Obyte

Obyte’s community is currently at its weakest point in 8 years. Our social channels often go quiet for days and almost nobody seems to be interested — all that despite strong underlying technology.
We must fix that and build a community Obyte deserves.
Obyte City — along with a few other community engagement tools we have in the pipeline — is designed to strengthen our community by encouraging closer connections, and more connections between community members. We believe that such horizontal ties, and a dense network of them, will make our community stronger, more cooperative, more capable of effective collective action, more resilient, and more independent of the team — who, otherwise, would be a central point of failure and has already demonstrated its poor performance in community building.
<h2 id="header-0">What is City</h2>
City is a virtual space divided into 1 trillion plots of land. The space is represented as a square, and the plots have coordinates that look like (123456, 789012), where the numbers indicate the plot’s horizontal and vertical positions, ranging from 0 to 1000000.
<img src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/1*A6hnsmXAWwbqsr6DoSBrug.png">
Users can buy plots in the City, and the coordinates of the newly bought plots are assigned randomly. The tokens paid for a plot (minus a fee) stay deposited on that plot and can be withdrawn at any time by leaving the plot.
If a newly acquired plot happens to be close enough to an existing unbuilt plot, both owners receive rewards:
<ul>
 <li>houses at the locations of their plots, turning their unbuilt plots into built ones;</li>
 <li>two new unbuilt plots at new random locations for each owner (4 new plots total).</li>
</ul>
Each of the reward plots has the same amount on it as the original plots had, meaning that each user books a profit by getting two new unbuilt plots instead of just one old plot. They can then either leave the new plots and withdraw the tokens deposited on them (thus cashing out) or wait for another new plot to become a neighbor, triggering another reward cycle. Built plots don’t have any tokens deposited on them any more.
The most interesting part occurs when the two users — owners of the neighboring plots — claim the rewards mentioned above. To do so, they need to connect on discord or telegram and coordinate sending their claiming requests, ensuring both requests are sent within 10 minutes of each other. This is when the two community members establish a closer connection with each other and solve a small problem together, with this experience anchored to the act of receiving rewards.
Later, they receive several smaller follow-up rewards to refresh the connection. They claim these rewards in the same way as the initial reward: by connecting on telegram or discord and coordinating their transactions so that they are sent within 10 minutes of each other. The first follow-up reward is issued in 60 days after becoming neighbors.
To enable seamless connection between users for the purpose of claiming rewards, the users need to be attested on at least one of the two networks (telegram or discord) before they buy a plot. Attestation links the user’s Obyte address (which identifies them in the City) with their telegram or discord username. This is one of Obyte’s unique features. With these links, our bots can notify the users over telegram and/or discord when they become neighbors and let them know each other’s username so that they can connect and coordinate the claiming process.
Once a user has a house, they can assign a unique shortcode to it. Shortcodes are given on a first come, first served basis, and are available only to house owners, one shortcode per house. A user can sell their shortcode to another house owner. Shortcodes are likely to be used in the future versions of Obyte wallet to send tokens between users. So, when someone wants to send tokens to someone else, they can send them to the recipient’s @shortcode instead of their (not-so-friendly-looking) address.
Users can customize their houses and plots by assigning names to them and linking them to their twitter, linkedin, telegram, instagram, and various other social profiles. It’s their place in the City.
A user can have as many plots and houses as they like.
There are more details, such as how close a plot needs to be to be considered a neighbor, the odds of finding a neighbor, and many more. We don’t describe them all here, please refer to the <a href="https://city.obyte.org/faq" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">FAQ</a> on the City’s website city.obyte.org.
<h2 id="header-1">CITY token</h2>
Plots can only be bought with CITY tokens (except in the initial sale, see below).
New CITY tokens are minted to pay the reward plots and the follow-up rewards. On the other hand, CITY tokens are burned when paying a fee for buying a plot.
This fee is designed to offset the token emissions caused by rewards, assuming users hold on to their plots until they find a neighbor. However, this assumption may not hold true in practice, and the more users abandon their plots without finding a neighbor, the more likely CITY will become deflationary.
<h2 id="header-2">Initial sale</h2>
During the initial sale period, which will run from June 3, 2025 to June 30, 2025, plots will be sold for GBYTE at a fixed rate 1 GBYTE = 1000 CITY. The initial plot price is 1000 CITY, or 1 GBYTE.
During this period, buyers of plots also buy CITY tokens (not bound in plots) for 10% of the plot price. In other words, when buying a plot, users will pay an additional 0.1 GBYTE and receive 100 CITY along with the plot. This will be a source of liquid CITY tokens. Users can also buy a plot for GBYTE and then immediately leave it to receive CITY in exchange. This is another way to obtain liquid CITY, however users doing so will lose the fee they paid for buying the plot.
After the initial sale ends, CITY can only be purchased on secondary markets, e.g. on <a href="https://oswap.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Oswap DEX</a>.
The GBYTE raised in the initial sale will be used by the Obyte team to fund the future development of the infrastructure around City (such as user interfaces and analytic tools) and other community engagement apps.
<h2 id="header-3">Secure and immutable</h2>
Like all other dapps on Obyte, City is operated by autonomous agents (AAs), which are soulless code-driven actors on <a href="https://obyte.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Obyte DAG</a>. The AAs work strictly according to the rules which were baked into them when they were created, and the rules cannot be changed, even by the Obyte team. In particular, no one can arbitrarily withdraw, move, or mint tokens. And since the AAs operate on Obyte, <a href="https://blog.obyte.org/distribution-of-power-in-dags-and-blockchains-7727ca1a2b6d" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">all transactions are uncensorable</a>, meaning they cannot be stopped by anyone. So, anyone engaging with City knows for certain what the rules of the game are.
The only way some City parameters can be changed is through <a href="https://city.obyte.org/governance" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">governance</a>, which is again implemented in an immutable AA. Owners of plots, who are the stakeholders here, can vote for changing some parameters, such as plot price and the probability of finding a neighbor. Vote weight depends on the total amount of CITY a user holds in plots. However, the power of governance is limited to only a few parameters, while the rules themselves cannot be changed by anyone.
<h2 id="header-4">Referrals</h2>
As a way to not only strengthen ties within the community but also expand it, there are referral rewards for those who bring new users into the City.
When a new plot is bought from a user’s page at <a href="https://city.obyte.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">city.obyte.org</a>, or a page of their existing plot or house, that user automatically becomes the referrer for the new plot. This results in greatly increased likelihood (but not certainty) that the new user will become the referring user’s neighbor, and therefore both will get rewards.
One can put their referral link on their Twitter (e.g. as one’s location) and other social profiles to attract referral traffic and receive reward plots and houses more often.
<h2 id="header-5">Turnaround</h2>
We really hope that City, along with upcoming community engagement apps, will reverse the decline we saw lately. A more connected community is a stronger community — and <a href="https://obyte.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Obyte</a>, with its unparalleled censorship-resistant technology, definitely deserves it.
This is our opportunity, please make use of it — get your own space and neighbors in the City at <a href="https://city.obyte.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">city.obyte.org</a>.

Introducing Obyte City — a community engagement space for Obyte

Table of Contents

obyte

Other articles published on Jun 5, 2025

Join our free newsletter for daily crypto updates!