This Tuesday, TSM, a competitive gaming organization, announced an exclusive blockchain partnership with Avalanche. According to the press release, the goal of the partnership is to “create new experiences for players, fans, and creators,” and to help make “player-first Web3 gaming products mainstream.”

TSM Makes Avalanche its Exclusive Web3 Partner

On March 7th, TSM revealed it had entered into an exclusive partnership with Avalanche in order to bring its Blitz App to the blockchain. TSM is a gaming organization consisting of multiple teams competing in League of Legends, Dota 2, Hartstone, Fortnite, Valorant, chess, and many other tournaments.

John Wu, president of Avalanche’s Ava Labs commented that “partnering with TSM brings truly innovative gaming experiences to players around the world”. Likewise, Andy Dinh, the CEO of TSM and Blitz expressed his excitement about the partnership and called Avalanche “an authentic leader in this space” and added that the platforms share the vision of creating products that are “authentic and beneficial to our community.”

The partnership will also lead to a dedicated Blitz subnet in an effort to guarantee security, speed, and scalability. TSM plans to host Avalanche-branded tournaments on the subnet in an effort to “help gamers improve their skills with performance insights and learning tools”. The press release also reveals that TSM will use the services of Core to power all transactions.

The partnership with Ava Labs isn’t the first collaboration between TSM and a digital assets company. Last November, the organization terminated its partnership with FTX after the exchange filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Is 2023 The Year of Web3 Gaming?

With the deluge of partnerships between blockchain firms and gaming companies, 2023 may prove a pivotal year for web3 gaming. Last October, Avalanche and Japanese Gaming company GREE teamed up to take the latter from developing web2 games to creating web3 ones. In late December, a team consisting of industry veterans known for their work on Diablo Immortal, Far Cry and Destiny revealed it had picked ImmutableX as their preferred platform to create an Unreal Engine AAA web3 game sometime in 2023.

January saw the president of one of the industry’s largest players, Square Enix, announce his company would not give up on its blockchain projects. Furthermore, rumors that Amazon is working on an NFT initiative with web3 gaming at its core started circulating early in 2023—an initiative that may significantly help in the normalization of digital asset ownership. Other trends from 2022, however, also hint that gaming’s journey to web3 may not be entirely smooth sailing.

Last year also saw the broader gaming community reject the introduction of NFTs to their favorite pastimes with a popular outlet from within the industry stating that the effort “crashed and burned”. The skepticism toward web3 from within the community perhaps isn’t surprising as gamers have been suspicious of—and sometimes hostile towards—digital collectibles for some time. The attitude was drastically worsened thanks to some arguably predatory practices certain companies have employed throughout the 2010s with the backlash to Star Wars: Battlefront II’s loot crates perhaps being the most dramatic example.

This article originally appeared on The Tokenist