OVERTAKE’s CEO on why game asset trading must evolve — faster, safer, and in service of the player-owned economy.
For years, gamers have generated immense wealth within virtual worlds, collecting rare skins, grinding for loot and trading in-game currencies.
Despite all that activity, they have had little real control over what they earn. Most items remain locked in publisher servers, while trades go through intermediaries and see much of their worth eroded by high fees. This lack of control is far from a niche problem.
The secondary market for digital assets is vast, with gaming making up millions of transactions daily. Source: Overtake
The secondary market for digital goods is worth more than $85 billion, with roughly $55 billion directly linked to gaming. That is why “true digital ownership” is more than a passing trend. It represents a generational opportunity to redefine the relationship between players and the value they create.
What’s changing now is not the size of the market — it’s the rules of ownership.
From Gamer to Infrastructure Builder
My journey into this space began not in a boardroom but on the competitive ladders of StarCraft, Sudden Attack and World of Warcraft. Later, while advising technology companies at Boston Consulting Group, I kept noticing the same paradox. In-game economies were thriving, yet the value players created rarely became something they could securely own or transfer to others.
Today, the rails to fix this already exist. Proven Web2 trading models have already moved billions in value between players for decades. Now, blockchain infrastructure can upgrade those same flows to be faster, safer, and player-owned from day one.
However, one of the main barriers to mainstream adoption in blockchain gaming is that players are often asked to start by learning Web3 tools. Seed phrases, wallet setups and gas fees feel more like obstacles than invitations. The solution is to make blockchain invisible at first, keeping the surface experience familiar while delivering ownership, speed and transparency under the hood.
In practice, this means enabling trades directly within Discord communities where gamers spend their time and automatically creating wallets via social or email login. Transaction fees are covered so that new users aren’t hit with unexpected costs on their first trade.
Proven Models, Upgraded Rails
This approach draws on proven Web2 marketplaces such as Korea’s ItemBay and ItemMania, which have supported tens of millions of users and billions in trading volume. Moving these models on-chain delivers structural advantages, including reducing fraud through smart contract escrow, accelerating settlement and significantly cutting fees. The interface feels familiar, but the system underneath is faster, safer and cheaper.
We put this approach to the test in a closed beta without offering any token rewards. The result was active, repeat trading driven by faster settlement, lower fees and reduced fraud risk. Participants engaged because the marketplace solved real user needs, not because of speculative incentives.
The real growth lies in a “PvE model” — in gaming terms, Player vs Environment — where gains come from engaging with a broader market rather than competing for the same pool of users. This open-loop approach contrasts with the “PvP” or Player vs Player dynamic common in many crypto projects, where benefits simply circulate among existing participants.
In gaming commerce, a PvE approach means embedding on-chain settlement into behaviours players already understand, rather than asking them to adopt entirely new ones.
Scaling through infrastructure
The long-term vision extends beyond any single marketplace. Sustainable scale comes from infrastructure, not one-off titles. That is why our roadmap focuses on making our escrow, settlement, verification and tokenization tools available as SDKs and Protocol-as-a-Service modules that other game studios can integrate.
A small development team should be able to launch an in-game marketplace with just a few lines of code. The complexities of compliance, payments and risk management are handled quietly in the background, which is exactly how it should feel for end users.
This vision is supported by our partnership with Sui, whose high-performance, object-based architecture enables low-cost microtransactions and instant settlement. Features such as zkLogin and Slush Wallet allow users to onboard as easily as they would sign into a social account, a crucial factor for mainstream adoption.
The future of the player-owned economy will not be built by convincing gamers to embrace a brand-new paradigm overnight. It will come from replacing the fragile, expensive rails beneath today’s trading markets with infrastructure that delivers ownership, security and speed by default. Once those benefits are felt, the fact that it runs on-chain becomes just a technical detail.
The real question is whether the industry will focus on building products that deliver lasting value or keep chasing the next short-term hype cycle.
About Seunghwan Oh, Overtake CEO
Seunghwan Oh is the CEO of OVERTAKE, a blockchain-enabled gaming marketplace with over 30 million Web2 users. The platform aims to bring true digital ownership to gamers without the friction of traditional Web3 onboarding. Known in the gaming world as Captain SH, Oh first made his mark climbing the competitive ladders of StarCraft, Sudden Attack and World of Warcraft. Before founding OVERTAKE, he advised leading technology companies at Boston Consulting Group, where he developed a deep understanding of the gap between thriving in-game economies and the lack of secure, transferable value for players. “Players shouldn’t have to master blockchain to own what they earn,” says Oh. “Our mission is to make true ownership effortless, so gamers can focus on what they love most — playing.”
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