tl;dr
Blockchain Project Hytopia Pivots in Wake of Minecraft Ban on NFTs When Minecraft announced that it would ban NFTs from one of the world’s biggest games in 2022, one blockchain project in particular took the hardest hit: NFT Worlds. Two years later, the rebranded Hytopia is now aiming to...
Blockchain Project Hytopia Pivots in Wake of Minecraft Ban on NFTs
When Minecraft announced that it would ban NFTs from one of the world’s biggest games in 2022, one blockchain project in particular took the hardest hit: NFT Worlds. Two years later, the rebranded Hytopia is now aiming to make a big splash on its own—and maybe take some of the shine off of the Web2 gaming smash.
With a customized Minecraft server as its home world, NFT Worlds had minted and sold scarce chunks of in-game land as NFTs on Ethereum scaling network Polygon. They’d sold for as much as tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of ETH on secondary marketplaces, generating some $163 million worth of trading volume before the ban was announced.
NFT Worlds faced mockery in some corners, as critics said that of course Minecraft wouldn’t let third-party creators monetize in-game content. But as pseudonymous NFT Worlds co-founder ArkDev told Decrypt’s GG this week that the game’s end user licensing agreement (EULA) didn’t specifically prohibit using crypto technologies on third-party servers at the time. Instead of folding, though, NFT Worlds pivoted.
Since then, the project started building its own game rather than rely on one from a centralized giant with a closed ecosystem. The rebranded game, Hytopia, is nearing release—and its creators are also launching their own chain, Hychain, for other game studios to build on. And it has a token, too.
Hytopia will take a sizable step in that direction this weekend with the launch of a Hychain Guardian Node sale, similar in approach to the model employed by Xai, a layer-3 gaming chain on Ethereum scaling network Arbitrum that launched a huge airdrop in January that benefited node key owners.
Hychain will sell NFT-based Guardian Node keys starting Saturday at a price of 0.1 ETH (about $340), though the price will gradually increase over time as each tier of keys is sold. A total of 50,000 such keys will be made available, and users who operate the network software will be eligible for a share of 250 million TOPIA reward tokens over the next three years. Guardian Node operators also receive a share of 25% of all network transaction fees.
After the node sale, it won’t be long before Hytopia itself becomes playable: ArkDev estimated a beta launch in early April. He described Hytopia as a cross between Minecraft and one of the other most popular games in the world: Roblox, a free-to-play platform that lets players create and share their own games, with millions of available options.
Hytopia will look and feel like Minecraft, with a similar blocky, pixelated voxel vibe, but with more flexibility to play and create within the world. As with Roblox, players will be able to create and share their own game and worlds in Hytopia. And after the beta period, Hytopia will be freely open and available for anyone to play—no NFT required.
Hytopia may not easily shake its Minecraft association, but ArkDev hopes that it can prove out a model for supporting in-game item trades that typically happen in black markets for Web2 titles. With blockchain, such trades could happen within the game and give a cut of sales to the developer. If that concept takes hold, he thinks Web2 devs will seriously consider the tech.
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