Saltwater Games, the developer of officially-licensed web2 games such as Peaky Blinders: The King’s Ransom, and Doctor Who: The Edge of Time, is opening up an XR One Hero Node sale on October 9th at 12:00 UTC for its gaming-centric, Arbitrum-powered layer 3 Orbit network on the Samurai Starter launchpad.
What Are XR One Hero Nodes?
Hero Nodes are validators designed to passively reward you with $XR tokens for securing the XR One network by verifying transactions. By running this node, you will earn a share of the tokens from prize pools for each epoch, with 15% of the token’s total supply reserved for these reward pools. Next to that allocation, node operators also earn from transaction fees generated from activity on dApps and web3 games on the network. There is a possibility that you will gain governance rights as your reputation grows in the network thanks to continuously operating a node. Holders can look forward to “constant airdrops” from various projects that build on this network, according to official documentation.
Becoming a node owner will provide you access to the upcoming $XR airdrop, the network’s core token that Animoca Brands invested in through a seed SAFT round in June this year. The airdrop is planned for Q4 this year, with node owners set to get a 25% share alongside a rewards multiplier you can get by doing campaign quests on the official website. Signing up now with your email address will let you complete a wide variety of social and gameplay-based quests to earn TXR that will be converted into $XR this Q4. Some of the available missions revolve around downloading and playing the Steam demo of free to play aerial motorsports game Celeros.
Node Utility
Next to securing the network that is focused on web3 PvP games, node operators can expect to have more roles they can take on in the future for even more rewards. These include providing computational power for GPU and AI processing to make it possible to deliver advanced graphics rendering and complex AI behaviors. By doing so, you get demand-driven rewards, meaning that the more power is demanded and the more resources you can provide to help fulfill that demand, the bigger your earnings could be. Offering these services will make blockchain games on this network more accessible to a wider gaming audience while also potentially making it easier for developers to deliver more intricate, high-quality web3 gaming experiences with on-chain transactions.
In order to place decentralization at the core of this node-based network, the team is adopting a fractionalized approach in which eligible participants can become owners of fractional nodes instead of whole nodes.
Fractionalized Node Distribution
Running a node will require owning a Hero Node License NFT. According to the roadmap, in order to make these NFTs more ‘affordable’ to gamers and not just whales, Saltwater Labs, the innovation division of Saltwater Games, is working with various gaming guilds to form a fractionalization solution, as instructed by the XR Foundation. Doing it this way will ensure decentralization of the network’s infrastructure layer as a diverse range of users get nodes distributed from Q4 2024 to mid-2025. Web3 gaming guilds, as well as communities and projects in general focused on gaming and AI can team up with XR One to become a part of this Node Distribution phase. Doing so means becoming eligible to receive whitelist access to buying nodes.
Fractionalized node distribution can come with a variety of benefits over owning whole nodes, according to this page in the official GitBook.
With fractional nodes, the team claims that there is a lower entry price point over whole nodes while still letting you get the same number of rewards as you would by owning a complete node. While whole nodes are focused on marketing towards investors, the studio claims that fractional nodes are designed with gaming guild members in mind, as well as for users in countries with lower incomes. Fractional nodes do come with a 10% fee though that is taken from rewards before they are distributed to operators. Operating a fractional node however is simple, as everything is said to be taken care of behind the scenes to ensure a seamless and accessible experience instead of having to locally run a full node license.
You can check out the prices across 21 tiers in the image below, which make up a total supply of 15,000. Whether these numbers represent a lower entry price point over other node sales, well, that’s up to you to decide. For comparison, Gala Games had its Founder’s Nodes initially priced at $2000, with the price increasing by $100 for every 100 nodes sold. In that case, XR One’s Hero Nodes certainly do have a lower entry price point for the first 9 tiers, but whether even those lower prices are cheaper enough to consider these nodes as a “product tailor made for gaming guild members” and “investors in countries with lower dollar spending propensity” is debatable. Another example, though not exactly the same type of node, is the ongoing Nemesis Downfall Node Sale that kicked off in August with 5 tiers, where the starting price was $100 per NFT for the first tier, with the price increasing by $100 for each tier, meaning $500 will be the max node price from that sale.
Here’s All the Info for the XR One Hero Node Sale on Samurai Starter
This upcoming sale for Hero Nodes is being hosted by the Samurai Starter launchpad and venture group, who have a total of 160 Hero Nodes across tiers 2 to 5 up for grabs on a FCFS basis for $637 USDC per NFT on the Base chain. There is no max limit per transaction.
If you compare the prices for each tier from the image above with the price set by the launchpad, you can see that they’ve decided to set a fixed price representing an average of those tiers to offer all their nodes at a fixed price, which they state was done in the “spirit of democracy.”
This sale begins on Wednesday, October 9th at 12:00 UTC, so if you’d like a chance at grabbing a fractional node without needing to have whitelist access, then this will be your chance to potentially do just that. Based on the pricing tier image, you can probably look forward to seeing more public sales as the supply for each tier isn’t completely whitelisted, but since higher tiers cost more, the NFT price in future sales will probably be more expensive than in this upcoming one.
