Sappy Seals and Other NFT Communities Band Together in ‘Pixelverse’ and Take on Giants

We very seldom see collaborations across websites on the normal internet, where different companies are extremely possessive of their visitors. Attention is the currency of the web, and no one gives it away.

Perhaps it’s just the idealistic early days of web3, but on Wednesday night multiple leaders of different NFT products with dreams of metaverse collaboration came together on a Twitter Spaces discussion. These teams have joined together under the banner of the project that the Sappy Seals NFT founders are leading. It’s called the Pixelverse, and it is a metaverse for many projects.

Unveiled in November, the Pixelverse is a 2D metaverse where different NFT communities interact, create their own worlds, and also enable visits to each other’s worlds seamlessly. Communities joined the call because they have committed to be part of the Pixelverse, and these included the Sappy Seals, BearX, Winter Bears, Axolittles, Chubbicorns, WeAre24Px and Caked Apes. Other communities have also already committed to join (as many as 15), but there has not been a single complete list of the founding communities published so far.

Sappy Seal #9606

Interoperability between applications is a core idea across blockchains. The theory here is that by allowing parts of different creations to work with each other, the whole might be greater than the sum of its parts. As a set of Ethereum based projects, the Pixelverse might also find itself heavily courted by layer-2 solutions as they look for scaling options.

The NFT projects founding the new universe aren’t miniscule, but they aren’t the mega valuable NFTs that are getting stories in The New York Times or landing segments on the nightly news either. The Pixelverse could be an interesting example of lots of small groups unifying to see if together they can wield the clout the early name brands already have. “The Pixelverse will realize this dream by creating an accessible and immersive Pixel world upon which the wider NFT Community can build Web3 applications, benefit from the $PIXL ecosystem and bring their NFTs to life,” the first announcement said in November

Founding Communities

Sappy Seals holders can earn pre-mine PIXL now by staking their seal NFTs. It’s currently trading for about $0.07 on SushiSwap. PIXL is envisioned to be the shared currency used across the Pixelverse. It can be used now in PIXL Marketplace, to buy NFTs that will be useful when this corner of the metaverse is realized.

“Sappy Seals is a cutesy NFT that we launched four or five months ago, and we’ve taken on the task of building a collaborative metaverse with a bunch of projects,” Wab, a Sappy Seals founder, said during the Twitter Space, “and really deliver value to these founding communities who are joining us on these ventures.”

Each participant from a founding community that was on the call described their project and what its holders have been up to, while also discussing the potential for interoperating with each other in a shared digital space.

“I’m really bullish on Sappy Seals and just the space in general and us coming together,” the representative from the BearX community said. “That’s the difference between web2 and web3, it’s that everyone’s coming together for Web3.”

Overall, the project is not dissimilar from Atlantis World, a 2D metaverse that many of the early leaders in DeFi have supported with their treasuries to give new users a different way of interacting with their financial protocols.

Details of the Pixelverse are still coming out. So far, the seals team has announced PIXL, a PIXL Petsprogram — which looks similar to Axie Infinity, and a limited alpha release.

Play-to-Earn Games

The PIXL Pets release (the “mint”) should happen sometime in the start of the next month, Wab said on the call.

“Right now we are just building the foundations and structure. Then we’ll work on really nailing down integrations,” Wab said.

Axie Infinity is currently the most successful game in the metaverse, kicking off a craze for play-to-earn games, and as it has grown its community has pushed for it to improve scalability with its own layer-2 blockchain, facilitate trading with its own decentralized exchange and provide passive income opportunities with its governance token.

The Pixelverse developers have promised to come out early with these tools. Another member of the Sappy Seals team, 0xCryptokass, said that the DeFi tools for the Pixelverse are coming very soon. He particularly emphasized single asset NFT staking. There will be ways for players to earn serums that unlock other aspects in their Pixel Pets, but he stopped short of giving more details.

“You can expect those contracts to be launching in the next four weeks,” he said.