Flip Earth: Lessons from Dark Forest, MUD, and Biomes
Dark Forest (2020): The Revelation
Bitcoin emerged from decades of attempts to build digital money. Ethereum set out to generalize Bitcoin. It succeeded in engineering, but not yet in purpose—people still use it to program more digital money.
Ethereum's roots in digital money shape how people see it—and what it has become. Dark Forest broke away from that path and started a new one.
It used smart contracts to enforce a game’s rules: movement, crafting, attack. This hinted at a digital world no one could shut down or tamper with—akin to physical laws, robust enough to settle and invest in. By contrast, today’s virtual worlds revealed themselves as theme parks at the whims of their owners.
Dark Forest saw strong player-driven emergence, despite <100 DAUs, because players trusted in smart contract enforced rules and unstoppable uptime. With The Astral Colossus, 50 strangers pooled their resources within 24 hours into a smart contract-governed spaceship. Markets emerged for trading artifacts and secret coordinates. Players developed custom tools to uncover the ZK-hidden map, with one spending ~$3/hour running them on AWS.
MUD (2022): The Means
Dark Forest was a revelation, but also a demonstration. It couldn’t deploy and scale on mainnet. The MUD framework was built to take systems like it into production—faster to develop, cheaper to scale.
Beyond scaling Dark Forest, MUD made games deeply programmable: letting anyone program new mechanics into the shared game for all players. By contrast, today's games run on studio-hosted servers, so only studios can add new mechanics, while players build workarounds and isolated mods on separate servers.
CCP Games, creators of EVE Online, used MUD to build this capability into EVE Frontier—letting players program in-game objects with smart contracts, like turning storage units into trading posts.
By this point, the path Dark Forest started had grown into the Autonomous Worlds movement. Hundreds of developers gathered in assemblies, authored books, and built early experiments in onchain games—searching for the first digital world.
Biomes (2024): The Blueprint
As MUD matured, developers built production-grade onchain games. But no one built an onchain world. A game has a win condition and resets when finished. A world doesn’t. It builds history, players drive emergence, and resources grow in value over time.
Biomes prototyped the first onchain world, using Minecraft's design—the most familiar sandbox, where millions have spent 15 years building economies, games, and societies. Unlike studio-hosted worlds, Minecraft runs on player-hosted servers that can't promise longevity or fairness. The community suffers from server shutdowns, progress wipes, admin abuse. No one has more to gain from a solution.
Biomes solved Minecraft’s core problems by replacing servers with smart contracts. Then it went further: resources became provably scarce on mainnet and players programmed in-game objects with MUD.
Biomes made Minecraft real. Players spent thousands in gas mining resources, despite <100 DAUs, for their scarcity. WasdSwap programmed chests into shops to earn real revenue for their guild.
DUST (2025–): Flip Earth
DUST turns Biomes’ proof-of-concept into the first serious attempt at building The World. The rules of physics are fixed onchain, the supply of matter is provably scarce, and the history is permanently recorded. Together, we program a new civilization inside.
Bitcoin, the first digital money, evolved over 15 years from e-cash for idealists to payments for unregulated activity to digital gold for government reserves. How far will the first digital world go? Could it flip Earth?
The World Completes The World Computer
Ethereum: The World Computer
Ethereum is a permanent ledger with fixed rules for transferring scarce tokens. We program finance on top.
DeFi brought billions in value onto open, composable finance. But it lacks native productivity. Protocols serve protocols in a closed game of risk: yield farming, recursive lending, leverage loops, borrowing tokens to trade tokens.
We tried creating native productivity through NFTs—digital assets people can own and value: PFPs, 1/1s, collectibles. While NFTs trade onchain, they function offchain. Ethereum scaled finance, but not utility beyond it.
Without a world of our own to create native utility and anchor value, we returned to the one we meant to replace: stablecoins, RWAs, ETFs.
DUST: The World
DUST is a permanent spacetime with fixed rules of physics for scarce matter. We program civilization inside.
The cost to extract and keep matter sets its floor price. Every action—mining, farming, moving, defending—is an onchain transaction that burns gas.
Matter exists at a position in space, and must be moved through it. So, it trades through local shops, not global exchanges. Its value comes from utility in onchain physics—PvE, PvP, building—and the stories it carries, like “sakura sakura”. As players arrive, supply grows contested.
Earth’s economy emerged from physical constraints: oil, land, energy. The World gives the World Computer constraints and consequences of its own. When value is created onchain—not just exchanged into it—a new civilization begins:
Ore-Backed Stablecoins, DeFi Chests, MEV Trains, Token-Gated Doors, Forcefield Staking, Raid Slashing, Mob Coverage, Multisig Inventories, DAO Cities, Wheat Laundering, Inventory Mixers
