Cross-chain GameFi: Which projects have expanded to new chains?
There are many cheap and fast chains for NFT and gaming projects to choose from, from BSC to Elrond. But the best way to capture a large audience can be to launch on several chains, and some innovative games are already exploring this route. Let’s look at 5 NFT games leading the industry into the cross-chain future.
One chain or several?
If you are starting a Play2Earn or metaverse project, the most pressing question is which chain to launch on. In the past, it was as simple as choosing between Ethereum and Tron, but nowadays, there are over 10 blockchains that are well-adapted for NFTs and games: BSC, Solana, Harmony, Polygon, Avalanche, Elrond, WAX, Hive, and others.
By a well-adapted chain, we mean one with fees below $0.50, including for minting NFTs (and preferably below $0.1). The blockchain should also have the capacity to process thousands of transactions in a short period of time without freezing, since each player can generate many computation-heavy operations every day — minting and upgrading NFT characters, fusing them, staking them, etc.
Many projects first launch on BSC, since it has a very large gaming audience. However, soon they realize that a) competition is high on BSC b) it’s not that cheap or fast, after all, and c) there are untapped possibilities elsewhere.
At this point, the more forward-looking projects take the decisive step and expand to a new network. It’s a big undertaking for a NFT-based game, as you have to make the collection (characters, weapons, and so on) available on the new chain, spend a lot on marketing, etc.
Luckily, there are no ways to go cross-chain painlessly — the XP.network bridge, for example. Our bridge allows NFT games to transfer a collection of any size to any of the 10+ supported networks, including non-EVM ones like Elrond.
The returns of a multichain expansion can be great: instead of paying $0.2 per transaction and waiting a minute for it to confirm, your players will spend less than $0.1 and wait just a couple of seconds.
We’ve made a list of 5 projects that have already made this decisive step — from the ambitious Drifters metaverse to one of the biggest games in the industry, Splinterlands.
Blockchains: Hive, WAX
Splinterlands is a trading card game with over 280 different cards belonging to various factions, such as Fire and Water. The cards differ by rarity, abilities, and stats, including armor, speed, and magic attack strength.
Players can take part in battles, tournaments, and quests, earning DEC tokens (‘dark crystals’), card packs, and other prizes.
So far this is similar to how many other NFT trading card games work, but what makes Splinterlands special is the blockchain it uses. Splinterlands runs on Hive, which was designed specifically for the game but now also powers other dApps, such as PeakD and Leo Finance.
On Hive, a transaction takes just 3 seconds to confirm and won’t cost you anything as long as you have some HIVE staked.
Splinterlands is also integrated with several other chains via bridges: WAX, BSC, Tron, Ethereum, and Steem. You can transfer Splinterland NFT cards to any of these networks to trade them on marketplaces.
Blockchains: WAX, BSC
In Alien Worlds, there are 6 distinct worlds with 500 plots of virtual land each. You can mine resources on those land plots, own land and sell the mining rights, go on missions, stake TLM tokens, etc. Overall, it’s more of a mining & quest game than a battle game.
The game runs on WAX (Worldwide Asset Exchange), an EOS sidechain purpose-built for NFTs. It also hosts games like Farmers World, Mining Network, Sanguo Z World, and Taco — all of the on DappRadar’s ranking of the top 25 Play2Earn games.
Alien Worlds’s TLM tokens and NFTs can also be teleported to BSC or Ethereum. In fact, the project was in the headlines in October 2021 when it launched a series of brand-new Missions on Binance Smart Chain.
Blockchains: BSC, Avalanche, Polygon, Aurora, HECO, and OEC
In CryptoBlades, you first need to recruit a character with a weapon, paying some SKILL tokens. The character will fight for you and earn more SKILL, which you can use to recruit more warriors and then forge them (or the weapons) into more powerful ones. Alternatively, you can buy advanced characters in the marketplace.
CryptoBlades proves that you don’t have to limit yourself to just 2 chains — in fact, the game runs on six! Originally a BSC-based project, the game added a multichain bridge in November 2021, and this triggered a huge adoption rally. Within weeks, CryptoBlades was the no.1 app by the number of active users on HECO, no.2 on OEC, and no.4 on Avalanche. This is the best evidence of how efficient a cross-chain expansion can be.
Blockchains: Ethereum, Elrond
Drifters is an NFT ecosystem that features the Genesis collection of Innovators, a gamified virtual world called Aevitas, the $AEV token, and even an upcoming real-world village that will live by the Web3 principles, Driftopia.
The first NFT collection launched on Ethereum in late 2021 and is trading successfully on OpenSea. However, the team was willing to try a less known but far more performant chain, Elrond — and we are very happy that Drifters chose XP.network to bridge the collection.
In fact, this was the first NFT project to make the transition from Ethereum to Elrond. The transaction fee on Elrond is around $0.001, and it takes only 6 seconds to confirm a transaction, so it’s no wonder that the NFT ecosystem on this chain is growing so rapidly.
Apart from the Innovators collection, you can also buy Drifters’ Settlers NFTs on Elrond marketplaces, such as Deadrare.io. Drifters soon became one of the best-selling NFT collections on Elrond, and we hope that many more projects will follow their path.
Blockchains: BSC, Polygon, Tron
Imps Kingdom is the reboot of the legendary Ether Kingdoms game from 2018 — one of the first P2E projects in the history of blockchain. In March 2021, the original developer transferred the rights to the game to a new team, and the project moved from Ethereum to BSC.
Imps Kingdom is a multiplayer RPG and strategy game where imps build castles and extract resources, as well as recruit heroes to take part in battles and quests. The game can be expanded to ever new territories by opening portals as resources are depleted.
In April 2022, Imps Kingdom partnered up with XP.NETWORK to enlarge the outreach of the game. You can now trade and mint Imps NFTs on NFTONE, one of the leading NFT marketplaces on Tron, as well as on Rarible on Polygon.
There are many good blockchains to choose from, and new ones keep appearing. Limiting yourself to just one means missing out on audience, sales, liquidity, and technical innovation. Now that bridging NFTs to another chain has become easy and cost-efficient with XP.NETWORK, going multi-chain is a wise move indeed. Check out which networks we support at https://bridge.xp.network/.
