Tiny Colony, a management and construction game, is the most recent NFT project to announce a move away from Solana.
The crypto industry as a whole has been effected by the ongoing crypto winter, but 2022 was especially difficult for Solana. The fall of FTX and Alameda Research, which were both financially dependent on the Solana ecosystem and had close connections to it, sped up a decline that had been going on for a year that was full of technical problems and high-profile hacks.
Even though Solana has a thriving NFT ecosystem and a growing gaming push, some creators have left because of the poor performance and the 94% drop in token price. Tiny Colony, a Solana game, is the latest project to announce that it will move to a different blockchain. The creator of DeGods and y00ts did the same thing and said that his games would also move.
Tiny Colony’s maker, Tinyverse Games, said today that it plans to move its still-in-development NFT game, a blockchain-based construction and management simulator, from the Solana blockchain to Ethereum’s scaling network, Immutable X.
“Immutable has been very gaming-focused since the beginning,” Tinyverse co-founder and CEO Arshia Navabi said. “They have an amazing development team and incredible technology focused around gaming.”
In Tiny Colony, players build and manage underground ant colonies that look like people. To keep their colonies alive, players must farm, mine, hatch larvae, and defend their colonies in a strategic way. Players get NFTs, which they can use in the game or trade on marketplaces. Last summer, testers were able to play an early version of the game on Solana. The full version will now come out later this year on Immutable X.
Tiny Colony is a small project compared to Ethereum games like Axie Infinity and the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Otherside, which have each sold more than a billion dollars worth of NFTs.
Tinyverse says that since the project’s start, it has sold more than $3 million worth of NFTs through the Solana marketplace Fractal. On the secondary market, the game’s NFTs start at less than $5 worth of SOL each.
NFTs are blockchain-based tokens that represent one-of-a-kind items. In video games, this can include characters, accessories, and digital land plots, among other things. In addition to profile pictures (PFPs), artwork, sports and entertainment collectibles, and access passes to special events and experiences, NFTs are utilized elsewhere for a variety of items.
Tiny Colony will allow current Solana NFT holders to exchange their tokens for an Immutable X version of the same asset via a “burn-in mint,” according to Navabi. As the technical process is finalized with the assistance of Immutable X developers, additional details on the redemption procedure will be published “over the next month.”
Why Immutable X?
Immutable is the developer of both the Immutable X network and Gods Unchained, a card game built on NFTs. Immutable X is a layer-2 scaling solution that allows for faster and less expensive transactions than Ethereum’s mainnet. As per Navabi, Tiny Colony was a perfect fit for Immutable’s emphasis on gaming and the user experience.
Solana has been a famous alternative destination for developers of decentralized apps (dapps) and NFTs due to its low transaction fees and capacity to process more transactions per second than Ethereum’s mainnet.
But the buzz that Solana garnered in 2021 didn’t sustain throughout 2022, with network disruptions, increasing competition, and NFT market turmoil reportedly contributing to a precipitous decrease in the token price. From its November 2021 high of $260 to its current price of roughly $16, SOL has had a sharper decline than leading cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
“Don’t get me wrong, Solana was an incredible starting point for us. We got everything we have today because of [Solana],” Navabi said. However, when Tinyverse began discussions with Immutable and learned about its future plans and focus on games and NFTs, Navabi said he “immediately got hooked.”
Tinyverse was founded in 2021 and consist of gaming, film, and television veterans who have worked on projects for Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime, Paramount, and EA, Capcom, and PlayStation.
Although Ethereum’s inherent technical limitations make it too slower and expensive for many Web3 games, scaling networks like Immutable X and Polygon have been increasingly adopted by developers to enable games with user-owned assets and low transaction fees.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Tiny Colony to the rapidly growing Immutable X family and provide the team with our full suite of tools and solutions to make the game as accessible, engaging, and performant as possible,” Immutable VP of Global Business Development Andrew Sorokovsky said in a statement.
Navabi said that one of the main reasons for the move was that there were no gas fees for completing transactions on Immutable X. He also said that the network was easy to use for traditional (or Web2) gamers who might not know what it means to use gas.
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