Microsoft-Owned Mojang Bans NFTs And Blockchain Integrations On Minecraft

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) owned Mojang Studios strongly opposed NFTs and blockchain integrations on its sandbox videogame Minecraft.

What Happened: In a blog post on Wednesday, Mojang said “integrations of NFTs with Minecraft are generally not something we will support or allow.”

Mojang reasoned that the “speculative pricing and investment mentality” behind these digital assets would take the focus away from the game, in addition to encouraging profiteering.

The game developer said that blockchain technologies would not be permitted to be integrated inside the Minecraft client and server applications these technologies also cannot be utilized to create NFTs associated with any in-game content, including worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods, said Mojang.

Why It Matters: Seeing as some of Minecraft’s software is open source, developers are free to build upon it. Earlier this year, web3 company NFT Worlds built a blockchain layer on Minecraft and unveiled a metaverse experience for users announcing a $WRLD in-game token and NFTs that could be used by Minecraft players. 

amazing

spent so much time playing minecraft multiplayer servers and buying stuff from the /shop all the time lol

so cool to see it happen with $wrld, really awesome, nice work

— shamdoo.eth (@TheShamdoo) February 12, 2022

NFT Worlds, built on third-party Minecraft servers, uses Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) sidechain Polygon (CRYPTO: MATIC) to offer users lower gas fees. The $WRLD is an ERC-20 token, meaning it uses the Ethereum blockchain’s token standard.

“First and foremost – this out of nowhere announcement by Microsoft/Minecraft to outright ban all possible uses of NFTs and blockchain tech within Minecraft feels like a step backwards in innovation and may even have painful downstream effects for them in the long run – we’ll see how that plays out,” said NFT Worlds in a Discord announcement.

We've just shared the following announcement on our Discord regarding the current @Minecraft & @nftworldsNFT situation. pic.twitter.com/ARbKABRK4A

— NFT Worlds (@nftworldsNFT) July 20, 2022

The project now plans to pivot to another platform and said it is in the process of weighing its options.

Photo: Courtesy of Aiminfreddy9 on Shutterstock