Your guide to Bitcoin, Ethereum and Web 3.0

The ongoing crypto winter has been painful for the entire industry, but 2022 was especially tough for Solana. The collapse of FTX and Alameda Research, which were closely linked and financially entrenched in the Solana ecosystem, accelerated a decline in a year marked by technical problems and high-profile hacks.

Although Solana hosts a thriving NFT ecosystem and growing gaming push, the turbulent times and 94% token price drop have pushed some creators to look for greener pastures elsewhere. The Solana game Tiny Colony is the latest project to chart a transition to another blockchain, as follows a similar announcement from the creator of DeGods and y00ts.

Tiny Colony developer Tinyverse Games announced today its plan to move its still-in-development NFT game – a blockchain-based construction and management simulator – from the Solana blockchain to the Ethereum scaling network, Immutable X.

“Immutable has been very gaming-focused since the beginning,” said Tinyverse co-founder and CEO Arshia Navabi Decrypt. “They have an amazing development team and incredible technology focused around games.”

In Tiny Colony, players must build and manage underground humanoid ant colonies, strategically farming, mining, hatching larvae, and defending their colony to survive. Players earn NFTs that can be spent in-game or traded on marketplaces. An early version of the game was released to testers at Solana last summer, but the full version will now debut later this year at Immutable X.

Tiny Colony is a relatively small project compared to Ethereum games that have respectively generated over a billion dollars or more in NFT sales, such as Axie Infinity and Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Otherside.

The project was originally launched via Solana marketplace Fractal and has generated more than $3 million in NFT sales to date, according to Tinyverse. The game’s NFTs currently start at less than $5 worth of SOL apiece on the secondary market.

An NFT is a blockchain token that represents a unique item. In video games, this can mean things like in-game characters, accessories, digital plots, and more. Elsewhere, NFTs are used for things like profile pictures (PFPs), artwork, sports and entertainment collectibles, and access cards to exclusive events and experiences.

Navabi told Decrypt that Tiny Colony will allow current Solana NFT holders to exchange for an Immutable X version of the same asset through a process it calls a “burn-in”. More details about the redemption process will be shared “over the next month” as the technical process is finalized with the help of Immutable X developers.

Why immutable X?

Immutable is both the creator of the Immutable X network and the developer of the NFT-based card game, Gods Unchained. Immutable X is a layer-2 scaling solution that enables faster and cheaper transactions than Ethereum’s own mainnet. Navabi said Immutable’s focus on gaming and player experience was a perfect fit for Tiny Colony.

Considered by some to be an “Ethereum killer”, Solana has been a prominent alternative destination builder for decentralized apps (dapps) and NFTs, due to its low fees and ability to handle a larger amount of transactions per second than Ethereum’s own main network.

But the buzz that Solana gained in 2021 did not last throughout 2022, with network outages, increasing competition and NFT market turmoil apparently contributing to a sharp decline in the token price. SOL has fallen from a November 2021 peak of $260 to a current price of around $16 – a much steeper fall than leading cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Tinyverse has previously commented on Solana’s decline in a tweet thread in Novemberwrites that while it didn’t lose funds in the FTX collapse, it has “significant SOL reserves that we need to hold on to for an extended time frame while the value of SOL and the market recovers.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Solana was an incredible starting point for us. We got everything we have today because of [Solana]”, Navabi told Decrypt. But when Tinyverse began discussions with Immutable and learned about its future plans and focus on games and NFTs, Navabi said he was “instantly hooked.”

Founded in 2021, Tinyverse is made up of gaming, film and television veterans who have worked on projects for Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime and Paramount, as well as gaming brands EA, Capcom and PlayStation.

Although Ethereum’s own technical limitations make it too slow and expensive for many Web3 games, scaling networks like Immutable X and Polygon have been increasingly embraced by creators to enable games that allow user-owned assets without significant transaction fees along the way.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Tiny Colony to the fast-growing Immutable X family and provide our team with the full suite of tools and solutions to make the game as accessible, engaging and performant as possible,” Immutable VP of Global Business Development Andrew Sorokovsky said in a statement.

Immutable X’s lack of gas fees to complete transactions was a key reason for the move, Navabi said, calling the network user-friendly for traditional (or Web2) players who may not understand what using gas means.

“Game developers and manufacturers should stop expecting Web2 players to understand these elements and just try to make this a very good country place for them – and make our Web3 games a very familiar place for them,” he said. Navabi added that he thinks Immutable X’s “strategies, timelines and focus are very much in line with that.”

Solana exodus?

Tiny Colony’s pivot comes less than a month after It was announced by DeLabs that two of Solana’s best PFP projects, DeGods and y00ts, will bridge to other platforms.

Details of the process remain unclear, but DeGods will shift to Ethereum and y00ts will migrate to Polygon, with the latter move facilitated by a 3 million dollar grant from Polygon Labs (formerly Polygon Studios). Polygon Labs has also reportedly tried to recruit other Solana projects, with president Ryan Wyatt acknowledges in a tweet reply in December that the team has “reached out to many projects across multiple chains.”

Navabi said that while Tinyverse did not receive direct funding for the move, Immutable will provide an allocation of IMX tokens based on project milestones when it goes live on Immutable X. However, he maintained that it was never moving from Solana to a new home. about the money.

“That was not our focus,” he said. “If our focus was money, we would go to Polygon or these different blockchains that offer huge dollar incentives for us to switch over.”