The Sponge Powered team has been busy working on our latest integrated product. We know our community loves to have new ways to engage with Sponge and to explore new server experiences. So we are pleased to announce latest product inspired by recent activity on the Sponge Docs Crowdin:

Sponge Blockchain is the first integrated in game solution that allows for synergy between players and their actions in game. It allows players to mine FLARDCoins by synchronously mining ingame blocks, enabling Sponge to enhance our world-leading position as the first blockchain economy based Minecraft server platform.

@worm424 has been spearheading this development effort and as such has recently been promoted to our new Sponge Blockchain Brand Ambassador. Also a big shoutout to @Phase for his work on the online backend (Soon to be integrated with Ore) and @mumfrey for getting the hard yards done using Mixins to embed blockchain technology into the core workings of Minecraft via the existing Sponge Platform.

We will be integrating it into various Sponge platforms starting with the Community Server which will switch to exclusively using FLARDCoins for the in game currency. A beta version of the official FLARDCoin miner will be available on Ore later this week. At a later point we will be introducing the miner and blockchain code in to both SpongeVanilla and SpongeForge. Rest assured, we will only use what system resources you have spare in order to contribute to the Sponge Blockchain, with that in mind we shall be dedicating a minimum of 40% CPU time towards mining.

Moving forward? We would like to expanded Sponge Blockchain and FLARDCoin beyond Minecraft to other games and server based economies. We plan to diversify into virtual real-estate, and establish our own virtual nation to help propagate and leverage the more interesting applications of FLARDCoin, and perhaps establish our own Iced Tea company.