Alien World’s NFT game launches in-game DAOs to stimulate competition

Hoping to boost competition across multiple communities, the creators of the play-and-earn NFT game Alien Worlds announced today the launch of in-game DAOs – or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations – under a new Planetary Syndicates model.

Alien Worlds is an NFT-powered game where users collect and trade unique digital items minted primarily on the WAX ​​blockchain. Players compete to earn Alien Worlds’ in-game token, Trilium (TLM), which is required to control one of the six rival DAOs. Alien World’s token is also available on Ethereum, and the token and some NFTs are also hosted on the BNB Chain.

A DAO is an online community united by a common cause or goal, with an organizational structure where control is spread out among the community rather than centralized and hierarchical. DAOs use smart contracts – code that runs autonomous applications – with participants using governance tokens to vote on various proposals.

“It’s the first time in history that DAOs have been put into a game to compete against each other as teams and hold or create their own NFTs,” said Alien Worlds founder Sarojina “Saro” McKenna Decrypt.

As McKenna explained, Syndicate members earn governance tokens by staking TLM, after which they can cast votes to help manage the DAO and its digital assets. The DAOs in the game can also cooperate and compete against other groups. Although Alien Worlds spans three blockchain platforms in different ways, the DAOs are built specifically on WAX.

“These DAOs are on WAX because you can build a good protocol layer [multi-sig wallets]that lend themselves to secure, powerful, scalable DAOs for delegated democracy,” McKenna said.

One problem with DAOs, McKenna continued, is the under-involvement of members compared to the sizable coffers they sometimes hold. “Conversely,” she added, “you can also have pure rent-seeking where a few whales drain the funds.”

McKenna said that building on WAX allowed Alien Worlds to create “good decentralized democracy DAOs.” In the future, McKenna sees more of these types of DAOs building on blockchains compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) as multi-sig tools continue to improve.

“It’s great to have an active community that loves the metaverse and builds their own cool stuff,” McKenna said. “It’s great to have scale, because scale plus decentralization equals the potential for long-term, stable growth.”

NFTs are cryptographically unique tokens linked to digital and physical content, which provide proof of ownership, authenticity or membership in a group. In Web3 games, NFTs allow players to truly own the unique digital assets they purchase, such as pet monsters or starships, and are free to trade or sell these NFTs as they wish.

While Alien Worlds does not have the massive NFT trading volume of Ethereum-based game Axie Infinity in its prime, blockchain data suggests it has a significant contingent of active players. DappRadar reports that around 635,000 unique wallets have connected to the game in the last 30 days, placing it behind only Solana/BNB gaming platform Gameta.

However, it is unclear how many individual users each of these wallets represents. Alien Worlds’ terms of service prevent players from using multiple wallets to gain an advantage, but McKenna said there’s no way to know for sure that players aren’t skirting that provision.

“We [try to] makes it unattractive to ‘play’ Alien Worlds (ie play with more than one account),” she said Decrypt“so that our active players get a great experience.”

According to data from WAX NFT marketplace Atomic Hub, Alien World’s NFTs on the platform have generated a total volume of about $42.7 million in trading volume to date, but only about $4,600 worth in the last 24 hours.