The Announcement — Lamina1 Enters the Scene (2022)

The Carnival Opens

Betanet didn’t arrive quietly. It landed like a traveling carnival, neon tents and flashing lights pitched in the middle of the internet. The Discord never slept. Notifications fired like popcorn in a hot pan — quest prompts, leaderboard updates, new badge announcements.

At any hour, you could scroll and see the same flood:

Screenshots poured in like trophies. Leaderboards became status symbols. For a moment, it felt like a game that everyone was winning — or at least playing.

The First Spaces

Then came the demos. Space Lasers — a neon browser shooter where you could mint a “Custom Laser” NFT and fire it across the screen. Nyric — a downloadable prototype showing how authentication might work between Spaces. For the first time, Lamina1 users could log in through the Hub, carry items with them, and watch blockchain assets stitched into live gameplay.

It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t even stable. But it was real. And that was enough. For a moment, Betanet turned speculation into play — proof, however glitchy, that the architecture could hold more than white papers and Discord threads.

The Glow and the Glitch

On the surface, it worked. Quests completed, badges minted, screenshots posted like trophies. The carnival lights dazzled, and the numbers soared. Fifty thousand participants, the headlines said.

In the margins, something flickered. Quests completed at machine speed. New accounts spawning faster than moderators could welcome them. Wallets with nothing but XP and a trail of identical behavior. Some said it was just rapid growth. Others whispered about scripts grinding through the system.

Nobody wanted to look too closely. Not yet.

The Uneasy Promise

Betanet dazzled like a midway at night — loud, bright, and impossible to ignore. The demos inspired, the quests gamified the crowd, and on paper the promise was intact.

But beneath the glow, the cracks were widening. Wallets with nothing but XP. Accounts completing quests faster than any human could. Growth without people. For the moment, the illusion held, and few wanted to look too closely.

Mainnet would change that. The lights would come up, and whatever shadows had gathered in Betanet would be impossible to ignore.