Avalanche’s John Nahas on web3 gaming: ‘Blockchain on the backend’

As blockchain matures beyond peer-to-peer payments, gaming is fast becoming one of its most compelling frontiers — and Avalanche is betting big on that transformation.Speaking with TheStreet Roundtable’s Malak Albaw, John Nahas, Chief Business Officer at Ava Labs (the team driving Avalanche’s growth), explained how their ecosystem is changing the game for everyday users of decentralized apps.“The problem that we have in this space... is that the user experience and the user interfaces are very difficult,” Nahas said. “That’s because you have to, again, contort your application to fit the existing blockchain infrastructure that exists.”But Avalanche is flipping that script.“With Avalanche, you can have a blockchain on the backend,” he explained. “A perfect example is Gonz Games. They have Off the Grid, it’s a new AAA game that’s on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. They have 15 million users. Every user that has an account... has a Web3 wallet on the backend.”In this model, every in-game item — whether earned or purchased — is not just data but a digital asset owned by the player.“All of their in-game assets... are owned by them and are able to be freely traded,” Nahas said. “This is using blockchain for efficiencies, to unlock new use cases.”Beyond gaming, Avalanche’s strategy is sweeping. “We like to look at it comprehensively,” Nahas said. “We can tackle payments... institutional adoption, tokenize real-world assets... enterprise use cases such as loyalty and rewards.”And for gamers used to closed ecosystems, the Web3 model offers something radical: control. “You don’t really own your assets,” Nahas said of Web2 games. “In a situation like Off the Grid, you are able to own your own assets. You can sell them, you can trade them... It gives ownership back to the player.”Avalanche Labs is the development arm behind the Avalanche blockchain, a high-performance, scalable Layer-1 platform designed for decentralized applications and custom blockchain networks. Founded by Emin Gün Sirer and launched in 2020, Avalanche supports fast transaction finality and low fees through its unique consensus protocol. It enables developers to create interoperable subnets tailored for everything from gaming and DeFi to institutional-grade finance.