Atari Token – Addressing the Need Of The Gaming Industry

Token Name: Atari Token
Token Symbol: ATRI (ERC-20)
Token Contract Address: 0xdacd69347de42babfaecd09dc88958378780fb62
Token Website: AtariChain.com

The goal of the Atari token is to address the needs of the gaming industry – more specifically, to become a universal means of apyment for the video game industry. Their goal is to grant developers and publishers new means of monetization for their products and protection of in-game assets.

Quick Thoughts on the Atari Token

I actually stumbled on to the Atari Chain on accident while reading an article about Enjin Coin. Obviously, the name instantly caught my eye, so I decided to look into it.

Atari is a name that every gamer is familiar with, having revolutionized gaming back in 1972 – and I was pleasantly surprised to see that, despite their more recent issues, they were forging new frontiers – applying blockchain technology into the world of gaming.

Atari launched their token via a public sale of the Atari token in late October, 2020, at a price of $0.25 per token. Since then, journey has been a bumpy one; spiking to just under $0.70, and currently trading at $0.12 – more on the spike below.

This is definitely not a “quick ride to the moon” type of project – I bought in with the expectation of waiting on developers to build out the use-cases before seeing any types of returns.

First Things First, Let’s Address The “Bumpy Ride”

Two things dictate the price of a token – availability and use-cases.

Atari token is currently not available on any *serious* exchanges, with around 60% of the volume being traded on Uniswap (Decentralized exchange). There are minimal use-cases for Atari token at the moment, and with such low availability, it was expected that the price would rise if ATRI ever got a serious exchange listing.

As such, the price spiked on the rumor (thanks to a “big time influencer”) that it was going to be getting added to a major exchange – and when that didn’t happen, the price plummeted sharply. This is why you don’t trust any influencer that does NOT share their public wallets…

Spikes aside, let’s get into the fundementals.

Atari Token Platform Partnerships

As stated above, Atari is looking to implement blockchain technology into the gaming industry to make it easier for developers and publishers to monetize and protect in-game assets, and to help facilitate this, they’ve made some partnerships with some pretty big names.

One of the bigger partnerships (that I was happy to see) was Enjin – who I had written about earlier – partnered with Atari to help Atari achieve their goals:

“We are very excited about this collaboration with Atari and its initiation with our latest Enjin Adopter, eBallR Games. Atari resonates with all ages as the household name synonymous with gaming and its belief in blockchain shows the maturity of this technology and the tools now available.”

Alex Russman, Enjin’s director of Business Development

Atari has also partnered with organizations like the Litecoin Foundation, Zed.Run, Chain Games, and ICICB (to name a few) to expand the use-cases and discounts available to holders of their token.

Atari also has partnerships with The Sandbox ($SAND) and Decentraland ($MANA) for products to be built inside those metaverses (like the Atari Casino in Decentraland), and is currently developing their OWN virtual world which will be the host to a number of games from the atari universe, with $ATRI as the in-game currency.

Think “The Oasis” from Ready Player One.

If (and when) that’s successful, the Atari Token will have the ultimate use-case.

Conclusion & Thoughts

Development on the Atari Chain project has been quietly progressing – maybe a little too quietly for some users (the users in the telegram group know of whom I am referring), but it has been progressing nonetheless.

To address the cost of transactions, Atari has switched gears and started looking into layer 2 solutions for utilizing the ATRI token due to the often-overlooked factor that affects all erc-20 tokens; Ethereum Transaction Fees.

In my opinion, Atari partnering with Polygon ($MATIC) is a step in the right direction for the company (and token) – and will be worth the delay. After all, who wants to pay $20 in fees to spend $5 of in-game currency? No one – and that would make the use-case useless in my opinion.

For some, the seemingly slow developments may be off-putting, but as with all projects, I tend to look at the overall picture. Slow and steady (as long as it’s in the right direction) is always better than quick and dirty in the wrong direction.