Blockchain gaming, along with decentralized finance (DeFi), will likely benefit most from Donald Trump’s presidency, said Jeffrey Zirlin, the co-founder of crypto gaming platform Sky Mavis.
Speaking to Cointelegraph at the YGG Play Summit in the Philippines on Nov. 21, Zirlin said the “token design” space may yield the most benefit from the new crypto-friendly administration in the United States.
“You want to experiment with all these ways of adding utility to tokens so that you can distribute tokens via the games and then have people who want to use and spend the tokens.”
Zirlin said the outgoing administration in the US — watched over by a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) led by Gary Gensler and other top Democrats — made it “very difficult” to do anything novel in the token design space without running into serious regulatory headwinds.
Jeffrey Zirlin at the YGG Play Summit in Manila. Source: Cointelegraph
“So the bottom line is that the token design space has now been massively opened up. I believe that’s most bullish for DeFi and gaming, which we believe are the most consequential sectors that have the most long-term substantive value in this industry.”
Memecoins are a funnel into crypto games
While some have lamented the rise of memecoins as being “the most extractive” trend to ever hit the crypto industry, Zirlin takes the other side of the argument.
“The good thing about memecoins is that they get the people who are only in [crypto] for primarily speculative reasons and are thinking very short-term — it attracts those people.”
To Zirlin, it’s exactly this kind of inclination for speculation and shorter-term thinking that makes memecoiners ideal candidates for the earliest users of new blockchain games.
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While memecoins are eating up the lion’s share of attention right now, Zirlin said this cycle has been fairly “predictable” and is betting on legitimate crypto gaming projects seeing major adoption in the coming months and years.
Trump’s election is great for legitimate projects
Meanwhile, Zirlin shares a similar sentiment with many crypto industry pundits, including Consensys CEO Joe Lubin, who said that a Trump administration and its widely anticipated crypto-friendly policy would be a boon for more utility-geared crypto projects.
Lubin told Cointelegraph on Nov. 13 that Ethereum and its ecosystem of projects were “poised to benefit” more than any other protocol from Trump’s election, saying it was more mature than any other major blockchain, aside from Bitcoin.
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