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Interview with Sergey Sholom President of GNation

Updated: Apr 30, 2018


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The Russian math whiz who aims to save the world with video games


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Sergey Sholom talks quickly, his green eyes flashing. His accented but fluent English betrays his life as a member of Russia’s glasnost generation. A former student and professional video game player, today Sholom is an entrepreneur who makes his home in airport boarding lounges, hotel suites, and corporate boardrooms where he shares his vision of how blockchain technology can help gaming - a pastime shared by a third of the world’s population - bring people together to address global ills.


The vision is fueled by Sholom’s ambitious idealism, influenced by a life spent gaming, and inspired by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, an ambitious plan to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all.


“For 2,000 years, since the Olympics started, games have brought people together in peace and the spirit of competition,” he says. “Today, a PC role-playing game can bring together players from rural China, from equatorial Africa, from Sao Paolo and Berlin and Montreal. The gaming community spans languages, religions, cultures, and continents.”


Playing games with destiny

Sergey Sholom and his twin brother Maxim were born on 10 February 1978 to parents Anatoly and Marina in Moscow, in what was then the Soviet Union. Sholom was competitive from the beginning. He liked soccer, ice hockey, and math. His scores got him transferred from the anonymity of 220 School to a math-focused high school. He studied engineering and financial management at the Russian State University of Technology between 1995 and 2000 before earning a doctorate in mathematical modeling.


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Those are tough academic programs, but they weren’t sufficient to scratch Sholom’s competitive itch. He supported himself during his college years by winning tournaments playing the video game Quake 1 under the pseudonym DF[Judge]. Sholom’s team - DataForce - was the top-rated Quake clan in Russia during between 1997 and 2000.


It was at this point that Sholom began to organize public Quake tournaments - then known as S-port. Thousands of people throughout Russia paid for seats to watch teams compete against each other. DataForce went on to win the biggest of these live competitions - Moscow Gamers’ League 2 - in 1999.


“These were the very first esports competitions,” Sholom says. “There was no TV, no internet streaming - only the competitors and the live audience. And real prizes from the sponsors. It was a lot of drive and emotions as people watched gaming live.”


Sholom’s reputation as a professional gamer allowed him to participate in game design with a Russian company. And in short order he founded a company to publish games of his own design. “I had no experience,” Sholom remembers, “but I had a dream to reach together with my partners and the team.”


Datcroft Games went on to publish a series of games reaching an audience of more than 15 million users around the world.


Global ambitions

The competitive gaming industry pioneered by Sholom and people like him has continued to prosper. In 2017, esports revenues reached nearly $700 million, according to Newzoo’s annual Global Esports Market Report. Esports tournaments are streamed live online and on cable television around the world. Champions earn multi-million dollar purses and sponsorship deals. Stadiums sell out around the globe. Newzoo predicts global revenues will rise to $1.5 billion by 2020.


Sholom, meanwhile, has focused his entrepreneurial ambitions on a larger target. His current company, GameCredits - based in Belgrade, Serbia - is laying a blockchain-based foundation to support a new way of thinking about gaming and competition. Sholom’s goal is nothing less than revolution.


“The world has 2.4, 2.5 billion gamers,” he says. “That’s one person in three. Imagine what we could accomplish if all the world’s gamers work together.”


GameCredits’ GNation community project is an expression of Sholom’s pragmatic idealism. The first products in the GNation ecosystem are intended to support a mutually beneficial relationship between gamers and game developers, with opportunities for gamers to acquire games at little to no cost and game publishers to earn higher royalties on each sale.

“The effect of blockchain is to support trust and eliminate intermediaries in relationships, including financial transactions,” Sholom says. “Eliminating game-store gatekeepers allows gamers and publishers to work together and pursue their common interests directly.”


Gamers are dreamers, Sholom says. Given the opportunity to support idealistic goals and charitable causes conveniently, they would happily help sustain the planet and help others.

That’s not just talk. GameCredits technology and GNation products, distributed at no cost all around the world, will serve as a medium for allowing gamers to express tangible support for social goals, to remake and perfect the world.


“It’s the biggest game of all,” Sholom says. “And we are changing the rules.”



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