GameCoin (GMC) is a digital currency targeted towards the gaming community. GMC tokens go on sale at the end of September through the GameCoin ICO. GameCoin aims to increase the revenue of the gaming industry by 3 times – or 300 billion dollars per year. It aims to allow players to earn money from their hobby. And, within a year, the developers claim the capitalization of GameCoin will “exceed and billion dollars and will continue to grow rapidly.” GameCoin is being proposed as a way to monetize the world of free gaming. The GameCoin whitepaper explains that the majority of gaming revenue comes from 10% of users. Today, developers are struggling to monetize the remaining 90% of users. GameCoin claims to have found a way to do that using blockchain technology. Basically, GameCoin’s idea is to allow each game developer to create their own cryptocurrency. This cryptocurrency is used as in-game money. The developers can create this cryptocurrency at virtually no cost to themselves – it’s just a digital token that has value in the game. However, by the time it circulates through gamers, the token will have value because it can be used to pay for in-game items. In more straightforward terms, GameCoin plans to make it easy for developers to create a secure in-game currency. It appears that these cryptocurrencies will operate as forks on the GameCoin blockchain. Each developer will be able to make their own fork – so gamers can easily apply their GWC tokens to any game of their choice (the GameCoin wallet will support all forks).
Ripple is the catchall name for the cryptocurrency platform, the transactional protocol for which is actually XRP, in the same fashion as Ethereum is the name for the platform that facilitates trades in Ether. Like other cryptocurrencies, Ripple is built atop the idea of a distributed ledger network which requires various parties to participate in validating transactions, rather than any singular centralized authority. That facilitates transactions all over the world, and transfer fees are far cheaper than the likes of bitcoin. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, XRP transfers are effectively immediate, requiring no typical confirmation time. Ripple was originally founded by a single company, Ripple Labs, and continues to be backed by it, rather than the larger network of developers that continue bitcoin’s development. It also doesn’t have a fluctuating amount of its currency in existence. Where bitcoin has a continually growing pool with an eventual maximum, and Ethereum theoretically has no limit, Ripple was created with all of its 100 billion XRP tokens right out of the gate. That number is maintained with no mining and most of the tokens are owned and held by Ripple Labs itself — around 60 billion at the latest count. Even at the recently reduced value of around half a dollar per XRP, that means Ripple Labs is currently sitting on around $20 billion worth of the cryptocurrency (note: Ripple’s price crashed hard recently, and may be worth far less than $60 billion by time you read this). It holds 55 billion XRP in an escrow account, which allows it to sell up to a billion per month if it so chooses in order to fund new projects and acquisitions. Selling such an amount would likely have a drastic effect on the cryptocurrency’s value, and isn’t something Ripple Labs plans to do anytime soon. In actuality, Ripple Labs is looking to leverage the technology behind XRP to allow for faster banking transactions around the world. While Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are built on the idea of separating financial transactions from the financial organizations of traditional currencies, Ripple is almost the opposite in every sense. XRP by Ripple price can be found on this page alongside the market capitalization and additional stats.