Hi, I’m the CEO of double jump.tokyo (DJT), a company that has been designing, developing, and operating blockchain games since 2018. Oasys PTE. LTD. announced Oasys, a new blockchain for the gaming community, at exactly midnight Japan time on February 8, 2022. I excited to annouce that I’ll be joining the project as one of the Founding Team Members. I sent the following message to the team, and I’ll write about my thoughts in this article.
“This is an incredibly exciting project! Combining our 4 years of experience developing blockchain games, the Oasys Architecture integrates the latest L1 and L2 technology solutions and is designed to be optimal for game developers and the gaming community.”
Reflecting on early-2018: NFT = Digital Asset (Value)
I was shocked by NFTs, born with CryptoKitties at the end of 2017, and I founded DJT in April 2018. At that time, the new sci-fi movie about a futuristic metaverse world was in theaters in Japan. I was thrilled to see all my favorite characters, robots, and machines coming together on the screen. I also remember being touched that the story was not about saving the whole world but saving “our” world and having that sense of ownership. No matter what other people think, for gamers like me, the digital world that I’m in right now is important and can be valuable like the real world.
The concept of MyCryptoHeroes is “a world where your time and passion will become assets.” Your character and items are of irreplaceable value to you, no matter what anyone says. As you may have realized, Oasys is inspired by Oasis from the Ready Player One movie.
Reflecting on 2018 & 2019: Building the Best Blockchain UX
While developing MyCryptoHeroes, we explored what technologies should be selected to bring a better user experience (UX). We considered running the game in a full on-chain mode, but as a result, we decided to move off-chain, except for the NFTs, to offer a blockchain UX to run the game.
After releasing the game in November 2018, in 2019, we became the world’s №1 blockchain game for trading volume, the number of transactions, and the number of users on Ethereum. Although this was a great accomplishment, as an engineer, I was left with the feeling that I had a lot of work to do in the future, challenging myself to create a better UX using blockchain technologies. You can read more about the story of developing MyCryptoHeroes through trial and error and the Hi-Con 2018 presentation slides (Japanese only).
From the Metaverse to the Multiverse
In 2021, the awareness of NFTs increased significantly, but another keyword, “metaverse,” had also significantly increased with the timing of Facebook’s name change to Meta in November. Different people define the term “metaverse” in many ways, but commonly, people think of a “digital world,” whether that world exists digitally in 3D, VR, or Discord. This possibly means each company, game, and content creator may also have a different view of the digital world; thus, many metaverses can be built. From a user’s perspective, we can imagine a future where we go into different metaverses, just like we use Twitter, Discord, and Facebook for various purposes. This is why I like to call it the Multiverse Era.
In this future of multiverses, pseudonyms, avatars, wearables, or machines you drive will be an expression of your identity, and you will want to use them across all the different metaverses. This is similar to the world in the movie, where typically, people imagine what the metaverse might look like. Of course, various issues need to be solved for such interoperability. Still, there needs to be a mechanism to guarantee the ownership of digital assets for each metaverse neutrally. The best solution at the moment is to use blockchain and NFT technologies.
Oasys Architecture
Although we believe that blockchain and NFT technologies will be used in the era of the multiverse, the existing Layer 1 technologies have slow transaction speeds and high gas fees making the user experience (UX) challenging for mainstream user adoption. Back in 2018, it was very difficult to overcome these challenges. However, by 2021, Layer 2 solutions started becoming available and transactions can be completed at similar speeds as normal servers.
Most of the Layer 2 technology solutions are based on Ethereum as Layer 1, which has high value and therefore high gas cost. Although the transaction speed is instantaneous on L2, it requires a certain amount of gas fees. For this reason, we decided to run Oasys Layer 1 (Consensus Layer), which is an EVM side chain and public blockchain specialized for games, and build it so that users will rarely use Layer 1 directly, and the actual logic of the games will run on the Oasys Layer 2 (Execution Layer). Since each metaverse (game developer) can run its own Layer 2, there are no gas fees for users, and the developer covers these fees. Furthermore, Oasys is an environmentally friendly bockchain that doesn’t cosume energy unnecessarily because of its PoS-based consensus mechanism, so the cost of gas fees for developers will be minimal.
Oasys will be the Hub of the Multiverse Era!
The NFT craze, Layer 2 technology solutions, the new era of the multiverse, and many other factors have all come together at the right time for the new gaming chain, Oasys. However, these trends alone are not enough to make Oasys a reality; we need the game developers, the gaming community, and most of all, the fans to support us to re-build the future of gaming.
In exciting news, we have a few key members to support Oasys as the Founding Team Members. I’m really thrilled to take the first step toward achieving our dream of becoming a Hub for the Multiverse Era.
Welcome to the Multiverse Era with Oasys!