Watching the trailer video for Retro Ronin’s VR sandbox Minecraft-like game Voxelnauts engenders memories of the Final Fantasy series (it’s the music.) The game is currently on Kickstarter and has half-way funded its $200,000 goal to deliver a VR-based MMORPG that will allow players to build their own universe.

To make things more interesting, the developers also plan to use blockchain backed technology in order to provide property management and ownership rights of items. According to an article in CoinTelegraph the NXT blockchain will be used by Voxelnauts to provide a transparent way to track, create, trade items for user-created currencies and assets.

NXT is an altcoin developed as an open source cryptocurrency and released in 2013 by an anonymous software developer. It uses proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work as Bitcoin does; and was developed to be used as a financial tool and application platform with a built in asset exchange system.

NXT Blockchain for virtual asset management in an MMO

Co-founder of Retro Ronin and Director of Blockchains Daniel Mross told readers of Nxtforum.org that the game would use NXT to secure ownership rights of player-generated assets. One of the foundations of the game, as a sandbox MMO with a design rooted in player creations, the developers expect that there would be a player-run economy for items and objects. This seems reminiscent of a virtual world like Second Life, which also allows players to create user-generated items and sell them for in game currency.

“The main way we will be using NXT is as a registry for user-created content in the game,” says Mross. “In Voxelnauts, players can create their own artwork and import it into the game — furniture, weapons, animals, etc. These creations can be assigned an ownership title that exists in the NXT blockchain, and players can buy/sell/trade their creations directly on the NXT blockchain, if they like. The game universe will simply reflect the state of ownership for certain items based on what exists in the public ledger.”

This is extremely similar to the use of Factom by the government of Honduras to track and secure the land ownership registry–except that this is in a virtual world and everything that exists is already already in a database.

Blockchain-based access controls for owners

Aside from using the NXT blockchain to secure trades, the developers of Voxelnauts also plan to use it to allow owners to provide permissions and access control to owned property. By securing permissions with the NXT blockchain, owners can add rules to existing owned property that the game can then check before allowing others to appropriate, use, or interact with objects.

In this fashion, Voxelnauts will have an anti-griefer system. Griefing in games is essentially one player acting to make a game unplayable or unfun for other players–in games such as Minecraft griefing usually takes the form of vandalizing or destroying other players’ hard work. By implementing a code-as-law system into the NXT blockchain, Voxelnauts hopes to give granular access controls to content creators that is difficult to bypass or exploit.

Using the NXT blockchain, the Voxelnauts developers also expect to permit players to produce their own in-game currencies. This would allow for a wide variety of economies in the game and bolster player-run economic systems that revolve around player-generated assets–and not just player-built products. In fact, it could mean that in Voxelnauts separate sovereign “kingdoms” could arise that used different assets that then would then have to exchange between one another’s currencies in order to interact, similar to real world principalities and countries.

Still 10 days to go

The concepts presented by Voxelnauts are not far fetched at all and have a multitude of implications already being explored in the real world with the Bitcoin blockchain. It’s obvious that a virtual world could benefit from a cryptocurrency network with a strong hashing power to secure the provenance and ownership of in game items in a transparent, auditable fashion.

The use of the NXT blockchain provides an interesting backdrop that will even allow more advanced users to “cash out” by receiving NXT from the game. They would still have to exchange that NXT for local currency or Bitcoin to make any money, but the potential is there.

As it stands Voxelnauts still has 10 days to go in its Kickstarter and still needs approximately $100,000 to make its goal.

Image credit: Voxelnauts screenshot courtesy of Retro Ronin