Young entrepreneurs are taking over the ‘smart’ NFT games

They bonded in their freshman year of university over a mutual interest in cryptocurrency. Now they are taking over the gaming world.

Maxim Sindal and Majd Hailat are the heads of a start-up company called Altura, which deals with the mysterious world of cryptocurrency, blockchain technology and NFT (non-fungible tokens) as part of the multi-billion dollar international online gaming industry.

And despite the huge drop in cryptocurrency values ​​in recent weeks, digital entrepreneurs are ready to keep it going with the hope of a prosperous future.

“We’re starting to sign deals with significantly larger game companies, with higher quality games, and our infrastructure is really coming together. So the company and our products and our trajectory haven’t changed and we’re very confident,” Hailat said.

Among its services, the company sells “smart” NFT with properties that can change (unlike standard NFT), offers technology to game developers that allows them to more easily include cryptocurrency in their games, and has created a marketplace to buy , selling and trading in-game items.

But in order to focus on their company, Sindal and Hailat made the important decision to leave the university.

For Hailat, the Michigan-born son of Jordanian immigrants — the family moved to Windsor, Ont., when he was two — it was hard to tell his parents he was leaving school last year, halfway through his second year of computer engineering at University of Toronto.

“I told (my parents) even a year or two ago that I really want to start something and if I do, I have no problem leaving school. They were very hesitant. They told me, “You should have a degree no matter what, it’s a good backup. Later in the future, if something happens, you can use it,” Khailat recalls.

For Sindall, it wasn’t so difficult. His mother, a 24-year-old professor who received a PhD at 22 from Cambridge University and who has been the CEO of two publicly traded companies, actually supported his decision to drop out of his mining engineering program.

“It dawned on us when we started doing really well that it really didn’t make any sense (to stay in school). My mom was actually the one (who) came out and said, ‘Look, I think it’s good that you left the university and got on with it,'” Sindal said.

“The university will always be there. The institution has been around since 1827 in the case of U of T. It’s not going anywhere, but this opportunity can be taken advantage of,” he added.

In April 2021 — in the midst of first-year exams — they decided to go ahead with the company, only to receive a cease and desist order hours after the launch from a UK law firm demanding they not use the company’s name. which they chose.

“We changed our entire marketing. Our community was incredibly confused 20 minutes before launch as to why there was a new token name. It was a very crazy day,” Sindal said.

The two met in their first year of university and became friends over a common interest in cryptocurrency. Sindal has been mining crypto since he was a teenager (both now in their 20s), and Hailat has been coding – writing digital code – since 9th grade. Both bring different skills to the partnership.

“I bring a lot of technical skills to the table, a lot of coding knowledge, and (Sindall) has a lot of connections. Something about Maxim made me realize that if I was going to do business with anyone, it had to be this person. He is a dynamic person. He can’t always explain the technology very well, but everyone likes him right away. That’s one of his strengths,” Hailat said.

“We are a unit. There’s no partnership that doesn’t have its ups and downs, but we’re one unit and we’re focused on the same mission and we’re doing it,” said Sindall, who grew up in downtown Toronto and attended Island Public/School of Science at Center Island.

They are also introducing some serious innovations in the gaming industry that they hope will make the company a commercial success.

Chief among them is the creation of a “smart” NFT for the gaming market. An NFT, which until now was a static or immutable item, is a relatively new form of cryptocurrency that allows anyone to have digital ownership of a real-world item, be it an image such as a piece of art or a photo, or, in the gaming world , an in-game item such as a sword.

“Before Altura, … an NFT was a static image, title and description, something that could not be changed. That was the nature of NFTs. So Altura came up with this technology that allows NFTs to change without sacrificing any of the previous properties. This is the first time the market has seen anything like this,” Hailat said.

The second big innovation: making it much easier for gaming companies to use NFTs, reducing the time required — due to the technical difficulty of coding — from a few months to a few days, he said.

“Our tools allow game developers to create games that use NFTs without having to know anything about crypto,” Hailat said.

They also created a marketplace to buy, sell and trade NFTs, noting that game developers get a piece of the action — royalties — from each transaction, giving them an incentive to participate, Sindal said.

“These in-game items have a whole economy and a market of their own,” Sindal said.

It’s big business. In the gaming world, some NFTs have sold for millions of dollars, Hailat noted.

But the cryptocurrency market — which includes NFTs, which are similar to bitcoin tokens — has been a rollercoaster of booms and busts since its inception a decade ago, with a serious decline in value recently.

“In the last two years, there have definitely been a lot of shady actors, shady companies and things that have put a really bad stigma on crypto. I think the public got a little bit burned in the last two years and now there’s a lot of resistance to the crypto market… I totally understand that,” Hailat said.

“We were seeing (NFT) pictures of $3 million dogs … with (people) thinking they were going to get rich. So obviously this is a sign of a bubble. I think crypto is here to stay, but it needs to cool down,” he added.

John French, director of the University of Toronto’s entrepreneurship program, said cryptocurrency, NFTs and blockchain technology dominated the conversation at the recent Collision Conference — which focuses on digital technologies — held in Toronto last month.

“I would say they (Altura) are in one of the most exciting spaces we see in the tech and startup ecosystem right now. While I don’t know what the company is like without looking under the hood, they (Altura) are definitely playing in the right space,” French said.

“Everything related to crypto continues to be highly speculative. But the core technology… I think it’s here to stay. I would agree that it’s a roller coaster ride for anyone in crypto right now, but I think the underlying blockchain technology will continue to create new businesses and new business opportunities that we haven’t even dreamed of yet,” added French .

For his part, Hailat said the company is performing well even though the crypto market is fluctuating.

“It felt like a dream because we went from these nobodies at U of T to having 70,000 people on the Internet talking about our company and all of a sudden money is flowing out the door,” Hailat said.

“The whole (crypto) market is down significantly. But the company itself, I’m more confident in the future and the success of the company than I’ve ever been,” he said.

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