This overview is NOT financial advice. Please do your own research and make wise financial decisions!
This article is written as a general overview of the project and is outlined in chronological order for the most part. Certain aspects may or will be outdated as you will read.
Table of Contents
At A Glance
NFT Worlds is the most capable & flexible metaverse platform. Each NFT World is an explorable, limitless world that can be built into anything you can imagine. NFT Worlds are massively multiplayer, have extensive developer APIs, are decentralized, and more.
NFT Worlds
Introduction
The NFT Worlds public mint was launched on October 5th, 2021 as a free mint with a 10,000 total supply and quickly sold out amidst a heavy gas war. Each NFT represents a unique, near-infinite world seed utilizing the immensely popular game Minecraft1 as the platform for owners to build and play on. Each world comes with its’ own set of unique traits, biomes, materials with varying rarities.
1 Due to recent news from Minecraft in July 2022, which has prohibited the use of NFTs on its platform, NFT Worlds is no longer utilizing Minecraft as their platform
Upon further development, these worlds would eventually become multiplayer-enabled, interconnected via a portal system, rentable with the proprietary $WRLD token, and many more advancements from creators and projects building on the NFT Worlds platform.
Launching as a main competitor to metaverse projects The Sandbox and Decentraland, NFT Worlds quickly climbed the ladder through it’s rapid heavy-impact early developments combined with the potential and familiarity of the Minecraft ecosystem – eventually attracting the attention of several big names including Gary Vaynerchuk (GaryVee), Andy Milonakis and RTFKT founder Samuel Cardillo.
NFT Worlds would surpass The Sandbox and Decentraland in floor price within a few months after launch en route to an all time high floor price value of 18.5Ξ in February 2022.
Check out the NFT Worlds collection here.
Over 100 NFT communities and projects have began building full-scale metaverses within NFT Worlds including RTFKT, Hero Galaxy, White Sands, and The Wanderers. You can view the full list here (may be outdated).
The NFT Worlds Team
The NFT Worlds team is lead by founders ArkDev and Temptranquil, along with a few other developers on-board and actively hiring more.
ArkDev
Co-Founder ArkDev (@iamarkdev), multi-exit startup founder, has quickly gained recognition in the space for his development work on NFT Worlds and Gray Boys, pioneering many patented/patent-pending technologies in the space including gasless transactions, proxy ownership with Gray Boys, and more.
Due to the nature of his developmental impact and speed, there is a golden rule of the NFT Worlds discord that is simply “Don’t tag Ark“. You can read more in-depth about ArkDev through a recent tweet from his official Twitter account:
Temptranquil
Co-Founder Temptranquil (@Temptranquil) is the head of marketing, operations and art lead, having created the art for the NFT Worlds and Gray Boys collections. He has also created many other creative assets including logos and the UI/UX design for the projects’ websites. ArkDev and Temptranquil did a very informative Q&A on YouTube in November 2021 detailing NFT Worlds and their experience:
NFT Worlds has more team members; some that are not explicitly named, but honorable mentions to these team members:
- @DannPetty – NFT Worlds Lead Designer
- fuyu.wrld – Head Moderator
- EROD – Moderator
- byno.wrld – Community Helper
- Jasmine – Builder Manager
- The13Ninjas – Founder and CEO of Entity Builds & Genesis Avatars Founder
$WRLD Utility Token
$WRLD is the primary utility token for the NFT Worlds ecosystem. You can view the liquidity pool on DexTools.
Launching on December 28th, 2021, existing NFT World holders were airdropped $WRLD tokens based on a proprietary formula the team created. This formula factored in world rarity and length of time held (in blocks) for a potential 10% token increase for long-term world holders. This was the first of 2 airdrops to world holders.
The $WRLD token is the in-game currency of the NFT Worlds ecosystem, giving players the ability to purchase items, skins, rent plots of land, trade, and access to exclusive experiences and content.
NFT Worlds will implement mechanisms for players to earn $WRLD tokens by playing games in worlds. Additionally, world owners may incentivize players to visit their worlds through competitions, free to play games and more that reward players with $WRLD tokens.
– NFT Worlds Docs
Soon after its inception, renowned NFT collector and NFT World whale Pranksy started a liquidity pool (LP) for the token. Within the coming weeks after the LP was created, $WRLD reached an all-time high price of $0.60.
The 2nd and final airdrop of $WRLD tokens launched on February 28th, 2022 to world holders via a claiming process.
Here’s the original tokenomics2 breakdown for the $WRLD token from the NFT Worlds official docs:
2 Original tokenomics is outdated and are actively being reworked since the Minecraft news and NFT Worlds pivot, see below for $WRLD 2.0 tokenomics section
Staking Worlds for $WRLD
World staking launched on March 9th, 2022. This highly-anticipated development was initially delayed for several weeks as the community waited for contract auditing company Certik to verify and publish the staking contract.
After Certik published the staking contract and verified that there were no security vulnerabilities; world staking commenced. The amount of $WRLD yielded by a staked world is determined by another proprietary formula that factored in variables such as world rarity and percentage of worlds staked.
Community member @xdm99 created a great tool for calculating staking rewards at www.rareworlds.app.
You can read more in-depth about $WRLD staking, formulas and more in the NFT Worlds official docs here.
$WRLD 2.0 (Tokenomics changes)
The Baguette
My memory recalls Ark tweeting something along the lines of “what’s a word that starts with b and ends in e?” and people going haywire over it meaning a Binance listing for $WRLD token.
No no, alas the baguette was born.
The baguette stirred up a lot of conspiracies, often pertaining to a potential partnership with RTFKT. This may or may not have been true, however RTFKT has been confirmed to have been building a world.
ArkDev also took some heat from holders and the pump and dumpers thinking the baguette was “disingenuously” being used or inciting hype for nothing. It’s just a piece of bread of French origin though.
But in the end, the baguette means nothing, but it also means EVERYTHING. wink.
NFT Worlds Builder Marketplace
- Entity Builds
- 1UP Nova
- Icy Studios
- LeadPro
- Meraki Studios
- Pixel Creations
NFT Worlds Alpha Launcher
- Completely polished redesign, with UI/UX focused on onboarding new players & removing as much friction as possible to retain those players.
- Significant quality of life upgrades for in-game. Further updated graphics, shaders & texture optimized based on your PC/Mac’s specs, updated UI design specific to NFT Worlds & no longer the generic Minecraft UI in most cases
- Complete inventory management systems for your player account. Equip your avatars, additional cosmetic items you may have earned/bought from your favorite worlds (hats, jet packs, wings, anything you can imagine) and more.
- Native $WRLD marketplace. You’ll be able to browse the NFT collections from all projects that have an NFT World live – allowing trading of those NFTs using $WRLD – both in game & via the marketplace UI.
- Individual world info pages – clicking a world from the launcher will take you to a full screen page specific to that world. Worlds will be able to update their details, share the latest news with their players, offer items & nfts directly for sale to their players for $WRLD, allow trading of items specific to their world through a world specific marketplace that each world has, using $WRLD.
- In game NFT trading interface using $WRLD. Interact with other players & trade $WRLD with them for NFTs owned by their associated wallet address.
- Friends lists are coming. See what worlds your friends are playing on and quickly join the same world/server they’re in.
- Cosmetic & vanity rewards for players that stake specific tiers of their earned $WRLD. Some of the rarest cosmetics will only be available to players who’ve staked enough $WRLD.
NFT Worlds Genesis Avatars
NFT Worlds launched their 2nd ecosystem collection NFT Worlds Genesis Avatars on May 4th, 2022 with a whitelist mint and public mint on May 5th, 2022.
- Whitelist Mint: May 4th (0.4 Eth Mint Price For Whitelist)
- Public Mint: May 5th (1 Eth Starting Dutch Auction Price for Public, Reducing To 0.4 Eth Over Time)
WRLD Name Service (WRLDNS)
WRLD Name Service (WRLDNS) names are both a gamertag compatible with all metaverses and a secure, decentralized domain name. WRLDNS names provide a way for metaverses, web3 games/projects to assign and track player achievements and game related data specific to their WRLDNS name. Think of them as a singular account identity for all the metaverses/web3 games you might play in the future. They also operate as a way to map human readable names to blockchain and non-blockchain resources.
WRLDNS names are designed to be cross chain – in the future supporting name ownership, data and record propagation across all major EVM based chains such as Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, and more.
WRLD Name Service launched early access to NFT Worlds holders on June 22, 2022. Holders of NFT Worlds were able to claim a WRLD registration pass for each world they owned.
After the initial 48 hours, holders of Gray Boys and NFT Worlds Genesis Avatars were able to claim registration passes as well. Early access claims were 1 registration pass + gas.
After a brief hiccup with Web3 Name Service filing a DMCA claim on OpenSea against WRLD Name Service for using the acronym “WNS”, a mutual agreement was made and WRLD Name Service switched to “WRLDNS”.
Public registration was launched on June 27th, 2022 at price of 500 $WRLD per year registered.
Register your WRLD name here: https://wrld.name/
Minecraft Bans NFTs
In a stunning development, on July 20th, 2022, Minecraft posted an article on their website detailing their position on NFTs within the Minecraft ecoystem. TLDR: They ain’t doin’ it.
To no surprise, this was very damaging to NFT Worlds and their subsidiary projects as whole; spawning a slew of controversy in the space and towards Microsoft in general.
The NFT Worlds team had consistently maintained a good relationship with the IP team of Minecraft since their launch up to this point, including adhering to certain guidelines the project was to follow i.e. no gambling, brand advertising etc.
This was substantiated with email evidence very early on in the project. This unprecedented move blindsided everybody, including the NFT Worlds team.
Since then, the NFT Worlds team has made the decision to pivot into a new direction by creating their own game and metaverse platform from the ground up. You can read their official statement here or below (on desktop).
The Future Of NFT Worlds
On July 20th, 2022 Mojang decided to, without warning, outright ban all integrations of
blockchain technology and NFTs within Minecraft. This decision completely disrupted emerging Web3 based game platforms built on top of it, like NFT Worlds.
NFT Worlds is a cryptocurrency enabled games platform launched in October, 2021. It’s enabled an ecosystem of the first interlinked but independently owned worlds operating under a single unifying game currency, dozens of newly developed gameplay modes for Minecraft by creators and emerging free opportunities for players to earn exciting items, access to top quality content and more just by enjoying and playing these games built on our platform – all free to play so long as players owned a copy of Minecraft.
NFT Worlds gave the world a vision of what Web3 technologies could positively bring to existing and new games at scale.
To date NFT Worlds consists of nearly 200 independent teams from projects building on our platform, a rapidly growing player count of almost 100,000 players who have registered and were actively playing across worlds, and dozens of creative Minecraft development teams being able to provide exceptional full-time wages to their teams for, in some cases, the first time in their development history. All because of the excitement and opportunities the NFT Worlds ecosystem provided.
Microsoft, Mojang and Minecraft have signaled they have no regard for creators, builders and players if at any moment a new idea or vision conflicts with any internal politics or opinions of their power holding minority; regardless of their public facing ideals around creators and developers they say they uphold.
This is not the first time Microsoft and Minecraft has enforced a new crippling policy or agenda based rule enforcements on creators within the Minecraft ecosystem, and certainly won’t be the last.
Coming from a decade worth of enjoyable experiences playing and building within the Minecraft ecosystem, this stings and feels like a violation of the true creative spirit Minecraft was supposed to embody and enable.
Minecraft is no longer a welcoming place for us or creators involved with our platform. For many, this would be the end – but not for us. We’ve seen the glimpse of something too special to abandon. Thousands upon thousands of others have too.
We’ve already started bringing together the top visionary developers within the Minecraft development ecosystem to join NFT Worlds as we move into the future. We’re diving head first into this with a fantastic team, a thriving community fully supporting us, a warchest of funds to sustain us through the process, and a core belief that it’s time for a change.
We’re creating a new game and platform based on many of the core mechanics of Minecraft, but with the modernization and active development Minecraft has been missing for years. This is not a rewrite of some open source Minecraft clone, which likely would violate the EULA or still risk legal action, this is entirely from the ground up. This transition will additionally come with a public facing brand identity change that is more player friendly.
While the playstyle, look and feel of this will be very familiar to Minecraft players; the game mechanics, graphics, performance optimizations and overall improvements will usher in a more accessible, ownable and enjoyable playing experience. Best of all, we’ll be completely untethered from the policy enforcement Microsoft and Mojang have over Minecraft. We truly become our own open game and platform.
Game access will be 100% free for players and there will never be any credit card pay barriers for content. NFT Worlds was built on the idea that all players should have access to earning, purchasing and owning items and content through in-game play mechanics and currency rewards.
Finally, we’ll prioritize backwards compatibility with existing Minecraft server development plugins and practices. This will allow for a smooth transition for our creator’s existing content when the time comes. We encourage creators to continue building NFT Worlds content within the requirements of the new EULA until our game is ready for transition.
With the recent policy changes, worlds are still allowed to operate and be played but cannot integrate blockchain based functionality, nft support or game currency.
As we go through this transitional period, the launcher & play pages for NFT Worlds will continue to stay up and be developed to introduce new non-crypto player attracting features while our coming game platform is under development.
Make no mistake, this is a web2 vs web3 battle. It is a battle between two different visions of the future of the web: one that prioritizes shareholder value and profit margins above all else and one that prioritizes the spirit of innovation through independent creators. It is both a philosophical conflict over what the Internet represents, and a technological struggle over who will have ownership of digital assets. Microsoft has made it clear they will always act in the interest of their shareholders and balance sheet, to the detriment of innovation, player experience and creators. We believe an open, free, evolved version of what Minecraft brought to the world will be a better future for creators, developers and ultimately gamers.
We’re fighting for a future with a player owned and operated economy, where all participants benefit from their contributions to the ecosystem. We recognize this is a monumental task.
If you’re a creator, builder or player who wants a future where the ideas that Minecraft brought to the world are evolving, free, open and accessible to all – join us.
– NFT Worlds
Sample Art Palettes for New Game Client
After community feedback and deliberation, on September 15th, they announced a revised item palettes and mob samples:
These palettes are constantly being revised and innovated per community feedback and new ideas.
Future Outlook of NFT Worlds
You can’t sugarcoat it, as much as I’d like to, NFT Worlds has A LOT of work to do and the recent Minecraft news is a huge damper in the project’s development. In tandem with the current bear market effecting all projects, this has seen NFT Worlds take a heavy dip down to 0.5Ξ before a small recovery to the 1.30Ξ range as of the time of writing.
However, if there was a project that could do the unthinkable and make a huge recovery during these times; it is NFT Worlds. The team is a fiercely dedicated group of Web2 and Web3 professionals that have built a free mint project that would take on metaverse giants The Sandbox and Decentraland and surplanted them in OpenSea rankings within months from launch.
They have established multiple patented and patent-pending technologies including gasless transactions, proxy ownership, and rentable lands (among others) – as well as generally just being a developmental powerhouse from the beginning.
They have fought through adversity before and have built a sustainable foundation of tech that will translate nicely into the new game and platform they are building.
The team is here and expanding, core foundations have been built, the warchest is loaded, and the community remains strong and hungry. NFT Worlds will be back, now with a chip on their shoulder.
Conclusion
There is a lot of information on NFT Worlds that is not covered in this article, it would take a year to cover everything lol. Refer to the official documentation to get more in-depth explanations of the project!
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