We couldn’t meet each other in person.
Lockdowns, political complexities, life and distance all prevented us from being as close as we wanted to be. We were passionate about our ideas and the software we’d written to enable a more connected world, but we ourselves still felt disconnected.
We spent long hours talking in Discord. We hugged in VRChat. We built powerful friendships across cultures and perspectives. We learned of each other’s motivations, and drew inspiration from a shared dream. We privately longed for connection, romance, warmth, depth, information rich in a way that almost felt forgotten.
We tried to feel normal in a world that had long stopped being anything like normal.
And so we set out to build a city online. We call it The Nexus – the connection point, the link between worlds. We modeled it after the kind of place we’d all want to live in, if we lived in one place together. We decided that we would share it equally with others who sought the same things we did. We imagined a place for writers, poets, actors, artists, data scientists, software engineers, philosophers, psychologists– people from all walks of life– to gather together and build something beautiful and worthy of collective effort.
We have experience building collaborative networks, maintaining open source projects, running non-profit foundations and deploying medical supplies to those in need. We know that getting a lot of people to coordinate on a large-scale, idealistic project is difficult but invaluable work. We have looked at prior projects tackling the many complexity crises, as well as projects attempting to form proto-cities in the verse, and we have chosen a middle path that acknowledges a much wider user base, maximizes the intrinsic value of ownership for those participating in making The Nexus a vibrant and exciting place to spend time.
We knew that engineering, product development, design and art would have a place in solutions for complex human crises. It was deeply important to us that our efforts be a positive force, pushing humanity to solve the problems of our age. Looking at the successes of grind-to-earn projects like Axie Infinity, we longed to create an infinite game that everyone could play together, and feel good about playing, knowing they were doing the right thing with their time and for their fellow humans.
We are virtual denizens living in a world increasingly out of touch with nature and the pre-technological world. We will not hide from or distract ourselves from reality, but we accept that the world is not comfortable for everyone, and virtual space lets us be close even when we can’t be. We believe we can build something unique, community-owned, and open to all.
We built our own browser-based 3D world engine to power projects like The Nexus, called XREngine. The engine runs on every platform, in the browser and native, including VR and mobile. We wanted to take full advantage of the web tooling, and XREngine is the only publicly available game engine to include full MMO multiplayer deployment at scale, as well as web3 wallet and inventory integration. XREngine is built on React, three.js and many other open source frameworks and libraries.
By utilizing XREngine we also open up the realm of possibility for integrations and portal connections to any other project built on XREngine by default, as well as with Webaverse, Janus and others as we develop the connectors. In the future, we will bridge XREngine backend server tech to Unreal and Unity. We imagine The Nexus as trans-dimensional, operating on many platforms and on adjacent hosted layers.
The heart of The Nexus is AI.
We built a software stack to ensemble the latest and most efficient models and create interesting, story-driven agents to populate the city. Each one has a unique personality and is capable of open-ended conversation. The AI agents can build relationships with each other, form meta-narratives and keep the world rich and interesting for all. Even when it’s quiet and nobody’s around, there’s something to do and someone to talk to in The Nexus.
This tech is built in partnership with Super Reality, an AI education startup, Latitude Games, creators of AIDungeon, and XRFoundation. The architecture can be interacted with by programmers, hackers and non-techies alike to make interesting and realistic AI agents who can interact with users across different platforms and modalities. We plan to launch a set of avatars that can operate like NPCs in The Nexus and other platforms after The Nexus opens.
The Nexus will launch with support for Ethereum, Internet Computer, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, and even our own zero-gas sidechain for non-crypto users. For other chains, we make it easy for external contributors to add support. Our cross-chain support starts with caching NFTs from a user’s wallet and enabling same-chain payment and trade. Once the system has matured we will also offer cross-chain escrow, payment and trade (covered below).
One of our collaborative efforts is called Magrathea, a cross-verse exporter from Unity3D to our own multiplayer stack as well as Webaverse, Janus and soon Mozilla Hubs, VRChat, Sinespace and NeosVR. We aim to build and deploy replicas of The Nexus on as many platforms as is reasonable and enabling other creators to expand their reach to many platforms at once.
Interoperability between different worlds is critical for the success of an open metaverse. We need specifications for avatars, wearables and equipment that are adopted across different platforms so that users can seamlessly bring their stuff anywhere and creators can maximize the value and reach of the assets they create.
With the Cryptosabers project, we are focusing on interoperability of inventory items. We believe that supporting existing assets, however possible, and promoting free open solutions to enable our assets to have further reach is critical to the legacy of The Nexus and the growth of an open metaverse.
Cryptosabers will be released on five different chains, starting with mainnet Ethereum. We will then release on Internet Computer, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon and Solana in that order. We may sponsor teams to launch on other chains as well.
The DAO will take this further by investing into the development of integrations toward popular destinations, based on votes held in the community. We have initial plans to invest in asset interoperability with XREngine, Webaverse, Janus XR, Mozilla Hubs, VRChat, NeosVR, Decentraland, Cryptovoxels, Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot Engine and Source Engine.
Beyond that, we’ll let the community vote on where we should focus our efforts next.
Our long term goal with The Nexus is to build a decentralized, self-hosted city. Decentralization in a high-performance multiplayer context is difficult. In order to incentivize and enable decentralization, we are building host nodes that community members can purchase and operate. Operators of these host nodes will earn regular rewards in NXC token.
The first nodes will be focused on content hosting. Our goal is to replace Amazon S3 and Cloudfront CDN with a distributed content system. Node operators will receive payouts based on how much data they store and how much they serve. Our mechanisms for this are inspired by Chia, Filecoin and Storj.
Future versions of the host node infrastructure will allow for hosting of multiplayer sessions and serving of voice and video between users. Users who meet the minimum specs will also be able to serve AI model requests, process and transcode content and serve other users in replacement of services like AWS EC2 and Lambda.
NXG holders can create and vote on proposals for the Nexus DAO, especially as related to the production and burning of tokens, distribution of rewards and spending of excess treasury profits. The Nexus team will handle most of the day-to-day operations at launch, but our focus is to build a completely free-standing, community-owned DAO and integrate modern tooling as it is developed to enable democratic governance.
The Nexus interoperates with multiple chains and allows users to import their NFT assets from their various wallets into their inventory. We believe that the near future will require heavily abstracted multi-chain solutions to enable interoperable metaverse, and we see a market opportunity to mediate these sales. The Nexus will enable cross-verse marketplace and offer it as an integration into other platforms. For all transactions on the Nexus, a 2.5% fee will be charged. For all transactions on other platforms, a .5% network fee will be charged. 50% of this revenue will go into the DAO, with the other 50% used to buy NXC and burn it.
One of the big dreams of the metaverse is trade. While trade has been largely solved on a single chain in projects like Webaverse and XREngine, multi-chain trade is complicated. The Nexus serves as an escrow agent, holding the assets from both parties across all related chains and confirming the validity of the entire trade. The Nexus charges an escrow fee in NXC. Similar to the network fees, half of all NXC earned through escrow is burned.
The public spaces in The Nexus are established by partnership. Each interior area of The Nexus is it’s own hosted space and can be visited directly from a web browser. Each participating organization with space in The Nexus must ensure that the two-way portal is maintained so users can either teleport in from a URL via their browser, navigate from in-world or traverse virtual space to arrive there.
This model enables self-ownership and sovereignty for partnering organizations, while binding all of us together in collective ownership of the city.
Public land NFTs can be offered, altered or revoked by the DAO via approval by the Nexus Public Zoning Commision (NPZC). At launch, this will include all of the public areas of The Nexus Plaza. It is important to us that the publicly accessible parts of The Nexus be high quality and focused on a great experience for users. Public land will be granted for free, and organizations can hold an indefinite lease if they maintain their allotted land.
Private-area LAND NFTs are fully self-sovereign and cannot be altered or revoked. At launch, these include all of the residential space in the Plaza Towers, along with commercial space in the Plaza Headquarters building.
Name: Nexus Governance Token (“govs”)
Ticker: NXG
100,000,000 initial supply
30% public sale
28% to The Nexus team
20% staking and governance rewards
10% allocation to vault for cross chaining token
10% grants & ecosystem investment, bug and hack bounties
2% for airdropping to Cryptosabers and follow-up NFT holders
Initial Token Tax - 10%
This will curve toward 0% over 6-12 months3% to DAO platform
1% to token marketing spend
3% to token burn3% into staking rewards
Name: Nexus Credit Token (“credits”)
Ticker: NXC
Initial farm offering (presale for staking pool)
Initial offering of 100,000
Token is generated at a fixed rate of 6 tokens per block – can be altered through governance
45% of token is available for farming
45% is held by DAO treasury for in-game rewards, mining rewards, grants, investments, bug bounties and zero day discovery awards
10% is held by DAO in reserve for burning
NXC is served as an attention token – players can enable ads in the Nexus and earn money for engaging with them
50% of revenue from ads goes toward purchasing and burning NXC
10% of all revenue generated from asset sales and network fees goes toward purchasing and burning NXC
These will all be available for NXC holders:Blockchain incentives Farming LP pairs
Single coin staking
Community Polling Swap/Defi ExchangeProject onboard crowd-funding rounds
Please note that development is a fluid process and all dates are subject to change. Any significant delays would be communicated to the community as early as possible. Timeline assumes no major roadblocks to development.
Q2
Cryptosabers
The Nexus DAO
NXG Token
NXC Token
Q3
The Nexus Plaza Beta Launch (holders only)
Cryptosabers PVP Arena
Second Nexus NFT Drop - Avatars
Marketplace Service
Q4
The Nexus Plaza Public Launch (all users)
Cross-verse ARG Game Launch
Escrow Service
Q1 2023
Node Infrastructure Rollout
Decentralization Plan Phase 1