Meliora

Blockchain empowers people with unprecedented opportunity, autonomy of identity, financial freedom and ownership of data. So, why aren’t more people using it?

The answer is clear: value of blockchain is difficult to understand. There is no desire to learn about how to use blockchain without the initial appreciation of what makes it special. Without seeing clearly how decentralized ledgers and consensus mechanisms make web3 different from web2, “crypto” just sounds like a scam. To most people, “blockchain” is just a buzzword, and nothing more.

This problem is not alleviated by any project, product or platform. Coinbase Learn and MetaMask Learn claim to be onboarding new users, but they’re really just making existing users click through boring slideshows. This method of torture has become ubiquitous amongst crypto exchanges, which are the largest and most successful “web3” platforms. Indeed, the biggest “teachers of web3” are not teaching at all, while simultaneously eliminating the fundamental values of blockchain by holding ownership of their users’ assets. This is a colossal failure.

Courses about blockchain available on LinkedIn, Coursera and Binance Academy suffer the same ailment of being boring, plus another common problem - they entirely focus on developers. All of their instructions, resources and tools are only for software engineers, and no one else. This issue is even seen in the remarkable and noteworthy Crypto Zombies game. While it offers a compelling solution to the problem of education, it’s a Solidity course built for coders. It’s not for everyone. Right out of the gate, most people are excluded. Alchemy University, Polygon Academy, Read to Web3...the list goes on. The world of educational resources for developers is robust. The world of educational resources for new users is barren.

Enter Meliora.

The game world of Meliora is a decentralized universe built on blockchain. Its plants, animals, elements and laws of physics are all derived from the core concepts of web3. As players explore, build and level up, they learn the fundamentals of blockchain...without even realizing it!

To state that “we learn better when we’re having fun” is to state the obvious. We know from our own personal lives that, for example, the experience of learning how to play Super Smash Bros. and the experience of learning how to use the sin() function are very different. We know which types of experiences we liked more, and which engaged us more. Most importantly, we know which experiences inspired us, leading us to do even more learning on our own. After school, there was homework, which meant we had to learn about past participles, historical dates and trigonometric functions. And then, after homework, we got to learn about Monopoly, Pokemon, football and Call of Duty.

Unsurprisingly, experiments and data support the same conclusion. Playing Super Mario 64 builds hippocampal grey matter (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5718432/). Playing Super Monkey Ball helps doctors perform laparoscopic surgery (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27631319/). Bleeding edge machine learning algorithms are being written by college students to win Pokemon battles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhvj7CmTRkg). Why would anyone learn ML just to play Pokemon? Because Pokemon is fun. It only takes one drop of fun to inspire a sea of learning.

Meliora is not just a single game, but an entire fantasy universe whose characters, nature and magic exemplify and illustrate the fundamental values of decentralized ledger technology. The trees and fungi of the forests communicate with each other through trustless networks of roots and fungal nodes, redistributing resources throughout the woods to sustain their inhabitants. Adjacent to nature, democratic utopian cities with unimaginable technology flourish and grow, all thanks to their use of decentralized governance and distributed computing. Everything in Meliora is derived from the basic elements: the fires of proof of work, the winds of peer-to-peer communications, the waters of decentralized governance, and the groundedness of immutability. The legendary Ledger of Fate contains every event that has ever occurred in Meliora, and ever will. This gives it the mysterious quality of being the only distributed ledger whose future transactions are already filled in...but what does this mean? You’ll have to play to find out!

It’s worth noting that the word “blockchain” does not appear in the above paragraph. The word “blockchain” is not important. The values are.

No one needs another blockchain course - there are at least 21 million of them, and they’re all failing. Rather than repeating an ineffective strategy, Meliora features a wide array interactive experiences for different learning styles. RPG adventure games are very popular amongst younger people, whereas word games are more popular with older individuals. Story-driven games and interactive shows engage users with comedy, drama and suspense. Meanwhile, other users are drawn in by the soothing challenge of fun puzzles and simple text-based games. There’s always something fun to do in Meliora!

There are already so many incredible dapps, and so many more to come. Despite their value, most of these dapps will struggle due to lack of users. In a painful irony, most potential users will also suffer due to a lack of web3 understanding. Meliora is the bridge that connects people to blockchain. In this way, Meliora provides more value to other blockchain projects than any other dapp. Every web3 builder, artist, creator, company and DAO benefits from Meliora’s onboarding. That’s why, through fun, Meliora is onboarding the world to web3.

The Meliora.sol smart contract runs on any EVM network, and pulls game information from IPFS. This includes images, rules and rewards. As a result, the game assets that people use to make games become decentralized and available to all, allowing them to use them to make their own games.