Immortal Worlds

We believe there is something unique and significant about virtual worlds that are truly decentralized.

Human beings place tremendous time, money, and attention in virtual environments, treating them as parallel worlds. Online games like World of Warcraft occupy millions of people each day. But these worlds as they are right now are limited, finite and mortal.

No matter how committed a player is, the world itself is still a centralized entity - fragile, prone to censorship and restriction, and doomed to one day be shut down. Many MMORPGs do not last, and the ones that do are mutable.

Transience undermines value. When a world is forever at risk of disappearing overnight, it places a cap on how seriously users can take the system.

We dream of worlds where this cannot happen. Worlds that live forever, that have no centralized owners, that cannot be censored, where players own their characters and assets and where that matters. True virtual worlds - ones that feel, to their players, like parallel universes.^[1]

One step from that, worlds where the economy is as liquid and tangible and meaningful as the economy we use in the real world every day. Worlds built around decentralized economic primitives that last. Virtual worlds that develop in economic and social complexity until they become something like a "network state" but from a whole different direction.

Asphodel is our way of building towards this future.

_{[1] - (We're not the first to observe this - famously, part of the reason why Vitalik Buterin was driven to work on Ethereum was that his World of Warcraft character was nerfed without his consent, making him dream of decentralized systems. We like to think that in a way we're putting Ethereum to its original, intended use: hosting immortal, immutable, uncensorable virtual worlds.)}