And I say that in ways beyond just getting Claude to run 21 Soccerverse teams and GPT to handle my Gigaverse dungeon runs — currently Hall of Noobs rank 636 out of 5,362.

This week I bought a car by asking GPT to find me the day’s best examples of Toyota Yarises across national websites and local retailers to get a feel for price based on age, mileage, and service record.

It was a particularly good process balancing price against service record and annual testing, which in the UK is called the MOT: anyone can see the online history of any car, which is very useful for AI.

After one good opportunity slipped through our fingers, we quickly found another example. It was older but with a perfect service history and well priced, so well priced that after a couple of days, I had to ask why no-one had bought it.

As GPT says, the underlying progression is:

Explain it → produce it → build the process → operate the process → improve the process

We then discussed the various financing options and the deal was closed, although I had to do that part manually; ironically going through two anti-fraud gates, including having to provide screenshots of the car I was potentially “being pressurized by external forces” to buy.

Of course, I didn’t mention that AI told me to buy this car, but I was tempted.

My point is that this stuff is incredibly useful in real life, and if you aren’t using it in such serious situations, you should at least be using it in playful ways: like blockchain games, prediction markets, or building a parody news site about a small town in Cumbria.

🔗 Additional Links 🔗

• CEO Robby Yung on how AI reboots The Sandbox.

• Cambria’s volume breaks $27 million as RSGP TGE approaches.

• Pixels launches community hub for player-built games, tools and voting.

• WEMIX opens pre-registration for roguelike TD Hellsquad Rrrush!: Stone Rush.

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The one-time Roblox-on-blockchain metaverse burned bright in the 2021-22 era, thanks to the combination of mini-game creativity with no-code tools, land NFT speculation, and plenty of asset interoperability thanks to strong support from hundreds of brands.

And, surprisingly perhaps, this vision persisted for years, even as the value of assets and the promise of mass-market adoption drained away.

For example, land’s floor price is down to $75, so this means that for the vast majority of holders, they’re only good for harvesting tax losses. Even the genesis land sale was priced at $200.

But after a tricky management reorg last summer, the promise for late 2026 and into 2027 lies in how successfully the project integrates AI.

However, as new CEO Robby Yung explains in Blockchain Gaming World #213, The Sandbox isn’t adding AI to make everyone into a game-maker.

“The goal here is not to automate game creation. Because that’s how you get AI slop,” he says.

Instead, the focus is onboarding professional studios, who will use the AI smarts not to automate creativity per se but to automate repetitive work such as debugging, testing, content updates and — in particular — porting to multiple platforms.

This is a big departure from The Sandbox’s previous goal of building a platform.

According to Yung, however, the hard truth is that no developer will make a living exclusively from The Sandbox today.

In that context, providing the ability to publish in The Sandbox *and* on the web, Telegram, via app stores, and (stretch goal) via Steam is simply an acknowledgment of present realities.

The Sandbox is no longer the destination. But perhaps Sandbox Studio can become a useful production technology in its own right, helping to rebuild The Sandbox’s reputation and, eventually, something of its audience too.

Calendar

• Creative Minds Jam #1 ends — 28th August

• Control of Axie Classic handed to community — 10th September

• Creative Minds Jam #1 winners announced — 15th September

• MapleStory’s Vibe Camp 2 ends — 15th September

• Gigaverse’s The Awakening ends — 10th October

🔗 Additional Links 🔗

• YGG has appointed an EVE Frontier ambassador.

• Cambria is killing support for its Cambria Founders, Cores, and Companions NFTs, giving holders an allocation of the forthcoming RSGP tokens in exchange.

• AOC NFTs can now be burned to create a new Origins Axie, although 5 are required. AOC’s floor price is 0.5 ETH, although liquidity is low as Sky Mavis owns 1,232 of the total 1,375 AOC left in circulation.

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However, it is the blockchain game I play most regularly.

In part this is because the browser/mobile resource idler runs off factories and timers, so at …

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These NFTs were given away as referral rewards for the presale. The utility was simple.

Collect five AOCs, and you could burn them, randomly generating an Origin Axie, albeit with a 7% chance that one of those Axie’s six parts might be mystic, in that case minting a single-part Mystic Axie.

These have a current floor price of $5,100.

There are also 232 2-part Mystics — floor price $40,000 — and three 3-part Mystics — none for sale!

That was then.

For various reasons, the 1,375 unrolled AOC tokens have been sitting on the Ronin blockchain since 2024, lacking the smart contract-based ability to be burnt — but this is about to change.

Probably not of interest to most of us, it’s very good news for the 37 wallets still holding AOC tokens. If nothing else, they will soon have the opportunity to experience the trading activity as people attempt to arrange those 1,375 NFTs into useful groups of 5.

No doubt, there will also be some interesting game theory to ponder as the number of remaining tokens starts to fall, something that will be enhanced as the first very lucky wallets burn and mint a Mystic Axie.

With 1,375 AOC tokens available, that’s a hard limit of 275 Origins, with an expected return of 97 Mystics, always assuming the random number generator is truly random.

Calendar

• Creative Minds Jam #1 ends — 28th August

• Control of Axie Classic handled to community — 10th September

• Creative Minds Jam #1 winners announced — 15th September

• MapleStory’s Vibe Camp 2 ends — 15th September

• Gigaverse’s The Awakening ends — 10th October

AI playing Gigaverse news

• As you’d expect, I’ve been burning the tokens, with GPT doing the hard work as we look to improve our status in Gigaverse’s now-$30,000 The Awakening event. Our biggest multiplier has been buying a monthly Gigajuice subscription ($19), which quadruples rewards.

With that in place, and making sure we’re doing our allotted 12 runs per day, we’re now ranking 630 out of 5,019 in the Hall of Noobs leaderboard.

There’s also more green than red happening in my Soccerverse empire.

Additional Links

• How EVE Frontier’s game director is thinking about AI agents.

• Pirate Nations-inspired Booty Wars rebooting the vibe with “high-stakes PVP”.

• MapleStory’s Vibe Camp 2 launches for “short, simple, tense” gameplay.

• The Sandbox updates Studio, with Cursor as recommended AI provider.

• Sky Mavis to hand over Axie Classic to community.

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Codex set up a wallet on the Abstract blockchain, which I manually funded, but it’s been GPT all the way since, including buying materials to craft power-ups and heal juices. It’s also been modifyi…

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Soccerverse is always a favorite subject. I’m currently managing 21 different teams, which would be a full time job without AI, especially at the start of the season, where as well as setting tactics, you’re also dealing with transfers.

Even using AI it gets pretty complex, which is why I got Claude to build me a map displaying all my teams. It also displays their league position and most recent five results.

As you can see there’s currently a lot of red down arrows, suggesting that we need to up our respective game. But the main point of running multiple teams is you don’t get too hung up about any single team’s result.

Equally, by design, I’ve chosen a lot of low ranking teams who shouldn’t be too hard to get promoted, assuming relatively small capital injections to ensure we can buy the marginally better players required for the goal over the six-month-season.

Claude is also working out how much I have to spend to ensure no other players can vote me out of these teams. I call it Soccerverse as a 4X game, hence the castles on the map.

Another blockchain game that’s well set up for AI is Gigaverse, which announced this week that it will be migrating from a seasonal cadence to a fully persistent MMORPG called Gigaverse Online in Q4.

It was just the trigger I needed to finally start playing for the first time; something I decided to entrust to GPT, rather than put everything through Claude.

This decision wasn’t just about duplication, however, as I recently bought one of Work Louder’s Codex Micro mini-keyboards, which is designed to speed your AI usage by allowing you to see what’s happening with up to six threads or agents, and bind regular actions such as approve, deny and fork to its keys.

I have to confess I love it and it’s increased my GPT usage 5-fold.

As for actually playing Gigaverse, GPT set everything up itself including a wallet, which I funded. We’ve been playing through the first missions via the text terminal with an AI-generated local webpage showing me everything that’s happening in-game.

Each of the simple turn-based battles looks like this when it’s in progress.

Then there’s an overall progress screen, which shows how each dungeon run played out.

It may not look as pretty as the canonical game, but it’s much more accessible, especially as I can just query all the things I don’t understand, which at this stage is pretty much everything.

Is it the future of gaming?

I don’t know, but the ability to AI to provide an instant ad hoc game client that can simultaneously play, record and interpret a game is a truly magical thing.

🔗 Additional News 🔗

• MIR4 players have traded over 40,000 character NFTs.

• Sunflower Land dev announces Ronin creature-collector Yakkamon.

• Pirate Nation developer Proof of Play shuts down.

• The Sandbox launches $7,500 AI-led Creator Game Jam on 12th August.

• The Sandbox tweaks LAND benefits as part of AI tools reboot.

🤖 Additional AI | Agent Links 🤖

• MetaMask’s Agent Wallets are live. You can “choose between Guard Mode or Beast Mode”.

• “The things that went wrong at Anthropic are not remotely similar in magnitude to what happened at OpenAI.” 😟

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Sure, I’ve used it off-and-on and one of my Minds sends me a daily email about token prices. But that’s not how you’re supposed to interact with the product now that there’s a whole catalog of skills you can equip your Mind(s) with…

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“When we started out, we believed games using blockchain tech had the potential to usher in a new, decentralized internet. Ultimately, we couldn't build a product and sustainable business that proved out this thesis at scale.”

Proof of Play burst onto the sce…

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AI enables people with great ideas — or even just personal ideas — to build them, see how they work, and whether anyone else is interested.

And if the outcomes of the MapleStory Universe’s Vibe Camp #1 are anything to go by,…

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Axie Infinity peaked as a play-to-earn game back in November 2021, but if you want to extract value from the game today in the form as AXS tokens — as opposed to spending the bAXS tokens you earn in-game — you’ll get your money slashed by at least 15%, or perhaps as much as 82.5%, depending on the health of your Axie Score.

The Ronin blockchain is now launching something similar; this time, the cross-game reputation is labeled as its Honor Score.

It will be based on your general activity, what games you’re playing, what assets you own and how much you participate in the ecosystem. On the plus side, the higher your Honor Score, the better rewards you’ll get, plus potential airdrops and other benefits, including early access to new games.

This individual system is layered onto Ronin’s existing Proof of Distribution system, which has already delivered over $40,000-worth of RON tokens to games on the blockchain. Games driving the most activity in terms of players, gas spent and transactions get the most RON.

It’s not difficult to see how the two systems could combine: players with the best Honor Scores boost the rewards of the games they play, and those games give those players their best rewards.

Finally, a sustainable win-win?

As for Pixels, the play-to-earn game that peaked in early 2024, it’s deploying an even more disruptive playbook and going open source.

This week, the frontend was released, to be followed by the backend, supported by new creator tools and the ability to fork your own version of the game and deploy it onto Pixels’ cloud infrastructure.

In this manner, it hopes to encourage a community of builders who can build their own Pixels-like games, add new features to the canonical game via a new governance voting method, while also bringing new functionality and perhaps greater value to assets such as the PIXEL token and land NFTs.

It’s not the only game to be thinking this way. EVE Frontier and MapleStory Universe also have their own versions of allowing creators and AIs to build on top of canonical systems, and potentially get rewarded in the process.

Of course, such features don’t magically make a game successful, but let’s not allow perfection to be the enemy of the better.

Other news

• Marblex’s 4,500-strong NFT Adventure with The Seven Deadly Sins mints out.

• Post-World Cup 2026, FIFA Rivals launches All-Star event.

• WEMIX hit by stablecoin hack, with $724,198 taken.

🔗 Additional Links 🔗

• Ubisoft has finally killed Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles. Servers for the now-web2 game close 30th October.

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Of course, open-sourcing a frontend really is only the first step. It’s great for people who want to mess around with the look and feel of the game and launch their own…

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Indeed, as Claude praised me yesterday, one of the big predictive wins of this Substack thus far has been its early adoption of AI, with the start of AI Fridays in April 2023.

If only I’d been so timely with the blockchain gaming stuff!

Which brings us onto Substack’s new AI crackdown. All posts from 21st July 2026, when accessed from the Substack app, can now be scanned for their use of AI, thanks to its integration with Pangram.

In conjunction with this, Substack provides all authors with the ability to make a formal disclosure statement, which it calls a “How I make this” statement.

I presume the reason is for the blowhards and poets to protest their words’ fully human origins. As for me, I just state:

“This article was produced by a stochastic system. Some of it also involved AI.”

The point is that while a few people still physically write everything out, and the odd novelist is keen to show off their typewriters, over the past 20 years, most of us have moved to word processing … with spell checkers … and Grammarly etc.

In that pipeline, AI is just another tool. As Tyler says, You’ll Learn To Love AI Writing.

But that’s not really the point. The point of working with AI is much more multifaceted. Here’s an example.

Over the past months, I’ve read various stories about South Korean outfit Nexus and its CROSS blockchain, recently renamed ONE to reflect its acquisition of the One Store; Korea’s primary domestic alternative to Google Play.

But I’ve never written anything up or had the time to work out how these stories fit together, or even if there’s any coherence.

Then the subject came up in one of the daily news digests I get Claude Opus 4.8 High to run, combining the X API and various micro-payment API search engines accessed through Stripe’s Tempo blockchain. The cost ranges from $0.04 to sub $0.001 depending on the service.

Some number of queries later, including some Korean-only searches — plus a couple of double-checking passes through GPT 5.6 Sol — I had the following article, which has been lightly edited.

The point is that this is something I would have never had produced without AI as a research and writing tool.

The second act of Jang Hyun-guk; Korea’s complex blockchain game guru

For a decade, Jang Hyun-guk has been Korean gaming’s most persistent advocate for putting games on blockchains.

As chief executive of Wemade, he made WEMIX central to the company’s strategy and oversaw the international blockchain versions of MIR4 and Night Crows. At the height of the enthusiasm in 2021, Wemade’s market capitalization passed ₩5 trillion ($4.2 billion).

The reversal was equally dramatic. In November 2022, Korea’s major crypto exchanges decided to delist its WEMIX token, citing discrepancies in its reported circulating supply and inadequate or incorrect information given to investors. The token was removed from those exchanges on 8th December 2022 after Wemade failed to stop the decision in court.

A related but distinct criminal case followed. In August 2024, prosecutors indicted Jang and Wemade under the Capital Markets Act. They alleged that Jang had said WEMIX liquidation would stop while the company continued to use and liquidate tokens, and that the statement helped induce investment and support Wemade’s share price. Prosecutors later sought five years in prison and a ₩200 million fine.

Jang had already stepped down as Wemade’s chief executive in March 2024, becoming vice-chairman. He also resigned as chief executive of affiliate Wemade Max that September.

Nor did the criminal case end with the first acquittal. The Seoul Southern District Court found Jang not guilty on 15th July 2025. The court said the relevant financial product under the charge was Wemade stock, not WEMIX, and that prosecutors had not sufficiently established the required link between Jang’s statements, WEMIX and Wemade’s share price. Nexus shares closed 14.5% higher that day.

The Seoul High Court upheld the acquittal on 27th November 2025. The prosecution declined a final appeal, making the result final in December.

That distinction matters. The courts did not declare that every WEMIX circulation statement had been complete or accurate. They found that the specific Capital Markets Act case brought by prosecutors, centred on Wemade shares, had not been proved.

Jang did not build his second act from a conventional startup. In December 2024, Action Square announced that he would become co-chief executive from 1st January 2025. He invested ₩5 billion through a third-party share issue, then bought roughly another ₩600 million of stock in the market. By 7th January, his disclosed stake was 10.1%, making him the company’s second-largest shareholder, with a contractual route to acquire more.

Action Square was a listed game developer with a long record of operating losses. That was a liability, but its corporate structure and listing also gave Jang a platform from which to recruit and raise capital. At a February shareholder meeting, the company changed its name to Nexus; later that month Jang became sole chief executive.

Jang has described his departure from Wemade as involuntary. In a ChosunBiz interview published on 29th March 2025, he said he did not want to return to life as an employee and believed blockchain games were the field in which he had achieved the most. He also argued that the sector had made little progress since he left Wemade. Those statements are useful evidence of his motivation, but they are his assessment of the industry, not an established fact.

Nexus moved quickly. The OpenGame Foundation launched CROSS’s first mainnet, “Adventure,” on 23rd April 2025, with Nexus as its principal technical partner. Ragnarok: Monster World followed as the first onboarded game the next day.

Rohan 2 Global, co-published with Playwith Korea, launched on 30th September. The companies reported more than 3 million pre-registrations at launch, and Jang said in November that monthly active users were approaching 300,000. Those are meaningful signs of use, although the latter figure is management’s claim rather than an independently audited metric.

But the transaction that changed Nexus’s position was its acquisition of One Store, Korea’s home-grown alternative to Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

Nexus agreed in June 2026 to pay ₩63 billion ($41 million) for a controlling interest reported as 89%, buying shares from SK Square, Naver, a special-purpose company and Krafton.

More importantly, Jang did not personally write that cheque. Nexus financed most of the purchase with a roughly ₩39.5 billion third-party share issue and ₩21 billion of convertible bonds.

SK Square, Naver and Krafton sold their One Store shares while reinvesting substantial portions of the proceeds in Nexus through the new equity and convertible bonds. That continuing involvement gives Nexus more institutional substance than the average web3 gaming venture: the former owners did not simply take their money and leave.

The structure does not remove the financial risk. The $41 million purchase price was equal to about 165% of Nexus’s year-end equity, and the company relied heavily on shareholder dilution and convertible debt to complete it. Investors initially reacted badly: Nexus shares fell sharply after the acquisition and financing were announced.

Nexus now controls One Store, but it does not own it outright. One Store says its marketplace is installed on more than 38 million devices. An IGAWorks analysis placed it second in Korea for game transaction value, with a 12.6% share accumulated across the five years from the second half of 2020 to the first half of 2025. That makes it a substantial distribution asset, although it remains far behind Google Play on the same measure.

Nor has One Store demonstrated consistently profitable operations. It reported revenue of ₩113 billion in 2025 but an operating loss of ₩9.7 billion. Nexus has therefore acquired a real platform with established commercial relationships, not a proven profit engine. The investment case depends on whether combining that platform with Nexus’s games, payments and blockchain services can improve its economics.

Nexus says it will combine One Store with its web shop, payments, community, rewards and blockchain services. The strategic logic is straightforward: at Wemade, Jang controlled games and blockchain infrastructure but not the store through which most mobile users discovered and paid for games. Nexus now controls a meaningful domestic distribution channel as well.

On 15th July, One Store joined CROSS Mainnet 2.0 as a validator, operating node infrastructure for block production, transaction verification and network security. The “Breakpoint” upgrade, launched on 1 June, uses Proof of Staked Authority and describes a top-21 active validator set.

This is real infrastructure integration, but it should not be mistaken for proof of mature decentralization. H Lab was announced as the first external independent validator. One Store is now another operator, while CertiK had signed a memorandum of understanding to participate.

Public announcements do not establish that only two validator nodes exist, because foundation-operated nodes may also be active. They do show, however, that the publicly identified set of independent operators remains limited. One Store may diversify the network operationally, but it is controlled by Nexus and therefore is not independent of the corporate group driving the platform.

The rebrand also predates the validator announcement. Nexus said on 18th June that CROSS would become ONEChain and its native token would change from $CROSS to $ONE; the ecosystem dollar was later named $ONEUSD. The purpose is to put the store, chain, payments and game services under a single ONE identity.

On 23rd July, Nexus launched Frost Kingdom, its first self-published title. The strategy game is available through One Store, iOS, Android, PC and an HTML5 version. In the global version, its $RDIA game token can be converted into the premium in-game currency, and Nexus says 5% of game revenue will fund rewards paid in ONEUSD to token holders.

That is a concrete product, but it is too new to demonstrate that the combined store-and-chain model works commercially.

Nexus is also building a Dubai presence. Its local entity co-hosted a gaming, AI and blockchain event with the Dubai Multi Commodities Center on 16th July, and the two organizations plan joint appearances at ChinaJoy in Shanghai and Gamescom in Cologne. The facts support a Korea-to-Dubai expansion strategy, though claims about the capital or studios it will attract remain prospective.

Jang’s clearest formulation remains the one he gave ChosunBiz in March 2025:

“Blockchain is not magic. The game needs to be fun first, then we add blockchain.”

His comeback is no longer hypothetical, and the criminal case is no longer hanging over it. But the One Store acquisition is not personal vindication, nor is a parent-controlled validator evidence of decentralization by itself.

Nexus has acquired a serious distribution asset and connected it to a functioning, if still concentrated, blockchain-game stack. It has also attracted continuing financial involvement from some of Korea’s largest technology and gaming companies.

That makes Nexus more substantial than the average web3 gaming venture. It does not yet make it a proven business.

The question is now more concrete than it was at Wemade: can Nexus turn its distribution, payment and blockchain infrastructure into durable games, users and cash flow—or will it produce another cycle of token-led expectations?

N.B. Pangram reckons this article is 7% AI, which is order-of-magnitude incorrect. You can’t trust anyone these days.

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It answered as below.

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And now it’s announced the start of a new ongoing program called Creative Minds Jam, which it’s running in conjunction with Animoca Brands and its Animoca Minds AI.

Although mainly a virtual event, it’s also designed to have a local element. At least, the …

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MapleStory Universe’s Vibe Camp was even more accessible than EVE Frontier’s thanks to its partnership with AI game-making platform Verse8, which meant all 693 games submitted were created usi…

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Fenris Creations has completed its first substantial task, with the Carbon engine framework — developed over more than two decades of building and operating EVE Online — now available on GitHub for those with the …

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Decentralized authority and ownership of digital assets have always been central to blockchain gaming’s vision. But ownership means little if players cannot do anything meaningful with those assets beyond holding, trading or selling them.

Without agency, blockchain gaming is reduced to little more than a speculative investment scheme, as its recent history has demonstrated.

Ownership and agency therefore have to coexist. Players need to own their assets, but they also need the ability to use them to create new content, experiences and games without remaining entirely dependent on the original developer.

We are not there yet. But the rise of vibe-coding is the first time blockchain gaming has had a credible route toward fulfilling that vision, because it dramatically lowers the technical barrier between owning an asset and building something with it.

This also helps explain why a growing number of blockchain gaming companies are organizing their strategies around player creation — and why I expect every serious onchain project eventually to launch some version of it.

EVE Frontier provided an early indication of the direction in March with its first hackathon, which, although not AI-branded, was predominantly vibe-coded, notably by the overall winner, who wasn’t even typing prompts, just talking to ChatGPT.

This was followed by Gigaverse’s GIGATHON #1 and MapleStory Universe’s recently completed Vibe Camp, which generated 693 projects using the fabled franchise’s IP.

The Sandbox’s first AI game jam is still running, while YGG is preparing the inaugural game jam for its newly launched vibecode.game platform in partnership with Animoca Brands’ Minds.

Now, these initiatives are not all doing exactly the same thing. Some are integrated with onchain assets, and generating yield whereas others are just about using AI to make mini-games, no blockchain required.

But collectively, the direction of travel is that blockchain gaming is shifting from asking players to own parts of a game towards giving them the tools to extend it.

Even games without formal game jams and prize pools are finding out that their users will build things anyway.

Soccerverse’s World Cup-adjacent Grand Tournament is one example, as is my own modest contribution, SVC Showdown: an external game built around Soccerverse player ownership and real-world World Cup performances.

Its player leaderboard has predictably been dominated by the goal-scoring antics of Kylian, Lionel, Erling and ’Arry. The player ROI leaderboard, however, has thrown up some rather more interesting names.

🔗 Additional Links 🔗

• YGG shuts down YGG Play, pivots to AI gaming data.

• GFAL’s Diamond Jewels Match hits 100,000 downloads on Google Play.

• WEMIX token now live on Kraken.

• Ethereum is rebuilding with privacy and quantum-resistant key features.

• The top 50 players in high-risk, high-reward game Cambria spent $1.05 million.

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The reason was given as “a market decision, not a product decision”, and that’s something underlined by YGG’s announcement of its new vibecode.game platform, whose existence is certainly a market-driven decision.

Indeed, the grow…

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And what a trajectory it’s been.

From the simple concept of distributing crypto yields globally off the back …

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It’s a highly relevant question, given that both common sense and historical evidence suggest blockchain still carries significant downside risk in terms of corporate reputation, financial sustainability, and player sentiment.

And yet, this week, Nexpace, Sky Mavis and Avalon — in their own specific way — all offer their own answer.

One of the surprises of the week was the news that AI-powered UGC platform Avalon is still using blockchain.

Granted, Avalon raised the bulk of its $23 million investment from crypto VCs, but it had never formally announced a blockchain partner, and in recent years has focused much more heavily on its AI credentials.

Nevertheless, as it moves toward its planned late 2026 early access release, the PC and console platform has revealed that its ownership and monetization layer will run on Sony’s Soneium Ethereum L2 blockchain.

Significantly, Avalon is positioning blockchain as functional infrastructure, not as the core product. There will be no wallet onboarding and no gas fees. For players, blockchain is intended to be an invisible element within a platform described as enabling “anyone to create high-quality games, worlds, and experiences.”

Blockchain is more of a consumer-facing technology for Nexpace. It’s careful to avoid stirring up speculative vibes, instead pointing out that blockchain is one element of its vision to enable players to become builders in MapleStory Universe.

And, this week, it had good news to share in this regard, as it received over 430 submissions for its Vibe Camp hackathon, which was held in conjunction with the AI game-making platform Verse8. The three-week-long event allowed users to access MapleStory IP, immediately making these games appear more professional than they otherwise would.

Winners for the $60,000 NXPC prize pool will be announced on 22nd July.

As for Sky Mavis, it’s well past the point at which blockchain could be considered optional. In 2026, the more significant question is, how can it combine blockchain and games to regain the sort of excitement Axie Infinity once generated purely through speculation?

Those heights may not be regained, of course, but the latest playtest for its combat-centric Atia’s Legacy, combined with updates to its land-based DeFi layer Terrariums, suggests it’s moving in the right direction in terms of introducing new functionality to existing assets.

If nothing else, Terrariums players spent $95,753 in its first week, with that revenue going into the Axie Infinity treasury for future ecosystem activity.

That underlines both the opportunity and the tension. Blockchain can still generate economic engagement, but in 2026, the challenge is proving that engagement can support better games, not just more elaborate asset systems.

Calendar

• Soccerverse Season 4 starts — 4th July

• Alien Worlds’ Drone Racing tournament ends — 9th July

• MapleStory Universe Vibe Camp winners announced — 22nd July

• The Sandbox Alpha Creators Game Jam ends — 31st July

• The Sandbox Alpha Creators Game Jam winners announced — 7th August

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