Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are the hottest thing in the crypto world. An explosion in interest in the unique digital tokens has led to absurd money being spent. An example? One digital artist, known as Beeple, last month sold an image file for $69 million.

So they’re definitely sought after. And you could soon get rewarded with them for playing video games. Or at least that’s what one platform is trying to do. 

Vorto Gaming AB, the developers of Vorto Network, the hub for blockchain-enabled play-to-earn games, is working on Hash Rush. The game, which is still in BETA mode, allows players to receive NFTs as rewards for playing. 

It’s part of the company’s plan to revolutionize the world of blockchain gaming. 

And with new funding, Swedish Vorto, looks like it is well on its way. 

A new deal 

Vorto will be teaming up with the NEAR Foundation in a new partnership that has kicked-off with a grant of 25,000 tokens in addition to $10,000 dollars cash. The funds, from NEAR, will help Vorto expand their platform on the NEAR’S network.  

The idea is that Vorto Gaming will deploy its Vorto Network Minimum Viable Product (MVP) on NEAR Protocol, benefitting from its high scalability and sharding.

“It’s undeniable that blockchain gaming, despite its promise and excitement, has seen slow adoption in recent years,” Kristaps Vaivods, CEO of Vorto Gaming, said.

“We think there are two main reasons for that: bad UI and UX, and an unscalable blockchain infrastructure. We solve for the former, while NEAR for the latter.” 

How can NEAR help? 

The NEAR Foundation, based in Switzerland, works to accelerate the development of decentralized applications. As Vorto’s CEO said, NEAR can solve scalability issues. 

But why’s scalability an issue? There are plenty of games on Ethereum, right? Yes, but with so many people playing them, and a congested network, it can be slow. It’s also expensive: to run the network, one needs to pay gas fees — and right now they’re high as hell. 

NEAR says it can solve this issue. It’s 10k times cheaper per transaction than Ethereum. So by building on the network, gaming developers should be able to do things more economically and efficiently. 

The deal hopes to change the way blockchain gaming is done — and draw more people to its world. 

“NEAR Protocol is made for developers just like Vorto Gaming,” NEAR Foundation CEO Erik Trautman said. “NEAR provides abstractions to hide as many of the underlying scalability solutions as possible, offering a high-performance sharded blockchain that looks and feels like a traditional smart contract platform.”