Infinite Fleet’s Creator and CEO of Pixelmatic Samson Mow recently spoke about how their development team plans to utilize NFT’s in the upcoming spacefaring MMO. Infinite Fleet plans to employ a crypto asset, INF, which can be used by players to make trades both in and out of the game.
Samson Mow is not only the CEO of Pixelmatic, but he also holds the position of Chief Strategy Officer at Blockstream, a blockchain technology company that developed and monitors the Liquid Network which the team intends to utilize for in (and out) of game transactions. The decision to utilize NFT’s and crypto assets was explained on Andy Pickering’s Crypto Conversation podcast back in March of this year, but resurfaced in a tweet shared recently by the official Infinite Fleet twitter account:
The #InfiniteFleet spaceships will be made available as NFTs on @Liquid_BTC. Why? Because this allows players to trade the ships peer-to-peer, and even via atomic swaps. @Pixelmatic CEO @Excellion explains how this works on @AndyPickeringNZ’s Crypto Conversation podcast. pic.twitter.com/Ix2JFLGVBh
— Infinite Fleet (@InfiniteFleet) April 17, 2021
The excerpt has been transcribed below:
“Recently, we’ve made the decision to make the ships in Infinite Fleet NFT’s, so those will be tokenized, and there’s a reason for that – because we want peer-to-peer trade. And that is the primary driver for making them into NFT’s, because the game currency, INF, is going to be the primary mechanism for player-to-player trade, so they’ll use INF to trade for ships with other players. And because everything is on Liquid Network, you can conduct an atomic swap which is a trustless transaction.
So, I construct a transaction with you, let’s say your ship is 100 INF, and if we both conduct this transaction, broadcast it, and that will be executed. But you don’t need to send me the ship first, and I send you the money, or vice versa, it just happens all at once or not at all. So that’s the way we’re using blockchain technology and the Liquid Network."
-Samson Mow, CEO Pixelmatic, Infinite Fleet
From an outsiders’ perspective one could easily brush off the utilization of the blockchain-based system as frivolous, as many games over the course of several decades have utilized some kind of a similar trading system that would allow for players to buy and sell items with each other – but there are some key benefits to Pixelmatic’s usage of NFT’s and crypto assets for Infinite Fleet’s economy. Security is one key factor, as Mow mentions. As a trustless transaction, Mow isn’t attempting to say that there is no trust involved, like your transaction will not process properly, or you shouldn’t trust your ability to transact securely. In actuality, these kinds of peer-to-peer transactions don’t require trust between parties due to the use of a secure intermediary, in this case the Liquid Network.
That isn’t to say that Liquid Network hasn’t had security issues in the past, most notably a problem in early 2020 with timelock problems that led to “unsafe transactions”, but it was quickly patched, and by comparison to the average security of peer-to-peer trading in games currently, Infinite Fleet’s proposed system may seem like overkill. Recently, NFT’s have found their way into gaming in strange ways that aren’t always entirely functional. Quite possibly the largest gaffe in the utilization of NFT’s resides in Visionary Realms’ attempt at fundraising through selling “unique collectibles” via Opensea. The premise of "ownership" of digital assets is also a main stated benefit, and NFT's can facilitate that ownership which could potentially lead the way to grey markets later, but in a far more secure fashion than what we see today.
In the least, Mow seems to understand how frivolous usage of NFT’s may actually be hurting the real use cases that actually exist for NFT’s – more specifically in gaming. Mow explains this in detail during an interview on Finance Magnates:
“Since the majority of today’s NFTs neither makes much sense nor provides much value, we’ll see that hype die down and the prices of many non-fungible tokens plummet. That’s not to say all NFTs are useless, NFTs have a real use case in gaming that hasn’t been properly explored yet — and that’s an industry worth hundreds of billions each year."
-Samson Mow, CEO Pixelmatic, Infinite Fleet
More games are starting to come around to the idea of utilizing blockchain and crypto assets as ways to facilitate currencies, infrastructure and transactions within their games. Unfortunately, so many of these projects fail to break through with mainstream adoption, though some digital currencies have stood the test of time, such as PLEX and Robux. The relatively new premise of utilizing crypto assets and NFT’s has to convince players of its benefits through beneficial use-cases outside of just the technological aspects. With alpha invites for Infinite Fleet slowly rolling out, we anticipate more information on all space-faring aspects of the game soon.
