Category: Blockchain-Based Virtual Worlds

This category is for all the new cryptocurrency- and blockchain-based social VR spaces and virtual worlds (Decentraland, The Deep, Ethernia, Mark Space, Somnium Space, Staramba Spaces, Terra Virtua, VIBEHub, Virtual Universe, etc.)

A List of Christmas Events in the Various Social VR/Virtual Worlds

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

This is a list of the various Christmas events which are taking place this holiday season on the various social VR platforms and virtual worlds I cover on this blog. If you have an event that I have missed, please let me know and I will update this listing, thanks!

Sinespace

Sinespace has a Winter Festival with events running every day from Dec. 21st, straight through until New Year’s Eve! Here’s the complete schedule. (And don’t forget to take advantage of one month of free Premium membership!)

Second Life

As usual, there is so much happening in Second Life around Christmastime that it is impossible to compile a full list!

  • Your best bet is to check the Events listing under Search; you can do a keyword search, or select events using the drop-down category menu in the upper right-hand corner of the Events window in Firestorm (for example, “Live Music” to catch a live performer’s show).
  • The official Second Life Destination Guide lists eight pages worth of winter attractions to visit.
  • The Seraphim website has a list of fairs and events that you might want to check out.
  • Among many other club events happening throughout Second Life over the holidays, Bryce Sun is DJing on Christmas Day at the FMD Club, which bills itself “the premiere destination for Second Life’s sexiest and most fashionable residents”.

Sansar

On Dec. 21st, Solas and Drax will host a special holiday edition of Harvest Hopping (the long-running Sansar worlds exploration event formerly known as Atlas Hopping). All are welcome!

And on Dec. 27th, there will be a Christmas Community Campfire at Witchy’s Winter, hosted by Beverly Zauberflote:

Please check the Sansar Events page for more details on these and other events during this holiday season.

AltspaceVR

Check the AltspaceVR Events Listing for all the news on what’s going on, including four separate VR Church Christmas services on Dec. 22nd: one at a time zone for Australians, a second at a time zone for Europeans, and two back-to-back services for North Americans.

VRChat

The best place to find out what Christmas events are happening in the busy world of VRChat is the VRChat Events website, with an online calendar of events, and a link to join the VRChat Events Discord server.

Also, there is a brand new Winter category in the Worlds menu in VRChat, with places for you to explore!

VRChat is also home to the annual New Years Times Square, where you could run into just about anybody! It is described as a developer-made world with hundreds of posters from the VRChat community.

My source, Fionna, also tells me:

I will be hosting an event for the world builder community on New Year’s Eve as well, featuring a world made by Sentinel, which is a gorgeous Art Deco lounge.

NeosVR

Medra, an organizer of the NeosVR Creator Jam series of events in NeosVR, posted:

The holidays are almost upon us and the 30th Creator Jam…so it’s time for:

Creator Jam 30: 3rd Megajam & Winter Holiday Party

Sunday December 22nd
Starts at 2 p.m. EST(11 a.m. PST/19:00 UTC).

As an anniversary and Holiday celebration come hang out exchanging gifts, dressing up, and voting on Christmas trees. This will be a party and Swap Meet. NeosVR is wonderful for people unloading their inventories. What a better way to be in the spirit of giving than for people to share what they have or made. If you have a cool avatar, share it! If you have a cool gadget, please share. Pack neat Logix snippets in adult beverages or prezzies. We will be be exploring all the previous nine Creator Jam worlds in a livestream with Nexulan.

Secret Santa gift exchange will be held during this party at 2:30 p.m. EST (11:30 a.m. PST/19:30 UTC) Even if you aren’t a part of the Secret Santa gift exchange feel free to give gifts to specific people or everyone.

Everyone is welcome. I look forward to seeing all!

Somnium Space

Somnium Space is simultaneously saying goodbye both to 2019 and to the first version of their Steam client, with a Farewell Party on Dec. 30th with special guests Vivian Chazen (the host of The Hive VR) and musical artist Luke Reynolds:

UPDATED! Editorial: Decentraland Is Paying for Contest Entries (And Why This May Backfire)

On Nov. 8th, I wrote about the Decentraland Builder Contest, which is currently underway and runs until Dec. 15th, 2019. You can refer to my previous blogpost for all the details on the contest, or you can check the Decentraland website.

One thing that I did not know about the contest is that each accepted entry will receive 200 MANA, which works out to about US$5.00 at the current exchange rates. I understand that you can submit up to 20 entries per person, which means that a user who submits the maximum number of entries earns 4,000 MANA, worth about US$100. (This information comes from a recent blogpost on the DCLPlazas blog, which is a good source of news about Decentraland.)

This reminds me of how High Fidelity was offering US$300 per accepted entry to an avatar contest at one of its final big events (this was before its abrupt pivot earlier this year to promote business use of HiFi for remote workteams, and an attempt to rein in runaway costs). For a while there, High Fidelity was spending money like a drunken sailor, and I am starting to wonder if the same thing is starting to happen over at Decentraland, which has been extremely generous with its contest prizes this year.

I have absolutely no problem with large cash prizes for contest winners, and I know that contests encourage the creation of good content, which drives usage of the platform. But in my opinion, paying for every single contest entry is only going to encourage a flood of people gaming the system with the maximum number of contest entries, just to collect the most money they can and then cash it out.

This is essentially bribing people to use your platform, which means that as soon as the money stops flowing, fickle users, who were there only because they were paid, will abandon the platform (which is exactly what happened to High Fidelity).

One of the things that is starting to concern me about blockchain-based virtual worlds like Decentraland is how they seem to encourage a rather mercenary approach to their in-world economy. It doesn’t help matters that land is such an expensive commodity in DCL, which almost makes it imperative to be able to use it to generate revenue. (A year ago, DCL even launched virtual land mortgages, for those who could not afford to pay for their LAND up front.)

Want to play a hunting game? You’ve got to pay for the arrows. Want your choice of avatar username? You’ve got to buy one. One person on the official Decentraland Discord server recently asked whether they would be allowed to erect a paywall in front of a constructed scene, so you couldn’t even look at it without paying. Everybody seems out to make a buck.

The blockchain/cryptocurrency community is a world apart, and most current Decentraland users and investors do not see this sort of setup as strange. But I wonder how well this will play out with the casual, non-crypto visitors which DCL needs to attract in order to survive and thrive long-term. Will potential users be put off by having to pay for everything, even buying their username? I guess we’ll find out once the doors open to the general public.

UPDATE Dec. 6th, 2019: Ari Meilich, the Project Lead at Decentraland, says:

The idea behind subsidizing content creation is trying to crack the chicken and egg problem. A lot of people have been building in the absence of incentives, but other are more likely to create better scenes provided they receive tokens, particularly before we have launched and there isn’t an immediate flux of users. In the previous contests it has worked out great. This contest will be the last one before launch, Ryan. And it’s looking like there’ll be enough interactive content to put us in a good position to open the world publicly soon 🙂

Thanks, Ari!

Blockchain-Based Virtual World MARK.SPACE Fires Some Staff, and Announces a Pivot to Provide Business-to-Business Services Visualizing Real Estate

The long-running saga of blockchain-based virtual world MARK.SPACE has taken a few more strange twists since I last looked at it.

The company shut down its original Telegram group (with 2,626 members) and started up a brand new one (with 193 subscribers), explaining the reasons for this decision on their website in this undated news release:

Just like all of you, we are also upset by the current MRK token currency rate. However, we guarantee that we did not sell and are not going to sell our tokens on exchanges! By the way, speaking about the dissemination of false information – we are very upset by the negative informational background in this group – communication of this kind has led to a negative state of mind of a large part of the MARK.SPACE community.

In this regard, we have decided not to support this group anymore. Instead, the team is launching a new MARK.SPACE Telegram channel. We try to regularly please you with industry news, informational copyright articles, as well as platform updates. We duplicate all the information here, but, unfortunately, much remains unnoticed and we receive complaints that we are either inactive or have abandoned the development of the platform altogether.

Both of those accusations are obviously NOT true! The new Telegram channel will automatically duplicate news from the official MARK.SPACE website and you will be able to see all the news and updates without them being lost in the stream of comments and unnecessary links.

And then, in a Nov. 10th, 2019, in a news release posted to their website and to the new Telegram channel, MARK.SPACE dropped a bombshell announcement:

In May this year, it was revealed that a group of developers was trying to appropriate the MARK.SPACE technology: certain employees – in secret from their colleagues – wanted to use the technology for personal gain. To do this, they used the company MARK.SPACE Japan, and also planned to register (or possibly registered) a new legal entity in Japan called Site Makers Japan, through which over the past few months these corrupt employees tried to sell intellectual property owned by MARK.SPACE for 37 million US dollars. 

Having discovered the above facts in June 2019, MARK.SPACE Management took the following steps:

1. stopped financing Site Makers (in Russia), a company led by Vladimir Shlyapin that carried out technical development of the MARK.SPACE platform on agreement basis;

2. terminated the operating authorities and roles of Oleg Ershov, Vladimir Shlyapin, and Dmitry Shamov in the MARK.SPACE project, as they were the persons responsible for the incident with an attempt to appropriate the technology.

A Google search for MARK.SPACE Japan pulls up nothing, except a few older profiles of Dmitry Shamov. Searches for Site Makers and Site Makers Japan were similarly fruitless. MARK.SPACE has done a document dump from what it says was its internal investigation into the matter, stating “The documentation is provided without changes and in the original language.” (The documents all appear to be in either Russian or Japanese. Since I speak neither language, I have no idea what happened.)

In addition to these allegations the company makes against former coworkers, MARK.SPACE has announced a pivot to a brand new use: a business-to-business platform for visualizing real estate:

We inform you that, despite the situation, MARK.SPACE continues platform development. At the moment, our efforts are aimed at finalizing existing products, as well as selling business solutions. Over the past six months, negotiations with venture capital funds have shown that at this stage the platform needs to demonstrate sustainable development. Only after that it is possible to carry out the following stages of financing by venture funds on favorable terms and plan further IPO procedures.

Now the team is actively engaged in the promotion and sale of B2B solutions (https://live.mark.space/b2b-solution/), such as the visualization of real estate – objects both under construction and those already put into operation. MARK.SPACE representatives are currently negotiating with companies, contracts with which will allow to make substantial profits and direct them to finalizing B2C functionality of the MARK.SPACE universe. In addition, obtaining steady revenue through the sale of B2B solutions will allow the next stage of financing by venture investors on optimal conditions and to continue accelerated development of the MARK.SPACE platform.

It’s not clear to me what will happen to the previous business that MARK.SPACE was engaged in: their virtual shopping mall (which is still up), and their sale of virtual residential units to consumers (which I blogged about here and here).

For now, they are focusing on B2B solutions:

Thanks to our 3D/VR/AR solutions you can present existing real estate items as well as under construction ones to your clients in the most advanced and efficient way.

– 360/VR virtual tours for existing real estate

– 3D/360/VR virtual tours for under-construction real estate

– 3D modeling and visualization of apartments, offices, interior and furnishings

– 3D/VR modeling and visualization of development area

– Video production & 4D construction animation based on 3D modeling

– 2D floor plans redrawing in one style

– AR solutions for appealing presentations

Image taken from the MARK.SPACE B2B Announcement

Well, I wish the company well. There’s absolutely nothing in all this recent news that would encourage or entice me to invest in their MRK token or their virtual real estate. As I have often said before about this and all the other blockchain-based virtual worlds I cover on this blog: do every single shred of your homework before investing a penny! MARK.SPACE is another company that I will continue to monitor—safely from the sidelines.

The Sandbox: A Brief Introduction

Yep, yet another blockchain-based virtual world. This one is called The Sandbox:

Here’s the requisite promotional video:

Basically, you build and animate voxel-based assets, and you can put them up for sale in the store to earn cryptocurrency called Sand (get it?). Their virtual land parcels, 96 by 96 metres square, are called LAND (gee, sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) and the presale starts in eleven days from now, when 166,464 LANDS will go up for sale (with all the expected talk about land scarcity, buy now, supplies are limited, etc. etc. etc.):

The Sandbox looks an awful lot like a cross between Cryptovoxels and Decentraland (there’s no mention of virtual reality support). A potentially interesting twist is their VoxEdit software, which they claim is “the first software that allows you to create your own voxel models, rig them and animate them in no time”. They have an alpha version of VoxEdit available to download for Windows and Mac users.

They also are offering cash rewards to attract game developers for their new platform, from a US$2 million fund called the Game Maker Fund, which will grant amounts from US$5,000-30,000 each to fund up to 100 games:

We are happy to announce the creation of the Game Maker Fund, our exclusive program that will reward the first 100 original game proposals that get accepted. Yes, you read that right: we’re offering free exposure for the games you create in The Sandbox, one of the most anticipated blockchain games of 2019. The Fund will be used to reward and incentivize Game Crafters to submit unique experiences. Don’t worry if you have more than one great idea: there is no limit on the number of proposals that each candidate can submit!

If you want to follow The Sandbox as the project develops (as far as I can tell, they haven’t launched yet), they have accounts on all the standard social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Medium, Telegram, and Discord.