The World Completes The World Computer.
Ethereum: The World Computer
Ethereum is a ledger with a scarce token and fixed rules for transferring it. We built a new financial system on top: AMMs, lending, staking.
But DeFi has no real productivity to manage. Protocols serve protocols: yield farming, recursive lending, leverage loops. Users borrow tokens to buy tokens in a closed game of risk: aping into pools, rebalancing LPs.
We tried to make DeFi productive with NFTs—digital assets people may value: PFPs, 1/1s, memes. They trade onchain, but function offchain. If assets are onchain but The World isn’t, their value anchors to nothing real.
Without a world of our own to anchor value, we returned to the one we meant to replace: stablecoins, oracles, RWAs, ETFs.
DUST: The World
DUST is a 3D space with scarce matter and fixed rules of physics controlling it. We build a new 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 trades through local chest shops, not global exchanges. Its value comes from onchain utility—PvE, PvP, building, programming—and the stories it carries, like “sakura sakura”. As players arrive, supply grows contested.
Earth’s economy emerges from physical constraints: oil, land, energy. The World gives the World Computer scarcities 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, Sakura Sniper Bots, Diamond Ore Hands
The World Computer Completes The World.
Dark Forest (2020): The Revelation
If you want to understand something, study how it began. Bitcoin emerged from decades of attempts to build digital money. Ethereum set out to generalize Bitcoin. It succeeded in engineering, but not in culture—people just use it to program more digital money.
The World Computer'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 were exposed as theme parks at the whims of their owners.
Dark Forest saw strong player-driven emergence—despite only a few hundred players—because they 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 explore the secret map faster. One player even spent ~$3/hour running such tools 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 unlocked co-creation: letting anyone program new mechanics into the core game at runtime, shaping it for everyone. Traditionally, 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 was the first proof-of-concept for an onchain world, using Minecraft's design as a starting point. Minecraft is the most general-purpose and familiar world today. Hundreds of millions of players have spent 15 years building social structures, economies, and games inside it.
Most crucially, Minecraft worlds run on player-hosted servers. Every other world—World of Warcraft, Runescape, EVE Online, Roblox—runs on studio-hosted servers. Studios can make credible commitments on server longevity and fairness. Players can't. The Minecraft community lives with the consequences: server shutdowns, progress wipes, admin overrides, item duping, player bans, capped size, forced updates. 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: players programmed in-game objects with MUD, and resources became provably scarce on mainnet. 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. Biomes made Minecraft real.
DUST (2025): The World
DUST turns Biomes’ proof-of-concept into the first serious attempt in building The World. The rules of physics are fixed onchain, the supply of matter is provably scarce, and 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?