Celebrating Our Anniversary — Nine Chronicles is 1 Year Old! 🥳🎉
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It’s been such an amazing year full of ups and downs, and we couldn’t be happier to celebrate Nine Chronicles’ 1st anniversary together with you, dear Adventurers.
Without a doubt, launching Nine Chronicles has been one of the most exciting, challenging and heartwarming chapters of Planetarium. We pushed the button to kick off the mainnet last year, full of enthusiasm to create a gaming network that could be powered by the players and can never be shut down.
During Nine Chronicles’ first year, we met tens of thousands of believers, early adopters, investors, players and builders from over 140 countries. As a 100% on-chain game, we reached the top 5 ranking in trading volume of all blockchain games, and thousands of players run our node each day to power the network while generating valuable resources and items.
This is our day to celebrate — let’s read about the past year of Nine Chronicles’ development, and the vision for the network ahead! 🎂
🕹 A game network to outlive us
Can we create an open source game network fully powered by the community? How will the players respond?
Every year, tens of thousands of games are created but most disappear over time. A lifecycle of an online game mainly depends on its revenue. And the revenue of a game is often not directly related to the core content — whether that may be art, story, interaction, or any kind of emotion that incites users.
This leads to one-sided monetization schemes, for example, random “gachas” that will mostly “suck the money” from users but never give back. At the worst scenario, what you purchased and earned will disappear when the game company decides that maintaining the network is no longer profitable.
So previously we would say, the games belonged to the publishers and developers, especially the revenue part. The actual players who equally make the game what it is, may never benefit from the growth itself. What is worse — all the time and effort, and memories built within the game — can disappear completely if the company simply decides to turn the network down. And the efforts to preserve what you love can be met with great resistance.
So in 2018, we dreamt of a game network that could last forever and be governed by the players. Back then, no one dared to create a multiplayer online game that fully runs on a blockchain. Theoretically, this idea seemed doable, however the technical challenges we faced were steep. Blockchain such as Bitcoin and Ethereum were never built to run an entire online game, so we needed a different approach from the rest.
We are more than lucky to have had true believers, enthusiasts and talented developers who had the same vision with us. Nine Chronicles is now a reality, a serverless gaming experience our adventurers are enjoying every day.
Our community has earned over 15M NCG in the first year, and our early backers also benefited from the growth of the network which rose more than 100 times in value. In the latest Arena Season 0, we distributed 896,000 NCG to more than 4000 players who battled their hearts out — the game that gives back to the community is now an official reality.
As the first fully on-chain gaming project, we face our own share of difficulties because our journey has never been attempted before. Yet, if we look back to 2020 and showed a picture of what we would accomplish in the first year of Nine Chronicles, we’d be amazed. Entering our second year, we are fully commited to make the Nine Chronicles Network a fun, inclusive, competitive, rewarding RPG experience powered by the community.
📈 1 Year Milestones
Network Statistics
- 2500+ Nodes powering the network daily
- 9,200,000+ On-chain Battles
- 1,500,000+ NFTs crafted by players
- 472,000+ NFTs traded on in-house decentralized marketplace
- 80M $NCG market trade volume
Funding and Partnership
- Raised $13M USD from prominent VCs and public backers to scale up the Nine Chronicles network and ecosystem
- Partnered with Animoca Brands, Hashed, Divergence Ventures, IDEO CoLab, Sfermion, Hypershere Ventures, SkyVision Capital, The Sandbox and more.
Game features and ecosystem
- Launched Play2Earn Portal, distributing over 2,300,000 NCG to players
- Introduced monster collection feature (staking version 0) and opened up World 5
- Rolled out ecosystem support program for content creators and developers
- Held Arena Season 0, distributing 896,000 NCG to 4000+ players.
- Launched our Ethereum Bridge, which was used to bridge over 66M NCG &WNCGs
- Launched Nine Chronicles Improvement Proposal, a gathering of the best ideas and proposals from the community
- Launched a feature-complete new block explorer through our ecosystem partners
Community
- 37K active Discord users, 43K Twitter followers
- 60+ content creators and 3600+ created content
- 35K players from 143 countries
- 12,000+ NCG holders
- 96K registered portal users — (we hope to onboard you all soon!)
🚀 Looking Ahead
As an open source game that operates entirely on chain, Nine Chronicles is the future of online gaming owned and powered by the players. After the IDO, we have been working hard to sketch out a unique vision and team to support it in the midst of many exciting moments happening in the blockchain gaming space.
Nine Chronicles Economy 2.0
A new design team composed of players, advisors, and Planetarium is working together to build a sustainable economy ready for another phase of growth. We will introduce a new inflationary sub-currency focusing on play to earn, while building out a robust end content for our highest tier users. An entirely new economic model based on supply and demand is in development, and the initial design will be shared with the community in the format of a new whitepaper later this year.
Focus on Our Unique Strength: Open Source
We believe open source online gaming is the future. We are ready to take this to the next step by supporting mods and even individual game experiences that utilize our beautiful assets and the NCG & WNCG economy.
A quarter of our token economy (over $200M) is reserved for content creation, and we will use these resources to fund new experiments that extend the Nine Chronicles network and content. These experiences may bridge over to other thriving blockchain ecosystems, which will be easier now that we have our own ERC-20 token.
We are excited to see where this will bring us! If you have an idea for a mini-game, NFT project, metaverse experience, DeFi collaboration, or more based on our assets, do come and say hello!
Making Nine Chronicles Easier to Access
It is still amazing to wake up to see thousands of nodes running and powering the network daily. But our blockchain has gotten non-trivial in terms of size (40 million transactions!), and we want to make sure that players can access Nine Chronicles from everywhere without downloading the whole chain.
Targeting November, players will be able to connect to full nodes managed by Planetarium or other players to play instantaneously without syncing the entire chain! Think of how fast your crypto wallet is — this experience will be similar. This update will be a huge momentum boost for our game, which is currently only playable on the best PCs with the best internet connection.
Mobile build is also in development, and in 2022 anyone will be able to pick up their phone to join the Nine Realms.
Proof of Stake (for all)
When NCG price increased rapidly after the IDO (can’t believe it’s only been two months!), greedy miners appeared and made the game difficult to play. We made a difficult decision to operate under a PoA mode, but we recognize this is not an ideal situation. Do we want the reorgs or centralized mining? Tough situation for all of us, especially now that reorgs significantly degrade the game experience while mobile will be launched in 2022.
We are working hard to migrate to PoS, but we are also 100% committed to supporting our players and guilds to operate their own validators. We will give our community a way to participate in our economy in the deepest and the most rewarding way. Staking rewards, which will include NCG, will be issued as well.
Reinvest into our community
Last but not least, we will focus on filling the Nine Realms, our Discord & socials, and other ecosystem locations with exciting content and support for everyone. Because of the technical challenges we faced, Planetarium has mostly been a “development-first” organization, but we will switch gears and double down on expanding our content & community team to support your growth, to bring fresh exciting content for the community to enjoy. These content may be an in game feature, or competition outside of the game itself. Our initiatives will focus on making the community a more rewarding, supportive, and fun place to belong.
From all of us at Planetarium (we’ve grown more and need a larger group picture!), we would like to thank every one of you for your support. Thank you very much for celebrating the 1st year anniversary together with us 🙏
If you haven’t already, please feel free to join our B-Day Crappy Drawing Contest and leave a note for the team :)
