As a self-styled history buff — my The Rest Is History listening is off-the-scale — I’m always pleased to see people citing past precedent to contextualize future trends.
So it’s great that Animoca Brands’ chairman Yat Siu has stepped up with a discussion of English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) — entitled The Labour of our Time, and the Work of our Minds — to justify the company’s Mocaverse project, which has just announced 200,000 created accounts for its Moca ID system.
Labelling Locke “one of the OGs in the field of ownership and a major inspiration for both the European Enlightenment and the US Constitution,” Siu highlights Locke’s theories of property, notably that the individual should have the rights to the results of his labour, rights that even governments cannot arbitrarily preempt.
Siu combines this with one of his longstanding arguments contrasting blockchain value creation models with “personal digital property rights that have been denied to us during much of the Internet age”.
Of course, it is easy to dismiss such arguments as misaligned or just weird.
On one level, Locke discussing whether 17th century Englishmen should be able to use common resources such as land to create private property seems wildly irrelevant to the future success of one of the many web3 identity systems currently looking for product-market-fit.
Yet despite the differences between these two situations, I think Siu is correct to attempt the synthesis of thought, if only to remind people that blockchain is a much more significant project in economic development that the ‘number go up’ narrative which is already dominating the discussion in 2024.
Which reminds me, Bitcoin is +$45,000 again. Bring on the ETFs!
Sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing 📈 in the future 🔮 of gaming 🎮
Calendar
MixMob’s public MXM token and NFT sale — 11th January
Nifty Island starts its play-to-airdrop — 21st January
Let’s meet at Pocket Gamer Connects London 2024 — 23nd January
Line Next launches its DOSI mobile app — January 2024
Funding news
Bitcoin inscription-based retro gaming and wagering platform Ordz Games has raised an undisclosed funding round from a set of degens. The platform has renamed its BRC20 token to ORDG and its 105 game cartridge NFTs currently have a floor price of 0.0093 BTC (c.$4,000). These NFT owners receive a percent of players’ points when their NFT is played. Points can be converted to ORDG, which are used to buy boosts.
Current experiences available to play include Ordz Heroes — which has its own hero NFTs — Ordz Rush and Ordz City. There are also wagering pools and lottery draws. Find out more via the FAQ.
Gated Gas Heroes news
Despite being NFT-gated, the initial release of Find Satoshi Labs’ social mobile game Gas Heroes — it’s currently available on browser not mobile — has been spiking activity.
The game has various sets of NFTs including Genesis Heroes (floor price $15,400), Common Heroes ($1,100) Weapons ($750), Pets ($350) and Items, including the Base Construction Vehicle ($830) that’s required to start playing the game. Presumably the game will have go F2P if it ever launches through app stores, as they don’t allow NFT gating.
The collection’s total trading volume to-date is $29 million, which accounts for 78% of total NFT trading on Polygon in January thus far. To put that into context, total trading on Polygon during the whole of December was $48 million, while February was the peak month during 2023 with a total of $69 million.
In terms of active wallets in the game, DappRadar is tracking around 4,000 DAUWs, or around 40% of the potential market given there are currently only 10,023 Base Construction Vehicle NFTs live.
Additional Links
Post-token announcement, Pixels DAUWs now 159,000 with total for Ronin up to 456,000.
Heroes of Mavia announces its token airdrop season one for land NFT holders.
Listen👂to Blockchain Gaming World on Fountain and get paid in ₿itcoin.