Editors note (9th January 2019): The below news have been reveal as an accident and rectified a few days after.
There had been rumours circulating the market that the company were looking to use a cryptocurrency as payment since around New Year’s Eve and the gaming company took to Twitter to make the announcement. It was left to the teams lead maintainer of the Monero project Riccardo Spagni to say that the development was ‘too cool’ tweeting ‘“The official Fortnite Merch Store is now exclusively accepting #Monero as a cryptocurrency payment option!’. Obviously there are other payment methods available (Paypal and Gpay) these let you use traditional currencies but it will be interesting to see the payment statistics once they have been released by Epic Games (owner of Fortnite).
According to the retail rows website, GloBee will be processing the payments and this Co. has also been known to organise payments in other cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, litecoin, ethereum, dogecoin and XRP.
This move came as a surprise to many as Monero is not even in the top ten in terms of Market Cap but there are some pretty good reasons to choose XMR. It has been said the game makers chose Monero over Bitcoin due to the enhanced privacy.
What do we mean by privacy?
When you send someone a payment with Monero they cannot tell it came from you, unless you decide to tell them. If someone sends you money twice you cannot even tell if they have sent you two payments or one. When you tell someone your wallet address and they send you a payment nobody else can know if they have sent you a payment or not.
Could any other games follow?
There is massive scope for the online gaming community to follow this theme. There are some smaller online games that use cryptos already but Fortnite is by far the largest. With more than 200m players worldwide, chances are that you have heard of the game already. To summarise, it’s a mass online brawl where lots of players leap out of a flying bus on to a small island and then fight each other until only one is left. Hidden around the island are weapons and traps but the aim is to be the last player standing. By far the most important part of the game is the social element, players can talk in real time and interact from all over the world in any language, this is what makes the game so popular amongst the players.
Looking at the Monero price action there was a strong signal on the daily chart that it was about to turn. The RSI indicator has been making higher lowers while the price has been making lower lows. This is called divergence and can give you an indication that the bearish momentum is about to end. Since we have rallied somewhat and reached the 51.11 level today. The next important resistance point is the consolidation high of 67.87. If price takes this level out we could see a move higher to the next resistance of 77.68.
(XMR/USD Daily chart using Kraken data from Tradingview.com)