Echelon Prime Explained: Where Gaming and AI Collide
Powered by $PRIME token, Echelon aims to build the next generation of gaming and P2E economies
As the market's volatility wreaks havoc, traders are left bruised and battle-worn.
With September’s outlook grim, there's no better time to dive deep into crypto and spot the next big opportunity.
In this series of in-depth analyses, we’ll keep you ahead of the curve by uncovering crypto projects with significant upside potential, ready to soar when the market turns bullish again.
First up: Echelon Prime!
What is Echelon Prime
The Echelon Prime Foundation is a non-profit organization building a gaming, AI, and P2E ecosystem for developers.
$PRIME, an ERC-20-based token, powers everything in its ecosystem, including transactions, marketplaces, and games.
The Prime white paper explains how it all fits together.
Here’s a brief snippet:
”Echelon is not a company or a traditional non-profit. Rather, it is an ecosystem and set of tools dedicated to supporting and enabling a new generation of gaming innovation within a decentralized, community-led environment. Echelon’s decentralization will encompass an infrastructure, including its PRIME token (PRIME) that will animate this ecosystem of games. Echelon is making PRIME and P2E focused development tools available to the ecosystem, and the community will determine where to take things from there.”
From the sounds of it, the community will have a significant role in the project's future.
However, the Foundation plays a central role in facilitating the entire ecosystem, including:
Token Launch and Management
Community Growth
Strategic Partnerships
Regulatory Compliance
Development and Innovation
Marketing
The governance system includes 11 elected representatives, called Emissaries Prime (EPs), who represent the interests of the $PRIME token holders and the Echelon Prime Foundation.
While they play a crucial role in the ecosystem's decentralized governance, the community can call for the re-election or removal of all nine EPs at any time.
Vision
The ultimate vision for Echelon Prime is an ecosystem with a wide range of rewarding and immersive games and experiences that offer real-world value through the ownership and trading of in-game digital assets.
This includes different types of NFTs, including Primary NFTs, PRIMEsets, and Cornerstone NFTs, all of which play a different role in the ecosystem.
For example, Primary NFTs aim to trigger the distribution of PRIME to NFT holders, while Cornerstone NFTs leverage Echelon staking contracts.
Funding
Echelon Prime raised a total of $85 million through two funding rounds.
These funding rounds included prominent investors such as Paradigm, Focus Labs, Yunt Capital, Chad Hurley, OSS Capital, and Solana Ventures.
Narratives
Crypto is narrative-driven, and Echelon Prime taps into two massive ones:
AI
Gaming
Here’s the data to back it up:
AI
$196.63 billion: Global AI market value in 2024
$1.85 trillion: Expected market value by 2030
32.9%: Expected CAGR in 2030
$15.7 trillion: Amount expected to contribute to the global economy by 2030
Gaming
3.32 billion: Amount of gamers worldwide by end of 2024
$282.30 billion: Expected revenue by end of 2024
8.76%: Annual growth rate between 2024 - 2027
$522 billion: Market value by 2027
$PRIME Tokenomics
The $PRIME token powers the Echelon Prime ecosystem, and it plays a role in everything that happens in the ecosystem, including:
Currency: Used for purchasing cards, entering tournaments, and accessing unique in-game content.
Governance: Allows holders to vote on key aspects of game development and ecosystem updates.
Rewards: Players earn $PRIME through gameplay, incentivizing active participation.
Prime Sinks: These are mechanisms within the ecosystem to utilize PRIME tokens, such as buying unique game cards and unlocking exclusive features.
This helps manage the token's circulation and maintain a stable economic environment within the platform.Community Involvement: Echelon Prime strongly emphasizes community feedback and engagement, supported by the PRIME token's governance model. This ensures the ecosystem evolves according to the community's needs and preferences.
$PRIME has a circulating supply of approximately 46 million, with a total supply capped at 111.1 million.
$PRIME is distributed through gameplay and sink distributions.
Parallel Studios has a reserve of 21,848,888 (19.7%), which will be unlocked starting on June 30th, 2025. From then, 438,016 $PRIME will be unlocked per month.
Investor unlocks equate to 751,853 $PRIME unlocked monthly from July 17th, 2023 - July 17th, 2025.
Investors were allocated 18,044,478 (16.24%) of all tokens before the launch.
The Problems of Web2 Gaming
While gaming is an exploding industry that is expected to continue to grow, quite a few problems plague it today.
Two of the biggest are:
Lack of Ownership
Many of you reading may have spent countless hours playing World of Warcraft, Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Elden Ring, Hearthstone, and IRL games like Magic The Gathering.
With Magic The Gathering, you at least have the opportunity to sell rare cards on the open market for thousands or sometimes millions of dollars. In the case of Hearthstone, you can’t transfer the cards to anyone, and the time you’ve invested will be lost forever.
With video games, the only thing you have to show for it is thousands of hours of entertainment and thousands of dollars spent on gaming consoles and future iterations of games.
Centralized Control
All game companies are centrally controlled entities, and the players and community have zero input into how gameplay changes or what games should be built.
Many complain that gaming has become like movies, where the same concept is repeated with minor improvements with little to no impact.
This is due to distribution.
When you launch a franchise, you have limited distribution channels or community unless the game takes off.
Often, gaming studios have to spend millions of dollars to build these distribution channels.
That’s a big reason why movies and games rehash and release new iterations of a game with only minor tweaks to gameplay.
Additionally, gamers have no direct stake in the games or opportunity to invest in them, leaving them with nothing to show for being fans of the game.
Imagine if you could have invested early into Madden, Call of Duty, World of WarCraft, or other popular games.
That’s not possible in web2 gaming but with games built on top of crypto.
How Echelon Prime Solves This
With the token $PRIME, investors and early adopters can earn money by participating in and staying active in the ecosystem.
To top it off, $PRIME is utilized for a wide range of in-game transactions and governance decisions, adding significant utility beyond mere speculation.
Let’s use their game Parallel as an example.
In Parallel, unlike web2 games, players own in-game items thanks to NFTs and the underlying blockchain technology it’s built upon.
Players can buy, sell, and trade these in-game items on the Parallel marketplace, with different rarities and cosmetic effects.
The currency of the marketplace is $PRIME, ensuring it maintains utility at all levels of the ecosystem.
With $PRIME, gamers can derive real value from their in-game assets through staking, trading, card sharing, and market activity rewards!
Games on PRIME
We’re all used to hearing about crypto projects that promise to do something but never do it.
Echelon Prime has delivered so far with their flagship game, Parallel TCG.
What is Parallel TCG?
It is a science fiction-themed trading card game where each card is tokenized as a non-fungible token (NFT).
Players can own, trade, and use these NFTs within the game, creating a real-world market for digital assets.
The story is set in a dystopian Sci-Fi backdrop where Earth has become uninhabitable.
Factions vie to return to a now energy-rich Earth, leading to conflict.
Gameplay Mechanics:
Players build decks of 40 cards from one of five Parallels, each with unique abilities and strategies.
Matches are 1vs1, turn-based battles where players aim to reduce their opponent's health to zero.
Cards have various types, such as Units, Relics, and Upgrades, each with specific roles and abilities.
Energy is used to play cards, gained by banking cards from the player's hand.
Unique Features:
Utilizes blockchain for true ownership of digital assets.
Through gameplay, players earn $PRIME tokens, which can be used for transactions and governance within the Echelon ecosystem.
Incorporates a battle pass system for earning additional cards and rewards.
Are people playing the game?
It appears so.
Transactions a day peaked at 8,000 on May 1st, 2024, while active monthly addresses peaked at 17,100 on June 24th, 2024.
However, daily transactions have nuked to about 1,000/day today.
This mirrors the broader crypto market’s liquidity drain.
Transactions are down across most chains, including Solana, which seems to have hit an all-time low in volume.
Because liquidity and crypto prices are down, there is a backlash against Parallel, similar to Axie Infinity, after the 2021 bull market.
While I’m not defending the critiques, this is standard in crypto and I witnessed it first hand when I worked at a crypto startup.
When the market outlook is bleak, the community and critics emerge from the woodwork, pointing out everything wrong with your app or chain.
It happens with Bitcoin, too.
You never hear critics say Bitcoin is a scam when the price is going up, but they lash out after every pullback.
If you want to see a video that bashes almost everything about the game, check out the one by Jauwn from 4 months ago (I linked it below).
However, I suggest using it to balance your expectations.
Crypto gaming still has a long way to go, and there will be bugs and issues that need to be improved along the way.
Future Updates
Echelon PRIME has several exciting updates in the works, including:
Parallel Colony
A new game within the Echelon Prime ecosystem that combines AI-driven avatars with resource management and strategy. It is in beta and offers new ways for players to earn and spend PRIME tokens.
Bonds System
Echelon Prime is preparing to launch a guild system called "Bonds," which will enable the gasless and permissioned exchange of digital assets, such as NFT cards, among games in the ecosystem. This feature is currently in the Alpha testing phase.
Wayfinder AI
An omni-chain AI tool designed for blockchain environments.
Enables user-owned, autonomous AI agents to navigate blockchain ecosystems.
Facilitates secure and efficient transactions via dedicated Web3 wallets.
Final Thoughts
Having worked in crypto for 4 years and been part of 3 cycles, I’m familiar with the blowback Echelon Prime and Parallel are getting right now.
Crypto moves in cycles.
When prices are up, expectations get ahead of reality. Everyone is making money, and crypto is the future of everything.
When prices are down, your critics start bashing you for everything, and the community quickly turns on you because they’re losing money.
There’s a lot of psychology in crypto that people don’t fully comprehend, especially if you’re new.
Greed flairs, and people forget to click the sell button, thinking things will go up forever.
I’m not saying that there aren’t things to improve here.
Far from it.
I’m saying the reality is between the hopium and negativity circulating on CT.
Echelon Prime has a unique approach to building the ecosystem by leveraging its community.
It’s an opportunity to get involved in a game that enables you to monetize your time.
They are shipping regularly and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.
It’s a project worth keeping an eye on.
Of course, you have to be careful with the unlock schedule as new supply of $PRIME will continue to hit the market.
All that said, the foundation has delayed its unlock schedule to 2025, while the investors unlocked it starting in 2023.
That’s a year of selling from investors, who own 16% of $PRIME.
So, a decent amount has to have already hit the market over the last yr or so.
$PRIME is worth watching for when things start to turn around.
Echelon Prime Resources