Brooks Brown

First off, the good news for our community: NOR has no exposure to the FTX crash. As a games platform, we use Web3 technology to give permanence to player activity, rather than as a speculative asset. We’re not a part of any bubble. In fact, we’re defined by seeing past trends.

That said, this has been yet another terrible week for Crypto, one so exceptional I feel the need to respond. Our hearts go out to the victims. Too many are now facing financial insecurity due to the actions of a few bad people. Especially disheartening are the fates of those who didn’t make the choice, but had it made for them. Those who only this week found out that someone else was gambling with their money, and lost.

Crypto once promised us a victory over the evils of traditional finance. It was supposed to redefine existing structures, empower the voiceless, decentralize influence, and incentivize good behavior without the need for external regulation. I’m no longer convinced this promise exists–or if it ever existed. So is this a Crypto problem, or a human problem?

Since the beginning, Consortium9 has maintained that there is no “bad” or “good” technology, only how the technology is applied. Crypto is not bad tech. The current Crypto system was arranged in a specific way to make a handful of people rich very quickly, which brought us to this exceptionally terrible week.

But that arrangement isn’t the only arrangement.

I created NOR before the collapse of many Play2Earn games because I saw where many of those games were headed. I’ve since spent dozens of AMAs, interviews, panels and more proselytizing on the importance of a protected space for Play. Video games must do away with predatory and destructive models like Pay2Win, Free2Play, and Play2Earn. Their collective failure is the natural result of video games devolving from a focus on exploration and competition into analytics-driven gambling traps.

As the current version of Crypto also takes its inevitable course, it’s time for something new in the world of Tokens, NFTs, and Decentralization. We believe that we can rearrange the games financialization model to build a new type of game–one where skill, play, creativity, and freedom come first, not last.

Web3 is at a crossroads. The Crypto community has to decide what kind of future it wants to build, and we believe we have a clear vision for that future. To light the way forward, we need to go further in explaining the Economy of NOR–our Metagame–which we call the City of Khora.

Over the next few weeks we will share how we are tackling this and bringing Play back to the Metagame.

— Brooks Brown
    Founder + CEO