A new era for thirdweb 🔮

GM builders,

Welcome back to thirdweb weekly: where we highlight how web3 is disrupting everything from decentralized finance to media & entertainment. 🚀 

Speaking of which… we’re excited to announce Onchain Chats: a series of monthly talks to showcase how web3 is being used in the real world — kicking it off next Wednesday with Jesse Pollak from Base! Sign up here to join. 🔵 

The future of gaming is web3 — and we’re here for it 🎮️ 

Gaming has seen explosive growth over the last decade — and in 2020 alone, gamers spent over $54 billion on in-game purchases. Games like Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft have built massive global communities through in-game economies, unlockable items, and open marketplaces. 🎮️ 

But building the infrastructure to support games like these takes years alone — dramatically increasing the barriers to entry for new game developers.

As a result, developers are turning to web3 to make games much faster, cheaper, and easier to build — with the blockchain serving as an underlying platform & replacing the backend systems in traditional games, reducing development time from years to just weeks.

Last year, we partnered with Coinbase to launch thirdweb’s GamingKit: The all-in-one toolkit for developers to build best-in-class web3 games, fast. Since then, we have:

• Continued to build the most performant Unity SDK on the market

• Powered hundreds of onchain games — working with industry leaders like Pixels, Gala Games, and Fractal

• Used GamingKit to build our own full-scale web3 game in 3 weeks

And now, we’re excited to announce that we’re launching a new gaming division within thirdweb: bringing Atif Khan onto the team as our new VP of Gaming — a former Facebook executive with 15+ years of industry experience.

Learn more about how web3 is transforming the entire gaming industry — and what we’re doing about it — in our full announcement blog:

📹️ YouTube Video: How to Create an In-Game Currency for your Web3 Game

In this video, learn how to create a web3 game with an in-game currency — implementing it as an ERC-20 token. We’ll take you step-by-step through:

• Deploying an ERC-20 Token contract to any EVM chain — in 1 click

• Creating a Unity game & adding the token as an in-game currency

• Building a flow for users to connect their wallets & claim the tokens they earn

📚️ Guide: How to Create Token Bound Accounts (ERC-6551)

In this guide, learn how to implement ERC-6551: a new standard for ‘token bound accounts‘ that creates a smart contract wallet for every ERC-721 NFT — unlocking new use cases for fully onchain identities, in-game characters, & much more.

🗓️ Events & Workshops

🔥 May Ecosystem Report: Blockchain apps are booming!

🚢 thirdweb Changelog: Weekly Product Updates

Here are some of the updates we’ve made in the past few weeks:

• Full support for zkSync Era mainnet & testnet

• Analytics for any smart contract in your dashboard

• Magic, MetaMask, and Smart Wallet support in Unity SDK

• Magic & Smart Wallet support in React Native SDK

• Enhanced customization for React Native UI components

• Revamped contract publish flow

We’re constantly shipping product updates to make thirdweb better. Get the latest updates in our Changelog.

Have a great rest of your week shippin’! 🚢 🛠️ 

And if you’re ever looking for 40,000+ other builders to learn from & share your web3 journey with, look no further than our Discord community 🤝