GM frens,

This is a thesis with no valuations. I don’t deep dive into the technicals or spreadsheet estimations. I wrote this to clarify and share my thinking with you. I’ve minted this as verifiable proof we’re early. It’s taken 4 weeks to write what I thought would take 2 days. I hope it’s worth the wait.

Game on.

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TL;DR:

• NFT Worlds is a tech platform disguised as a video game.

• NFT Worlds aligns content, community and commerce incentives to bring traditional and crypto gamers together in a blockchain-based play-and-earn ecosystem.

• NFT Worlds is an era-defining moonshot company that reduces the friction of NFTs, cryptocurrency, and play-and-earn mechanics in mass-market gameplay. It is well-positioned for an acquisition.

OVERVIEW: GAMING IS SERIOUS BUSINESS

Over the last two decades, gaming has evolved from a bedroom hobby to a billion-dollar industry. The platform expansion from consoles and computers to mobile phones and tablets has ushered in a new wave of players challenging the tired stereotype of gaming being niche, antisocial and male.

Nearly half of the world’s population - 3.2 billion people - play games ranging from 99c mobile arcade puzzles to open worlds on $500+ consoles. While they may not identify as gamers, the hours and money they spend would suggest otherwise; the gaming industry is now bigger than Hollywood, raking in $175B+ globally.

Gaming represents the new era of entertainment where tech possibilities have transformative potential. Games don’t just offer quick hits of escapism like movies and TV shows. Games offer participatory immersion in new universes where players build their own meaning, status, and connections. This is a subtle but important distinction; one that reframes gaming platforms from siloed ecosystems to social networks with scalable economies.

CURRENT STATE: THE HIDDEN ECONOMY

The most successful games in the industry today are not games at all. They are free-to-play services.

This has fundamentally changed the playing experience. In a standalone singular game, the designer's only concern is to entertain the player. However, in a free-to-play game, the focus is both on the player's entertainment and ongoing monetisation.

Newer social gaming platforms like Fortnite are designed to get players hooked with low or no cost entry. Players get the game for free and can play it endlessly, but if they want to progress faster or unlock more powerful abilities, they are enticed to spend real cash in a microtransaction model. It’s a lucrative monetisation strategy that generated more than $9 billion in revenue for Fortnite’s parent company, Epic Games, in 2018 and 2019.

Microtransactions create a hidden economy in games. Gamers are encouraged to make repeated small payments that continue indefinitely, obscuring real-world costs via in-game currency. In-game progress boosters, customisable character skins, randomised loot boxes, upgrades, season passes, and custom maps are the most popular digital items in free-to-play games.

Microtransactions allow publishers to extract a constant stream of revenue in an opaque economy under the guise of free-to-play. In-game economies are centrally controlled by publishers who reserve the right to change, substitute or withdraw access to digital items, as well as alter the exchange rate for currencies at any time.

Every year, gamers spend billions to purchase digital items they don’t own. They’ve never been able to resell skins they've bought or cash out virtual currency they've amassed. They risk account bans if they try to transfer ownership or exchange items outside the game. Despite spending thousands of hours and effort in gameplay, publishers tell players that in-game digital items have no real-world value.

It’s quite ironic that the same industry boosts real-world balance sheets by selling digital in-game items.

TECTONIC SHIFT: CHANGING THE GAME

Gaming is on the cusp of a major technological shift, with play-and-earn set to transform how games are distributed, played, and monetised.

Play-and-earn is the evolution of the play-to-earn gaming model. Both models are centred around the ethos of true ownership of in-game items, however play-and-earn games are built with a ‘fun first’ approach. Play-and-earn is experience first, earning second.

Unlike the free-to-play model, play-and-earn recognises and rewards the value players contribute to a game’s ecosystem. Blockchain, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and cryptocurrency make this new open digital economy possible.

Blockchain is the infrastructure of a decentralised open economy. It’s an unfuckwithable source of truth that publicly records peer-to-peer transactions of digital money (cryptocurrencies) and digital items (NFTs). NFTs verify and validate ownership of unique digital items on the blockchain.

The more time and effort a player puts into a game, the more value they stack via NFTs and cryptocurrency. Players can freely buy, sell, hold, and cash out items without relying on a third-party authority. When items can be freely and instantly traded, the overall value of the in-game economy increases because value is no longer isolated for in-game use.

By introducing scarcity to game economies, NFTs transform once ‘worthless’ digital items into cultural investments. Players can on-sell NFTs they receive in gameplay, and also profit when the item’s value increases. True ownership encourages a more flexible and functional in-game economy where items of different worlds connect seamlessly to others.

Play-and-earn is a game-breaking paradigm shift of The Great Incentive Alignment Of Web3, reimagining the relationships between publisher and player, and founder and fan. Players are incentivised to build and create content because they also capture the financial upside. By investing more time and effort, they earn more and benefit from the ecosystem at large. Basically, everyone is invested in the ecosystem doing well because everyone is getting paid.

Spearheading this evolution is NFT Worlds. It combines play-and-earn mechanics in a sprawling and immersive metaverse platform where gamers build and play to the lengths of their imaginations.

COMPANY: WTF IS NFT WORLDS?

NFT Worlds is a multi-metaverse platform of 10,000 NFTs. Each NFT is a customisable and playable world that enables NFT holders - world owners - to build limitless games in exchange for the ecosystem’s utility token $WRLD. It’s an open-ended infinite game.

NFT Worlds has a max supply of 5 billion $WRLD to support the in-game economy. $WRLD uses the Ethereum and Polygon networks to deliver the security, speed, and scalability required for a massively multiplayer in-game economy. To earn $WRLD, players spend time and effort developing their skill set by creating or contributing to experiences in the ecosystem. $WRLD functions as both a medium of exchange and a store of value in which players can cash out into their native currency.

NFT Worlds is Minecraft compatible and has a familiar set of game controls over 172 million players already use. Unlike other metaverse platforms, NFT Worlds is cross-platform and playable on smartphones, tablets, computers, and all consoles (XBOX, PS5, Nintendo Switch).

By combining open source, open marketplaces, and open protocols, NFT Worlds arms players with a decentralised creative tech stack. Players are bridged into a unified $WRLD token system which innovates interoperability within and across communities. More on this later.

INVESTMENT THESIS

NFT Worlds is a tech platform disguised as a video game. It offers tools to align content, community, and commerce incentives to combine game creation and distribution in a single global platform. In other words, NFT Worlds is the L1 architecture of the metaverse; a new age social network with a scalable economy and several network effects simultaneously at play. Every new creator, player, and piece of content adds exponential value and utility to the NFT Worlds ecosystem.

• Blocks Of Creativity

• Religion Meets Capitalism

• Imagined Identities

• $WRLD Economy

• Frictionless Focus

• Turnkey Metaverse

• Finite Loops & Infinite Games

Blocks Of Creativity

In NFT Worlds, players place, break and rearrange blocks to build immersive experiences, from simple huts to vast sprawling cities. NFT Worlds uses blocks of creativity to compound user-generated content, aggregate global online attention, and scale the ecosystem at an incredible pace.

Players are co-creators, fully-fledged businesses, and entertainment conduits. They control their narrative, make their own choices, and engage in free-form creativity. NFT Worlds empowers and equips them to create in-game content in the form of games, quests, levels, characters, shopfronts, mods, maps, skins, and items.

NFT Worlds is an experience for players to share together. When creators build games in the ecosystem, the ecosystem becomes more valuable to players, who then become more valuable to creators. As the number of players and creators increases, so does the variety and quality of games, creating a virtuous cycle and cultural phenomenon known as network effects.

Over time, the network effects spur further decentralised development. Thousands of players actively create and collaborate on ideas that are assembled into building blocks of interconnected worlds, resulting in long-term digital defensibility.

Religion Meets Capitalism

In gaming, money follows fun, and fun needs friends. When like-minded people coalesce around a shared idea, a fandom is born. In fandoms, things like cultural meaning, status, and identity are socially negotiated, produced, and exchanged.

NFT Worlds takes fandoms from 0 to 100 by introducing tokenisation to align content, community, and commerce. Aligning incentives maximises community value and growth. It's a compounding network effect called Metcalfe's Law, where platform users are also platform owners. Players not only use $WRLD currency to transact in the game; they also invest in it. Everyone who creates or builds in the NFT Worlds ecosystem benefits from the ecosystem succeeding.

Macroeconomist Raoul Pal labels this emerging economy of intense fans ‘religion meets capitalism’ because the shared source of meaning, identity and connection is fundamentally driven by a collective investment. Gamers become stakeholders.

Metcalfe’s Law turns community members into modern-day marketers who pool knowledge, skills, and resources to build collective intelligence and drive awareness. This results in hundreds of micro-marketing campaigns where the community crafts tweets, builds permissionless projects, creates memes, produces videos, writes theses (guilty), and so on. It’s word-of-mouth marketing on rocket fuel.

Imagined Identities

NFT Worlds is a blank canvas for the next generation of builders, designers, engineers, creators, gamers, and artists. Players create imagined identities and new realities through customisable avatars.

Avatars enable greater forms of self-expression because they promise players two things:

• You can be anyone you want to be.

• You can be anything you want to be.

Imagined identities give players the freedom to reinvent themselves. They’re free to form social connections, gain confidence, build lasting relationships and construct new layers of meaning in social gameplay. Imagined identities fulfil our innate human desire to belong, express ourselves, create wealth, and build status and power in ways that may not be possible IRL.

It’s interesting to consider the psychology behind the phenomenon: sociologists discovered gamers become emotionally attached to their avatars since digital items fulfil the same kinds of aesthetic and social roles as physical objects. Players are motivated to spend money on their imagined identities in the same way their real-life identities are invested with social, vocational, and legal value.

In many cases, players' imagined identities are more important than their real-life identities because they spend more time immersed in digital worlds.

$WRLD Economy

The $WRLD economy is stabilised through three core levers: the marketplace, renting/staking, and the P2E faucet. The levers incentivise the best creators to build in the ecosystem and incorporate $WRLD into their games, communities, businesses, services, and other projects.

The 2-sided marketplace connects players and creators, matches supply and demand, and enables open peer-to-peer transactions within a unified $WRLD economy. In turn, the platform’s success compounds its own network effect; players must earn or acquire $WRLD to in order to fully participate in the broader ecosystem. The utility of $WRLD increases as more people join and transact in-game. This is already well-tested in Minecraft’s Marketplace, which hosts curated content from its community developers, as it’s generated over $1 billion in revenue since it launched in 2017.

The next major lever is the renting contract. World owners can choose to set a price to lease their world(s) when not in use. This not only decreases the investment risk for world owners but it makes the ecosystem more accessible to other players. The renting system attracts fresh talent who create richer and more compelling playable experiences.

The P2E faucet bootstraps the in-game economy for the next 5 years by subsidising player payouts on select play-and-earn worlds. To be eligible, world owners must lock up - or stake - a sizeable amount of $WRLD for a sizeable amount of time, reducing the circulation supply. Think of it as community governed stimmys to produce a thriving and self-sustaining $WRLD economy.

Frictionless Focus

Ark and Temptranquil have a clear mission: eliminate every point of friction in onboarding non-crypto gamers. There are 3 core rules:

1. It should be easy to onboard new players in play-and-earn games.

2. The NFT Worlds learning curve should be very shallow.

3. The core transaction type should be free & instant.

Currently, setting up play-and-earn games is time-consuming and technically challenging for non-crypto gamers. Play-and-earn games require new players to sign up for a crypto wallet, go through the platform’s KYC process, transfer cash to their wallet & likely wait a business day for funds to clear, buy crypto, potentially buy a starter pack NFT, and bridge the remaining crypto into a game’s native currency.

In NFT Worlds all crypto-related friction disappears.

The team has innovated a first-of-its-kind gasless transaction system to make onboarding painless, quick, and close to free. The gasless transaction system consists of a forwarding node that automatically covers the $MATIC in-game transaction gas fees and charges it back in $WRLD. This means non-crypto players don’t need to know a thing about the wider crypto space in order to play in NFT Worlds. They simply sign up, receive an in-game wallet and start playing to earn $WRLD.

Every product decision, every design, and every deployed development is a result of frictionless focus which compounds network effects. The NFT Worlds platform is thoughtfully designed to make it as easy as possible for players to start earning, playing, and returning to the $WRLD economy.

Turnkey Metaverse

NFT Worlds is the turnkey metaverse solution for over 100 verified NFT projects building and creating games.

NFT Worlds offers projects immediate utility for their communities. Project founders can purchase a world and outsource the play-and-earn game development to one of 18 verified NFT Worlds builders. Play-and-earn creates an additional revenue stream for NFT projects that otherwise rely on the hype of secondary sale royalties.

With NFT Worlds, projects gain access to over a decade's worth of knowledge on successful gameplay mechanics, design, and strategies. Players don’t need to be tokenomics experts or system designers to generate hefty profits. Thousands of games have been attempted, tested, and refined over time in the Minecraft community. The blueprint for success already exists.

NFT projects are not limited to creating play-and-earn games. The NFT Worlds team has built developer APIs so projects can verify if players own specific NFTs. This creates endless possibilities to reward holders with exclusive content, perks, access, and earning potential within a community-owned world.

NFT Worlds is a content creation and distribution platform. It solidifies web3 projects as fully functional revenue-generating brands and universes. Most importantly, it helps projects attract and acquire new fans. And in return every project onboards up to 10,000 players into the $WRLD ecosystem.

Finite Loops & Infinite Games

NFT Worlds is the only metaverse platform built on a successful and long-established gameplay loop. The gameplay loop is the foundation of the entire game. It's a cycle of actions that players repeat over and over within a game.

The more players engage in gameplay, the more they are rewarded. The more they are rewarded, the more they feel like they progress. The more they feel like they progress, the more they return.

Good gameplay loops attract players. Addictive gameplay loops retain players. Addictive gameplay loops are insanely hard to build because there must be a sequence where gamers are compelled to come back over & over for a long time.

The power of the NFT Worlds gameplay loop is in its Minecraft compatibility. Not because there are 172 million players who already know how to play, but because there’s over 10 years of evidence of a core gameplay loop that has kept up to 172 million players returning.

The addition of $WRLD creates a scalable economy that:

1. Rewards progress (tokenised time and effort)

2. Reminds them of how far they've come (in-game NFTs)

3. Presents a problem they can solve infinitely over time (evolving ecosystem)

NFT Worlds operates on a scale of extremes of finite loops and infinite games. While players stick to the finite gameplay loop in each individual world, the sprawling decentralised 10,000 world ecosystem provides a space for gamers to play forever. And because the ecosystem is ever-evolving and changing, there is always more to do and explore.

THE PLAYERS

Play-and-earn is an emerging market in which the future growth potential is yet to be fully realised, let alone accurately estimated. Rather than get hooked on the hopium of huge numbers, this section zooms in on the immediate growth potential of NFT Worlds in which there are two key audiences: the target audience and the current audience.

The target audience scopes the immediate growth potential of NFT Worlds. It identifies the groups of people who are easiest to attract to NFT Worlds based on behaviour and knowledge:

The potential player growth is enormous. However, the main key to creating value in play-and-earn games is by retaining current players' attention.

NFT Worlds players are not merely participants, they are co-creators. They actively take part in creating or enriching the gaming experience for others. Co-creators fall into 4 roles based on their interactions within the ecosystem: build, onboard, play and support. Roles are not exclusive silos as co-creators can be active across all 4 at different times.

The below table categorises them under a primary and secondary role:

Play-and-earn games attract a whole range of players who take part in the construction of playing experiences, bringing their anticipations, needs, desires and goals into the ecosystem. It’s not about the grind. It’s about fun and fulfilment.

WEB3 COMPETITORS

The key competitors are Decentraland and Sandbox. Neither threatens NFT Worlds. Currently, each platform offers players wildly different experiences despite sharing the metaverse label.

The key differentiator: NFT Worlds is a console. Sandbox is a game with resource- intensive custom tooling. And Decentraland is a buggy, deserted digital wasteland with minimal gameplay loops and loads of branded shop fronts.

This is not to suggest these platforms won’t be successful in the future. It’ll be a few years before VR tech improves to scale mass adoption. When VR tech is widely adopted, the spaces Decentraland and Sandbox are developing will usher us into the next phase of the metaverse. Until then, the platform that retains player attention has an enormous advantage in accelerating network effects, building a stronger ecosystem and compounding valuation.

METRICS

NFT Worlds is in the very early stages of ramping up the ecosystem. The team is building and testing systems to handle an infinite amount of players playing in a world, which will be spread across horizontally scaled "regions" for each world.

It’s difficult to accurately estimate the growth of the entire ecosystem right now but broadly here’s what we do know:

• 11,100+ active wallets in the ecosystem.

• 11 customised & fully-functional play-and-earn worlds online.

• 100+ verified projects currently building experiences.

• New worlds opening every week.

The player stats from the recent Gray Boys launch world further illustrate the appetite for fun play-and-earn experiences. The Gray Boys recently hosted a team deathmatch shooter game where the winning team received $WRLD. The world held 400 players at one time. Within 48 hours the waiting queue to enter the game had stretched to thousands of players. Furthermore:

• 10,000+ gamers had played in the arena

• 32,000+ in-game transactions occurred

The two most important metrics that fuel network effects are monthly active players and the number of content experiences. For now, it’s clear the NFT Worlds team is focusing all efforts on scaling the system architecture to onboard millions of players. A good sign of what’s to come.

VALUATION

1 $WRLD = 1 $WRLD.

ENDGAME

If Ark’s stellar record of company acquisitions is anything to go by, there is only one endgame for NFT Worlds: a Microsoft acquisition. And Microsoft is no stranger to acquisitions, racking up 197 buyout deals since inception.

Microsoft owns the hardware, game developers and publishers, and the most beloved globally gaming titles on the balance sheet. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, is aggressively expanding the gaming arm of the business. Nadella recognises the scale of the transition to the metaverse and is placing strategic bets that people will spend way more time in digital worlds.

But why would Microsoft buy NFT Worlds?

The promised metaverse that we imagine is still a fair way away. AAA gaming studios are at least 2 years away from entering the space due to development timelines. VR tech is at least ~5 years from mass adoption. L1 social gaming architecture will remain the future metaverse for some time. NFT Worlds - and therefore Microsoft - is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this.

NFT Worlds is the accelerated on-ramp for Microsoft’s metaverse ambitions. It’s the native web3 edge case built on top of the Microsoft-owned open-source Minecraft engine. The intrinsic value is in the decentralised tech layers and pre-established network effects of hundreds of projects already building in the ecosystem. Microsoft receives the entire metaverse potential in the acquisition of NFT Worlds.

Microsoft can operate the Minecraft and NFT Worlds gameplay models simultaneously. On a player level, Minecraft and NFT Worlds do not compete with each other. Rather, the new age of gaming gives players something they've never had before: choice. And that’s the most exciting promise of all.

- GAME OVER -

DISCLAIMER: I own 2 NFT Worlds and I am part of the NFT Worlds community marketing team. This is an unpaid volunteer position. I have never received any monetary/NFT compensation from the NFT Worlds Co-Founders. All work I produce is of my own doing and is not influenced or endorsed by the NFT Worlds Co-Founders. This is my personal thesis. NFA, DYOR + WAGMI.