For those interested in catching back up on NFT Worlds and for the devoted fans alike, in this piece I’ll attempt to fill the gap for everything there is to know heading into 2023. I’ve invested in, followed and bore witness to the project’s ups and downs since December 2021, so I’m in probably as good a position as any to tell the story. To sum up where we are, think of it like this:

It’s a David and Goliath story that I can get behind and one that I believe is representative of the industry’s innovation and challenge to the status quo. There has been plenty to deal with, but with anything, success is the best revenge.

Read this and learn why I think NFT Worlds will continue to rise from the ashes and represent one of the more trusted and successful Web3 gaming brands moving forward.

NFT Worlds History

For a detailed rundown on the Minecraft fallout, read War of the (NFT) Worlds which provides everything you need to know. Since the ban, NFT Worlds has set out on creating its own independent game engine apart from Minecraft, which will be discussed later in this piece. As it otherwise concerns NFT Worlds’ history, see below for a recap on what NFT Worlds is, previous player engagement and historic price action which are all important to recall before we look toward the future.

What NFT Worlds Is

Let’s first refresh on what NFT Worlds is. It is not a game per se, but rather a creator platform for other developers to build upon. There are 10,000 unique worlds, and by owning one you own the rights to do whatever you want to do with it within the NFT Worlds ecosystem. Create in-game experiences, build cities or transform it into anything you imagine — all in a 3D voxel and massively multiplayer setting.

Sound familiar? Probably, as it was initially built on top of Minecraft which inherently facilitates the same. What NFT Worlds adds is the Web3 component — e.g., the railings for a frictionless token economy, item (NFT) marketplace, play-to-earn (P2E) opportunities and much more. A true Web3 metaverse and gaming economy interlinked by 10,000 unique yet interconnected worlds all under the same umbrella and powered by $WRLD.

Is there an end market for this type of platform / creator-focused ecosystem? Considering that Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time and averaged over 170 million active monthly players in 2022, I would say yes. Although it’s not appropriate to measure against such an established brand with clear first-mover advantage, it’s obvious the idea works. The question is whether there is product-market fit and sufficient demand for NFT Worlds’ Web3 component. Unlike a lot of Minecraft clones that have emerged over the years, NFT Worlds has a built-in and loyal community following which is an advantage to start. However, whether the ecosystem can be structured in a way that retains users over the long run is unknown, which is also an open question for other metaverses more broadly.

Previous Player Engagement

As we await the launch of NFT Worlds’ new game client in 2023, we can look at player engagement earlier in 2022 to get an understanding of what to expect once the new version goes live. Prior to the Minecraft ban, NFT Worlds actually experienced a decent degree of traction by metaverse standards, which for context is a very low bar. In May 2022, the platform estimated it had brought in nearly 60,000 unique players, with 34,000 of these being first-time crypto users since February. The monthly active player count had just surpassed Decentraland and The Sandbox (two of the largest metaverses) and player growth was clearly accelerating month over month, even with limited P2E opportunities available. Granted, these are very low numbers by any gaming standard, but given the aforementioned competitors have maintained $1 billion+ ecosystems with less, it’s something to note and keep in mind.

Price Action — $WRLD Token and Land Prices

Token price action and the team’s stance toward it is a touchy subject for a variety of reasons, not least of which concerns legal. For a detailed breakdown regarding the regulatory uncertainty all projects are facing, I recommend reading Utility Tokens as Securities — Analyzing the LBRY Decision.

For what you need to know, $WRLD is the utility token that powers the NFT Worlds ecosystem, and it was obliterated over the last 12 months. It touched around $0.58 (over $200mm market cap) at its peak in February 2022 and proceeded to fall as low as $0.005 (sub $3mm market cap) for months to close out the year. This was a 99% drop and brutal for even alt coin standards. The token has recovered to over a cent (~$10mm market cap) as of writing, but it still represents a precipitous drop from the high.

Land in the NFT Worlds ecosystem followed a similar trajectory, falling from a peak floor price of ~20ETH at a time when ETH was nearly $3,000 in February 2022 to the ~0.6 ETH range for most of the latter half of the year.

Granted, part of the reason for the decline is macro. Although we’ve seen a recent rebound, over the latter half of 2022 horrible macroeconomic conditions (high inflation, recession looming), regulatory threats, fallout from FTX’s collapse (among others) and a general lack of innovation have all contributed to dying hype and extremely low volume in the NFT space. These conditions adversely affected nearly every project, although profile picture (PFP) collections as well as gaming/metaverse projects still in development (like NFT Worlds) were particularly hit.

However, the other part of the price equation is unique to NFT Worlds. In March 2022, the project launched staking for NFT World owners, allowing them to stake their worlds and earn daily $WRLD in the process. Staking is just one component of the overall P2E token economy that NFT Worlds envisions. For example, to the extent there is too much demand or lock-up for in-game $WRLD tokens, staking provides another lever for new supply to enter the ecosystem — similar to the Fed’s management of monetary policy in the US.

The only issue — no in-game demand for $WRLD existed then, and still does not exist to this day. A lot of this was out of the team’s control, as the Minecraft ban set back the launch of the project’s marketplace and other core in-game functions that were soon to be released. However, what has resulted is there being approximately 1 million $WRLD pumped into the ecosystem daily for nearly a year now, with zero in-game utility to counteract the increasing supply. In-game demand for $WRLD will come, but staking was launched too early and unfortunately never paused when delays occurred.

For context, as of writing, adding 1 million $WRLD daily increases total supply by less than .15%, so it’s not a wildly dilutive situation. However, the slow trickle of selling from new supply over the course of a year with zero reason to purchase the token aside from speculation or anticipation of the game’s release largely contributed to the ~99% drop in price.

Where NFT Worlds Is Now

Having refreshed on NFT Worlds’ history, let’s next take a look at where the project is now.

Leadership

NFT Worlds leadership has not changed since the beginning, starting and ending with @iamarkdev and @Temptranquil. Exact identities are not known but they are not anonymous and an early interview with the two of them can be found here. Whereas Temptranquil does the heavy-lifting on operations and day-to-day, ArkDev is the brainchild behind most of the technology and infrastructure. The latter is a bit of a technical/coding wunderkind in the space, receiving consistently high praise from other top devs particularly for the speed at which he works. Some background on ArkDev’s professional history and achievements can be found here.

New Game Engine

As noted before, following the July 2022 Minecraft ban NFT Worlds set out on creating their own similar game and platform based on many of the core mechanics of Minecraft, but with new modernized features and built-in Web3 infrastructure. Here is the formal statement provided at the time outlining this vision.

It is currently being developed from the ground up in Rust programming language by a team of seven full-time developers/engineers, and once completed game access will be 100% free for players with no game purchase paywalls like in Minecraft. Although lean and details are minimal, some of these devs also apparently have extensive Minecraft modding experience.

From an NFT Worlds developer’s perspective, the new game engine is also planned to be backwards compatible with Minecraft, allowing for a smooth transition for previous NFT Worlds creator builds to port over.

As for the timing of launch, ArkDev recently indicated on Discord that the team is ideally targeting Q2 2023 for the first playable public version, although take this prediction with a grain of salt as gaming development is historically hard to predict. However, with the recent reveal of the game’s 1st edition loot boxes containing playable skins (with many more to come), clear progress is being made.

WRLD Name Service

WRLD Name Service is currently a very minor part of the NFT Worlds ecosystem particularly since the game engine isn’t live, but it’s worth a brief mention to not undermine what this team is capable of. Think of this service as an extension of ENS (.eth) domains but gamer-focused (.wrld), applying broadly across different metaverses and blockchain games. It’s almost like a decentralized version of something like a Steam profile with ENS functionality, tracking gamer achievements, progress, stats and more across any games played. More details can be found here.

Another huge gaming ecosystem called Treasure recently generated a lot of buzz for creating something similar (see TreasureTags). ArkDev and team did it eight months earlier as a side project with broader functionality — just something to note.

MetaFab

To date, if there is any one thing to point to that best demonstrates the potential of the NFT Worlds team, it is MetaFab.

MetaFab is a Web3 gaming infrastructure platform that provides the tools for traditional and blockchain gaming developers alike to seamlessly integrate their products into Web3 technology. Infrastructure is currently a big hurdle standing in the way of mass Web3 gaming adoption — see Looking Under the Hood at Blockchain Gaming for a detailed read. MetaFab addresses this by offering a range of proven and battle-tested APIs for other gaming ecosystems and developers to create frictionless Web3 experiences for their players. We’re talking gasless transactions, built-in wallets, ecosystem profiles and much more. Major partnerships with Fantom, Treasure and Arbitrum have already been announced, and RTFKT’s CTO Samuel Cardillo has even joined as an advisor.

How is it possible that ArkDev and team could have launched this service in September 2022 while also balancing the work in building an entirely new game engine? The answer — much of the work was already done as a result of creating NFT Worlds, which was built using MetaFab’s capabilities all along. The team merely opened up NFT Worlds’ tech publicly under MetaFab’s guise for the benefit of the Web3 gaming ecosystem as a whole. Better yet, the tech is free to use (read its Pricing & Business Model for how), so it is hard to argue against the team’s intentions here.

So how does opening NFT Worlds’ tech and infrastructure to the broader community through MetaFab benefit NFT Worlds itself? This is a question that is asked a lot, and the answer is that it’s an indirect, long-term play.

For one, it brings way more eyes and partners loosely under the NFT Worlds umbrella than ever could have been imagined had the team kept the ecosystem closed. None of the aforementioned partners may ever purchase an NFT Worlds for their communities, but now they are inextricably linked not only to its tech but also the guidance of its founders. The more gamers these other ecosystems bring in the better as well, as more Web3 gamers equals more opportunity for NFT Worlds. These are indirect benefits, but a net plus all things considered.

Secondly, opening up the tech provides more refinement for NFT Worlds’ infrastructure prior to launch. Additional MetaFab capabilities and upgrades seem to come out almost weekly (recent example), and working out any bugs in advance through others using the tech only improves NFT Worlds’ offerings once live.

For those also wondering, although $WRLD is intended to be the native and only currency used within NFT Worlds, MetaFab is not restricted to any one token — developers can create their own when using its tooling. However, $WRLD is also supported, meaning developers can build and interact with the MetaFab APIs on top of $WRLD if they so choose. The latter may make sense for a subset of developers who are looking for an industry-tested and reliable in-game currency instead of deploying, funding, and maintaining their own.

Lastly, investors have poured billions into Web3 gaming over the past couple years. As a picks-and-shovel infrastructure play (as opposed to a speculative token investment), I imagine many investors would jump at the opportunity to partner with a project like MetaFab, even from a strategic standpoint given low prospects for monetization in the near term. Although the team is in no rush to partner, they have indicated an interest in doing so down the line, so who knows. Interestingly, the MetaFab Twitter account only follows 12 people, and two of those people focus on gaming at a16z.

Runway

Unfortunately, given the recent crypto bear many projects have had to shut down (read here for an example of recent struggles that EtherOrcs is facing). No matter how good an idea, funding can always get in the way of success.

With respect to NFT Worlds, it has been indicated that the team has a multi-million dollar warchest to sustain development over a few years. Most of this funding came from royalties (9.5%) on secondary NFT Worlds trading on OpenSea, as well as the NFT Worlds Genesis Avatars mint, which minted ~11,900 avatars (0.4 ETH each) that are to eventually be used as playable characters within the NFT Worlds ecosystem. Nothing more is known, but from the team’s output to date there is no reason to believe they are strapped for cash at the moment.

Looking Into the Future

NFT Worlds has a busy and eventful 2023 ahead of itself, not least of which hopefully includes the successful launch of its new game engine. However, there are still plenty of unknowns ahead, a few of which are highlighted below.

NFT Worlds Rebrand

It’s no secret there’s a certain stigma associated with the word “NFT,” much of which comes from general misunderstanding and the media’s sensationalized portrayal of scams in the industry. As a result, the team announced it will be rebranding the platform to something more public-friendly once the new game engine is close to going live. We don’t know what the new name will be, but expect it to be something similar to “Worlds” or “MetaWorlds.”

A lesser-known fact is some of the talent NFT Worlds has on the design side as well, led by lead designer Dann Petty. Silicon Valley pioneer and ex-Google/Airbnb/Adobe, expect Dann to be heavily involved in a lot of the new looks to come. Check out some of his work here.

Tokenomics 2.0

Play-to-earn (P2E) will play a component in the NFT Worlds ecosystem once the game client launches and the team has not shied away from meeting the challenge of creating a sustainable token economy despite broader industry struggles to date.

Although subject to change, the team provided a taste of what’s to come with revamped tokenomics in late July 2022. This article will not get into the weeds of token allocation and the like, so I recommend reading through the 20 or so pages in the report to get a high-level overview of the team’s plans. The million-dollar question is how to structure a proper balance between token supply and demand. Supply will continue through NFT World staking and eventually P2E flow to incentive and reward gameplay. Whether the various token sinks proposed can counteract this supply is a huge unknown, but strategies include $LP-$WRLD staking (in return for vote-escrowed governance tokens), a $WRLD marketplace, loot crates, guilds, player level systems and more. The team has studied up on the topic and received input from Wolves DAO and other smart minds in the space — it will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

It should also be noted here that the original $WRLD token was upgraded to $WRLD v2 in December 2022. Do not fear which of these tokens you hold. $WRLD v1 will forever be exchangeable for $WRLD v2 at a 1:1.05 rate to incentive conversion (see here to convert). Although $WRLD v1 has more liquidity than v2 at the moment, it is $WRLD v2 that will be supported in the game, so it’s anticipated the majority of the liquidity will convert over as game launch approaches. The conversion to $WRLD v2 was voted on and approved by community members and originally proposed by the NFT Worlds team to enhance $WRLD’s capabilities for game-related and other uses.

Creator Development

It’s important to remember that NFT Worlds is a creator platform and for that reason also partly depends on others to develop engaging experience on it in order to succeed. Prior to the Minecraft ban there were 100+ announced projects building within the ecosystem, some of which had already launched. How many of these projects are still around a year later come the new game client remains a mystery, although we know certain top projects like White Sands and Collecting Meta (formerly SkuxxVerse) have not stopped building.

Despite the turn of events, separating from Minecraft also comes with its benefits. Building on top of Minecraft came with various end user restrictions that prevented certain content like gambling, pay-to-win, advertising, building worlds with IP for big brands and other things (to name a few). Without these restrictions the possibilities for each world become that much greater and free.

Macro Trends

I personally believe Web3 gaming will be a major catalyst for the next wave of public adoption in the space. Numerous quality games like NFT Worlds are soon coming to market after years of development, and I think people underestimate the hysteria that may come with millions of new users entering the space in such a short amount of time. We’ve seen it before with other major trends, and Web3 gaming’s time has yet to come. Although this will lead to bubbles with good and bad gaming ecosystems alike probably exploding and subsequently crashing with unrealistic valuations, I see it as the beginning of a longer-term shift toward redefining digital property ownership and value sharing within games. Lasting winners will emerge, and there is a chance NFT Worlds is one of them.

At the same time, macro risks are present, which can sink crypto markets as a whole no matter the fundamentals. We’re in the middle of an uncertain economy, and an overhang of regulatory uncertainty on the industry exists as a result of recent SEC investigations and actions. The crypto industry as a whole is also still experiencing the aftershocks of FTX’s collapse, which will not soon be forgotten. Although gaming has been touted as more recession-proof than other industries, Web3 gaming is not yet proven and is still very much susceptible to these broader trends.

Final Words

Plenty has been said in this piece, and I hope it has been helpful for those looking to catch up on the project. Most of the information found here is scattered over a year’s worth of tweets and updates, so I get how frustrating it can be if you’re otherwise trying to catch up with little context or history.

I hate to associate token price or NFT value with the success of a project, as there are so many other metrics to gauge success such as daily active users (DAUs) and wallets created. However, the two are inextricably connected as we know of Web3 gaming today. As I view NFT Worlds within the broader metaverse and Web3 gaming ecosystem, I can’t help but wonder whether this project is being overlooked. To the extent NFT Worlds delivers on its new game client and even achieves its former glory in terms of player adoption and traction, a ~$10 million token economy pales in comparison to many of its peers who have much less of a proven script (i.e., the Minecraft formula). Some points for comparison as of writing — Treasure/$MAGIC ($310 million), The Sandbox/$SAND ($1.1 billion), Decentraland/$MANA ($1.26 billion) and ApeCoin/$APE ($1.93 billion). And this is after these respective ecosystems have similarly fallen from grace.

This is not financial advice in any way and who’s to say these other platforms are not currently overvalued, but the disparity is striking given the promise of NFT Worlds and its comparative standing next to these other ecosystems less than a year ago.