Wilder World is many things. It’s a DAO, it’s an immersive three-dimensional wonderland, and it’s the biggest and newest MMORPG-like space based on NFTs, where anything is possible. According to Wilder World’s zine, they are “building out the next version of a decentralized Marvel Studios, bringing the world’s top artists together to collaborate on stories, characters, landscapes, and environments, building a Metaverse that is far more ambitious than any single artist could create on their own.” At its heart, though, Wilder World is an artist-friendly NFT marketplace.
That being said, Wilder World looks a lot more like Burning Man than it does Opensea. Marrying some attractive features enjoyed by gamers and collectors alike, the immersive 3D platform will allow users to roam and interact, like Second Life, across a digital space comprised of NFT real estate, like Decentraland, through futuristic VR technology in a 3D environment, quite unlike anything else out there. Expecting the 2022 release of Apple’s VR headset to mainstream the technology, Wilder World hopes to build a community where creators, artists, and users dream up a world in a democratic and censorship free zone “designed to incentivize all participants of the Liquid NFT Market to be rewarded for doing what’s good for the entire system.”
A Thoughtful Approach to World Building
This sounds like the perfect venue for adult entertainment to take over, but the ethos driving this project is clearly one that promotes freedom of speech and artistic endeavors beyond the skin trade. Zero spent six years working on the technology behind Wilder World, along the way solving “one of the hardest technical problems, which is the ability to elegantly stitch together massive real-time landscapes across a distributed network.”
The creators of Zero cite shared values as the reason they put their trust in artist Frank Wilder to guide years of their hard hard work into its first release. Zero has stated that it trusts Wilder’s vision for shaping the paradigm for similar worlds to come, of which they expect many.
Trust might seem like an odd word these days when so much of the decentralized blockchain depends on the trustless nature of code, but Zero asserts “trustfulness” is one of their primary considerations and “a powerful concept that can be used to significantly enhance Member experience.” It’s apparent that there has been a lot of thought and care put into the release of Wilder World. As such, if you look deep in Zero’s whitepaper, you can find philosophical gems about their guiding principles including:
“As exponential technology enables smaller and smaller groups of people to make choices that impact everyone, including other humans, beings and ecosystems, we must learn to deeply consider what is, in fact, an ‘Effective Choice’ when designing systems capable of such far-reaching consequences.”
Wilder World Gets Ready for the World
The first token released by this project, $WILD, is scheduled for an IDO on May 11, and the list of countries’ citizens excluded from participation is quite telling about Wilder World’s choices of who to invite to the party. To quote, verbatim, the blacklisted nations are: Belarus, Burma, China, Côte D’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Iraq, Liberia, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, USA, Venezuela, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. Make what you will of the list, but the common denominator between them is certainly not their regulations on crypto.
According to an update from Zero, there is no lack of interest in the project, despite citizens from both the USA and Zimbabwe being barred from participating in the IDO. Over 250 industry leading crypto-artists and collectors have signed up, and the waiting list to become a member of Wilder World stands at over 15,000, while over $3 million has been collected from investors in private sales. Wilder World’s first annual Cyber Gala will be held on July 15, 2021, and you can follow the Wilder Telegram for updates on when tickets will be made available.
