NAB
There’s impatience among metaverse watchers that the thing
hasn’t been built yet.
article here
Vice calls out The Sandbox and Decentraland as
being bare-bones, largely empty and janky, and yet, according
to Decrypt, still overrun with corporate promotions from brands
such as Adidas.
There are also groups and consortia attempting to agree on
standards as the first building blocks to scaling between metauniverses, as
detailed by Streaming Media.
But Vice, and others, have latched onto a product — a
game — that’s been under our noses all along.
Minecraft.
As digital currency market data provider FTFX points
out, some of Minecraft’s software is open source, meaning that anyone with the
right technical knowledge can build on it. And Minecraft doesn’t have an
established economy like competitor Roblox, which has a robust virtual
marketplace and its own (non-crypto) digital currency called Robux.
In recent months a project called NFT Worlds has established
itself on Minecraft’s servers, offering gamers the chance to buy one of 10,000
unique NFTs related to Minecraft.
An NFT Worlds white paper describes the entity as
“a fully decentralized, fully customizable, community-driven, play to earn
gaming platform,” and explains that each NFT contains a “world seed,” which is
a code that generates a Minecraft world.
In other words, you can now buy and own, via NFT, a virtual
piece of land in Minecraft. These assets vary in appearance from snowy tundra
to forest islands to massive volcanoes.
Vice explains that if you want your world to be a
metaverse destination, you can host your own server. NFT Worlds claims to have
“verified” builders on tap to help NFT holders build up their Minecraft
experiences.
To get verified, teams of builders must purchase a world at
the floor price (currently $45,000) to show they’re serious. FTFX pins the cost
at 14.5 Ethereum, or about $38,150, but the Vice article is more
current. The ante was just $26,000 in February, showing that property price
inflation is rising.
If that seems like a lot of money to invest in a piece of
real estate that only exists online, then consider that The Sandbox (a
competing online game) often commands much higher prices. Back in December,
someone paid $450,000 for a small piece of virtual land next to rapper Snoop
Dogg’s property in The Sandbox, reports FTFX.
According to NFT Worlds’ co-founder, who goes by the moniker
ArkDev, Minecraft was the obvious choice to build the metaverse on top of
because it works, and because it already has a “thriving ecosystem” of mods,
user-generated game modes, cosmetic items, and maps.
Quoting the project’s documentation, ArkDev tells Vice,
“We didn’t want to have to ‘reinvent the wheel’ by creating our own unproven
game from scratch, while also having to innovate on the NFT integration and
decentralized metaverse side of the platform we envisioned. This would take far
too long to deliver on.”
Cunningly, NFT Worlds has layered its own cryptocurrency
called $WRLD on top of everything. According to Vice, “the idea is for
$WRLD to be the plug-and-play currency for all NFT Worlds, which players can
earn in bespoke “play-to-earn” games built in Minecraft and pay to
world owners for various things.”
NFT Worlds isn’t alone in seeing Minecraft as a shortcut to
the metaverse. Critterz is an NFT project where token ownership lets
users buy plots of land in an “exclusive” Minecraft server and earn more tokens
for in-game time.
Another project called “Survival Game NFT” invites players
to purchase unique tokens in order to participate in play-to-earn games in “our
private, masterfully-crafted Minecraft Server,” according to a post on Medium.
So what does Microsoft have to say about all this? Remember,
the technology giant acquired Minecraft’s developer Mojang Studios for $2.5
billion in 2014. Since then, the game’s player base has grown to more than 141
million monthly active users.
Microsoft appears to be taking a look-and-see approach,
content to see how this experiment unfolds, perhaps judging whether NFT Worlds
can be incorporated into its newly acquired $69 billion asset of Activision
Blizzard.
At the bottom of its website, NFT Worlds features the
disclaimer: “NFT Worlds is in no way associated with, endorsed by, or a partner
of Minecraft, Mojang, Microsoft or any related parties.” The whitepaper adds
that the team believes NFT Worlds falls under “transformative fair use.”
NFT Worlds co-founder Temptranquil told FTFX, “They’re
watching us from the sidelines — not like a formal green light — but I think in
their eyes, we’re the best case scenario for someone using their product.”
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