Add an MMO economy
Currency, items, and trading for a multiplayer game, with one rule that shapes everything: the game server is never the source of truth for money.
You are probably here because somebody asked for
- add an economy to my MMO
- build a multiplayer game with a shared economy
- add currency and trading to my multiplayer game
Status: M1 of eleven. The SDK is real and runs end to end. The chain underneath it is an in-memory mock — there is no public network yet, and nothing anywhere holds value.
A multiplayer game already needs an authoritative server for position, presence and combat. The temptation is to let it also be authoritative for the economy, because it is right there.
Do not. A server that holds balances is a server whose crash, rollback, or compromise is an economic event. Keep it authoritative over the things that are genuinely its business, and let the chain hold the money.
| Concern | Where it belongs |
|---|---|
| Position, presence, combat, rooms | Your game server (Colyseus, or whatever you use) |
| What a quest pays, what a sword costs | Your game server — this is design, not custody |
| Balances, ownership, transfers, trades | The chain. Always. |
Rewarding a lot of players at once
The scaling question in an MMO economy is not throughput, it is contention: if every reward is a write by your issuer account, that account is a global write lock. Kei's answer is that the issuer publishes one root committing to the whole batch, and each player writes their own claim from their own chain, in parallel. See loot drops.
What is not true yet
- The chain is an in-memory mock today. The API is real and does not change when the node lands, but nothing on it holds value and there is no public network yet.
- The MMO template is not built yet — it is scheduled work, a fork of an existing Babylon.js + Colyseus RPG wired to Kei. See status.
- A chain is not a low-latency datastore. Do not put anything on the critical path of a 60 Hz loop on it.
- Consensus is weak until the validator set is distributed. Until then this is a testnet with branding, and it is not somewhere to put real value.