GoNetwork Review: A Mobile Marketplace for Virtual Goods

GoNetwork aims to build a marketplace for buying and selling virtual goods on a
massive scale. Virtual goods only have value within the app itself – for example, an
avatar or virtual currency. GoNetwork understands that as the marketplace for
virtual goods increases, blockchain technology will need to gain speed and lower its
transaction fees in response. GoNetwork is meeting this future need through a fast,
affordable and scalable mobile-first off-chain transaction network for Ethereum.

Article Summary

• The GoNetwork Team and Idea
• The GoNetwork Technology
• The GoNetwork Tokens
• The GoNetwork Platform
• The GoNetwork ICO

The Idea and the Team Behind GoNetwork

The team at GoNetwork launched an app called dubsquad.me, which is a video social
network that has since grown to over 1 million users. The team understood that
monetizing the virtual coins by turning them into real money was an opportunity for
developers and users to create a new stream of revenue. They believed that
Ethereum was a good foundation for this concept.

The mobile app economy is growing and is expected to reach 6.3 trillion by 2021.
Many of these in-app purchases include virtual goods. The ability to buy and sell
these virtual goods across the blockchain will help prevent issues of fraud as well as
help users earn a living while doing what they love. The team at GoNetwork wanted
to extend the use case of the new platform beyond dusquad to any product that
deals with virtual goods.

GoNetwork’s team is composed of serial entrepreneurs with a proven track record in
creating mobile apps for millions of users, including Happy Park, the largest Theme
Park game on iOS. Rashid Khan, GoNetwork’s CEO, is the founder of Infinidy
Corporation, one of Canada’s leading game development studios. The company
became one of the first to join Communitech, Canada’s top digital media incubator.
Xun Cai, the COO of GoNetwork, is a co-founder and CTO of Infinidy Corporation.

The team at GoNetwork was the winning team at ETHWaterloo, the world’s largest
Ethereum hackathon, judged by Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum and other major
industry influencers. This adds tremendous credibility to the team. Although the
GoNetwork team has strong experience building apps, critics point out that they
have little experience using the blockchain. It is important to note, however, that
many companies launch ICOs without either a single strand of code or experience
founding a company.

The GoNetwork Technology

As a coin that runs on the Ethereum blockchain, GoNetwork sought to eliminate
certain hurdles of Ethereum, namely scalability and mass adoption. GoNetwork
believes that a faster, cheaper and scalable mobile-first off-chain transaction
network is necessary for Ethereum.

GoNetwork sets out to do this by employing State Channels to reduce workload
issues on the blockchain. State Channels are two-way discussion channels between
users or between a user and a service. The discussions are messages which are
signed by each participant, so that it is next to impossible to refute the transactions.
These transactions take place off of the blockchain and exclusively between the two
participants. As off-chain transactions, they are faster and cheaper.

GoNetwork reduces the workload issues by facilitating a series of balance transfers
between parties off-chain at no cost. Users accumulate off-chain transactions (which
are faster and cheaper) between two actors to send output to the blockchain. In
order to facilitate faster transactions, GoNetwork has incentives that reward actors
based on the longevity of their state channels.

The projects that encompass the GoNetwork platform can be viewed in the
GoNetwork github. These projects include smart contract stores that update and
manage virtual goods that are added by developers. It also includes an
AssetManager which has a list of games smart assets – when a user buys and sells
and asset he or she uses the command through the AssetManager. The Dapp and
Pocket care can be seen on github as well.

GoNetwork also has plans for a P2P mobile networking solution.

The GoNetwork Tokens

GoNetwork tokens, or GoTokens, can purchase apps and are used to create and
close contracts. The token’s value will increase as more users join the platform —
GoExchange. GoTokens can be purchases either via bitcoin or Ethereum. During the ICO, 50 million tokens out of the total of 100 million will be available for sale. A quarter of these tokens are reserved for the team.

Future plans include a debit card, the Pocket card, which accepts these GoTokens for
in-app purchases.

The Platform

GoNetwork’s platform, GoExchange, allows the trade and purchase of virtual goods
across game ecosystems and between users, with a focus on mobile platforms.

Critics point out that similar solutions to GoNetwork exist (such as Raiden and
Lightning Network), but as CTO Amit Shah explained to Cryptobriefing:

Raiden runs as a companion node on desktop, there are no mobile builds, and its written in
python. The core concepts are similar to lightning State channels and HTLC [a hashed
timelock contract]. But all this tech has to be developed for mobile, in some cases
from the ground up. Secondly, mobile ecosystems have further limitations, you don’t
want to sync a node on mobile… Currently the questions that we are researching is
overcoming intermittent network connections during long network routes.

The company plans to release GoExchange into the public in Q2 of 2018.

The ICO

GoNetwork originally announced its ICO in November 2017 and delayed to later in
2018.

The goal of the ICO is for the tokens to represent the transaction cost of the off-
chain solution. The idea is that as the number of State Channel transactions
increases, the value of the token will increase as well. On the other hand, there is
concern that the 100 million GoTokens that currently exist might not be sufficient for
the future. Of course, this depends on the costs of the transaction fees.

It alsodepends on if these number of token are finite (i.e. if tokens disappear or are later
redistributed). Critics argue that since the value of the tokens is unclear, the goal of
the ICO is unclear as well.

We shall have to continue to wait and gather more information on this promising
coin and ICO.