#mintopoly-explainer
My co-creator hotel has mentioned Mintopoly! a lot (see here, and here for starters) in the short while this blog has been a thing, so I wrote a bit of an explainer on it.
Mintopoly! is a crypto-themed online NFT game akin to idle games of old, like Cookie Clicker and A Dark Room, wherein you invest virtual Mintopoly! money into crypto world stuff (rigs, nodes, oracles, bots) to make more Mintopoly! money to invest into more crypto stuff (and so on) until you win (or get pretty close, anyway). The game takes place over rounds of 30,000 "blocks"— increments of 15 seconds — and the player with the highest amount Mintopoly! Money (₼) wins the round. Round winners will typically receive one of many types of Mintopoly! cards via airdrop, each of which provides valuable bonuses to your in-game investments, like a 10% bonus to one investment's production, or a 6% discount to the cost of another. Those cards can be bought, sold, traded, burned, or whatever else because they're NFTs and you own them and you can do whatever the hell you want with them because they're NFTs and you own them and you can do whatever the hell you want with them because they’re NFTs and and and.
Also, the top 200 scoring players at the end of the round get a specific-to-their-final-spot amount of the in-game MM token, also via airdrop.
So what's the draw? Fundamentally, it's fun to compete, and even more fun to win. Even further than that, there are plans to let you use your MM winnings to craft/mint Mintopoly! cards.
Even further than that, the game itself is... kind of addicting? It's got a Formula One-esque gameplay cycle to it, with ruthless optimization and maximum efficiency being the keys to success. It's a game of equilibrium and opportunity cost; misjudging when to stop buying Mining Rigs and move onto Validator Nodes, for example, could cost you an early-game lead. Buying Decentralized Exchanges until the marginal ROI is too low will put you behind other players in the mid-game. And, as I've so painfully learned, you can throw away an easy top-20 finish by hard forking too early (and/or too late).
We've all heard the buzz about how NFTs are going to be huge for gaming, but what exactly is the endpoint of their application? Well, let me tell you — if I could have sold my League of Legends and Fortnite skins safely and for real money after growing out of those games, I'd have done it in a second, but locked behind/within a centralized system, I never actually owned any of the in-game assets I paid for. NFTs offer a way out of that mud and into real ownership of digital assets, a market for which has been bubbling for years just waiting to be enabled. I mean, gold farmers for games like Ultima Online and WoW have been a thing for 20+ years. Venezuelan RuneScape players generated multiple times their country's average annual income from selling accounts during economic crisis (and had such a profound effect on the game's economy that when Venezuela suffered a nationwide electrical blackouts, RuneScape's trading market underwent a small crisis due to the lack of supply of in-game items). NFT games like Axie Infinity are just now realizing the potential for multi-million dollar virtual economies that have existed in games like EVE Online for years. All this demand has been pent up, hindered by market friction and terms of service regulations, but NFT and cryptocurrency tech might now provide a path to salvation.
Back to Mintopoly! All in all, we like to think it's one of many great first steps towards reaching the full potential of NFT technology within the video game space. Tokenizing digital assets with an open standard and allowing them to be traded easily and trustlessly blows the top off of a gigantic underground economy that's been in the shadows for decades.
We await eagerly to see what the industry borne by these early forefathers has in store for gaming worldwide.
— rrn
