Well, whaddayaknow? I turned over a rock and discovered yet another blockchain-based virtual world!
Aether City is a new virtual world (city, to be more accurate) that uses the Ethereum blockchain to register property ownership.
The only way to explore Aether City is via their web browser, which is currently rather limited in functionality. You can buy units or entire buildings, such as this central skyscraper whimsically named “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”:
According to their website:
A unit is the smallest unit of property ownership in Aether. It is a property that is defined by its coordinates occupying an area of 10 m³. A unit is a part of a building and is adjacent to neighboring units. The owner of a unit determines its appearance, fills it with content, and has the ability to connect the unit to its own domain.
However, there doesn’t appear to be any way to actually build content within your units yet. All you can do is put in a link to the property’s domain page. Rather limited. (At least Decentraland already has a working command-line editor that allows builders to create and deploy test scenes.)
I bet that the team behind Aether City, Aether Labs in Waterloo, would just kill for the kind of media attention that Decentraland is getting. But sadly, it would appear that the project is moribund. There have been only two Medium posts about it (Feb. 4th and March 11th of this year), and not a word since. Their Discord has seen no discussion at all since May 11th, and their Telegram channel has seen absolutely zero chatter, with only a couple of company-posted pictures of their bland, rather uninspiring-looking city:
Frankly, I’m not sure exactly why anybody would want to spend their hard-earned cryptocurrency on this. The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace building is for sale for 10 Ethereum coins (approximately US$2,000) if you’re interested. I think I’ll pass.