¶ Exosama Network Whitepaper
¶ Summary
The Moonsama ecosystem started out as a simple NFT project that has enabled web3 capabilities for the Minecraft gaming world. By now the ecosystem grew so large that it is time we launch our own blockchain that we call Exosama Network.
Exosama Network will be a versatile metaverse-focused blockchain that will accommodate NFT projects from many fields of life, such as gaming, music, etc. It will feature high performance EVM capability and will be bridged to multiple metaverses and ecosystems.
It shall be the first enterprise-grade blockchain with a simple but fair NFT-based governance model, where the gas token originates from the in-game effort of players of the Minecraft carnage games.
Building out this new blockchain will consist of two phases: first launching a limited feature set on an EVM based standalone chain, and while gradually building out the feature set on this sandbox chain, we will eventually transform the Exosama Network into a fully-fledged Polkadot parachain which we shall later call Moonsama Network.
¶ Motivation
Bitcoin, the first ever blockchain network, is said to have a fair issuance model because for every new coin one has to exert some amount of real-world work by specialised computers and the chain launched without any pre-mined coins in the genesis block. But now imagine how 1000's of WoW players were working together to enable the next phase of content during the infamous opening of the gates of Ahn'Qiraj in World of Warcraft. We wanted to create a blockchain and bootstrap its token economy in a fair way, where people would initially “earn” the native gas/utility token with fun and laughs, simply by playing a game. This is exactly what we have started build in the Moonsama ecosystem and we will drive its momentum into the core of the Exosama Network.
Although Moonsama started out as a utility NFT layer on top of the recurring Minecraft Carnage game events, we always had it in the back of our minds that Moonsama could/should grow up to be so much bigger than that—it is posed to become a true metaverse ecosystem encompassing all areas of the world as we know it today, and whatever might come in the future. We believe that the music and fashion industries lend themselves to be integrated as the next natural step in the current phase of our project.
Music has always had a strong relationship with video games and it’s hard to imagine a world where music and fashion do not go hand in hand. Some songs became inseparable from some specific games, which have also introduced their players to new music and simply think of your favourite music videos how they consciously or subconsciously shape your longing for that new pair of shoes. Last but not least, gamers want their virtual characters to look good, special, and unique as a new form of self-expression in the metaverse. We want to bring about the best possible synergy across the digital assets of these interdependent realms by providing the necessary features in the Exosama Network and later in the Moonsama Network. With that said, naturally, our system shall accommodate the music and fashion industries outside of the realms of gaming as well.
Governance is ecosystem security and the participants need to protect it. But also, governance allows us to be flexible, meaning we can integrate new features, games, blockchains, oracles, marketplaces and metaverses or anything to come into the Exosama and Moonsama Network. We will put a huge emphasis on figuring out the best governance model for our project and we know that this is the hardest nut to crack. But we have some ideas that we elaborate on later.
The main reasons for our standalone EVM blockchain are that we want to move fast and we need the flexibility and the relevant community based control to be able to build a whole new multi-verse multi-game ecosystem revolutionising (for starters) the music and fashion industry for Web3. This is also why we want to quickly launch a standalone chain and eventually move to what we consider the best current shared-state blockchain ecosystem: Polkadot
¶ Problem Space
In this section we elaborate on what we see as the main pain points in the realms of gaming and the music industry, and we will leave addressing problems of fashion for Web3 for a later version of this paper. Note that we do not want to limit ourselves to any problem space going into the future, but we want to start where we currently have the best overview.
¶ Gaming
Currently most of the existing Web3 games are either an animated front-end on DeFi and Yield Farming mechanics (e.g. DeFi Kingdoms) or basic NFT projects that don’t require large numbers of concurrent on-chain transactions (e.g. Axie Infinity).
Traditional games (PvE, MMORPG-types) typically create multiple concurrent ‘events’ (e.g. a mob drops a unique item when slain), which could run into the multiple thousands of transactions per second. Not all games are this way, and not all actions within a game need to be written on-chain.
However, it is expected that Web3 games will need to become more sophisticated to allow the gameplay to be enjoyable while also making use of concepts like NFTs and real-world item trading which require the objective single source of truth that only blockchains can provide.
This presents the following problem space:
- number of transactions per second (tps) need to be high,
- gas fees per transaction need to be low,
- but without sacrificing the decentralised nature of the required single source of truth.
In both cases, traditional L1 chains are rarely fit for purpose. Some chains like Immutable X have emerged as dedicated gaming chains (high tps, free minting, SDKs for game devs) with a focus on high throughput. Others are using Polygon as a scaling solution for games that can’t resist the gravitational pull of the Ethereum ecosystem.
Some game developers (e.g. Tatum SDK) are experimenting with the potential to use Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) as a way to create privacy-preserving mechanics within games (e.g. fog of war) which can also be delivered by L2s such as Polygon, although this requirements is still very nascent.
As such, there is a compelling case for high-performance, low-cost L1 solution in Web3 gaming.
¶ Music
The music industry is very similar to Web 3, almost the perfect candidate to drive the adoption of better governed, fairer and decentralised internet. Both communities worship values of equality, progression and freedom from corrupted systems.
But in Web2 music, the big players are in charge and get the money. So the musicians are left with the breadcrumbs, especially the small and medium artists.
Unfortunately, the piracy narrative has helped centralisation, complicating things for emerging artists. As music can be stolen and the big record labels missed out on revenues, they decided to stream it for a fraction of a cent per stream. And this still leaves the artists with almost nothing: an artist with 20M streams per annum on Spotify earns approx. USD45K gross, then come the labels, middleman, taxes, etc…
Maybe they can survive on live events? Yes, big players do, but it is not easy for the emerging artists to organise a live event with globally dispersed communities.
This situation results in small & medium artists being forced to sell their rights to intermediaries for distributing music. Reaching mass distribution requires massive positioning and promotional support, and artists do not have the skills nor the tools to achieve this.
We aim to leverage Web3 technologies and ecosystem to give artists a better ecosystem to sustain their lifetime passion. We can create a fairer system.
¶ Structure of Exosama Network
¶ Standalone chain (launched on 2022-10-21)
Note that although the blockchain is up and running, it is still in a testing phase and the features described here will be gradually enabled in the coming weeks.
The Exosama Network blockchain will be the continuation of the EWT technology and it gives us the possibility to port it over later while putting less pressure and complexity of jumping on a new standalone chain.
It is basically a simple high performance EVM based blockchain, in which the clients are still maintained and this system gives us much more advanced features and possibilities to build out our full feature set (compared to other alternatives e.g. Ethereum, etc.).
Think of this blockchain as a sandbox where we can experiment with governance models and early features, which we can all move over to the parachain version of the blockchain.
Initial feature and permission set shall be the following:
- The network will be launched with a PoA consensus mechanism, i.e. our dev team will control the initial validator set (3 genesis validators). The number of all validators might go up to a maximum of 31 validators, and we will to groom the validator set manually.
- Block time shall be 5s.
- The Multiverse Portal shall be able to mint native tokens and initially we will control the rules of introducing new additional tokens into the system.
- In the initial phase, we reserve the right to blacklist at our discretion:
- anyone (based on IP and/or wallet addresses),
- certain types of transactions,
- and nodes.
- In the beginning the chain will provide no block rewards for validators, but we leave it open to give out some kind of rewards (ERC20s, NFTs, or similar) in the future.
- There shall be gasless transactions in certain cases (e.g. Multiverse Portal).
- There shall be a random generator provided on-chain enabling provably fair mints and reveals.
After the launch and when the chain has been running in a stable manner for some time, the governance upgrade path shall be the following:
- Introduce simple governance: 1 Moonsama NFT = 1 vote
- Introduce PoS-DAO on top of PoA:
- On-chain DAO governed delegated proof-of-stake (PoS)
- Automated slashing and validator pool management (basically would work almost the same as collator nominations of a parachain)
- We may tweak PoS-DAO to work with NFT staking, Multiverse Portal staking, etc.
¶ Moonsama Network parachain (coming soon)
This will be a Polkadot parachain with an EVM module, as well as other additional custom build Substrate modules built out gradually to offload and outsource specific functionalities from the EVM contracts to increase efficiency. Also will include a more sophisticated governance model (see Governance section).
¶ Utility Tokens and NFTs
The native gas/utility token of Exosama Network is $SAMA. The creation of $SAMA consists of three phases:
¶ Phase 0 (closed)
By participating and working hard / playing hard in the Moonsama Carnage Minecraft games for nearly an entire year, players could mine in-game resources and turn them into on-chain resources. These on-chain resources could be used to mint Pondsama fish and by farming the fish on-chain, players could earn $POOP tokens.
More specifically, 10000 pre-$POOP tokens were proportionally distributed to the Pondsama holders each week as an airdrop on the Moonriver network for over a couple of months.
Then, we launched the actual $POOP tokens on the Moonbeam network as a teleportable XC-20 token.
There was a redenomination of the pre-$POOP tokens such that:
- The total supply of the $POOP token became 1 000 000 000 (1 billion) tokens
- 510 million tokens were proportionally allocated to the pre-$POOP token holders (51%)
- 100 million tokens were allocated to the team fund (10%)
- The remaining 390 million was put into the community fund (39%)
¶ Phase 1 (starting on 2022-10-30)
In this phase, we are first introducing a bridge for the $POOP token on Moonbeam towards our new Exosama Network through the Multiverse Portal. Token holders will be able to migrate their tokens by burning their $POOP tokens on Moonbeam, and in turn they will get the permission to mint the same amount of $SAMA tokens on the Exosama Network. These new tokens will serve as the gas/utility token on the new blockchain.
Later in this phase, we shall gradually roll out the $POOP refineries as another option for migrating the $POOP tokens. Users will be able to lock their tokens into the Carnage games for use and refine them there. These $POOP refineries in the Metaverse are a brand new concept. We imagine them to be highly efficient at the start and degrade over time. Whilst $POOP will always be 1:1 with the $SAMA gas token, the faster you refine your $POOP the more bonus components you shall find. These bonus components shall be Blood Crystals (for infecting), Mobidium (for mechanising) and DNA (for Petsamas). The exact details of these refineries and their rollout schedule is TBD.
¶ Phase 2 (coming soon)
$SAMA will be ported over to the Moonsama Network Polkadot parachain. Details TBD.
¶ NFTs
The new metaverse and game economy will be on the Exosama Network and later on the Moonsama Network. Moonsamas will be ported over by the users through the Multiverse Bridge. The migrated NFTs will use the latest NFT standards.
Exosama NTFs will remain on Ethereum and shall provide some extra utility in the ecosystem (e.g. increases voting power in the governance, provide special boosts in Carnage, etc.)
¶ Bridging the Exosama Network to the Moonsama Ecosystem
The Moonsama Multiverse Portal is the central Moonsama hub. You can link gaming accounts for different games to your Moonsama account, you can import gaming assets and you can receive in-game resource rewards. Moonbeam and Ethereum are already integrated into our Moonsama Multiverse Portal. This enables anyone to bring in the assets from those chains over into the new Exosama Network and later to the Moonsama Network. We will gradually build out the new services and interfaces needed for the brand new features (e.g. Music IP tokens, License NFTs, fashion assets, etc.) described in this paper and they will nicely fit into our rapidly growing Moonsama ecosystem.
¶ Governance
The two main important things we need to realise in Web3 governance are the following:
- The future is both multi-chain and multi-verse.
- Low participation in the governance of PoS networks is a serious issue.
The first point is quite easy to visualise as each blockchain can have different domain-specific strengths and trade-offs in terms of security, decentralisation, throughput, feature set, etc. New innovations in layer 1s will always transpire and Polkadot really hit the nail on the head in this regard with its domain-specific upgradeable parachain architecture. The multi-chain/multi-verse nature of Web3 is inevitable as you will want to use your same on-chain assets in different games, ecosystems, metaverses, etc.
But the second point, namely the issues around PoS-based governance is a completely different story. Think of DAO's being raided/ransacked by governance manipulation or Layer 1 chains being abused via centralised decision making. In some worst-case scenarios and human developer negligence, if only 5% of a network participates in governance then you just need to buy up 5.1% of the supply to control it while the rest of the coin holders sleep. Even worse, you don't need to buy anything if you're a seed-round investor/founder and control a significant portion of the supply…
Governance participation is a huge issue, even in real life, even in the most direct democracies such as Switzerland. But in our case, the problem is understandable, especially when you know that little Jimmy wants to just buy his jpegs to flex as his profile pic. He has no interest in network governance. Little Jimmy would need to start a public movement comparable to a riot in the streets to create change on a network. Big Barry however can decide what he likes because he's a "whale". He just needs to make a couple of phone calls to the smaller whales/sharks to control a network (or throw some spare change at an orderbook…)
These situations are an unavoidable by-product of capitalism. It's always going to exist. But we can make steps to ensure our ecosystem is secured by building away from the Big Barry's and getting all the little Jimmy's involved in governance.
So how do we aim to do that? And here is the cold hard truth: we don’t know yet.
But we have the following ideas:
Our core tenet shall be removing (or at least reducing) wealth from what gives someone governance access and power, and replace it with experience and dedication to the success of the ecosystem.
We are very much enthusiastic about the proof-of-personhood project from Encointer in Polkadot. It can assign a unique ID to each human by holding in-person key-signing meetups simultaneously at regular intervals in multiple locations. Our idea is to create such secure key-signing sessions within concurrent game sessions (e.g. in the regular Minecraft Carnage and others) because it would be reasonably hard for one person to successfully play with two game characters at the same time (if we can successfully exclude bots). Such a system would enable us to anonymously distinguish real-world humans and map them to separate blockchain addresses.
NFT per se is a pretty new technical concept, but it enables a completely different philosophy regarding governance and opens a wide set of new opportunities. For the first time, governance ****will no longer have to be based only on the economic incentives of owning a token and staking it but it may utilise a community-driven ****concept which is very close to, for example, a tribe, a clan, or a fam:
- Voting power may depend on the ownership of specific NFTs (governance shall be democratic and exercisable by NFT holders of various collections);
- The governance shall decide how a new project can join the chain (e.g., when adding a new NFT collection, governance can invite the collection to join the governance and assign voting power to holders of the items in the collection).
- All the projects on the chain may have their own community-oriented governance;
- Governance shall be able to determine the eligibility criteria for purchasing an NFT.
Another concept we currently consider is to use NFTs not only as a proxy for voting right but also as its weight. Here we can combine multiple factors:
- NFT rankings: one collection (for example Moonsamas) can have more relevance in governance than others
- NFT staking: locking the NFT in-game and thus utilising them effectively may increase governance power
- NFT hodling: the long term holding of an NFT and thus the loyalty to the project may proportionally increase the weight of its respective vote
Although we aim to shy away from the token based Polkadot Governance, we sympathise with the proposed Fellowship system, which is a meritocratic approval & whitelisting body to steward protocol upgrades, but which can be overridden by the main governance system. We might choose to include some of its concepts into our own governance model.
We aim to build a unique governance system, which nobody can offer today but the exact details of the final governance model in our Exosama Network and the later Moonsama Network is yet to be defined. For now, Exosama Network will start with the simple 1 Moonsama NFT = 1 vote concept currently used in the Moonsama Townhall.
¶ Outlook
Until this point, we presented the problem space that we aim to tackle, and our concepts for a fitting structure to solve those problems with the Exosama and Moonsama Networks, which shall incorporate a novel democratic and stable governance system. In this section we would like to present some concrete features and proposals we aim to build to solve the problems we identified in the realms of gaming and music.
¶ Gaming
Our ultimate goal is to build a decentralised and high performance GameFi infrastructure. We start implementing the base features in the standalone chain, and later we plan to enable specific features as we move to the Polkadot parachain.
Below is what we believe to be a credible ‘long list’ of features and requirements that a ‘World Class’ gaming chain should be providing for game developers and partners and we aim to provide them all as we go ahead:
- Fiat on/off ramps
- Social sign-in (e.g. integration with KILT SocialKYC)
- Custodial and non-custodial wallets
- Wallets with NFT or asset visualisation
- Integration with OpenSea (and/or other popular marketplaces)
- Compatibility with Metamask (plus other major chains)
- Token (cryptocurrency) minting
- NFT minting
- ‘Free’ minting or gasless transactions for gamers
- High tps
- Fast finality (without risk of roll-backs from forking)
- Fast queries
- EVM compatible (for porting or multi-chain dApps / smart contracts)
- Accepting of assets in ERC standard
- Oracle integration (pricing, random function / RNG)
- Web3 users can bring in / hold / exit to multiple cryptocurrencies
- Off-chain storage / compute (decentralised)
- Integration with major gaming engine SDKs (Unity, Unreal, others TBC)
- Suitable for desktop and mobile gaming (e.g. TBC value of light clients)
- Node hosting as a service (game publishers don’t want to host nodes)
- Smart contract auditing and test tooling
- Game + crypto-economy tooling (impact of DEX, marketplaces on token / asset value)
- Easy-to-use tax compliance tooling for gamers
- DeFi functionality for ‘advanced’ users (e.g. lending against gaming assets)
- and many more…
¶ Music
Partnering with Public Pressure we aim to allow artists to monetise their music in a structure as follows:
- IP rights: Music Token Offerings (MTOs) will allow creators to tokenize and sell their IP rights to communities while sharing revenues from trading of these assets
- Licenses: NFTs will be the new CDs that end users can buy and sell
We aim to offer music professionals the best technology to move on the Web3. You can think of it as a public good for the music industry:
- An audio NFT standard designed to bridge music across multiverse projects.
- An IP payment gateway to bring on chain all the licensing revenue flow.
- An IP tokenization protocol to fractionalise the IP ownership across communities.
¶ Other fields and industries
We will provide anyone, with any background coming from any field or industry, the opportunity to copy/paste their dapps from Ethereum/EVM over to our blockchain and be connected to many in-game assets and economies right out-of-the-box. We invite everyone to bring over your assets and join us in building out the ecosystem, token by token, NFT by NFT, asset by asset, industry by industry.
¶ Disclaimer
This is a living document and anything we write or present here might change or simply prove wrong so it is most certainly NOT financial and/or investment advice. It is better to just simply expect chaos. LFG!