For well over two years, even before Breakout Coin (BRK) was launched, Breakout Gaming has been hard at work cultivating the BRK ecosystem. Their goal has been to bring online as many gaming verticals as possible, like casino (BreakoutCasino.com), poker (BreakoutPoker.com), and lotto (BreakoutLottos.com). Each vertical brings new challenges in licensing, infrastructure, and payment options. As they approach each challenge, one of Breakout Gaming’s most important objectives is to support payment in BRK while backing player balances 100%.
During this process, Breakout Gaming has worked to establish BRK payment gateways. Among these are EasyPaymentGateway (easypaymentsgateway.com), BTC Express AG (www.btc-express.ch), CoinPayments (www.coinpayments.net), and adoption of our own payment API (application programming interface) used by Breakout Gaming on their BreakoutPoker.com platform. Some of these payment gateways have been fully implemented, like CoinPayments and our proprietary API, and others Breakout Gaming actively works to establish.
Breakout Gaming’s interactions with payment processors and customers have awakened us to the need for specific blockchain features that make payments smoother and more secure and the user experience more natural. Chief among these features has been the need for quicker payment confirmations, a usable multisignature API, and watch addresses.
BRK is hosted on a blockchain called Breakout Chain, an advanced multicurrency blockchain. Perhaps the most significant recent change to the Breakout Chain is the reduction of block times from 5 minutes to 1 minute, making confirmation times very fast. This change has been requested both by payment processors and vendors, and was added in the most recent release. With this change, BRK confirmation times are ten times faster than Bitcoin. These 1 minute block times mean that players can load balances or make purchases almost as fast as it takes to refresh a web page.
Along with faster block times, Breakout Chain now has a unique and highly usable multisignature address API right in the client software. A multisignature address secures the spending process by requiring more than one signature to send funds. In practice, several different people would have authority to make signatures, and two or more must sign a transaction. This means that multisignatures require that groups of people agree on spending decisions, making unauthorized spending much less likely. To make multi-signatures work as one might expect them, Breakout Chain introduces several new behaviors not seen in other cryptocurrencies. For example a balance query may include funds available by both single-signature and multi-signature addresses, according to the user’s preference. Additionally, API functions that report which funds are available for spending will find registered multisignature funds if the user wishes. While this behavior may not be needed by most users, it is very desirable for payment processors and vendors who need this next level of security.
We also recently added watch addresses. This type of address directs the Breakout Chain client to watch for transactions to third-party addresses. When the client observes such a transaction, it can call downstream functions that allow payment processors, for example, to credit balances. Watch addresses make accepting payments more secure because they do not require the payment processor to run a so-called hotwallet that has spending authority. These security features mean that BRK will be attractive to payment processors and vendors that require higher security and more convenience than what is found in other cryptocurrencies.
As we continue development on Breakout Chain, we will prioritize adoption, implementing those features that make acceptance of BRK easier, handling of BRK more secure, and use of BRK more pleasurable.