8 Circuit Studios is launching a cryptocurrency token sale so that it can raise money to build a blockchain-based platform for the Metaverse, the digital universe envisioned in novels by William Gibson and Neal Stephenson and featured in movies Ready Player One, TRON, and The Matrix.
The company will hold a token sale for the cryptocurrency, 8 Bit Token, and launch other blockchain-integrated products in the coming weeks. Blockchain is a decentralized ledger that can verify the uniqueness of digital items. That means that users will be able to lay claim to the items that they own and transfer them from one virtual world to another. That’s one of the requirements of the envisioned Metaverse, which is like a collection of interconnected worlds that share a common foundation for commerce.
8 Circuit Studios (named after a theory about the human nervous system) in Seattle has a lot of veterans from games, and it hopes to develop a new ecosystem where all participants — gamers, developers and publishers — could collaborate to bring about the Metaverse sooner than we might think is possible.
The company said it will be using blockchain technology in new ways — offering additional features beyond basic currencies that developers can integrate into their games — to create living, breathing economies and virtual worlds that players can not just explore, but exist within, and move between.
The token sale will signify the first step in building the Metaverse, an entirely digital online universe of universes and a massive gaming ecosystem. This new Metaverse will offer an open opportunity for other game developers and publishers to create shared experiences for gamers. By using the Ethereum blockchain, 8 Circuit Studios is able to create, attribute and safeguard digital assets that you can own and store, along with your cryptocurrency, in a virtual wallet, the company said.
8 Circuit Studios’ key innovation are Smart Game Objects, which will allow unprecedented new ways for gamers to interact with their games. The company is currently developing its first two games utilizing this technology, Alien Arsenal: Battle for the Blockchain and Project Genesis.
The blockchains can provide truth-telling and enforcement for digital objects, an idea shared by the likes of Philip Rosedale, who is incorporating blockchain into his High Fidelity open-source virtual reality platform.