NFTs
‘Final Fantasy’ Maker Square Enix Switches to Arbitrage for Ethereum Game NFTs
Square Enix, the video game giant behind the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts franchises, is adopting another Ethereum scaling the network for your Symbiogenesis blockchain game.
The publisher announced on Thursday that its next NFT Character creation for the story-based game will take place on the Ethereum layer 2 network Arbitrationchanging gears after the first wave of characters were minted on the Ethereum mainnet.
“For Chapter 2, we adopted Arbitrum, reducing gas fees to about 1/1000 of the previous cost (about 1.3 yen per bid),” official Symbiogenesis account tweeted.
While previous character NFTs were minted on Ethereum, all other in-game NFT assets were minted on Polygon, an Ethereum sidechain scaling network. It’s unclear whether Square Enix plans to continue using Polygon for future game assets or whether it will fully adopt Arbitrum going forward.
DecryptSquare Enix’s GG asked a Square Enix representative for clarification regarding this issue and the decision to use Arbitrum, but did not immediately receive a response.
Symbiogenesis is a narrative adventure game built around NFTs, including the characters mentioned above as well as various in-game items. However, only owners of character NFTs can access some parts of the experience. There will be a total of 10,000 characters released for the game.
The first 500 characters were released on Ethereum in December, and Square Enix saw some mockery on social media around curious names – like “Egg”, “Starvation” and “Wastebasket”. Currently, Ethereum NFTs start at a price of less than 0.12 ETH (around $445) on secondary markets.
A total of 1,500 new NFT characters will be released on Arbitrum starting Friday, May 31st via public auction. The process will last three days, ending on Sunday, with characters released in small batches throughout the period. Square Enix posted a practical guide about bridging assets to Arbitrum One in preparation for the auction.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.