In case you haven't heard, @holozing has now launched a marketplace thanks to the work by
@rishi556,
@asgarth and
@klesniak (I forget the hive username) using HAF NFT tech: https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/nft_tracker
The reason I'm linking to it is also because people can build on top of the tech themselves already with @hivetrending already having used it in the past as a proof of concept for a game he made.
Now I'm not the most technical person as you may now, but I like to think I know how certain things work at least somewhat. As far as I understand it both parts that make this work are public so I had Claude write a summary of what what is.
One-liners: Holozing's NFTs live on the Hive blockchain itself — free to mint and move, tracked by open-source software from Hive's core developers, and verifiable by anyone without trusting any company, including us.
The marketplace settles trades in seconds for a 3% fee, and every listing, payment, and transfer it has ever made is a
public Hive transaction anyone can audit.
More-liners: Most NFT systems on Hive have historically lived on side platforms — separate networks with their own operators, their own tokens, and their own fees. The NFTs Holozing uses are different: they're written directly onto the Hive blockchain itself, using an open system called nft_tracker that was built and is maintained by Hive's core developers as public infrastructure. There's no company in the middle, no minting fee, and no gas — creating, sending, or receiving one costs nothing beyond Hive's normal free daily allowance. Anyone in the world can run the same open-source software, replay the blockchain, and arrive at the exact same answer to "who owns what." That means your Holozing creatures and items aren't rows in a game company's database — they're records on Hive itself, and they'd still be there, readable by anyone, even if every Holozing server vanished tomorrow. The system also supports things most platforms don't, like items whose data can evolve over time — which is exactly what a game whose creatures grow needs.
The marketplace at holozing.com/market is, as far as we can tell, the first live market built on this new core-level NFT system. It works like a classic escrow desk with a public paper trail: when you list a creature or item, the NFT moves into a dedicated market account where everyone can see it; when someone buys, they pay in HIVE with one Keychain click, the seller is paid out seconds later minus a 3% fee, and the NFT moves to the buyer. Every single step — the listing, the payment, the payout, the fee, the NFT changing hands — happens as a public transaction on the Hive blockchain. The market itself is run by the Holozing team, but nothing about it has to be taken on faith: anyone can audit every trade it has ever settled, down to the cent.
The activity on the holozing marketplace is understandably low, we've overshadowed a gameplay launch date for years now and things very much didn't turn out as planned. With complexity, a constantly dropping hive price which was our main fund for half our existence (in the form of delegations), with interest dropping from devs and artists involved, bad synergy in terms of timezones of the core team, literal things happening in the world making some members unable to even have internet/electricity most of the time even if they wanted to continue working on things, etc. I'm not trying to make excuses here, shit hit the fan and we didn't deliver on most things we promised, or at least not the main thing; gameplay.
There is however some hope down the line.
I'm gonna try and say this as nicely as I can, but when it comes to development I am really, really, really glad that AI is making the strides it is. Cause when it comes to myself and the project I think that's been one of the biggest minefields to overcome. Especially for a small indie project like this relying on outside help for the game development aspect. The best part about AI isn't that it is fast and cheap (if we ignore the bad parts about it), but that it's not trying to trick you and maximize your funds for their own gain. Now this is obviously a subjective thing to judge and I don't wanna get into all that, but it is a fact that AI isn't a person who may have ulterior motives that don't align with your goals. Now obviously they can pander to you as you're the customer and attempt to waste/spend tokens on dumb stuff you don't need, but it for sure makes up for it with the speed and cost.
Something a lot of people may underrate with AI is that it also allows you to experiment, which is kinda what I've been doing these past few months as well as sharing some of my focus with other projects such as scrobble.life and decentmemes.com. If something doesn't work then you can easily scratch it, you don't need to get married to it with sunk cost fallacy cause you've already had to spend $20k on a gamedev and artists etc to test one mini game out for the franchise. If community/gamers don't like it you just let it be or continue to the next thing until you find what sticks.
We launched Holozing:wilds in alpha testing recently which only took roughly a month for someone with no game dev experience to create (me) and it works, it does what it's meant to do. Some more tweaking and turning and we may launch beta with zing distribution towards players, holozing:wilds nfts on HAF NFTs, and we got ourselves an ingame economy going utilizing the tech and hopefully not even needing to shove it in players faces that this is BLOCKCHAIN and NFTs, etc.
Thus I'm quite excited for the future, I'm also hoping some more willing participants will return and wanna collaborate on things, maybe get some hive in exchange for their contributions, with AI or not, and also that the markets turn around slowly to enable us to do more and catch up on debt and who knows, maybe even advertise what we have to others and bring them to the ecosystem.
While I also understand people have been waiting for the game(s) for a long time it has in a way also felt like the rush may be premature, crypto gaming is at the lowest of the lows these days, probably on a similar reputation scale as nfts themselves as you probably are aware being involved in the main game here on Hive and outside of our ecosystem. This doesn't mean we're trying to purposely time to launch our things during a bull market to try pump and dump on users and vanish, cause that's never really been my style after 2-3 cycles and a decade on here, but maybe it'll be helpful to have some juice back for when things are getting closer to launch so we can really pop it for better efficiency.