BGA Stablecoins & Gaming Report
The report highlights that game professionals view stablecoins not as speculative assets, but as critical economic infrastructure necessary for stability, scalability, and efficiency.
1. Foundation for Stability and Retention: Stablecoins provide the price stability needed to keep player motivation tied to intrinsic gameplay, which publishers believe is necessary to prevent mass disengagement caused by market volatility.
2. Elimination of Payment Friction: They serve as a next-gen payment rail, cutting processing costs to a fraction of a percent and eliminating FX friction, making micro-transactions viable again.
3. Accelerated Global Payouts: Stablecoins facilitate near-instant (T+0, 24/7/365) and lower-cost cross-border payments to staff, creators, and contractors, simplifying cash flow compared to slow traditional bank transfers.
4. Legitimization of Secondary Markets: By pricing assets in a stable unit, they allow studios to internalize P2P trading with verifiable sales and automatically enforced royalties, monetizing value that previously leaked to black markets.
5. Programmable Economic Logic: They function as an “economic OS,” enabling automated revenue sharing, predictable incentive rewards (e.g., for referrals, UGC), and cleaner financial splits without complex month-end reconciliation.
6. Enabling Cross-Platform Portability: Stablecoins are considered the foundational monetary layer for the metaverse vision, allowing assets and value to flow seamlessly across different games and engines without introducing volatility.
7. Pragmatic Treasury Management: Studios use fiat-pegged stablecoins to preserve purchasing power in inflationary environments and simplify cross-border flows, potentially generating modest yield on operating capital.
8. UX Must Be Invisible: For mass adoption, stablecoins must be hidden from the player; success depends on abstracting complexity (like gas fees and seed phrases) through embedded wallets and deferring compliance (KYC) until necessary.
