“HyperPay Focus” section 19: Unlock Web3.0, talk to the popular blockchain game of Metaverse
“HyperPay Focus” section 19 AMA was held on September 1st at 11: 00 in HyperPayWallet Official Telegram(https://t.me/HyperPay_En). The theme of the special session is “ Into the Metaverse(1st phase): Unlock Web3.0, talk to the popular blockchain game of Metaverse”. HyperPay invited Lee Jenkins, the Head of Product at WAX, Stacy Neale, the Head of Communications at Alien Worlds and Bella Zhang, Chinese Community Manager at Big Time to share their views.
The Following is the Content of AMA
1. Please give a brief introduction to your respective projects and the current progress. (WAX, Alien worlds, Big Time)
Lee Jenkins: At a high level, WAX is the leading NFT network and has facilitated the trade of millions NFTs from partners such as Topps (Major League Baseball), Capcom (Street Fighter), Funko, Atari, Sony’s Funimation, famous films, such as SAW and The Princess Bride, world-renowned entertainers, such as Deadmau5, Weezer and William Shatner, and many more.
WAX operates as a full ecosystem for dApps, games and NFTs, and is already the most used blockchain in the world. According to https://dappradar.com/industry-overview, WAX has over 325k daily users and more than 15 million daily transactions. The WAX Cloud Wallet is the most used blockchain wallet in the world with more than 6 million accounts (https://wax.bloks.io/). WAX has many of the top dapps in the world for total users, such as Alien Worlds and Atomic Assets. WAX has many of the top NFT marketplaces in the world for total users, such as Atomic Market and NeftyBlocks. WAX has many of the top blockchain games in the world, such as Alien Worlds, R-Planet, Kolobok Adventures, Prospectors, and many emerging play-to-earn games.
Stacy Neale: Alien Worlds is an NFT Social Metaverse, whereby NFTs are leveraged as game pieces with utility and functionality in the game. In addition to non-fungible tokens, we also have the fungible token Trilium (TLM), a scarce resource which players currently can mine and stake. Our NFTs and the gaming logic are on the WAX blockchain; the token itself is also on Ethereum, and we also have gaming logic and NFTs on Binance Smart Chain. Soon, players will be able to stake TLM to go on Missions, participate in voting, and much more. We have a dynamic road map that includes the development of Planet DAOs which will have their own governance, governance tokens, and tokenomics.
Bella Zhang: Big Time Studios is a new company working to make NFTs a mainstay of the gaming industry. We’ve built some tech to make crypto-based items accessible, and as a way to go to market we’re eating our own dog food and creating a first-party game: Big Time, a co-op action RPG where players battle across history to save the universe from the company that owns time. It’s an opportunity for gamers to have a lot of fun and collect fascinating artifacts from throughout time and space.
The game also features Time Machines, your private pocket universe that you can decorate, hang out with friends, and host your own events. Big Time will be a very social game, with open areas for socializing and showing off your coolest NFT gear!
The game has been in development since 2020, and we’re targeting an early 2022 Early Access launch.
2. What is the Metaverse? What unique value can Metaverse create? (WAX)
Lee Jenkins: A metaverse is simply a virtual environment where people can shop, work, play, socialize and be entertained. This may or may not include VR or AR. Fortnite, for example, is a widely used metaverse that neither uses VR nor AR. But when most people think of the metaverse, they picture a world similar to that depicted in Ready Player One. As commerce is likely always going to be a significant part of metaverses, NFTs seem to be a natural fit for this type of commerce.
3. As a popular blockchain game project of Metaverse, it can stand out among many blockchain games. What do you think your main advantage is? (Alien worlds, Big Time)
Stacy Neale: One of the wonderful things about the Alien Worlds Metaverse is that it is primarily community-built. Outside of the core NFTs and gameplay, it is the imaginations of and relationships within our communities that largely define the Metaverse. As the gameplay mechanics develop and broaden the Metaverse, opportunities will increase for our Explorer Communities to grow, engage, incentivize, and reward. Even outside of the core gameplay, our communities are already creating games and engagement opportunities of their own. Given that the game will expand to include Planet DAOs with their own autonomy and governance, it is important to the Federation and the Alien Worlds team that the Communities play an integral role in defining the ecosystem of the Alien Worlds Metaverse, rather than a central authority or single entity.
Bella Zhang: Our founder Ari has been working for the adoption of blockchain and games for about 4 years now. And the BigTime team is made of game industry veterans from the likes of Epic Games, Blizzard, EA, Riot, and Zynga. Individually, we’ve contributed to some of the best-loved franchises in gaming history, including Fortnite, God of War, Call of Duty, and Overwatch just to name a few. Together, we aim to leverage our strengths to build something new and groundbreaking. Our fully remote team combines artistic prowess, technical innovation, and business leadership to set new standards in gaming.
4. 【WAX】
According to ClimateCare.org, WAX has already offset 211 tonnes of CO2 as of May 21, and energy consumption on the blockchain extraordinarily low. Officially making it the only carbon-neutral NFT blockchain on the market. Would you tell us about WAX’s environmental protection practices and actions?
Lee Jenkins: It all starts with WAX’s proof of stake architecture. As opposed to proof of work systems, which are inefficient from an energy usage standpoint due to the competition between miners to process transactions, WAX’s proof of stake architecture avoids the battle for computing power dominance. So the operation of the blockchain is highly efficient in that it only requires the exact amount of energy needed to power it without the waste that comes with proof of work competition. As a result, WAX is more than 100,000x more energy-efficient than Ethereum. WAX then further offsets carbon usage in two additional ways. First, WAX sells carbon impact NFTs, and every $1 in NFT value for those NFTs corresponds to the planting of one tree sapling by the National Forest Foundation. Each one of those trees planted will sequester approximately 1 ton of CO2 over its lifetime. Second, WAX offers vIRLs, which are NFTs linked to real-world products and services that separate ownership from physical possession. vIRLs can offset the environmental impact of the growth in e-commerce by reducing millions of package deliveries. Fewer deliveries translate into fewer delivery truck rolls and less landfill-destined packaging material required to ship products.
In the past three months, Gamefi has received a lot of attention. In terms of user scale and number growth, WAX In this track has made a great contribution, so what is the reason why Wax blockchain games are so popular?
Lee Jenkins: It really comes down to several factors. First, WAX has already aggregated the largest blockchain audience in the world with more than 6 million blockchain accounts and hundreds of thousands of daily active users. And having a critical mass of users in the community is going to be required for any game to be successful. A couple additional factors are low cost and high speed. WAX transactions are nearly instant and nearly free. This is essential for running a game on a blockchain as slow speeds or high gas fees are just not compatible with running a popular game. WAX’s approach to NFTs has also been extremely helpful in making our blockchain popular for games. As opposed to the 1 of 1 strategy employed by most other NFT platforms, WAX instead focused on the mass market with most NFTs being bought and sold in microtransactions of less than $10 each. That type of behavior is much better suited to building a successful gaming community than having a tiny audience spending large amounts on 1 of 1 NFTs.
5. 【Alien Worlds】
Alien Worlds’ NFT market has considerable trading volume. could you share how these gameplays(Game+NFT+Defi) are perfectly combined?
Stacy Neale: There are sophisticated underlying mechanics for different types of users’ values to align. The whitepaper overviews how NFTs are used in gameplay to produce demand through a variety of ways, such as mining, shining, and land ownership. Many players state that they’ve received an NFT from another player to either get going in the game, or as an incentive or reward. The accessibility of the NFTs as game pieces on the WAX blockchain allows for quick and easy transfer, and to rapidly engage in one’s community through rewards. The next roadmap element to be released will be Missions, which is a Defi-based game that will reward players with TLM tokens and NFTs. These will have added utility throughout the Metaverse.
I think the design of the planet DAO on Alien Worlds is very interesting, could you talk to us about the design concept of this part?
Stacy Neale: A Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is interchangeable with the term “Planet” in Alien Worlds. These Planets are the home bases for different communities and they will be built by the communities. Through engagement, they will be able to distribute their stores of value (Planetary pot and various community tokens and NFTs) to projects that help the planets’ growth through Proposals and Bounties. As the Planet DAOs grow and evolve, the Federation will have less and less involvement in its everyday workings. The Planets will be run by the players of the game who are voted as trusted community members to be leaders. This is intentional, as we want these structures of the game to give autonomy and power to players and Communities so they can decide how they want to thrive and build better worlds. What we’re doing with the DAOs has never been done before in gaming. You can send a free form proposal and have voted-in custodians decide what to do. In this way, the game is so much more than a game. Individuals are learning about blockchain technology — decentralized governance, consensus mechanisms, smart contracts, etc. — all while forming relationships and playing a game!
6. 【Big time】
Could you briefly introduce the worldview of Big Time?
Bella Zhang: In Big Time, you play as a time traveler who’s been summoned to the end of the universe, to take part in the greatest adventure in human history. Your journey will send you to the farthest reaches of time and space, where you’ll encounter ancient mysteries, terrifying dangers, and even a few familiar faces. Unwilling to surrender to fate, the greatest minds from history gather in Time’s End. Together, they found EVERMORE ACADEMY — an institution devoted to the defense of time itself. Leading this noble endeavor is none other than ALBERT EINSTEIN, the famed scientist who serves as Evermore’s headmaster. Einstein’s intelligence and determination prove indispensable as he assembles the greatest heroes ever known to tackle the most important mission of their lives.
We’re eager to share more details about this journey over the coming months. History is a big place after all, and we’ve only begun to explore the possibilities. As always… keep an eye on our social media channels for the latest updates. We’ll see you in the future.
The game is not officially launched yet, could you tell us about the current progress? And what is the bonus for early game players?
Bella Zhang: We announced the game back in May, at which point we started to grow our community to over 200k+ signups and 100k+ Discord members. We’ve had two NFTs sales in July and August, via Binance NFT, where VIP passes and Mystery Boxes sold right away.
The VIP passes grant players early access to the game, and in turn to the NFT drops that will be available only to those inside of the game. Later in the year, we will introduce in-game items (wearables, decoratives, mounts, etc) and Time Machines, our take on virtual real estate.
I once saw this sentence in Big Time’s blog: “NFT will change the game”, Could you share with us your interpretation of this sentence?
Bella Zhang: 80% of the revenue of games is through the sale of in-game items, so developers rely heavily on the sale of virtual items. But for traditional games, these items (such as avatar wearables) that everyone is paying for do not confer ownership rights to players, preventing them from gifting, trading, lending, and borrowing against those items. NFTs are property rights that unlock said use cases, turning players into owners of their loot. Big Time is our attempt at making NFT-enabled games as accessible and fun to play as the games you’d encounter on Steam.
“HyperPay Focus” is a high-end live dialogue column in the blockchain vertical field created by the HyperPay team. The column will invite industry leaders, KOLs, technology giants, potential and star projects to share industry hot spots, the latest technology, and market conditions. Pay attention to the focus of the industry and discuss the layout and future development of the industry.
