“There is a lot of history behind XAYA. It began in 2011 with Namecoin, to which core XAYA team members were major contributors. Forked off of Bitcoin, it took the concept of embedding critical data of the blockchain—despised by Bitcoin purists who view non-financial transactions as spam—and made it standard practice. The data was associated with strings of alphanumeric text in order to register ownership of things like identities and web domain names.

Not satisfied with these limitations, Namecoin was forked once more in 2013 to create Huntercoin, a massive multiplayer online game. The text strings now represented player-controlled characters, and the associated data was now the player’s most recent move. Combine all the moves stored on the blockchain, and players could calculate each other’s positions on the map without the need for mods, admins or servers.

This decentralized autonomous design had fascinating consequences. To many players it felt more “alive,” almost like a real world. When you added the fact that players could win huntercoins—which have real-world value—the stakes became very high.”

Excerpt from our blog (keep reading)