The Good Tech Companies - Blockchain Platform Obyte Rolls Out Incentivized Virtual World to Rebuild User Network
Episode Date: June 5, 2025This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/blockchain-platform-obyte-rolls-out-incentivized-virtual-world-to-rebuild-user-network. Obyt...e City is a community engagement space for Obyte where users are rewarded for establishing direct connections with each other. Check more stories related to web3 at: https://hackernoon.com/c/web3. You can also check exclusive content about #obyte, #crypto-community, #decentralization, #virtual-worlds, #cryptocurrency, #crypto, #obyte-city, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @obyte. Learn more about this writer by checking @obyte's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. Obyte City is a virtual space divided into 1 trillion plots of land. Users can buy plots in the City, and the coordinates of the newly bought plots are assigned randomly. If a newly acquired plot happens to be close enough to an existing unbuilt plot, both owners receive rewards.
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Blockchain platform Obite rolls out incentivized virtual world to rebuild user network, by Obite.
Obite's community is currently at its weakest point in 8 years.
Our social channels often go quiet for days and almost nobody seems to be interested,
all that despite strong underlying technology.
We must fix that and build a community Obite deserves.
Obite City, along with a few other community engagement tools we have in the pipeline,
is designed to strengthen our community by encouraging closer connections
and more connections between community members.
We believe that such horizontal ties and a dense network of them
will make our community stronger, more cooperative, more capable of effective collective action, more resilient, and more independent of the
team, who, otherwise, would be a central point of failure and has already demonstrated its
poor performance in community building.
What is city?
City is a virtual space divided into 1 trillion plots of land.
The space is represented as a square, and the plots have coordinates that look like
123,456,789,012, where the numbers indicate the plot's horizontal and vertical positions,
ranging from 0 to 1 million. Users can buy plots in the city, and the coordinates of the newly
bought plots are assigned randomly. The tokens paid for a plot, minus a fee,
stay deposited on that plot and can be withdrawn at any time by leaving the plot.
If a newly acquired plot happens to be close enough to an existing unbuilt plot,
both owners receive rewards. Houses at the locations of their plots, turning their unbuilt
plots into built ones. Two new unbuilt plots at new random locations for each owner, four new plots total.
Each of the reward plots has the same amount on it as the original plots had, meaning that
each user books a profit by getting two new unbuilt plots instead of just one old plot.
They can then either leave the new plots and withdraw the tokens deposited on them, thus
cashing out, or wait for another new plot to become a neighbor, triggering another reward cycle. Built plots don't have any tokens
deposited on them anymore, the most interesting part occurs when the two
users, owners of the neighboring plots, claim the rewards mentioned above. To do
so, they need to connect on Discord or Telegram and coordinate sending their
claiming requests, ensuring both requests are sent within 10 minutes of each other.
This is when the two community members establish a closer connection with each other and solve
a small problem together, with this experience anchored to the act of receiving rewards.
Later, they receive several smaller follow-up rewards to refresh the connection.
They claim these rewards in the same way as the initial reward, by connecting on Telegram
or Discord and coordinating their transactions so that they are sent within 10 minutes of
each other.
The first follow-up reward is issued in 60 days after becoming neighbors.
To enable seamless connection between users for the purpose of claiming rewards, the users
need to be attested on at least one of the two networks, Telegram or Discord, before
they buy a plot.
Attestation links the user's obite address, which identifies them in the city,
with their Telegram or Discord username. This is one of obite's unique features.
With these links, our bots can notify the users over Telegram and or Discord when they become
neighbors and let them know each other's username so that they can connect and coordinate the
claiming process. Once a user has a house that they can connect and coordinate the claiming process.
Once a user has a house, they can assign a unique shortcode to it.
Shortcodes are given on a first-come, first-served basis and are available only to house owners,
one shortcode per house.
A user can sell their shortcode to another house owner.
Shortcodes are likely to be used in the future versions of obitwallet to send tokens between
users.
So, when someone wants to send tokens to someone else,
they can send them to the recipients at shortcode instead of their
not so friendly looking address.
Users can customize their houses and plots by assigning names to them and linking them to their Twitter,
LinkedIn, Telegram, Instagram, and various other social profiles.
It's their place in the city.
A user can have as many plots and houses as they like.
There are more details, such as how close a plot needs to be to be considered a neighbor,
the odds of finding a neighbor, and many more.
We don't describe them all here, please refer to the FAQ on the city's website city.
Obite, Org, City Token
Plots can only be bought with city tokens,
except in the initial sale, see below.
new city tokens are minted to pay the reward plots and the follow-up rewards.
on the other hand, city tokens are burned when paying a fee for buying a plot.
this fee is designed to offset the token emissions caused by rewards, assuming users hold on
to their plots until they find a neighbor.
However, this assumption may not hold true in practice, and the more users abandon their plots
without finding a neighbor, the more likely Citi will become deflationary. Initial sale
During the initial sale period, which will run from June 3, 2025 to June 30, 2025, plots will be sold for GBYTE at a fixed rate 1 GBYTE equals 1000 Citi.
The initial plot price is 1000 Citi, or 1 GBYTE.
During this period, buyers of plots also buy Citi tokens, not bound in plots, for 10% of
the plot price.
In other words, when buying a plot, users will pay an additional 0.1GBYTE
and receive 100 Citi along with the plot. This will be a source of Liquid Citi tokens.
Users can also buy a plot for GBYTE and then immediately leave it to receive Citi in exchange.
This is another way to obtain Liquid Citi. However users doing so will lose the fee they
paid for buying the plot.
After the initial sale ends, City can only be purchased on secondary markets, e.g. on Aweswap Dex. The GBYTE raised in the initial sale will be used by the Obite team to fund the
future development of the infrastructure around City, such as user interface sand analytic tools,
and other community engagement apps.
Secure and immutable, like all other dApps on Obite,
Citi is operated by autonomous agents, AAs, which are soulless code-driven actors on Obite DAG.
The AAs work strictly according to the rules which were baked into them when they were created,
and the THE rules cannot be changed, even by the Obite team.
In particular, no one can arbitrarily withdraw,
move, or mint tokens. And since the AAs operate on obite, all transactions are uncensorable,
meaning they cannot be stopped by anyone. So, anyone engaging with Citi knows for certain
what the rules of the game are. The only way some Citi parameters can be changed is through
governance, which Isaacin implemented in an immutable awe. Owners of plots, who are the stakeholders here,
can vote for changing some parameters, such as plot price and the probability of finding a neighbor.
Vote weight depends on the total amount of city a user holds in plots.
However, the power of governance is limited to only a few parameters,
while the rules themselves cannot be changed by anyone. Referrals, as a way to not only strengthen ties within the community but also
expand it, there are referral rewards for those who bring new users into the city. When
a new plot is bought from a user's page at city.obite, org, or a page of their existing
plot or house, that user automatically becomes the referrer's fourth new plot.
This results in greatly increased likelihood, but not certainty, that the new user will become the referring user's neighbor, and therefore both will get rewards. One can put their referral link
on their Twitter, E.G., as one's location, and author social profiles to attract referral traffic
and receive reward plots and houses more often.
Turnaround. We really hope that Citi, along with upcoming community engagement apps, will reverse the decline we saw lately. A more connected community is a stronger community,
and Obite, with its unparalleled censorship-resistant technology, definitely deserves it.
This is our opportunity. Please make use of it. Get your own space and neighbors in the city at city.
Obite.org. Thank you for listening to this Hacker Noon story, read by Artificial Intelligence.
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