DSPACE
democratized.space
Web3
An important long term goal of DSPACE is to actually physically get to space and have a presence there. Even though the cost of getting to orbit is dropping rapidly, it is still prohibitively expensive, and companies and governments need a lot of capital to even get started with the process. Web3 is still in its infancy, and there are still a lot of big challenges we have to solve (namely, coordination failures, centralization risk, and scalability, among others), but one of the cool properties of tokenizing some concept or process is that you can take an incremental approach instead of raising capital all at once to successfully build and launch a rocket.
Thinking incrementally
Incremental games are a genre of games that mesh really well with the web3 world. In an incremental game, you start with a small amount of something (DPS, clicking power, production ability) and slowly and grow that something incrementally by buying upgrades, completing challenges, and reaching certain milestones. These types of games often rely on cooldown systems that both prevent you from rushing through the game and prevent the game from consuming a large chunk of your time.
Keeping your cool
Web3 games are a perfect way to enforce cooldown systems. CryptoKitties, one of the first web3 games, had a cooldown system that prevented you from breeding your kitties too quickly. This was a great way to prevent people from spamming the network with transactions and also to prevent people from rushing through the game too quickly. The cooldown system also made the game more fun because you had to wait for your kitties to grow up before you could breed them. STEPN, another well-known web3 game, allows you to mint new sneakers by spending in-game currency, but you must wait a certain amount (48 hours) before you can mint another pair of sneakers.
Mirror, mirror
An important constraint in DSPACE is that everything is supposed to happen in real-time whenever possible, which lets us mirror real-life constraints like the speed of light, the time to 3D print something, and the time to get to Mars. This mechanic may seem annoying, but it has the potential to lead to greater creativity, and it allows inventions and processes within DSPACE to bubble up into the real world. You could design and simulate a self-replicating robot, validate the design in your simulation world, and test for negative externalities like paperclip maximizers. By incurring a (hopefully small) gas cost every time you build a new robot, in-game actions feel much more grounded and tangible. You could get around that requirement by endowing an autonomous agent with a wallet full of ETH and letting it run wild just to see what happens, and that is OK. We do in fact want to be able to accurately model these sorts of scenarios before implementing them in real life, and web3 provides a mechanism to do that.
Final words
I like to think of blockchains and ERC-20 tokens and NFTs as exposed wires on a machine. They're complicated and distracting, and the end user doesn't really need to care about them. The end user just cares that the machine works. Blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and (especially) NFTs all have a negative reputation in the mainstream narrative: not because they are fundamentally bad technologies or outright scams, but because they're implementation details that the end user should not have to see, and they should be hiding behind a pretty interface where you push a big red button.
DSPACE is taking a bet on this potential eventuality, and people who are generally opposed to crypto can choose to ignore the web3 elements, but hopefully over time they will realize how powerful web3 can be.