Interview: Meet PRINGO project!

PRINGO project presents an innovative bridge between Common Goods and Videogames via evolutive NFT. Through their platform, gamers participate in a fun-to-play economy that reverts to the commons. And at the end everyone wins: more revenues are generated for the game publisher, for the common goods curator, and for the most active users. Team member Ignasi Oliva Corrales told us all about it in this interview.

How did you hear about ONTOCHAIN and what drove you to apply?

We met ONTOCHAIN through its website https://ontochain.ngi.eu/. In this second call, we saw it as a perfect opportunity to complement the use cases available in ONTOCHAIN. Our proposal was fully aligned with one of the objectives of the call, the creation of market mechanisms that maximize the potential use of NFT.

Tell us a bit about the story behind your team. What drives you and what brought you together?

Behind the PRINGO project, four agents come together to validate that it is possible to create a new model of an economy where everyone benefits and takes advantage of the synergies between all to go beyond technology.

The Consortium comprises four entities, two for-profit, and two non-profits. 

Freeverse.io is a for-profit blockchain B2B technology developer responsible for the Living Assets platform, a layer-2 technology capable of scaling all NFT-related transactions to support millions of Active Daily Users. Most crucially, this scaling allows the platform to evolve these NFTs.

The i2CAT Foundation is a non-profit research and innovation center that empowers citizens through open and participative digital social innovation with territorial capillarity and promotes pioneering and strategic initiatives.

Plant-for-the-Planet, is a non-profit foundation with two main objectives: to fight massive global reforestation to mitigate the scientifically proven effects of the climate emergency and to identify and train the future climate leaders who will be making decisions to ensure the sustainability of our planet. 

The Breach Studios is an experienced SME videogame developer private company composed of game industry veterans with a past in some of the greatest titles on diverse platforms. The company's main objective is to push the boundaries of already established genres with new and innovative ideas that provide genuine and exciting experiences.

Can you briefly explain your project and its contribution to the ONTOCHAIN software ecosystem?

This project aims to build, deploy, and test a platform that enables applications to easily design economies where private incentives are aligned with common good incentives.

We propose an initial focus on developing a solid link between common goods and the videogames industry. The platform will allow any common goods organization to easily introduce digital representations of the goods they curate in the form of NFTs.

The platform will allow real-world common goods to be acquired as NFTs in video games and, most importantly, enable owners to evolve them potentially for profit, increasing their market value if their actions are aligned with the needs of the actual real good, generating a recurrent flow of value back to society.

To provide a platform, easy to use for common goods curators and videogame developers, whereby gamers can obtain direct profit from improvements of the tangible curated goods. Doing so, will aim to significantly improve the funding of certain common goods and improve the retention, loyalty, and commitment of their contributors.

In this loop, everyone wins: more revenues are generated for the game publisher, the common goods curator, and the most active users.

The platform will hide all complexity from its users (common goods curators, videogame developers). It will promote a thriving, healthy ONTOCHAIN ecosystem where, ultimately, gamers participate in a fun-to-play economy that reverts to the commons. In alignment with the ONTOCHAIN primary directives, the platform will: i) help accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology in the sector of common goods organizations, ii) allow, due to Layer 2 scaling, the minting and evolution of NFTs to such organizations at zero cost, without worrying about fees or volatility.

How did you come up with this idea? What’s unique about it? And what will be the end user benefits?

Traditional market-based economies have proven their incredible efficiency at funding, producing, and distributing private goods. In parallel, they continue to prove their inefficiency at funding and curating public/common goods, forests, wildlife, climate change, social equality, and even peace. The so-called "tragedy of the commons" partly explains the root of this issue by relating it to the massive differences in incentives that drive economy agents in private versus common goods markets.

Leveraging the blockchain capabilities to design new market mechanisms, this project will provide a platform aimed at escaping from this curse in specific digital industry verticals by realigning incentives in common goods economies so that private agents obtain benefits as significant as in private goods markets if their actions provide real value to the commons.

The project will exploit recent advances in blockchain technology that allow NFTs to evolve as a function of how their owners use them yet scale to large numbers of Daily Active Users. The platform will enable real-world common goods to be acquired as NFTs in videogames and, most importantly, allow owners to evolve them potentially for profit, increasing their market value if their actions are aligned with the needs of the actual real good, generating a recurrent flow of value back to society.

You are contributing to ONTOCHAIN’s mission of delivering a new software ecosystem for trusted, traceable & transparent ontological knowledge. How is ONTOCHAIN contributing to your own ambitions?

Freeverse aims to use this project's outcome to onboard new entities using its Layer 2 technology. The innovative bridge between Common Goods and Videogames via evolutive NFT will provide a great competitive advantage for Freeverse, who intends to use the project results to onboard companies and users from such sectors, boosting asset quality, offering, trading, and demand.

Plant-for-the-Planet Spain and The Breach Studios expect to be in an advantageous position to become early adopters and possibly spin off new projects to exploit the platform's unique capabilities fully.

i2CAT aims at leveraging the results of the project to scale up and standardize the connection between the real common goods and their digital counterparts, coordinating the necessary EU organizations, and allowing this new market mechanism to flourish on solid grounds.

In doing so, it will continue the fulfilment of its goals to achieve excellence in knowledge generation and its transference to the industry, to citizens and to Public Administrations, through the participation and leadership in European research projects and the cooperation with other local R&D agents.

How do you assess the experience of working with other teams in the co-creation of the ONTOCHAIN ecosystem? What type of synergies do you want to explore?

The experience is positive, working with other teams allows us to get to know new ideas and different points of view on how it is possible to use technology to provide solutions to problems or needs that one has not identified, or simply new approaches on how to solve the same problem.

We are exploring collaborations that can generate added value and improve our platform, but without forgetting that our main aim is designed to generate and validate new economic models. We are also interested in projects that can be integrated with our services and could complement or enhance your projects.

What are your expectations regarding the new software ecosystem that ONTOCHAIN will deliver and its contribution to the NGI priority areas?

I believe that the most remarkable success would be to contribute to the construction of a decentralized ecosystem where the value of security, trust, and privacy is its main value, without forgetting to provide access to these services to everyone on equal terms.

This would be the greatest contribution; ensuring equal access to all users and providing a definitive solution regarding the security of users' personal data while ensuring that it is under the management and control of its owners is the only viable way to increase users' trust and accelerate the adoption of the technology.