Animoca Brands and Hedera announce Helix Warp and NFT-based football game

Press Releases

May 26, 2021

HONG KONG, May 25, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Animoca Brands announced today that, through its acquisition of Helix Accelerator (“Helix”), it has entered into an agreement with Hedera Hashgraph to develop two distributed ledger-based gaming projects.

Animoca Brands, Helix, and Hedera Hashgraph will develop a non-fungible token (NFT) based football game that will utilize the intellectual properties of famous football clubs under license to Animoca Brands. The game will feature tradable NFTs that will be backed by HBAR, the native cryptocurrency of the Hedera public network. NFTs that are backed by HBAR will be redeemable for HBAR after a cooldown period, representing the first time that an NFT will be redeemable for a fixed and guaranteed amount of an underlying crypto asset.

Animoca Brands, Helix, and Hedera Hashgraph will also collaborate to develop and launch Helix Warp, an independent and distributed online gaming platform. The mission is to create a fair and decentralised ecosystem of gaming related products and services to combat the chronic problem of cheating in online multiplayer games. Helix Warp will counteract cheating by creating a server-side simulation environment and leveraging the Hedera Consensus Service to record results. Game developers will be able to plug into Helix Warp and deploy hack-resistant leaderboards in their games. Helix Warp will target HTML5 games to begin with and utilize the Helix Warp token to underpin the ecosystem.

The Hedera Consensus Service and the Hedera Token Service will be used as foundational technology layers for both projects described above. The Hedera Consensus Service acts as a trust layer for any application or permissioned network and allows for the creation of an immutable and verifiable log of messages. The Hedera Token Service enables the configuration, management, and transfer of high-throughput native fungible and non-fungible tokens without having to deploy expensive and potentially faulty smart contracts.

Management commentary
Yat Siu, the co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, commented: “We are very excited to work with Hedera Hashgraph, which offers some highly appealing uses for gaming, particularly in the area of high-transaction scenarios. We believe this partnership will result in more efficient validation of play-to-earn activities, including addressing issues such as the multi billion dollar problem of cheating in games.”

Mance Harmon, CEO of Hedera Hashgraph, commented: “Animoca Brands develops and runs some of the most popular blockchain games worldwide. It has proved itself a leader in leveraging blockchain and distributed ledger technology, providing highly engaging entertainment applications that captivate fans everywhere. We are delighted that Animoca Brands chose to build these new offerings on top of the Hedera network.”

About Hedera
Hedera is the most used enterprise-grade public network for the decentralized economy. The platform is governed by a council of the world’s leading organizations, including Avery Dennison, Boeing, Chainlink Labs, Dentons, Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, EDF (Électricité de France), eftpos, FIS (WorldPay), Google, IBM, LG Electronics, Magalu, Nomura, Shinhan Bank, Standard Bank Group, Swirlds, Tata Communications, University College London (UCL), Wipro, and Zain Group.

For more information, visit www.hedera.com, or follow us on Twitter at @hedera, Telegram at t.me/hederahashgraph, or Discord at www.hedera.com/discord. The Hedera whitepaper can be found at www.hedera.com/papers.

About Animoca Brands
Animoca Brands, ranked in the Financial Times list of High Growth Companies Asia-Pacific 2021, is a leader in digital entertainment, blockchain, gamification, and artificial intelligence. Animoca Brands develops and publishes a broad portfolio of products including the REVV token and SAND token; original games including The Sandbox, Crazy Kings, and Crazy Defense Heroes; and products utilizing popular intellectual properties including Formula 1^®, Marvel, WWE, Power Rangers, MotoGP™, and Doraemon. Animoca Brands’ portfolio of blockchain investments and partnerships includes Sky Mavis (Axie Infinity), Dapper Labs (CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot), OpenSea, Harmony, Bitski, and Alien Worlds. Its subsidiaries include The Sandbox, Quidd, Gamee, nWay, Pixowl, and Lympo. For more information visit www.animocabrands.com or get updates by following Animoca Brands on Facebook or Twitter.