A while back we had a chat with Majd Hailat, the CEO and Co-founder of Altura, a leading web3 infrastructure provider for games. This 21-year-old founder with small town roots spent a lot of his childhood playing video games and exploring the more technical aspects of the industry. With a love of programming, he used to deconstruct every household gadget and this curiosity transferred over to computer science and programming.
Majd attended the University of Toronto for computer engineering, which was also when he was introduced to the world of crypto through his Dorm mate. Together, they lived the college entrepreneurial dropout experience which turned out to be exciting and productive.
Counter Strike consumed a lot of his early years and actually formed the inspiration for what is now Altura. Majd loved putting his money into custom skins for weapons. They did nothing for gameplay and were all purely status symbols and customization. With users devoting significant time to these games, they are participating in another reality that they want to express their own individuality in. The problem came when he wanted to liquidate the $3K plus he put into these custom skins. He recognized that NFT tech would be the best utility for this problem and the duo got to work developing Altura.
The issue was crypto development and gaming development were two different fields. “There’s such a huge learning curve for game developers to get into blockchain and integrate blockchain. And a lot of times these massive gaming studios don’t want to invest all that time sort of teaching or hiring web3 developers because they want to focus on building great games,” Majd said. What Altura does is make building a web3 game easier for game devs, small teams, and massive studios. They provide tools to integrate, update, and create NFTs to reward players in game. Altura can help projects build their own storefronts so their user base can exchange items freely, access wallets, authentication solutions, and everything that a developer would need to tap into blockchain without needing to understand all the intricacies of web3 development.
Their custom marketplaces are one of the most obviously necessary tools they offer. With controversy surrounding OpenSea’s creator earnings and fees, many projects are opting to integrate their own marketplaces and Altura has tools so projects can pretty much click and create custom stores. NeoTokyo is a good example of altura’s custom white label marketplace solutions, but they also have simple templates available where users can log in and customize a marketplace template for their own project.
Another one of many tools they offer are their smart NFTs. These are the evolution of the traditional non fungible token, allowing NFTs to become dynamic, programmable, and interactive assets that can change over time. What Majd noticed was in-game assets need to be flexible, the metadata needs to be updated, weapons need to degrade or upgrade, essentially, gaming assets traditionally need to be able to change, but NFTs simply can’t do that easily. For example a sword in most games, will degrade after a certain number of kills. The gamer will need to repair, upgrade, or get a new one.
Altura’s smart NFTs host the metadata centrally, with a decentralized copy on IPFS. This allows game developers to update the metadata by sending a request through their API to change the data on the centralized database. The copy is then appended to IPFS. They are simply creating new decentralized copies every time the metadata is changed providing instant flexibility for streamlined game play.
The full interview with @howimetweb3 can be listened to here on Spotify:
Altura supports 11 different blockchain which puts them near the top of all their competitors. This allows for the buying and selling of NFTs in multiple currencies, rather than just restricting gamers to USDT. 2024 will be a big year for Altura and they are in a position to dominate the industry. They recently attended the Game Developer Conference, partnered with SuperVerse DAO, provided integration tools for multiple projects, and have secured multiple exchange listings. Altura is gearing up to be one of the top Web3 infrastructure projects out there and to learn more follow @alturanft on x.
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