NFTs at the heart of major upgrade for decentralized virtual city

A decentralized virtual city is starting its transformation into a metaverse — enabling players to trade collectible NFTs on a scarce gaming map.

MegaCryptoPolis began life as a 2D city builder game in May 2018, with the DApp running on Ethereum smart contracts. The following year, it received a 3D upgrade, and expanded to Tron in 2020.

Every building that features on the gaming map is a non-fungible token owned by a player, and the team say every game action is a transaction minted on a blockchain.

Now, the game’s developers have their sights set on an ambitious “World” upgrade that will give players the chance to walk through this virtual map with their citizens as avatars — with a fully immersive experience that will enable them to enter buildings and admire interiors created by other players.

The vibrant marketplace is also set to pave the way for players to offer their lovingly created NFTs for sale in owned apartments… and complete missions in order to collect the materials that are needed to craft unique tokenized objects.

How the game works

A playable demo for the World upgrade was released on March 15 — complete with storefronts, a mayor’s office and the main tower lobby. This main lobby is going to be a major focal point for the game, as every new player gets their own private apartment there.

Storefront owners will get the chance to create unique experiences in a high-profile location — whether this is an NFT gallery, a museum, an electronics shop, a bar or even a tattoo salon. According to MegaCryptoPolis, the possibilities are endless.

A plethora of in-game assets are available — including land plots, buildings, citizens, cars, appliances and even pets. They’re presented in the form of ERC-721 tokens. While districts and land plots continue to be managed on the Ethereum network, other assets migrated to Polygon to ensure transactions can take place instantly and at zero cost.

MEGA is the game’s native cryptocurrency, and in the second quarter of 2021, players will be given the chance to stake the coins in order to unlock perks, vote for the metaverse’s mayor, and govern over the in-game economics.

A decentralized city

NFTs have exploded in popularity so far in 2021 — making the MegaCryptoPolis upgrade exceedingly well timed to say the least.

Continual improvements have been made by the game’s developers over the past three years — and they have been ahead of the curve when it came to finding a workaround for high gas fees on the Ethereum network, and eliminating congestion by embracing layer-two solutions that make transactions instant.

Last November, MegaCryptoPolis announced that it was going to embrace the Matic Network — enabling the team to move the most complex and gas-consuming operations to a sidechain.”

At the time, developers added: “The game logic remains intact and totally decentralized with all the smart contracts and tokens working the same way as they were on Ethereum.”

For MegaCryptoPolis, scalability has been a top priority, with developers acknowledging that levels of adoption would be affected if transactions were slow and expensive.

Developers say that the upgrades don’t end here, and the World demo is only the first step in delivering an even more immersive experience for the game’s loyal community.