Why we change our project name to OpenWorld
Please read Vietnamese version there
On March 9th, 2022, we officially changed our project name from CryptoWar into OpenWorld as well as changing the token name from $xBlade into $OPEN. A project name change like this is a critical development and in this writing I will walk through our line of thinking regarding this matter.
The first question to be asked is: Do we have to change the name of our project? There are two large reasons against changing the project name. (1) All marketing effort we did in the past no longer have any value toward the future: all of the URL, ads, publications, PR, group chats, memes, etc we have before with CryptoWar brand will become irrelevant into the future. (2) Renaming the project risks provoking fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) from the community. Yes, crypto is a very fragile market and there are scam and rug-pull project everywhere. Changing the name of the project can certainly create fear among community.
However, moving past that we feel like we have no other way to go but we must change the name of the project because the old name of CryptoWar is no longer suitable for the developments we are growing into. CryptoWar is a good name for a block-chain enabled casual game. But it is no good for an endless digital world, or metaverse, that we are going after. And we want to spend a lot of time, effort, and money into marketing and working with stakeholders under a name that more suitable for who we are, what we do, and what we envision for the future. Thus, changing the project name as soon as we can actually quite matter. Because time is against us. We don’t want to spend money into marketing, build new website with a name that we know is unfit. We don’t want to represent ourselves to prospect investors knowingly both sides (us and investors) don’t feel so right about the name and the nature of the project. Unless we want to build a Metaverse, or Multi-Metaverses and create a lot of wars in there, then maybe. Yet, that’s not we want to do.
We want to create an endless digital world with peace and prosperity. “War” for mobile games is fine. But for money-making, job creation, reality escape entertaining, we prefer going for peace and prosperity.
Alright, so changing the project name is critical and the right thing to do. What name should we go for?
Naming is a weird thing to do. Probably a few people have good sense on naming. But for us, it is more of a throwing darts into the darkness. We just hope that we can come up with a good name in the shortest time possible, but we know naming is a very strange task that sometime it just come and sometime it just doesn’t. We can sit and chase after a good name for a year we may still not come up with something good enough.
Anyway, to deal with that problem, we define a few criteria that the new name needs to satisfy:
It has to reflect either (a) who we are, or (b) what we do, or (c) what we envision, or (d) our values.
It has to be simple and elegant.
It has to be register-able as a domain.
It has to be meaningful.
Then, we put out all of the words that we think we really like or at least reflect who we are and what we do. These are the words that in our consideration:
Meta, Metaverse, verse, crypto, explore, frontier, Second Life, horizon, sky, next, venture, mobile, 2D, game, world, de/decentralized, web3, sci-fi/science fiction, extension, essence, Oasis, city, cyber, digital, virtual, internet, layer, foundation, ground, cloud, avatar, universe, multi-verse, system, alpha, star, stellar, constellation, interoperability, expanse, future, posterity, time, space, country, land, zone, transcendence, atlas, alt/alternate, beyond, open, cryptoverse, matrix, interstellar, international, infinity, shared, life, simulation, artificial, reality, unreal, /-ians (such as: Cambrian), utopian, dystopian, forward, onward, pocence (come from anthopo and cene), /-cene, anthopocene, holocene, virtucene, uni, thematic, sync, imagination, Axie Infinity.
From this list, you’ll see some actual names of other projects or companies in the market right now such as: Meta, Second Life, Oasis, CryptoVerse, Star Atlas, Unreal (from Unreal Engine), and Axie Infinity; and movies such as: Interstellar, Matrix, The Expanse, and Avatar. These are here because they are inspiring and they somehow are our colleagues in building this new endless digital space. And these projects somehow come to such a good names that looking from any angle it’s just so plain awesome.
Also, beyond that, you’ll see we have the tendency to be forward looking and future oriented such as: beyond, next, frontier, explore, horizon, forward, posterity, onward, utopian, dystopian, sci-fi. Or be into-the-sky such as universe, multiverse, star, alpha, stellar, constellation, cloud. We also explore the idea of what is the foundation and the construction of the digital world with words such as: internet, virtual, digital, cyber, simulation, artificial, reality. Wrap around these are words about space and time: space, time, /-cene, /-ians, world, open, alt/alternate, land, country, zone, ground. So you see even though we don’t know what name we can arrive to, however, our thinking certainly goes into some directions:
To the future
To the sky
To space and time
To the infrastructure that create the digital world
Why?
That is because we want our project to last forever (into the future and the sky) and become something meaningful and always be around the people who use it (into space and time). This world we want to create, we want it to be a natural extension of the reality that people are experiencing. Just like when you take your phone out and log into our world, it becomes your next reality. Of course, it’s a long way to go. Also, it’s cool and a massive thing to build. That’s why we are after it. This keeps us awake at night not because fear of under delivering, but because of excitements of doing something we really like.
So how this comes into OpenWorld?
The words that we really like among these are: frontier, next, extension, open, space. And our thinking just wandering around these words, try to somehow make this work with the words that we come up with. We know a name is coming and we are close.
Then the moment just come, accidentally. At that time, Tri was sitting and having lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Austin, scroll through the words in his head, and keep thinking and thinking, and suddenly this word just come up: OpenWorld. That’s the classic moment of a new name: it just comes in a sudden way. Tri brought it onto the team for everyone to discuss and vote, and everyone goes with it. The idea of OpenWorld is:
It is open, vast, endless. Just like the digital world we want to build.
It is a world. It reflects the Metaverse.
From (1) and (2) it reflect who we are, what we do, what we envision, and our values (awesome, open).
It gives us an opportunity to do whatever and build whatever in there: you want racing car game? done! you want selling digital clothing? done! you want buying virtual lands? done! you want to fight dragon? done! and the list just go on without any restriction.
OpenWorld also have politic and social meaning, when the world is open and transparent, war and hatred will be replace by peace and prosperity. Win-lose will be replace by win-win. If we can build a digital worlds that is endless, open, peaceful and prosperous, why don’t real life politicians learn from it and opt for peace instead of for war?
OpenWorld can be big and overreaching. Think about another names such as Standard Oil in oil industry, General Electric in electricity, General Motors in cars, Bank of International Settlement (BIS), and the like.
OpenWorld invites everyone to build and own. It’s an open world. It’s not our world alone.
The only thing that we afraid of is “open world” is is not a really new word, it has been used in normal context in social, gaming, and politic. Thus finding the domain might not be easy. Lucky for us we see two domains that we really like: openworld.vision and openworld.me - both are good.
Finally, the team went for a vote and choose openworld.vision.
We hope that this new name open a new chapter for our project. And yes, with this new name, we are now ready to co-build an endless digital world with everyone for the next decades.
OpenWorld - For peace and prosperity!
