Blockchain technology has a lot to offer the gaming space. This disruptive technology continues to produce new gaming opportunities as the Web 3.0 metaverse explodes into mainstream adoption. 2020 and 2021 saw the rise of NFTs, followed by several projects dedicated to enhancing the utility and experience of in-game asset purchases.
However, one of the issues with in-game NFT assets is the lack of infrastructure available to trade them on decentralized exchanges. WAX is a new exchange promising to fill this need in the market. The WAX peer-to-peer trading protocol allows holders of video game assets to trade them.
The WAX management team state they intend to serve over 400 million blockchain game players that sell, buy, and collect in-game items and NFTs.
This guide unpacks everything you need to know about WAX, and its native token, WAXP including where & how to buy it.
Where to Buy Wax Coin (WAXP)
This section is our top picks of where and how to buy the WAX Crypto token. We chose these based on our experience of using them and considered fees, security, payment options and reputation.
- Binance: Largest Crypto Exchange with Low Fees
- Kucoin: Beginner Friendly & Lots of Choice
- Gate: Great Exchange for Newbies & Advanced Users
Visit The Top Pick
Binance: Largest Crypto Exchange
Binance is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of daily trade volumes. Cryptocurrency investors can enjoy full access to trade over 600 crypto assets, including big movers like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most of the top cryptos. With a minimum deposit of $10, investors can instantly start investing their crypto of choice.
Besides its large inventory of crypto assets, Binance also offers the lowest trade fees in the market. Binance charges 0.1% on all trades, and there’s an option for this figure to be further discounted by 25% for investors who hold Binance Coin – the exchange’s native token.
Funding your Binance account is seamless and straightforward. The exchange supports several deposit channels, including bank wire transfers, peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, credit/debit cards, and payment processors.
However, unlike eToro – deposits are not always free. For instance, Binance charges customers a standard fee of up to 4.50% on all crypto purchases made with debit/credit cards. Crypto deposits, on the other hand, are free.
This popular crypto exchange features a detailed learning curve and advanced trading tools, making it more suited for well-experienced traders and not beginners.
In terms of security, Binance offers the best security integrations. This broker features two-factor authentication (2FA), whitelisting, and advanced data encryption to protect customer funds and data. Also, Binance utilizes cold storage to store a vast majority of its funds, and the exchange also operates an insurance fund that protects customers in the event of an attack.
Pros
- Lowest trading fees in the market
- High liquidity on most cryptos
- Advanced trading tools
- Large crypto inventory
- Wide range of deposit channels
Cons
- Not beginner-friendly
KuCoin: Beginner Friendly & Lots of Choice
This exchange, one of the oldest and most popular brokers globally, is especially suited for derivatives traders and sophisticated investors. However, everyday investors looking to get into the market can make use of the broker as well.
Based in Seychelles, KuCoin isn’t licensed to operate in the United States. However, investors in other countries can easily access the broker and buy coins. The exchange currently supports over 200 cryptocurrencies and 400 trading pairs, and it has a full suite of features that encompasses savings, staking, and even Initial Exchange Offering (IEO) participation.
This broker works for advanced traders or beginners, the interface takes a little time to get used to but it's fairly intuitive and there are tutorials on the site.
Currently, KuCoin doesn’t accept bank deposits. Instead, the broker allows investors to deposit using cards, swift peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers, and direct crypto transfers. Users can only deposit fiat or crypto, and KuCoin requires a $5 minimum deposit.
Trading fees on KuCoin stand at a flat rate of 0.1%. However, these fees could reduce based on users’ 30-day trading volumes and their ownership of KuCoin’s KCS token.
The broker also takes security very seriously, with bank-level encryption and security infrastructures to keep users’ funds and data safe.
Pros
- Bank-level security infrastructure
- Access to IEOs
- Quick P2P trading system
Cons
- No bank deposit option
Gate.io: Good Platform With Huge Range
Gate was established in 2017 and has maintained a good reputation since then among experienced traders and beginners alike.
They offer one of the largest ranges of crypto coins and tokens available, currently standing at over 1400 different assets to trade.
The site is secure and easy to use with some nice extra protections such as trading passwords, 2 factor authentication and so on.
There is a mobile app available and their web platform is fast and easy to use.
Gate also offers a lot of other options to trade on the platform such as NFTs, P2P trading, Futures, Leveraged tokens and also some earning options.
Pros
- Huge range of crypto to trade
- Simple & Easy to Use
- reasonable trading fees
- Mobile App Available
Cons
- No Fiat Options
- Not Regulated
What is WAX?
The Worldwide Asset Exchange (WAX) is a decentralized trading platform and ecosystem enabling creators to build and operate a virtual marketplace. Users don’t need to invest in expensive payment processing or security protocols, as WAX handles all this for them.
Founded by William E. Quigley, Jonathan Yantis, and John Brechisci Jr. in 2017. The team originally started a marketplace’ OPSkins,’ supporting popular games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO), King of the Kill (KotK), and Player Unknown Battlegrounds (PUBG).
The WAX founders have a long history, amassing two decades of experience in e-commerce and online marketplaces. The WAX project has offices in the United States and Canada and is fronted by former top brass at OPSkins, making for a solid foundation for WAX.
What Does WAX Offer?
Trading virtual goods or ‘skins’ in online marketplaces is not a new practice for gamers. However, until recently, no decentralized marketplace offered access to creators selling different skins for different games on a single platform.
As a result, exchanging virtual goods involved visiting online forums with the hope of selling them to someone else. More often than not, this results in a user falling victim to a scam. Those that did trade their assets on official exchanges had challenges with fees that could vary widely, depending on the asset and the exchange.
WAX President Malcolm CasSelle recently stated that most gamers who buy and sell digital assets are likely to pay exorbitant fees or have their assets stolen by bad actors unless they go through a centralized trading platform.
So, CasSelle believes the solution to the problem is to create a global asset register accessible to anyone and provides a complete source and registry of all digital assets available for sale in real-time.
Conventional trading systems require users to carry out an unverified exchange, where they send the user their digital asset, hoping the buyer would return the payment in good faith. Obviously, this led to a wave of fraud, theft, and scams involving NFTs.
So, WAX streamlines the payment process, providing users with secure trading and guaranteed delivery of all digital assets and funds. However, it manages all this while maintaining a decentralized marketplace and trustless system for its users.
Is the WAX Project Sustainable?
Given the established team running the WAX project, we can expect that WAX will rise to be one of the most-used platforms for trading digital assets in the near future. Despite only launching some four years ago, the company managed to build its trading volume into two million weekly transactions in the first three years of its existence.
As a result, the WAX platform targets a market of 400 million+ gamers, worth an estimated $50 billion in virtual assets worldwide. WAX certainly has huge upside potential for the firm and the industry. The WAX marketplace can do more than handle the sale and processing of digital assets.
Users have the option to tokenize assets and form guilds to accept unique collectibles, issuing tokens redeemed by the owner to settle the transaction. The owner can trade tokens for other digital assets on the WAX platform.
The platform uses transfer agents entrusted with facilitating the transfer of virtual goods between buyers and sellers and assisting with the administration of the transaction process. The agents handle everything, from verifying and settling your transactions to collecting and holding assets in escrow before delivering them to the seller.
The transaction process creates a marketplace that eliminates the need to transport assets physically sold through conventional auction processes.
The platform is available worldwide, with anyone being able to create guilds. So, we can look at WAX tokens as utility tokens for facilitating secure, low-cost, and trustless trades through the WAX trading platform.
The WAXP Token
WAX relies on its WAXP token for several functions on its platform. The WAX management team allocated WAXP using two token sales. The first ICO in 2017 raised WAX $45.5 million through the sale of 520 million WAXP tokens. This sale occurred over two rounds, with public participants and institutional investors participating in the sale.
A few months later, in November 2017, a public ICO sold 136.9 million WAXP tokens. The sale generated a further $9.6 million for WAX blockchain development. There is a total supply of 1,850,000,000 WAXP generated during the genesis of the WAX blockchain. After the launch of the WAX blockchain mainnet, users can swap their original ERC20 WAX tokens for WAX tokens native to the new WAX blockchain.
Before its ICO, the WAXP token attracted significant demand from VCs like HyperChain Capital, Pantera Capital, and Fenbushi Capital, expressing interest in the WAX project. The Ethereum co-founder, Anthony Di Iorio, invested in WAXP, and talented game developers Brian Fargo and Dave Anthony invested in the project, as did industry titan Mike Novogratz.
While it has plenty of support from some of the biggest names in the crypto space, WAX enjoys support from its partnership with payment company Xsolla. This payment processor is a global publisher and distributor of video games, representing platforms and companies like Twitch, Steam, and Ubisoft.
Xsolla confirmed it would accept WAXP as a form of payment through its platform. However, due to regulatory issues, WAXP purchases are unavailable in New York, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and the US Virgin Islands.
WAX Project Roadmap
The WAX project was initially built in the Ethereum blockchain. However, the development team ported it to EOS in a modified format. As a result of this design, the original ERC-20 WAXP tokens were swapped for a new standard after the main-net launch.
WAX consistently adds new bridges to improve its support of interoperability and cross-chain compatibility with the Ethereum blockchain. This structure ensures that the dev team can migrate to WAX and maintain seamless access to the ecosystems of both chains, such as working with ERC-1155 and ERC-721 NFTs.
The most significant update to the WAX network to date is the new DeFi-inspired’ tokenomics’ model. This model creates a hybrid inter-blockchain, connecting the WAX NFT tokenization functionality with versatile marketplaces. It combines them with Ethereum’s superior scaling and monetization capabilities.
The goal is for the WAX network to power the consumer-facing marketplace, allowing members to profit from the efficient use and optimization of its core operations for ETH and WAX. Ethereum will operate the WAX blockchain, reducing the need for the WAX team to manage it themselves.
Therefore, users on both chains reaped advantages. Users can accumulate NFTs tokenized with ERC-721 and ERC-1155 utility coins, trading them on the WAX platform without the need to pay outlandish gas fees. All network fees get transferred to the WAX community.
If successful, this project marks WAX as one of the first public blockchains adopting the 4th-generation economic model. This model sees the value of tokens tied to the economic activity across interconnected blockchains, with each blockchain chosen for optimum useability and performance.
Here are some of the standout features of WAX tokenomics.
- WAXP to Ethereum Bridge — When burning WAXP tokens, WAXP holders can convert holdings to WAXE.
- WAXE is an ERC-20 utility token allowing users to participate in WAX tokenomics through depositing ETH and WAXE into a liquidity pool.
- WAXE-ETH Liquidity Pool — This is the liquidity pool for the WAXE-ETH trading pair. Depositors earn WAXE-ETH Liquidity Pool tokens.
- WAXE-ETH Liquidity Pool Token — This ERC-20 token is staked to the WAX Economic Activity Pool to earn WAXG and ETH.
- WAXG — A ER-20 governance token used for voting on WAX network governance. Or, it’s burned to obtain ETH from the Piggybank Pool.
- The WAX Economic Activity Pool is an Ethereum smart contract and manages two pools.
The WAX Distribution Pool
This pool stores cash generated through the WAX blockchain. This includes fees converted to ETH from the WAX blockchain and paid out to WAXE-ETH holders who stake them in the WAX Economic Activity Pool.
Piggybank Pool
This pool collects cash from the WAX blockchain indefinitely. WAXG token holders choosing to burn tokens in the WAX Economic Activity Pool earn a percentage of the ETH-denominated value in the Piggybank Pool.
The WAX Wallet
The ‘WCW’ or ‘WAX Cloud Wallet‘ is the primary interface for users on the WAX platform. The WAX wallet lets users see all their NFTs in their inventory dashboard. The WCW includes features that enable players to receive unique drops and prizes from their favorite creators.
Wallet owners can explore a world of decentralized apps (dAPPs) developed on the WAX platform that powers its network of marketplaces. The WCW application allows you to access primary or secondary product markets.
One of the biggest advantages of WAX is its simplicity in getting started. New users don’t have to worry about a complex setup. It’s a simple process, and your WAX wallet is ready for transacting.
Create a new account with a ‘two-click’ registration process or log in using one of the several sign-in methods, such as Google, Facebook, Steam, Discord, Twitter, Twitch, Reddit, Line, and many other options.
This feature on WAX makes it much easier to use than other decentralized blockchain systems. With a few clicks, you have access to your wallet and the ability to start trading NFTs. It also makes account recovery a faster and easier process, which is something new users will appreciate, thereby spurning mass adoption.
With WAX wallet, there’s no need to connect to suspicious third parties and no need to juggle lengthy and confusing seed phrases. You get a simple interface, ensuring the security and safety of your private keys without the need to worry about backup systems that confuse you and lock you out.
In most cases, losing keys or seed phrases results in losing account access. However, the WAX platform and protocol remove these inconvenient aspects of owning a wallet. However, more sophisticated users may utilize the WCW wallet to lock down their accounts more securely. So, the WCW offers users a secure facility with plenty of functionality.
Is it Worth Investing in WAX?
WAX looks like a great project with plenty of upside potential to it. However, risks are always involved in any venture despite the project’s positives. One of the biggest challenges facing WAX is limiting its utility to the current user base. Outside users don’t have any incentive to find themselves drawn to using the WAXP token.
WAX also has stiff competition from other projects like Enjin and Dmarket, with these protocols aiming to facilitate virtual asset trading in the near future. Unlike Enjin and Dmarket, WAX doesn’t assist publishers with creating digital assets. Instead, it focuses on a secondary marketplace allowing for the online trading of digital assets.
WAX also has competition in the form of other centralized projects, such as IGXE in China and Steam. The Steam marketplace is one of the biggest online, with gamers around the globe using it to trade digital assets. However, the steam platform holds all the funds created in those markets.
WAX offers a unique approach to selling and buying digital assets. Its WAXP token also has solid tokenomics and plenty of utility for users. WAX continues its mission to dominate the decentralized exchange space and is picking up momentum in the market. Let’s see what the next five years have to bring for this project.