Sentient NFTs, A New Form Of Life — Part 1: The Roadmap

James Key
Autonomy Network
Published in
5 min readOct 3, 2021

Out of all the ideas in the metaverse/crypto gaming space, this is perhaps the most ambitious, the most long term, and blurs the line between the real world and the digital. This series lays out the roadmap and consequences of a phase shift for not just crypto, but the entire metaverse.

NFTs and blockchain games have been pretty limited so far. NFTs have mostly just been expensive jpegs, and blockchain games have, in practice, been nothing more than gamified yield farms with only a couple of game mechanics — they’re barely games. We’re at the stage here where crypto and DeFi was in 2017 — a lot of hype, arguably a bubble, and not many use cases in practice. Once the bubble bursts and 99% of NFTs become worthless, what will we have to show for it?

It’s hard to blame the game developers, because it’s like trying to build a computer with only a sledgehammer — the tools for building complex, engaging, interactive on-chain worlds just don’t exist yet.

We’re changing that — the consequences of which are far more fundamental than just games.

What if an NFT could actually do something? What are the use cases? What if a character in a game was as independent as biological life?

aNFTs

The new standard and next evolution of NFTs

aNFTs are autonomous NFTs. Imagine if your NFT could do things while you’re offline or asleep, without the need for running your own bot. aNFTs can create their own transactions — they can do arbitrary things under arbitrary conditions (both on-chain and off-chain actions and conditions, more on that later). For the first time ever, a non-human and non-human-controlled entity can make their own transactions on a blockchain. For example, an aNFT can, on its own:

  1. vote
  2. trade
  3. lend/borrow
  4. send messages
  5. play against you in a game
  6. buy NFTs
  7. do things off-chain based on off-chain events
  8. upgrade its own logic
  9. have children by minting more aNFTs of itself

There’s a lot to dig into here. First we need to understand how aNFTs can even exist.

Automation and Autonomy

Autonomy Network can be used to automate things, such as a limit order on a DEX like Uniswap (if the price of ETH hits $10k, sell my ETH for DAI) — this happens because the user uses Autonomy to request that someone executes their trade with a specific price, and a bot from the decentralised network of bots executes that trade when the price condition is met (otherwise the execution will revert).

Autonomy can be used to automate the execution of a single action, like a limit order, but it can also be used to execute something repeatedly, whenever the requester ‘wants to do something’ — and this requester can be a smart contract itself. After a single initial transaction to set this entity up, the entity is essentially alive and doesn’t rely on humans to do anything — the bot network will forevermore be monitoring the entity and executing for it whenever they see that one of its requests are executable. Since this is a decentralised, incentivised network of bots that will always be executing, it’s guaranteed that requests will always get executed by someone (the same game theory and economics that is behind Proof of Work and Proof of Stake). In this way, Autonomy is being used to make a smart contract autonomous — this is actually where the name Autonomy comes from.

In Autonomy, the executing bots need to be repaid for the gas they spend on the execution. These entities therefore need ETH (or whatever native token) or AUTO (Autonomy’s token) to pay for their own transactions — so they can either be given funds at the start, or, more interestingly, they can make their own money. You can think of these entities obtaining and using money in the same way that animals obtain and use energy. There are several ways of doing this, for example:

  1. acting as a trading bot
  2. by hodling tokens that appreciate
  3. by lending out tokens and receiving interest on them
  4. by minting and selling NFTs

The possibilities really are endless. This is incredibly powerful since it can be used to create the first ever on-chain NPCs (non-playable characters) — aNPCs (autonomous non-playable characters). The significance of this doesn’t end at games, however.

This is a bold statement, but, this is a new form of life.

This is a new, second category of life — cyber life. I will prove this to you later, but for now, just know that all the properties of biological life are present in cyber life.

Roadmap

So how do we go from NFTs to a new form of life? We could just jump straight to creating cyber life, but it would be more akin to research that few people care about with few actual use cases. In order to bring this vision, *ahem*, to life, we need to create an ecosystem and an entirely new industry. This is the path to adoption:

  1. aNFTs — piggyback off of NFTs by leveling up the space while it’s still hot
  2. aNPCs — create the aNPC industry and grow with the still-nascent gaming space
  3. evolution and natural selection
  4. a face
  5. intelligence

We’ll generally split this series into the stages of the roadmap. From part 3 onward, we get pretty profound and existential. Let’s dig deeper into the first step on that path — aNFTs.

Table

Part 1: The Roadmap
Part 2: The First Step
Part 3: NPCs
Part 4: Evolution
Part 5: Cyber Life
Part 6: A Face
Part 7: Intelligence

Join The Cause

If this ruffles your Jimmies too, visit our website and join our Discord! Follow us to stay updated. We’d love to meet you guys in-person, and the team will be at these conferences in 2021: Token2049 (London), World Blockchain Summit (Dubai), Liscon/ETH Lisbon (speaking on a panel and at the workshop stage, title same as this article series), Solana Breakpoint (Lisbon), and NFT NYC. We’re also hiring, raising a seed round, and are particularly interested in working with games/NFT artists to launch the first drops of aNFTs/aNPC — so get in touch via Discord if interested!

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