NFT Hyperstructures: Building Communities for Longevity

6 min readMar 4, 2022

Introduction

Before we reveal more about the Lucid Realms NFT ecosystem, we wanted to explain our vision for Lucid Realms and how you can play a direct role in the creation of this expansive universe. A core mental model for understanding what we’re trying to accomplish is the idea of a hyperstructure, which you can read more about here.

What is a Hyperstructure?

Hyperstructures are “Crypto protocols that can run for free and forever, without maintenance, interruption or intermediaries”. For a protocol to be considered a hyperstructure, it must be:

Unstoppable — cannot be stopped as long as its running on the underlying blockchain
Free — no protocol fees
Valuable — accrues value for owners
Expansive — incentives for participants to add value, impossible for value extraction without value generation
Permissionless — universal accessibility to permanent core functionality
Positive Sum — mutually beneficial for others to use the same infrastructure
Credibly Neutral — user-agnostic

For an NFT hyperstructure, however, some modifications need to be made due to the fundamental differences between functionality-centric protocols and community-centric NFT communities. To us, an NFT community can be considered a hyperstructure if it provides continuous value to its members forever, with minimal maintenance, interruption or intermediaries. Value for a member of an NFT community is much more subjective than value for a user of a crypto protocol. Thus, some human facilitation is needed to ensure an NFT community’s longevity. Here are what we believe to be the core components to an NFT hyperstructure:

Unstoppable — Cannot be stopped as long as its running on the underlying blockchain

Due to the censorship-resistant nature of blockchain technologies, communities (and their assets) living on the blockchain are guaranteed some level of permanence (depending on the underlying blockchain). For a community to be ‘unstoppable’, value inflows must match or exceed value outflows. In this case, value is determined by the community itself, and is not necessarily restricted to a single definition.

At this current point in time, we define value for participants in the Lucid Realms ecosystem as: shared social identity/a feeling of belonging, engaging virtual experiences, and economic benefits. These values will most likely need some tweaking in the future, but we feel that these capture the essence of what we’re doing with Lucid Realms.

Accessible — No barriers for any individual to be able to join community

We felt that having 0 fees is not 100% applicable to an NFT community, so we omitted this characteristic and replaced it with the principle of accessibility. However, no individual should be denied access to the community, regardless of their economic status. Therefore, there should be no barrier for users to receive some value by joining the community (most likely in the form of social identity/belonging).

Following this principle, every project in the Lucid Realms ecosystem will be accessible to free users. This does NOT mean that there won’t be some distinction between paid/free users, in order to incentivize members to contribute capital to the ecosystem. In our MMORPG, this means that all players will be able to mint a free-to-play character which they can use to explore the Lucid Realms. Essentially, the financial aspect and the core game loops of our MMORPG will be separate for maximum accessibility.

Valuable — Accrues value for owners

Every project in the Lucid Realms ecosystem will allow users to accrue value through ownership of both fungible and/or non-fungible tokens. Our primary fungible token will be $ENERGY, while the non-fungible tokens consist of digital characters, items and land. Each component of the Lucid Realms ecosystem serves to create value and utility for these tokens. For example, our MMORPG uses $ENERGY as the in-game currency, and the Lucid Realms NFT assets as playable characters, utility-driven items, and land for factions. Future branches of Lucid Realms would use these same tokens in different ways, according to the nature of the project. For example, a turn-based RPG version of Lucid Realms would use these same tokens in their game, possibly providing additional analogs of these tokens to better match the use case.

Expansive — Incentives for participants to add value, impossible for value extraction without value generation

Stores of value in our ecosystem (fungible and non-fungible tokens) will be used to incentivize value creation in the ecosystem. From a tokenomic perspective, this means allocating a portion of the token supply strictly for incentives for all participants (builders, artists, devs, and of course, players). More information will be released regarding $ENERGY tokenomics soon.

Participants who don’t create any value will not be able to extract value in any form. For our MMORPG, this means that F2P players will NOT be able to earn any assets which they would be able to extract value from.

Permissionless — Universal accessibility to permanent core functionality

Permissionlessness is similar to accessibility, but with an emphasis on maintaining permanent core utility which can be composed and expanded upon. Due to the permissionless nature of blockchain technology, permissionlessness is inherently present in all decentralized applications. However, with NFT projects, this doesn’t seem to be the case, as many projects are closed-source and do not operate under a CC0 license.

Lucid Realms is a CC0 “No Rights Reserved” project, meaning that the ecosystem is as publicly accessible and extensible as possible. With CC0, exclusive rights are granted automatically to creators, so anyone generating value by composing with Lucid Realms is able to capture said value and is granted legal rights to their works.

Positive Sum — Mutually beneficial for others to use the same infrastructure

If a protocol or NFT project were to be permissionless and zero-sum, there are clear incentives to fork and abandon said project for creators to reap maximum rewards. We’re building Lucid Realms with these incentives in mind, rewarding contributors in a positive-sum manner wherever possible. External parties can use the Lucid Realms infrastructure and integrate into our community in order to reap the social and economic benefits of Lucid Realms. For example, other projects can utilize the assets for our MMORPG in order to build a different game with the same concepts and overall theme. In doing so, the project brings in additional value to the Lucid Realms ecosystem while bootstrapping their own operations. With token grants, incentivizing builders becomes a lot easier, as there is a direct and clear-cut benefit to composing rather than forking.

Credibly Neutral — User-Agnostic

For NFT communities, this is quite simple. No discrimination, under any circumstances, will be tolerated in the Lucid Realms ecosystem. Any and all users will be able to join the community and will be treated fairly, to the extent that it’s possible to treat everyone fairly in a world where people have varied needs and capabilities.

Composability and Interoperability

Composability and interoperability are crucial for the longevity of an NFT community and are necessary for a NFT hyperstructure. Let’s start by defining what these words actually mean. Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. A composable system means that its components can be selected and assembled in different combinations to satisfy specific user needs. In the case of Lucid Realms, this means that all our assets should be able to be reused and repurposed by other projects. We will be providing all our assets for anyone interested in composing with Lucid Realms in any way. Artwork, animations, and the code/infrastructure for the game itself will be available to all. Additionally, we will be building out SDK’s for others to plug into our existing infrastructure.

The first component of the Lucid Realms ecosystem, our MMORPG, is a 2D top-down pixel game, but this does NOT mean that all future extensions to Lucid Realms will be limited to these mediums. For example, the community may want to experience a 3D strategy shooter game similar to Overwatch, so we would then build out a team capable of delivering such an experience. We’re keen on diversifying Lucid Realms as much as possible, to maximize value added to $ENERGY and our NFT’s.

As stated before, $ENERGY will play a crucial role in incentivizing healthy, positive-sum interoperability and composability. The end result is a continuous flow of value and utility directed to stakeholders of the Lucid Realms ecosystem ($ENERGY and NFT holders).

Conclusion

All of the aforementioned characteristics of an NFT hyperstructure (even its definition) are subject to change, since this is an idea still in its infancy. But right now, we felt that these traits captured what we’re trying to accomplish with Lucid Realms in the most concise manner. The end goal is perpetual value creation, both socially and economically.

If you or your organization found this article interesting or had some modifications, feel free to contact us through our Twitter @lucidrealmsxyz.

Here’s a code for your patience: hyperstructure (redeem in your quest log at lucidrealms.xyz/quests)