Case Study: How PlanetIX is Scaling Their In-Game Payments with Superfluid

Planet IX is a metaverse and blockchain-based strategy game on the Polygon network. They are striving to build the biggest blockchain game in the world — just two years after launch they have been the #1 game by transactions amount on the Polygon network for over a year, with 12 million NFTs minted and 100 million NFT transfers.

The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world. Players build territories and assets, earning IX Tokens. Planet IX offers free-to-play, play-to-earn mechanics, an expansive ecosystem for trading, staking, and strategic farming. With captivating missions and monetizable NFT assets, it’s a thrilling journey for gamers and crypto enthusiasts alike.

Players can subscribe to additional Tile Contracts where they harvest waste and build Facilities that generate Energy. Staking Energy earns players IXT token rewards.

To date, 50’000 unique users have used this system, streaming over 6M IXT tokens.

The Challenge

We spoke with the Planet IX team early on to understand the key challenges they were facing and how Superfluid could be useful in overcoming them. They wanted players to have a flexible subscription for additional Tile Contracts that would speed up Energy extraction, with a “set-and-forget” model such that once set up the payment would continue indefinitely until manually terminated.

The other major challenge was scalability, with over 80’000 active users, ensuring the system could scale without flooding the network with transactions every month was a must.

“A key factor we identified was that we wanted the player to have full control over the subscription. We also wanted the subscription model to be easy to understand and use. We realized that the best way to do this is with a streamable model via Superfluid.” — Lukas Alexandersson, Chief Product Officer at Planet IX

The Solution

Planet IX decided to design and implement a custom subscription system fully powered by Superfluid, including rolling out a custom SuperToken called $AGOLD — which adds to the lore of the game, and removes friction for their users (it doesn’t require any wrapping nor unwrapping).

With Superfluid, players have total flexibility to start and end their subscription whenever they want by simply streaming $AGOLD to the Tile Contracts, with rewards calculated in real time only as long as they are subscribed.

This allowed them to collect recurring payments from 50’000 users, with no “claim” nor settlement fees. Each user made one transaction to open their streams, and many are still running today, with funds automatically accumulating in the Planet IX wallet.

The system has been running for over a year and it could scale indefinitely to any amount of sender wallets allowing Planet IX to scale their user base independently from network TPS limitations.

“Without Superfluid, implementing a similar system would have been much more intense and not as user friendly. We’re happy to have a solution that fits our users!” — Lukas Alexandersson, Chief Product Officer at Planet IX

The Benefits

One of the driving factors of their solution choice has been the speed at which this scalable subscription system could be developed and deployed. In the span of 2 months the Planet IX team went from concept to deployment, launching live in early 2023.

The Superfluid Protocol allows a wallet to receive ongoing streaming payments from any number of senders, accumulating all the incoming value directly on the wallet — those tokens are immediately spendable without any need to claim them from a contract.

On top of the simplicity of the system itself, Superfluid counts with a mature suite of SDKs and developer tooling, allowing projects to easily build, test and continuously monitor their applications. A good example is our console, where you can easily observe Planet IX’s active subscription streams.

If you’d like to build many-to-one or one-to-many payment systems to collect or distribute funds at scale, independently from the number of senders/recipients and the network you’d like to use, Superfluid can help you. Take a look at our docs.

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