When you first connect, MetaMask will help you add Caduceus and switch to it, but you’ll need CMP tokens to buy NFTs. You can send them over from a major exchange. 

As we said, the project started out as CryptoSkyland – and you’ll find it mentioned under this name in our article on the Caduceus integration. In May 2023, CryptoSkyland officially rebranded to Skytopia, redesigning the website and social media pages in the process. According to the team, the new title better reflects the project vision.

On May 15, the platform officially released its first game, Party Planet. Users compete in various fun party games: running away from exploding grenades, jumping from one tree stump to another, passing a ball around on a field, turning over cards with messages on them, etc. Party Planet is available for MacOS and Windows.

Several more games are in development, each with its unique world design:

• Mysterious Village, where a wizard castle invites you to try yourself at spell duels;
• Dream Island, where gigantic mushrooms rise out of the lush greenery on a floating island;
• Cyber Racing Star, where you’ll race against other players in your customized car through a futuristic city;
• The City of Ruins, where you’ll explore the secrets of an ancient civilization.

Going multichain with Polygon

Going multichain with Polygon

Caduceus is a very attractive chain for games and metaverses. It’s very fast (up to 100k TPS) and extremely cheap, with less than $0.001 per transaction in fees. You can build NFT games on Caduceus that won’t lag even when the network load is high – and where users’ rewards won’t be devalued by the high fees.

On top of this, Caduceus has its own VR/AR/XR development kit, a 3D cloud rendering platform, and a protocol for storing content in IPFS. 

It gets even better: Caduceus is EVM-compatible and supports Ethereum’s NFT token standards (ERC-20, ERC-721, and ERC-1155). This means that teams can easily port Caduceus games and NFT collections to any other EVM chain – such as Polygon. 

In our case studies, we often write about the challenge of choosing the right chain for an NFT game or metaverse. A project has three options:

1) building on a chain that has high NFT trading volumes and liquidity - but also slow finality and/or high fees or technical issues.

2) building on a next-generation, fast, cheap, NFT-optimized chain like Caduceus or MultiversX. As such chains are still comparatively new, they don’t have huge NFT trading volumes or vast communities – though the communities they do have are usually active and loyal.

3) building the product (game) on an NFT-optimized chain and then either mint part of the collection on a large chain or bridge NFTs later as a marketing campaign. This is the best option, in our opinion. Minting on Polygon, Ethereum, or BNB Chain can attract a lot of users and liquidity – and then the project can incentivize them to bridge back to the original chain to use the NFTs in the game. It’s a low-cost alternative to launching a new product and a marketing campaign on a different chain. 

This is exactly what Skytopia is doing. We received a request from the team to deploy two contracts on Polygon to mirror the project’s two contracts on Caduceus. As always, our tech team (presided by the CTO Dima Brook) made sure that all the smart contract logic is preserved – including the 5% royalties. 

Bridging NFTs between EVM chains is relatively straightforward, and in the new V.3.0 version of the XP.NETWORK bridge even allows you to automatically scan contracts and whitelist them on your own. We are gradually enabling various chains in V.3.0, but Caduceus isn’t supported yet. So for bridging a collection to or from Caduceus, an NFT project does need the help of our devs.

So far a few Skytopia Residents have been bridged from Caduceus to Polygon, as you can observe on PolygonScan:

We will be following the next steps that Skytopia undertakes on their bridging journey – and we’ll update this case study accordingly. The important thing is that it’s really easy and cost-efficient to deploy a smart contract on Polygon – and with its large NFT market and low fees, it’s a great option if a project wants to expand.