All around us, creativity and opportunity are blooming. There are new collections, games, tools, airdrops, and beyond sprouting in every direction.

That said, try making a list of 3-5 things from this week’s news roundup that interest you most and then go explore them deeper in the coming days. My list looks like so right now:

• Explore the Nifty Island open beta

• Set up my Bountycaster account

• Check out Gallery’s new features

• Try Party’s new group chats

• Update my Ronin wallet

Make this process a routine, each week put some time into learning about and trying new things around NFTs to level up your experience and opportunities. Sow the seeds now for the harvests to come!

What’s your list look like, what’re you exploring this week? Let me know! In the meantime, let’s catch you up with the latest Metaversal roundup ✌️

-WMP

This week in NFTs…

📰 General news

• Blast launched its L2 testnet.

• Bonfire unveiled its 2.0 platform.

• NFT Price Floor published its 2023 retro report.

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• BasePaint passed +100k canvas mints.

• BasePaintBot added support for 1-year subscriptions.

• Gallery rolled out a series of new features.

• Outland published an essay on Mathcastles's Zero Suite release.

• SHL0MS released a new work, ∞.

• The Yellow Collective, a new group focused on supporting creatives around Nouns and the Superchain, launched on Base.

• Zora creators have collectively earned +555 ETH via protocol rewards so far.

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Bitcoin Pizza Ninjas raised 45 BTC through its collection drop.

• CryptoPunks relaunched the CryptoPunks721 system.

• CryptoUndeads concluded its art reveal.

• Little Swag World, a PFP collection created with AI, dropped on Solana.

• Pooly NFT minters may soon be receiving airdrops.

• Donald Trump announced a new Bitcoin NFT trading card collection.

• Nakamigos released the Crypto Trading Cards collection.

• Pudgy Penguins temporarily passed a +20 ETH floor.

• The Shadows, a new Ordinals collection, opened claims for holders.

• Quantum Cats is publishing its mint details today.

📱 Onchain social

• Bountycaster added support for user services posts.

• Ethereum Follow Protocol unveiled seven new launch partners.

• Farcaster dropped an NFT to commemorate its Giraffe update.

• Hey, formerly Lenster, added support for tipping.

• Party intro'd private group chats.

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Aavegotchi opened registrations for its Gotchi Battler tournament.

• Apeiron announced its $ANIMA airdrop campaign.

• Axie Infinity launched Origins Season 7.

• BattlePlan notched +300k battles in its first week.

• Cool Cats is bringing its new Match Quest game to Immutable.

• LooksRare saw its onchain games pass +10k ETH in volume.

• Nifty Island launched its open beta and Play-to-Airdrop campaign.

• Ronin intro'd the latest Ronin Wallet update.

🪙 NFTfi

• NFTfi.com launched a bug bounty program for its upcoming refinancing feature.

• Uniswap is the top burner of ETH over the past month.

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland launched an open call for its Art Week 2024 event.

• Upstreet is onboarding all Webaverse Genesis Pass holders to The Street.

Thanks for reading this week’s roundup! For more catching up:

• 📚 Collect the latest Metaversal posts on Mirror

• 🆕 See my other latest write-ups:

  • 🔶 Recursive Bitcoin Inscriptions

  • 🚦 15 Tips for NFT Beginners

  • 🪙 Getting Started with ether.fi

Now tokenholders have a chance to help make that future possible, by voting to fund a special purpose entity (SPE) dedicated to making this vision a reality. Voting will remain open until January 21st.

GPU scarcity and soaring demand are making it harder for startups and smaller companies to develop and run AI models. This raises the risks that AI’s future will be dominated by deep-pocketed big technology companies that charge exorbitant rates to those who want to access computing muscle.

Livepeer is committed to staying true to its core mission of building the world’s open video infrastructure. This commitment to accessibility extends to AI, and to doing all it can to enable the creation of open AI infrastructures and video AI compute as a counterweight to attempts by monopoly players to dominate this emerging market.

AI is expected to have as dramatic an impact on video, as it will on a host of other industries. And with deep expertise in the sector developed over the past six years, Livepeer is in prime position to be at the vanguard of that revolution.

AI has the potential to drastically reduce the time, cost, and expertise required to make top-notch video productions. A single user can now create video clips simply by typing a text or image prompt into a computer.

Generative video won’t replace professional productions, but it can create tremendous cost savings at various stages in the process. It can also make video more accessible and interactive for audiences by enabling features such as frame interpolation and subtitle generation, automatic object detection, masking, and scene-type classification.

We are already seeing the launch of some exciting open source foundational models such as Stable Video Diffusion, ESRGAN, and FAST, among others. By helping these models – and those yet to be introduced – compete with closed proprietary systems, Livepeer can help prevent larger organizations from dominating future innovation.

Should its funding be approved, the video AI compute SPE will take on the important role of validating Livepeer’s cost-effectiveness and reliability as a provider of AI video compute, and showcasing this new capability to the world.

To that end, the SPE will develop the following:

• A fork of the Livepeer nodes dedicated to AI capabilities.

• A subnetwork that node operators can form to perform these tasks with payments cashed in on Livepeer mainnet.

• A frontend app that demonstrates these capabilities to consumers.

• The capture of data that demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of the Livepeer network for performing AI inference at scale and the showcasing of this data to the world.

AI video compute tasks will ultimately become job types on the network, just as transcoding video is right now. Future actions by the SPE will be aimed at bringing the capabilities demonstrated in the initial validation exercise onto the network, and opening the network to a wide range of new job types.

Check out the #ai-video channel in the Livepeer Discord to catch up on the discussion about this initiative and its importance to the future of open AI infrastructures and video AI compute.

We have an exciting road ahead of us. Come play your part by casting your vote today!

• Nethermind hotfix client release.

• Pimlico launches stateful bundle compression.

• Axiom deploys its V2 on mainnet.

• Offchain Labs discusses chain-clusters.

The early gamification trend ushered in a wave of companies that sought to make games out of normally mundane activities and transform them into booming businesses. It turned visiting places into a game (Foursquare, 2009), monitoring traffic into a game (Waze, 2008), language learning into a game (Duolingo, 2011), the list goes on. What these companies realized was that gamification was an effective strategy for generating promotion, marketing, engagement, and loyalty with their users.

One of the common elements of gamification is a point system, where you can translate qualitative measures of progress into quantifiable metrics. Point systems fundamentally accomplish two ends: binary, legible outcomes (number go up, number go down) and channels to easily direct intrinsic motivation toward extrinsic motivations (perks, streaks, and rewards).

Blockchains are natural infrastructure for point systems because they’re designed as a universal ledger of entities with rails that can programmatically distribute value to these entities based on certain actions.

Historically, this value has largely been distributed through tokens on Ethereum (ERC20s)—financial assets whose value adjusts in real-time in open markets. Tokens are powerful tools for identifying, coordinating, and compensating users who contribute productively to a network with financial rewards and/or shares of ownership.

Token incentives have been critical for blockchain usage. The promise of tokens as financial rewards act as a counterbalance to the relatively high costs and often high risks of transacting on L1s like Ethereum. However, this dynamic can create a vicious cycle. The high cost of onchain transactions means that rewards often go to the users who are willing to pay high fees (often mercenary capital) and are generally not favorable to participants who are less willing to pay high fees or are more risk averse (often new users).

As blockchains transactions rapidly become cheaper—through the proliferation of L2s and L3s—broader classes of non-financial actions become feasible to bring onchain without the urgency and expectation to compensate users with requisite financial rewards. This new paradigm signals the emergence of new onchain primitives such as attestations to identify, coordinate, and engage a complex, decentralized network of users.

Onchain attestations are a method for identifying and classifying users, allowing users to self-attest to their own attributes and to attest to those of others. However, attestations have their own limitations. Attestations are often qualitative, which makes them difficult to use in a low-context, computational environment such as a blockchains. For example, it’s generally much easier to compare a player with 20 kills in a game vs. a player with 12 kills in the same game than it is to compare a player who killed the Green Boss vs. a player who killed the Blue Boss in the same game. This can be improved by increasing the context of the environment, and further scaling combined with developments in AI and LLMs will also make this type of analysis easier. However, given these limitations, it’s likely that more quantitative forms of attestations are most appropriate for where blockchain scalability is today.

We’ve seen experimentation with point systems in crypto begin to take off such as Blur points, which utilizes forms like “Listing Points” and “Lending Points” to incentivize specific actions and to distribute rewards that may include $BLUR tokens. More recently, Rainbow began issuing Rainbow Points to reward users for making transactions in the Rainbow wallet. To date, these point experimentations have largely been offchain, which makes them relatively similar to web2 points programs, at least implementation-wise.

Beyond traditional point systems, onchain points present an interesting opportunity to use points trustlessly within blockchain environments for purposes such as token redemptions for ownership distribution, access gating for sybil resistance, or improving market functionality in DeFi.

The rest of this post serves to illustrate the differences and tradeoffs between tokens, offchain points, and onchain points, and to explore the extent to which onchain points can serve as an additional primitive for builders and users with its own unique benefits and challenges.

Why Points

In the case of tokens, there are many characteristics that are carefully scrutinized pre-launch and can materially impact the resulting traction of the project and price of its token. Some of these factors include, but are not limited to:

• Supply and Issuance: Will the token be inflationary or deflationary?

• Usage: Will the token be used for governance, and if so, will holding governance tokens represent a claim on any fees generated by the project and control over the allocation of the project’s treasury? Or will the native token be used for utility? Will it be the unit of account/integral to using the project?

• Value accrual: Are there staking mechanisms or lockups? Are tokens spent and/or burned as a means of scarcity and value accrual?

• Distribution: Will tokens be distributed through airdrops or emissions? Will there be vesting schedules?

In the case of points, they are usually non-financial, mutable, and controlled by the issuer, meaning that point systems can be easily adjusted without immediately impacting any market dynamics. Point supply can be unlimited, and the method by which points are used/redeemed can be modified. Moreover, the tradeability of points is also determined by the issuer, whereas tokens are tradeable by design.

Being able to adjust point systems and receive community feedback in real-time without fundamentally changing market dynamics, product mechanics, or user behavior gives teams much more time and awareness to understand and better retain users. In the case that points are used as precursors to tokens, points help remove the urgency for a project to define its token model and distribution too early since it can determine later what proportion of the token supply will be allocated to the aggregate point pool.

Notably, of course, because point systems have established precedence in web2, evaluating them from a regulatory lens is arguably less questionable.

Not only are points more simple to design and execute for builders, they’re much simpler for users. Given the dynamicity of token price, users can find it difficult to know how to conceptualize a certain token: Should I treat it as an investment or as a utility/access tool? For example, imagine an arcade game where you have to pay a quarter to play the game. If you knew that tomorrow that quarter could be worth $10, you might be more hesitant to feed that quarter to the machine.

Points, alternatively, can be thought of as “meta-currencies,” where points can convert into financial value and influence usage, but this conversion can be designed to be less or more direct, depending on the situation. In this model, the redeemability of points becomes much more flexible.

In terms of point utility, points can be redeemable for a variety of options including direct product perks, ownership/equity of the project, governance rights, and/or directly swapped for income. These configurations can also be based on an opt-in basis for users.

Why Onchain Points

The more flexible nature of points raises an obvious question of what differentiates onchain points from offchain points. A key tension that emerges when thinking about tokens vs. points is that ERC20 tokens maximize composability and minimize issuer flexibility, while offchain points minimize composability and maximize issuer flexibility.

Implementing points onchain, rather than offchain, will likely sit somewhere between these two ends, allowing for flexibility while maintaining the benefits of blockchain auditability and composability.

But in practice, what does this really mean and why does it matter?

Composability

In a way, we can regard onchain points as quantitative attestations that people can view and leverage globally. Anyone can issue points to anyone else onchain, as well as build point systems based on other parties’ product usage or native point systems. Onchain points can add a new dimension to a user’s onchain identity, similar to accruing other onchain credentials, that can integrate into various modular protocols. With this framework, onchain points become a powerful tool that projects and brands can use to identify power users across products, and even attract prospective customers with discounts and airdrops.

Provenance

Onchain points also guarantee provenance and auditability, enabling transparency into the total allocation of points in the system, as well as a historical account of the methods of allocation. This transparency is vital to the extent that the point system becomes valuable to the project’s community and the demands for fairness in the allocation process.

For example, brands and agencies often work with influencers based on engagement metrics across platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc. However, these platforms configure and manipulate their algorithms for amplification and distribution in black box environments, making the logic behind metrics indiscernible.

Trust Guarantees

Blockchains allow for explicit guarantees on a user’s current point allocation and redemption options. These guarantees enable safe redemptions of points for other onchain assets with minimal trust assumptions, imbuing onchain points with a potential for value unprecedented in web2 point systems. Without blockchains, point systems that attempt to bridge value will suffer the same criticisms in the crypto community that we levy against web2 platforms—i.e., that they fail to satisfy a level of trust commensurate with their value—and that any stated redemption mechanism can be “rugged” without notice or historical trace.

Sybil Resistance

Point systems are also likely to impact “farming” activity that often accompanies web3 product launches. Bots can farm points just as they can tokens, but point systems can serve as a helpful communication mechanism between project teams and early adopters by explicitly signaling types of rewards that aren’t associated with a token and be used to encourage certain contributions to the product or network—for example, providing liquidity to a protocol or stress-testing certain features.

Community Accountability

Point allocations can also be held to community scrutiny before any redemption mechanisms are revealed in a more explicit manner than traditional airdrops, reducing risk of post-airdrop controversy. Onchain point allocations can even be audited, with a timestamped verification from a third-party.

Implementation

As we mentioned earlier, points can be designed for a variety of types of rewards ranging from discounts to product perks to ownership/equity of the project to governance rights to direct income. Similarly, points will likely differ widely in implementation across projects, ranging from some form of attestations to modified ERC20 tokens to soulbound tokens. While each method will have its own benefits and tradeoffs, we’ll walk through a likely common flow: redemption for ERC20 tokens.

While ERC20 tokens are the most composable method for distributing rewards, they generally minimize issuer flexibility and maximize speculative behavior. You can make modifications to effectively make them non-transferable or in unlimited supply; however, you still run into the common conflation of the token with a form of currency.

There’s also a cost consideration for implementing points as ERC20 tokens. The transaction costs of transferring ERC20 tokens onchain every time a user joins and/or a point balance is updated can get prohibitively expensive for the issuer. Alternatively, you could accumulate points in an offchain database into a Merkle tree and periodically publish the Merkle root onchain in a smart contract. When a user wants to claim the tokens, they submit a transaction to the smart contract that includes a Merkle proof that, when combined with the user's address and claim amount, can be verified against the published Merkle root (this is essentially how Merkle airdrops work).  This is a common method of distributing tokens because it pushes transaction costs to the end user instead of the project—thereby distributing the total cost (which might be in the millions of dollars) across all the token holders.

Stack* has built a solution for redeeming points for ERC20 tokens trustlessly on any EVM chain, with a distribution method that is cheaper than traditional Merkle airdrops.

While the exact specifications of a point or token system can and will vary on a case-by-case basis, we’ve included a general delineation of characteristics of offchain points, onchain points, and tokens below for guiding reference.

Apart from any technical or crypto-specific implementation considerations, there are still plenty of other crucial design decisions for creating a point system. A few thoughts:

The primary goal of a project’s point system should be to encourage product usage, not to encourage point accrual. Ensuring that point schemes eventually drive users back to your own product ecosystem is key to successfully kicking off a flywheel driven by points, rather than encouraging farm and churn behavior. This is particularly important for value sustainability. Any value lost by offering rewards must be compensated by value elsewhere—more users, higher value transactions, upsells, subsidies through ads, etc. Channeling points directly into product benefits is particularly helpful for maintaining a closed feedback loop and testing the success of specific features/products. An example of this is Farcaster Warps, whereby points earned in the app can be used as gifts to other users, or used to discount in-app NFT purchases. This explicit use-case for points within the product reduces the risk that points are viewed primarily through a speculator’s lens; i.e. only as the basis for some future financial incentive.

An effective points system also requires an intuition of what will move the needle for both your users and your product. For example, if your users are relatively price insensitive, discounts may not be as interesting; other levers like personalization or social access/rewards may be more compelling for products that benefit from strong network effects. If your product is driven by time-in-session, dripping smaller rewards often and consistently may be more productive vs. products driven by large volumes may benefit from issuing higher-value rewards less often.

The Future of Points

The story of gamification is not a new one, and there are many case studies that demonstrate that gamification can lead to positive habit-forming, incentive alignment, and increased loyalty between brands and users.

When we look to the future, it becomes clear that decentralized, user-owned networks will define the new internet. In an onchain world, gamified points can serve as a unique way to identify and reward users for their actions and contributions in an even more powerful and holistic way than in web2. Therefore, it’s important to understand the goals and roles of decentralization and ownership in your product and design point systems with those goals in mind. While tokens are incredibly powerful tools to coordinate and govern these networks, they’ve proven to also be more rigid than originally conceived. Onchain points serve as a potential new primitive for teams to use alongside tokens to explore paths to better user identity, user ownership, and incentive alignment. However, points will only be conducive towards these goals to the extent that they’re carefully leveraged with these ends in mind. We’re excited to explore the possibilities of this new primitive with you.

*denotes an Archetype portfolio company

Mint Entry

On this episode of Rehash, we’re speaking with Birb aka Chairman Birb Bernanke aka bonecondor on Twitter all about the new Bitcoin ETF and best security practices in crypto.

Birb was nominated by Andy Boyan and voted onto the podcast by Hudson Jameson, Triumph, and myself, Diana Chen.

Subscribe to Rehash

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On this episode of Rehash, we’re speaking with Birb aka Chairman Birb Bernanke aka bonecondor on Twitter all about the new Bitcoin ETF and best security practices in crypto.

Birb started her career in TradFi and was a product manager for a number of years before joining OtterSec, a blockchain security audits company. We start out by talking about the Bitcoin ETF, and Birb patiently answers a lot of my very basic questions, like what is an ETF and how is it different from index funds, before we move into more interesting questions like is this a good move for the crypto industry overall and what does this tell us about how the SEC will be treating crypto companies in 2024.

After we figure out what a Bitcoin ETF is, we get into a discussion about security best practices for DeFi protocols and other companies building onchain. Birb shares her best pieces of advice for organizations and for end users to avoid scams and hacks and gives us an inside look into what really goes on behind the scenes of some of these hacks.

If you enjoyed this episode, you can collect it as a podcast NFT here. There are unlimited editions available to collect at 0.00420 ETH each for the public or 0.00210 ETH for community members. Collecting an episode means you become part of the Rehash community, which allows you to nominate guests for future seasons of the podcast. Read more about joining the community here.

Resources and links referenced in this episode:

• OtterSec

Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts to help more people hear our conversations and learn about web3, DAOs, and the human side of emerging technology.

(Un)governance

Open Dollar goes against the grain of typical DAO governance structures embracing a philosophy of “Ungovernance”. While this labeling may seem counterintuitive for a DAO, it essentially means strategically limiting the scope of human influence to achieve, rather than prevent, true decentralization.

The downsides of centralization and their manifestations in the Web2 world are often cited by Web3 proponents as they make their cases for building decentralized products and governance structures. DAOs are widely viewed as the solution to centralized issues; however, DAOs are a relatively new, living concept which are not entirely immune to manipulation. A DAO with broad power over a protocol can be vulnerable to a variety of attacks including: treasury theft, hijacking attempts, aggressive governance accumulation, voting power manipulations, or just general infrastructural weakness.

To proactively address these challenges, ensure the longevity of the protocol, and imbue a desirable degree of predictability to the platform, Open Dollar is taking the approach of “minimal” governance. Ungovernance restricts the DAO from making disruptive changes to the protocol, i.e. minting tokens or altering fee distributions in a bid to prevent unwelcome surprises and reduce the risks of orchestrated attacks. Additionally, the protocol is non-upgradable, preventing it from being modified with malicious code while supporting developers with a stable technical foundation.

DAO functions

Ungovernance might seem limiting, so what can the DAO do? Despite efforts to reduce scope of the DAO’s control, its members are empowered to govern an array of functionalities, including but not limited to:

• Grant programs

• Additional audits

• Treasury management

• Adding new collateral types

• Prioritizing feature development

• Strategic investments and partnerships

• Liquidity mining and incentive programs

• Other proposals that don’t circumvent the DAO limitations

Open Dollar DAO participants (from individuals to their elected delegates) wield great influence over the future of the protocol regardless of Ungovernance’s safeguards. The DAO is charged with managing over 40% of the protocol’s supply of ODG tokens. The treasury receives 50% of the protocol’s fees while the remaining 50% is bought back from the market and burned.

Participation

The only requirement to participate in Open Dollar’s governance is to hold ODG tokens. Voting power is directly correlated with the amount of ODG a user holds (1 ODG = 1 vote). Users may passively participate by delegating voting power to a delegate of their choice to act on their behalf or participate as an individual by delegating to their address.

Creating proposals, voting, and delegating voting power is streamlined using Tally’s governance platform. Open Dollar is shortly launching a forum for proposal and governance discussions. For help or more information on using Tally, you can visit docs or ask questions in the Open Dollar or Tally Discord.

Disclaimer: be careful to only use official links and be wary of any impersonator accounts, scams, or phishing links that may be found on social media. Open Dollar has already reported at least one fake account on X and there will likely be more. Only interact with official, verified Open Dollar links.

Official links:

• The Open Dollar governance page:https://gov.opendollar.com/dao

• The Open Dollar delegates page:https://gov.opendollar.com/dao/delegates

• ODG Camelot Listing:https://info.camelot.exchange/pair/v3/0xf935263c9950eb2881ff58bd6a76c3d2564a78d5

• The Open Dollar homepage: https://www.opendollar.com/

• The Open Dollar docs: https://docs.opendollar.com/

• The Open Dollar linktree for all other official links:https://linktr.ee/opendollar

Over the past few months, we’ve spent a lot of time covering games in the MUD ecosystem like Primodium, Sky Strife, Network States, Words3, and others.

However, the MUD ecosystem is growing.

There’s a ton of exciting new games in the pipeline to go along with the those I mentioned above that have the potential to bring fun, innovative gameplay to us onchain gamers.

Today, we’ll look at four of these titles to see what they’re cooking, and what trends we can glean from them about the future of the MUD ecosystem.

Below, I’ll give an overview of each of these games, and then my impressions of them based on my experience playing or publicly available information.

In honor of my Los Angeles Chargers signing Jim Harbaugh as their head coach, we’ll call this latter section “First Takes.”

The face of the head coach of the Super Bowl 59 champions.

(I told you I’d have a Jim Harbaugh reference in here!)

Now…let’s get to it!

Everlon

Overview:

Everlon is an onchain sandbox created by Tenet.

The game is built using Zuse, a framework for creating worlds with digital physics.

At the highest level, digital physics are rules that govern a digital world, like its notions of space, time, and how objects interact with one another.

With Zuse, developers can implement their own set of digital physics by creating worlds known as “sandboxes.”

As the name suggests, sandboxes are highly composable primitives, as anyone can build objects, games, experiences and more within them.

While there are few details about it, based on available footage, Everlon appears to be a Minecraft-like voxel world, where users can do a variety of activities like farm, attack other players, post on in-world social media, and more.

The Tenet team will implement different components of Everlon’s digital physics over the course of 4 phases, which (per its website) is set to begin “soon.”

(For a much more in-depth explanation of digital physics, check out this video and this article).

First Takes:

Although I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the idea and implications of digital physics, I’m nonetheless very excited to try out Everlon.

It seems really cool, and well suited towards fostering experimentation and entertaining shenanigans, as anyone will be able to build or do whatever they want within it.

I’m also a big fan of the emphasis on autonomy, which should only help encourage developers to build interesting mods.

Furthermore, the world itself looks great - It’s one of the most visually appealing onchain games I’ve seen.

I’ll certainly be keeping tabs on the development of Everlon and any other sandboxes that get built with Zuse over the coming months.

Mississippi

Overview:

Mississippi is a roguelike PVP game.

A part of the Realms ecosystem, in Mississippi, your goal is to accumulate as much treasure as possible.

To do so, you’ll explore an underground cave system, where you’ll have to find and loot (pun intended) chests.

In addition, you can also battle other players to try to take their bounty (Though you’ll likely have to fend them off yourself).

The players who accumulate the most treasure will top the in-game leaderboard, and in the future, earn $LORDS tokens as a reward for doing so.

Mississippi is currently holding a public playtest on Redstone Holesky, Arbitrum Goerli, and the Mississippi Testnet.

Along with these EVM variants, the team is working on a Starknet deployment.

First Takes:

I enjoyed my experience playing Mississippi, though it (understandably) is not yet a finished product.

The game is easy to pick up, and I like the PVP component. It’s fun to compete against, battle, and merc other players.

However, more could be done to flesh out the combat system, as it’s very simplistic at the moment.

I’m also a fan of the art, as the playable characters (represented by NFTs that you mint at the beginning of the game) are really cute.

On the UX front, gameplay felt smooth due to the use of burner wallets.

Having said that, I did have some issues with load times, as I had to refresh my browser multiple times to successfully enter the game.

Aether Sands

Overview:

Aether Sands is an open-world colony-building game built by k0 Labs.

The game takes place following a “dimensional calamity” known as “The Fork,” where your goal is to rebuild civilization in a desert-like world.

The way you do is by accumulating resources like water, ore, and aether, using them to produce machines called harvesters, and defending your Temple, a structure that acts as your home base in the game.

Aether Sands held its first, 24-hour-long public playtest in December 2023, and is gearing up for its second on Redstone Holesky.

First Takes:

I’m very keen to get my hands on Aether Sands, as it looks like a lot of fun.

The game seems similar to Primodium, as like it, you’ll need to string together production sequences, allocate resources, and strategically defend your home turf.

I’m also a big fan of the graphics, and in particular the designs of structures like temples, harvesters, and vegetation.

Furthermore, Aether Sands seems to have quite a bit of lore, which (as readers of my piece on Network States know) I like to nerd out over.

I unfortunately missed the first playtest, but I’ll definitely be participating in the next one.

MOCS

Overview:

MOCS (Modular Onchain Spaceships) is a PVP roguelike game.

Built by the team behind Netherscape, MOCS and is intended to serve as an introduction to the gameplay mechanics for an upcoming RTS of the same name.

(For our purposes, we’ll focus on the roguelike).

In MOCS, you’ll stake an ERC-20 token (RED) to mint a Shinobi (ninja).

This Shinobi acts as your playable character, which you can then use to explore dungeons and battle others.

If you defeat your opponents, you’ll earn the RED tokens they staked, which you can then swap for other assets on DEXs.

MOCS is gearing up for its first playtest on Redstone Holesky, and will be using RedSwap to build out liquidity for Holesky ETH to facilitate RED <> ETH swaps.

First Takes:

I can’t wait to play MOCS, as the game looks like a lot of fun.

I love the idea of battles having real economic consequences, as players are able to take tokens from one another which they can sell for “real” assets like ETH.

(As anyone who tried to mint a Sky Strife season pass knows, Holesky ETH is money.)

As a result, this stake-to-play mechanism should add a ton of intensity to the game, and it’s also cool to see MOCS leveraging DeFi primitives on Redstone.

While its core gameplay caught my attention, I do think the game’s UI looks a bit intimidating and could be hard to navigate.

Regardless, I signed up for their playtest and will be doing what I can to get everyone’s ETH!

Other Games to Watch

There are several other up-and-coming MUD games that I’m keeping an eye on, but didn’t get the chance to cover in-depth in this piece.

These include:

• Imminent Solace, an onchain war-simulator.

• CardCraft, a trading-card-game (TCG).

• ChaqerRTS, a real-time-strategy game.

I’d highly recommend checking out and keeping tabs on these games too!

The Future of MUD is Bright

As you can see, there’s a lot of cool new games coming down the MUD pipeline.

I think Everlon, Mississippi, Aether Sands, and MOCS all have big potential and bring innovative design features, gameplay, and mechanisms to the digital table.

While these four games are pretty different from one another, we can still see a few common trends among them.

For starters, most of these games have a PVP component.

This is not too surprising, and falls in line with many of the other MUD games we’ve seen.

I’m a big fan of this, as I usually have more fun with PVP games than PVE, and enjoy the competition they bring (especially when crypto is on the line).

In addition, based on the above quartet, art design across games is improving dramatically.

This is great to see, as higher quality graphics will go along way towards immersing players.

Finally, on a deeper level, games are leveraging the unique affordances that come with being fully onchain.

For instance, Everlon is leaning into composability and autonomy, as anyone can build whatever mod they wish in the sandbox without permission.

Meanwhile, Mississippi and MOCS are tapping into blockchain-enabled financialization to enhance their gameplay.

I’m very encouraged to see this, as I’m in the camp that the space will attract more players by creating novel experiences that are only possible onchain versus trying to recreate Web2 ones.

Having said all this, it’s worth noting that these four (and many other) MUD games still have a ways to go before launching on mainnet, or even testnet.

The road ahead is long.

But, the light at the end of the tunnel is certainly bright.