Battleships: The NextColony Currency

We have only eleven days with the activated battleship module in @nextcolony and already see the ships emerging as a new currency on the Steem blockchain. Personally, I have sold 70 ships for nearly 700 Steem and this is just the beginning. My next move will be announced soon but in this post I look at how each ship resembles a non-fungible token.

Ships are NFT's

Ever since the Cryptokitties game on the Ethereum blockchain, we know about Non-Fungible Tokens or NFT's. @SteemMonsters, now known as @Splinterlands, has done a similar approach but as a top-level solution on the Steem blockchain. Each card is owned by a certain Steem account and can be transferred via a special transaction. Usefulness in the game, limited supply and possibility for destroying cards give them their value.

We have seen a massive rise in interest and value with the Splinterlands game and it has helped to bring many Steemians through the crypto winter. The cards were able to keep a certain value, while everything else was going downhill.

In NextColony, we also have now NFT-like items with proof-of-ownership: planets, ships and special items. Ships are particularly interesting, as the whole game mechanic is build around using ships to transport, explore, deploy, support and attack. The more you have the greater are your possibilities. Their supply is unlimited but it costs time and resources to build them and they can most certainly be destroyed. Just one major battle between big players will pulverize large amount of ships at once on both sides which took easily hundreds of hours to build.

To avoid an easy loss of their fleet, players will start to stockpile their ships and try to grow larger fleets than their neighbors. Both destruction as well as stockpiling leads to a steady demand of ships and producing enough just with your own planets can be too slow to keep up with the competition. To stay competitive, you need the support of an alliance, that supplies you with resources and ships, or buy them on the open market.

Conclusion

Ships are like NFT's and everyone who plays NextColony will have a demand for them. This leads to really interesting markets around the game, hopefully similar to Splinterlands. I have already earned some decent money with that and so did others.

And this is only the beginning. Behind the scenes are new alliances forged as you read this...