Andromaverse, SG Punks Moving to Polygon

Article has been updated with additional comment from Andromaverse and Shane from Stargaze

Stargaze NFT projects Andromaverse and Stargaze Punks are moving to Polygon according to the teams surrounding them.

Andromaverse appears to make the move final by changing their Twitter profile and issuing this Tweet:

No more Comos based on profile
Still will build on the stack
Just too likely to get bashed by our our own community to want to be associated with unfortunately pic.twitter.com/5hYGGKK1aH

— Andromaverse (@Andromaverse) June 11, 2023

“It’s a powerful narrative. I think Mainstream definitely won’t care what we’re running on. But they will care if they get weird comments about how one ecosystem is better than another or worse,” said Andromoverse on Twitter.

Andromaverse and Stargaze Punks are deemed successful NFT collections with good sales and burgeoning communities behind them, but the apparent recent decision to move the projects to Ethereum Layer 2 solution Polygon (MATIC) has left some in the Cosmos with mixed feelings.

“Wow wow wow, blaming a community for bad financial state of a project is something we can do on some projects. You minted out so many collections on stargaze and also had so much volume that you should have been financially very healthy ser. Also its your teams freaking job!” said Robineast.

“I do agree with this, it’s about the stack rather than a simple Cosmos community approach. My only criticism is that you picked Polygon as well, which doesn’t enable IBC and makes it more complex to try to bring cross chain value to your game. That move confused me,” said .ATOM.CRO

“With Stargaze Punks abandoning Stargaze after being the most featured & talked about Genesis project. Taking all the early liquidity only to blame the community as to why they can’t continue. I truly hope this shines a bright light on all of us that are still here…” said WolfmanShips.

According to Stargaze Punks, which has changed their profile name on Twitter to “Optional Migration,” they feel they got “faded out,” and that “It’s the market’s decision.” Stargaze Punks wants everyone to know they were sold as a profile picture collection and will remain that way on Stargaze, but can be migrated to Polygon for playing in Andromaverse’s game.

In a conversation on Twitter between Andromaverse and Gabriel Reyes-Ordeix, Reyes Ordeix accuses Andromaverse of “bashing the community” who gave them a platform. Andromaverse’s response was an admission that their “wording could have been more elegant,” and points out the reason for the move as one of a technical nature.

“I dont think you understand the moving of our game characters is technical based when referring to Stargaze. We made a game that’s ready for users to play that Stargaze doesn’t have the functionality for. They’ve been waiting and pushing us to do this,” Andromaverse said.

“I don’t think you understand: I am referring to messaging and PR—not the tech angle. It’s understandable to migrate especially to build something that’s not developed yet… but don’t bite the hand that fed you on your way out. Be loyal to the community that was loyal to you,” Gabriel Reyes-Ordeix said.

Stargaze Creator Shane had this to say about technical limitation claims:

“Stargaze has a history of always listening to feedback and building common asks. For example many projects including Andromaverse wanted mutable collections. We built and shipped it months ago. Others are using it already.”

Cosmos News had spoken to Andromaverse Founder Aaron back in April on Discord about moving to Polygon. Aaron said: “we’re not leaving Cosmos.” He said they are building a Cosmos-based EVM game hub and that it was the “opposite of leaving,” with the goal to drive more people to Cosmos. His vision was to have a cross-chain hub for gamers to be able to play gasless from many different places.

Cosmos News has reached out once again in an effort to find out if Aaron’s original plan to drive more people to Cosmos still stands or if the move to Polygon is one-way and permanent.

Andromaverse response:

“That’s the bigger picture, yes. As we we build out our already playable game to being more full and complete we will pivot to this at the same time as our second game teaser”

Additionally, Andromaverse says:

“The move is functionality-based because our game is now playable.”

“There are other game focused nft who have also had to leave. There’s no document for games, no toolkits (sdk) , there’s no years worth of open libraries of templates contracts. It’s just a young platform and not focused on games.”

Shane with Stargaze shares his thoughts on the matter:

“I’m not sure what technical issues they are talking about. There are multiple games already built on Stargaze that use NFTs. Check out SmolGame and Pixel Wizards for example: https://smolgame.smoldogs.fun, https://pixelwizards.art.”

“Stargaze is an app chain for NFTs, so its designed to support all NFT use cases. While Stargaze doesn’t have game-specific documentation yet, it has a powerful CosmWasm framework for NFTs that others have successfully built with. Although Stargaze is young, we believe our Rust-based smart contract framework (CosmWasm) is more future-proof as there are millions of Rust developers and only a few thousand Solidity developers.”