Welcome to the ’Blade Runner’ Crypto Version!

<p>The pixels are large and chunky. A large number of pixels are present. When you visit most of the early crypto metaverses, such as Decentraland and The Sandbox, you will see something similar. Avatars are straightforward. The graphics are a little rough. The ambitions are lofty, and the future may be bright, but the actual aesthetics are still in their "early days," to put it mildly.</p> <p>Neon District is another option.</p> <p>The Neon District is a hybrid of the crypto metaverse and the role-playing video game. It merely appears to be different. The visuals are stunning, but also hauntingly bleak – a cyberpunk dystopia filled with thieves, hackers, guilds, and assassins. It's pitch black outside. It's actually quite lovely. "What if we made a cyberpunk Final Fantasy 7?" Marguerite deCourcelle, aka "Coin Artist," the CEO and co-founder of Blockade Games, the company building Neon District that recently raised $5 million, had the original idea. (Among the investors are Roham Gharegozlou of Dapper Labs and Animoca Brands.)</p> <p>"The current version of the game is very rudimentary," says Blockade's chief technology officer and co-founder, Ben Heidorn. According to Heidorn, even with the raw prototype, an average of 33,000 gamers play it every day. Perhaps they're playing because it looks and feels like a game, a game with a real story and emotion. A game that simply... appears to be undeniably cool.</p> <p>DeCourcelle deserves credit for this. DeCourcelle, a former gallery director, was among the first – if not the very first – artists to create cryptographic art puzzles, beginning with "Dark Wallet" in 2014, a digital painting that concealed a key to 3.4 bitcoin. She read "Snow Crash" and "Ready Player One" around that time.</p> <p>"It dawned on me that bitcoin had real-world value, but could be used anywhere on the internet," says deCourcelle, who began to imagine a crypto-infused metaverse.</p> <p>DeCourcelle experimented further. Her crypto puzzles were published in Andreas Antonopoulos' "Mastering