When Aetheras cofounder Teddy Lee helped establish the blockchain company in 2018, the terms “blockchain” and “NFT” had barely entered the public consciousness. As gamers and friends since childhood, Lee and his cofounder, Denis Tsai, had a prescient insight into the pain points of players, such as game assets that evaporated as soon as games were pulled off the shelf, or the inability to share items with other players. As software engineers, they also understood the challenges faced by developers in terms of finding the time and resources to enter blockchain services. Hence, Aetheras has been dedicated to using blockchain for expanding the range of gaming applications for both players and developers since day one.
Agence lowers the barrier for players and developers into blockchain
Lee - who returned from Silicon Valley equipped with new knowledge and new ways of thinking – said that the concepts of blockchain and NFTs were not yet well known in Taiwan when Aetheras was founded. Amid the advent of web3, the Aetheras team developed a public blockchain focused on gaming: Agence. This platform aims to break traditional models and overcome gaming limitations by offering players access to secure and simple on-chain NFT trading and offering developers the tech support needed to connect to the Public Blockchain.
With the goal of enabling a fully-realized gaming ecosystem, the Aetheras team is constantly working to improve Agence’s service. Lee says that the platform has two unique features when compared to other public blockchains: First, delegated transactions enable companies to cover transaction fees for their minted NFTs, allowing users to auction items even without possessing tokens. Second, NFTs are treated as first-class citizens on the chain, with features such as NFT auction places baked in. This makes working with the chain easier and more straightforward, helping developers focus their efforts on building the actual applications. Therefore, it lowers the technological barriers for NFT issuing.
“Aetheras envisions a future which fulfills the gamers’ dream of using their favorite items across different games,” says Lee. He added that Agence will streamline cross collaboration between developers. This creates an entirely new business model for the industry.
Adopting GCP infrastructure and microservices for easier management and deployment
The Aetheras team was aware that adopting a public cloud infrastructure would be essential to support Agile development which was needed to expand the applications of blockchain in gaming. They chose Google Cloud and Kubernetes open source technology for convenience, better user experience, and the affordable pricing compared to other platforms.
The Aetheras team uses Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to deploy their game services. GKE provides a native Kubernetes microservices architecture that allows engineers to easily manage their products. Leveraging the unique strengths of Serverless Service, Aetheras uses Google’s serverless platform, Cloud Run, for product testing and development which is fully managed through Google Cloud. Cloud Run also enables machines to automatically scale resources up or down based on real-time traffic, which allows Aetheras to manage their cloud services flexibly and in line with their resources.
As more gamers and developers sign on to Agence, Aetheras is also evaluating cloud-based data warehousing and visualization tools to monitor resource allocation and speed up the decision-making process.
CloudMile and Google Cloud enable GameFi innovation
“We are very thankful for the CloudMile team for providing a highly transparent view of our cloud usage and billing along,” says Lee. “We look forward to further collaboration via both technology and co-branding.”
For the next step, Aetheras plans to launch an SDK for game developers by the end of 2022 to assist in fleshing out the platform’s ecosystem. The company will continue its collaboration with Google Cloud and CloudMile to further streamline its cloud infrastructure as well as leverage GKE to speed up app deployment and to thrive with innovation.
