The gods are evidently fond of tokens. Immutable said today that the Gods Unchained blockchain card game will launch a new Ethereum token dubbed $GODS in partnership with Nine Realms.
The Sydney, Australia-based Immutable will launch the $GODS token to scale its trading market and play-to-earn systems in the game. That means that players will be able to buy and sell the tokens and gain a voice on how the the studio will run the Gods Unchained.
Immutable said this helps give players a stake in the game and its economy, shifting power from the developers to the players by providing in-game assets that players can actually own.
The $GODS token will sit at the heart of the game’s ecosystem, providing both in-game and external utility. At launch, $GODS will operate as a utility and governance token, giving holders a voice in the digital space, as well as active staking opportunities that allow players to earn rewards through gameplay campaigns. Over time, functionality will expand to embed the token within Gods Unchained’s play-to-earn game loops, enabling players to earn $GODS tokens by simply playing the game. I call this the Leisure Economy, where we get paid to play games.
$GODS will then directly interact with Gods Unchained’s nonfungible token (NFT) assets, which are new NFTs that players can wield in-game and trade or sell on the marketplace. That means that those games will have uniquely identifiable digital items that players can earn or buy or sell, allowing the players to own the items permanently.
Immutable X
Immutable X has created a marketplace for players in games such as Gods Unchained to buy and sell the items they have collected. Immutable X is the brainchild of Immutable, an Australian game team that runs the NFT trading card game Gods Unchained. Gods Unchained is an important NFT game, as it is built by a development team headed by Chris Clay, the former director of Magic the Gathering: Arena. Gods Unchained is a “play to earn” game, where players can earn collectibles over time, Immutable founder Robbie Ferguson said in a recent interview with GamesBeat. And they can make money by trading those collectibles, including the unique NFTs that can be proven by the blockchain, the secure digital ledger technology, to not be copies.
In the past few months, NFTs have exploded in other applications such as art, sports collectibles, and music. NBA Top Shot (a digital take on collectible basketball cards) is one example. Published by Animoca Brands and built by Dapper Labs, NBA Top Shot has surpassed $540 million in sales, five months after going public to a worldwide audience. And an NFT digital collage by the artist Beeple sold at Christie’s for $69.3 million. Investors are pouring money into NFTs, and some of those investors are game fans. The prices for NFTs have fallen, but many of those fans are undeterred.
As one of the highest-grossing blockchain games of 2020, Gods Unchained has logged millions of matches during its ongoing beta and boasts over 4 million assets. The token launch comes off the back of Gods Unchained’s latest expansion set, Trial of the Gods. That set completely sold out, and a new expansion is on the horizon.
$GODS is an ERC-20 token that will interact natively with Immutable X, the layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum trading. The Immutable X platform allows for peer-to-peer trading without the hindrance of gas fees, and will be expanding to include ERC-20 tokens once the $GODS token drops.
In 2020, Immutable partnered with StarkWare, a company that taps the benefit of using the Ethereum cryptocurrency and its security without incurring huge fees. Immutable X is built on top of StarkWare’s layer 2 scaling technology. Essentially, users don’t have to trust in Immutable lasting permanently in order to keep owning their NFTs — they can just trust in Ethereum. Immutable X’s mainnet is now available as the first layer 2 solution for NFTs on Ethereum, the company said.
Other solutions to Ethereum are creating alternative, faster cryptocurrencies with different methods of reaching a consensus. But these alternatives aren’t as popular as Ethereum. Another solution is to create a side chain, with a different kind of processing for transactions. But Immutable believes those solutions can fail because their security isn’t still as strong as Ethereum’s. If the security fails, then so does the authenticity of the NFT, and that would be disastrous, Immutable said.
For more information on $GODS, keep an eye on this link for updates around eligibility, distribution methods, and ways to claim and earn tokens. Immutable has about 100 employees, with 40 of them working on Gods Unchained.