility to scale,” he notes. “If CryptoFights ever goes down, the game we’ve built can be resurrected by someone else in the community because all of the data we’ve used is stored on Java script and is all on chain.”
