Alien Worlds: Introducing DAOs via Participation

In a not-too-distant future, The Federation fled a raging pandemic on Earth through a wormhole. On the other side, they found interconnected exoPlanets, where they were able to establish the Federation of Alien Worlds and mine the precious Trilium.

This is the premise of Alien Worlds, a multichain, NFT-based gaming metaverse that aims to educate and engage players on the workings of decentralised governance and encourage mass adoption of blockchain concepts by gamifying the whole crypto experience.

“We created our metaverse, which is a boundary in space, divided into six planets. When people land on these digital worlds, they use NFTs to mine the fungible token, Trilium,” says Saro McKenna, Co-founder of Alien Worlds, as she describes the game.

Each planet in the Alien Worlds metaverse functions as a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO). Known as Planetary Syndicates, these in-game DAOs are a first for the web3 and gaming industries. The Planetary Syndicates within Alien Worlds give players the opportunity to govern their own communities, manage and allocate digital assets within their treasuries, and collaborate and compete against one another for Trilium ($TLM), the metaverse’s cryptocurrency token.

How Alien Worlds works

Alien Worlds is built on the WAX, Ethereum, and BNB Chain blockchains. 

Spread across six planets, Alien Worlds has a vast and rich universe for players to explore. 

Alien Worlds is the first project to put DAOs into competition with one another within a single economy. Players earn Trilium through the Mining and Mission games, which they can then stake to one or more of the Planetary Syndicates (DAOs) to either run for governance or to vote for leaders.

In the game, each of the six Planetary Syndicates must organize itself by holding regular elections for Custodians, who will control the vast treasuries funded by tokens staked by DAO members and topped up by the game’s economy. 

Players can strategize, collaborate and compete with each other. As a result, numerous communities have been created off the back of the Alien Worlds metaverse where players discuss tactics, politics and educate each other about the features and benefits of in-game digital assets (NFTs).

The ecosystem gives players a free rein when it comes to playstyle. Explorers can choose to focus on mining planets for TLM, completing missions, or partaking in planetary governance. All are good strategies. What matters is active participation in the game. As McKenna says, “You’ve got to pick your strategy.”

Growth story

First released in December 2020 as a beta version, Alien Worlds became an instant hit. In less than a year, it had racked up over 450,000 monthly active users. Players flocked to the game because of how easy it was to join. They stayed for the appeal of interpersonal relationships that gave them purpose and meaning through community building, collaboration and crypto incentives like earning NFTs  (digital objects or property).

Currently, Alien Worlds sits atop DappRadar’s top blockchain game rankings with over 8 million all-time players and more than 700,000 Monthly Active Users (number of unique wallet addresses interacting with Alien Worlds’ smart contracts on a monthly basis, Source: DappRadar). Alien Worlds is the number one game in DappRadar’s dapp ranking charts and has inspired individuals to scale new heights of imagination in order to create, share and thrive in the social metaverse.

How to join Alien Worlds

New players require a WAX wallet to access the game. After creating one, they visit play.alienworlds.io to set up a game account. While setting up the account, they must pick a username and an in-game avatar. 

Once the above process is completed, players are immediately asked to pick a planet, land and mining tools to start mining and begin their metaverse journey as Explorers. Watch the video below for a more detailed introduction.

Alien Worlds also has a feature where new and landless Explorers can rent land from other Explorers to mine and earn TLM.

How to play Alien Worlds

Digital assets can be gained on Alien Worlds through three activities: mining, staking, and trading NFTs.

1. Mining: Mining works by exploring different planets in search of TLM using various NFT tools. Mining also yields NFTs.
2. Trading NFTs: NFTs purchased or earned in the game can be traded on AtomicHub, a leading high scale NFT platform for creating and trading NFTs. 
3. Staking: Staking is a great way to earn digital assets since it offers an opportunity to earn passive income as the planet′s reward pool increases. Thus players can support their planetary DAOs and receive rewards that have utility and in-turn value.

Unique feature: Planetary DAOs

As aforementioned, each planet in Alien Worlds is a tokenised DAO with its own elected government. Here we dive a bit deeper on how they work.

Candidates are community members seeking election to a Planetary Council. When elected, a candidate becomes one of the five Custodians that make up the Planetary Council.  Each of the six planets has its own Custodians, who are both elected and removed by the members.

Custodians manage and allocate digital assets within the DAO treasuries, which come from the planet’s staking pool. 

The more TLM staked to a planet, the bigger its economy becomes and the more TLM it attracts in daily inflation. From there, the DAO’s treasury grows, thus attracting more competition for control over the planet. In time, members of each planetary DAO will be able to amend the code base and change the game’s rules. 

Alien Worlds is the only project where DAOs are a fundamental gaming component (as opposed to just governing part of the project).

What’s next for Alien Worlds?

Following significant developments in 2022, Alien World’s CEO Saro McKenna explains there’s more in store. ″We also have a roadmap of releasing further games, which are not really baked into the infrastructure of the Metaverse for inflation, but provide particular gaming loops that people can play and participate in”, McKenna says. “Those include a Fighting Game and Quests. In the fighting game you can send in your minions and weapons and challenge another player to battle.

“We have a multi-year vision of what Alien Worlds can become and we look forward to sharing more of that vision throughout 2023”, says McKenna. This vision includes a plan to introduce land terraforming, new NFTs and ‘Satellites’, which are DAOs that explorers can create and control. Satellites will increase TLM utility, expand Alien Worlds across chains and attract the next generation of users.

Alien Worlds requires the novice to dive into the community to learn the best practices and strategies for blockchain gaming novices. It is an excellent play-to-earn game where players can take part in meaningful, economic decision making that produces real consequences and influences the direction of the game.