Game items are economic assets, and players should own them. That is the thesis driving Jang Hyun-guk, the former Wemade chief who pioneered South Korea’s play-to-earn market and now heads blockchain gaming platform CROSS under Nexxus. Jang is betting his career on the transition from centralized game servers to decentralized ledgers, arguing that the traditional model of unilateral item sales is fundamentally broken.
To prove his point, Jang launched CROSS last year. The platform acts as a plug-and-play middleware layer, allowing traditional game studios to integrate asset ownership, trading structures, and compliance frameworks without building their own blockchain infrastructure. This setup lets developers focus entirely on gameplay while CROSS handles regional regulatory hurdles and tokenomics.
The financial proof of this model is already showing up in the data. Before integrating with CROSS, the mobile MMORPG Seal M was struggling. In December 2025, the game generated a mere 100 million won (around $72,500) in monthly revenue from a player base of just a few thousand. After relaunching globally on the CROSS platform with Web3 features, monthly revenue surged to 4 billion won ($2.9 million), while the player count exploded with 1.7 million new users.
Jang’s conviction stems from a decade leading Wemade, where he navigated the early, highly volatile days of GameFi. He insists that keeping item databases locked on corporate servers is an outdated practice that deprives players of the value they create with their time and money. By using blockchain as an immutable ledger, games can return disposal and trading rights to the users, creating a more sustainable secondary market.
Traders and developers will be watching whether CROSS can replicate the Seal M turnaround with its upcoming pipeline of titles. The platform's ability to scale and maintain compliance across fragmented global jurisdictions remains the key test for Nexxus as it attempts to establish a new industry standard for Web3 asset ownership.
Nexxus CEO Says Web3 Gaming Pivot Boosted Seal M Revenue 40x
Nexxus CEO Jang Hyun-guk emphasizes that blockchain enables players to truly own and trade in-game items, which could transform gaming. His platform CROSS supports this shift and has started generating revenue, indicating growing adoption.