Serum x Star Atlas: A Decentralized Economy Powered by Serum — Serum Spotlight #1
We are continuously impressed with the sheer level of innovation taking place within the Serum ecosystem every day.
The number of passionate teams and developers building projects that interact with the Serum DEX has grown significantly, spanning across the major primitives of the DeFi world: borrow-lending protocols, risk and liquidation engines, NFT marketplaces, social media networks, video games, and many more.
As you know, Serum is a core infrastructural layer powering financial and other major projects within the Solana ecosystem. Protocols with trading-related features benefit from being able to use Serum DEX’s central limit order book (CLOB) for trading, data, pricing, and risk management. As always, we invite developers to utilize our existing resources, check out popular project ideas, and to come interact with the community.
In hopes of providing another educational resource for DeFi innovators, we are delighted to kick off with the 1st edition of our Serum Spotlight series.
In this series, we will take a closer look at some of your favorite teams composing with Serum and discussing how their protocols utilize the Serum DEX to serve their users.
This week, we are joined by the Star Atlas team
Emerging as one of the most ambitious blockchain-based gaming projects to date, Star Atlas hits the scene with numerous innovations that lay out the blueprint for a full-scale token-driven metaverse economy with complete self-governing ability.
Take a peek at the teaser trailer to understand just how immense Star Atlas is.
Star Atlas consists of three key foundations:
- A next-generation video game with real-time graphics powered by Unreal Engine 5
- A decentralized economy powered by Serum
- A metaverse built on Solana
Star Atlas: A Next-Gen Gaming Experience
Star Atlas is a space-themed virtual gaming metaverse based in the year 2620, where three major factions have emerged to compete for resources, territorial conquest, and political domination. Thanks to Nanite graphic technology, which has just been released in 2021 after a decade of work, Star Atlas has the ability to simulate cinema-quality, real-time environments at AAA gaming standards.
The game falls under the grand strategy genre, but Star Atlas enhances this experience by integrating blockchain components across multiple facets of the game. By combining blockchain mechanics, state-of-the-art graphics, and the latest in 3D technology, Star Atlas is carving out the future of the gaming industry by redefining how virtual items are traded and what they’re worth both in and out of the metaverse.
Contrary to traditional video game models, Star Atlas is able to give all of the power back to the players. Before the collision of gaming and blockchain technology, players would spend their hard-earned money and time to accumulate in-game assets that are virtually trapped within the confines of that specific game or system.
In Star Atlas, the time and effort of players within the metaverse are reflected in the real-life value they generate. The entire economy is designed to reward players for the time they spend in the metaverse and not from the external resources (money) they put in. Star Atlas offers a variety of different roles to play and has many venues for players to profit from their time in the game.
Players can choose to play as an explorer and gather resources which can be sold on the Serum-powered decentralized in-game marketplace for ATLAS (the utility token) or traded with other players.
For those who prefer PvP action, they can be pilots in the game that battle other ships and earn by salvaging the wreckage from their defeated foes. Players are also able to craft items like ship parts, help maintain ships, and even run their own in-game bar.
All of the in-game assets in Star Atlas are NFTs, fully embracing the blockchain mindset and empowering gamers to monetize their items through a marketplace built right into the game. The items earned or made in the metaverse are under the player’s complete control. To ensure the economy does not turn into a pay-to-win system, players will earn greater rewards by spending more time in the metaverse, with the ultimate vision being a future where players could quit their day jobs and can earn their living by playing Star Atlas.
A Decentralized Economy Powered by Serum
The metaverse introduces a unique gaming experience through the combination of both traditional core gaming and blockchain mechanics, enabling players to be rewarded for their time spent exploring the deepest regions of outer space. For a technical look into the play-to-earn aspects of Star Atlas, we recommend reading the newly released Tokenomics and Game Economy whitepaper.
There are four pillars to the Star Atlas economy:
- Value Tokens — ATLAS and POLIS
- Real Estate — Land ownership across the galaxy with safeguards against unproductive accumulation
- Items and Characters — Every asset within the game — ships, crew, land, buildings, clothing, and more — is a NFT that can be traded on the Serum DEX
- Deep Space Resources — Raw and refined materials used for production and in-game activities
ATLAS: Medium of exchange and inflationary in-game currency.
POLIS: Revenue-bearing asset and governance token.
Star Atlas leverages Project Serum to provide a wide range of DeFi experiences within the game. Serum’s infrastructure offers the key fundamental features needed to fuel the Star Atlas metaverse economy; liquidity via central limit order book (CLOB), lightning-fast settlements, near-zero operating costs, and a robust framework for limitless DeFi tools.
Serum is the backbone of the Star Atlas Galactic Marketplace DEX. It is integrated into every facet of the exchange, from order books to the functionalities of opening and placing orders. Star Atlas has initially sold all of the NFT meta-posters here, and this is where the meta-posters are currently trading on secondary markets.
When a user views their inventory in the Star Atlas UI, they can see all the Official Star Atlas NFTs that they own. When they click to view the details of an item, they will also see the best ask and bid prices on the Serum Market Order Book for that specific item, allowing them to place orders for it.
All future game asset sales will be on Serum as well as implementations of DeFi protocols like automated market makers (AMMs) and Liquidity Pools (LPs). This will allow players to create residual income from their assets, providing them with toolsets to earn 20–300% yields per year on non-deployed assets that they have earned in-game.
In Star Atlas, there is no logging on and off, or living at the peril of the server hosting provider to upgrade bandwidth and keep the servers safe. Star Atlas leverages the Solana blockchain to bring immense freedom and empowerment to metaverse inhabitants, including a near-serverless and completely player-owned experience, especially when it comes to in-game assets. Anyone can swap, trade or store their in-game NFT items in an old-fashioned vault in their home, use them to their heart’s content, lend them, or express themselves through these items — for example, building an online or real-life display case for them.
Solana Powered Metaverse
From the very beginning, Star Atlas has understood the importance of choosing the right blockchain to build on. Undoubtedly, Ethereum’s groundbreaking technology initiated a massive decentralized movement that enabled users to mint and trade their own tokens, as well as execute on-chain programs called smart contracts. Nevertheless, Ethereum suffers from slow transaction speeds and high gas fees.
With the objective of delivering all game logic on-chain in the future, Star Atlas needed something that is technologically scalable. Solana offers just that; incredibly fast transaction times, sub-second finality (which translates directly to latency or lag), and low transaction costs that equate to fractions of a penny. While Ethereum struggles to process 20 transactions per second (TPS), Solana has the ability to accommodate 50,000+ TPS.
The Star Atlas team is currently investigating technologies like Arweave for large-asset storage, developing smart contracts on Solana to handle challenges like space combat, resource generation, and the economics underlying the metaverse.
The team is closely connected with Serum and the Solana Ecosystem projects in their day-to-day development work to ensure that new features like the permissioned markets and Metaplex NFT standards are being fully integrated into the metaverse core from the start.
The team regularly contributes and gives back to the Solana developer community. One such project was launching the Star Atlas Arcade: To support the future of blockchain game development, Star Atlas offered a prize pool of $25,000 as part of this year’s Solana Hackathon.
Star Atlas team also makes a point in educating its gaming and entertainment-driven community about the importance of the underlying structure the metaverse is running on, frequently raising awareness about the powerful features of the Solana blockchain and Serum in clear, simple language. The development team also runs its own Dev Blog, which they release once a month to keep developers abreast of the exciting successes and challenges they’re tackling while building an enormous new world.
Conclusion
The Star Atlas metaverse is forging a path to a more exciting future in gaming and the digital economy at large, giving players a sense of empowerment through NFT in-game assets and play-to-earn opportunities.
By developing a sustainable economy where anyone can create content within this deep space frontier and extract real-world financial value, Star Atlas bridges the gap between crypto natives and everyday gaming connoisseurs, moving us one step closer to mass adoption.
The relationship between gaming and finance has never been tighter, and it will be exciting to see how the future of the metaverse plays out over time.
We would love to continue providing in-depth looks at some of your favorite teams composing with Serum. Just let us know who you want to read about next!
You can keep up with the Star Atlas team and development through their Twitter, Telegram, Discord, Medium, and of course, their brand new website.
Getting Started with Project Serum
Read Serum Roadmap 2.0
Read An Ultimate Vision for Project Serum
Read Building on Serum’s Vision
Check out Serum’s Developer Resources and Project Ideas
Listen to Sam Bankman-Fried’s breakdown of the Serum ecosystem
