u/Diabolacal

Made this for the What I Wish I Knew challenge. It's a short video, about 2 minutes and no talking, on the thing I wish I'd known at the start of the cycle, which is how to get out of your starter system. Everything in it is just footage from EF-Map, nothing you can't see and do on the map yourself at https://ef-map.com

Since I recorded it the area has changed a fair bit. Kadian from Clonebank 86 has published his catapults in the Public Structures panel, 30 structures across 16 systems, so there's a lot more on the map around the starter systems now than what's in the video.

This came up in Twitch chat tonight and I said I'd have a proper look at it afterwards, because I don't think "because blockchain" is really a useful answer to why EVE Frontier is built the way it is.

The obvious question is why does Frontier need a blockchain at all? Couldn't Fenris Creations just have a normal database and build a much more capable version of ESI around it?

The first answer is yes. They could.

There isn't some capability where blockchain can write to a game and APIs can't. ESI itself has write endpoints. It is a REST API, authenticated access uses EVE SSO and OAuth 2.0, applications register with Fenris, request defined scopes and operate within whatever endpoints Fenris exposes. There are also rate limits, caching rules and all of the other things you'd expect from a centrally operated API.

So I don't think "blockchain can do this but an API can't" is the right argument.

In fact Frontier itself uses both.

Fenris described this pretty clearly during the Sui hackathon earlier this year. Mods that actually exist inside the world can run through Smart Assemblies and Sui, while external applications such as maps, dashboards, coordination tools and analytics can use an official API to read and react to the live universe.

That distinction is probably the easiest way I've found to explain why the blockchain is there.

If I'm building something like EF-Map, I mostly want information. Give me objects, events, ownership, structures and whatever else Fenris chooses to expose and I'll do something useful with it. An API is excellent for that.

If I'm changing the behaviour of a gate that physically exists inside the game world, that is a different problem.

A Smart Gate might allow only members of a particular Tribe through. It could charge for access. It could check ownership of something else. A Smart Storage Unit could become a shop. Different pieces of infrastructure can interact with systems written by different developers. The important bit is that this isn't just an external website looking at the game. Player-written logic is becoming part of the shared game state and can produce an actual in-game effect.

You could still build all of that with an API.

But now the API needs to be a very powerful write API and Fenris needs to operate the authoritative execution environment behind it. They need to decide how third-party code is hosted, how it executes, how users authorise actions, how ownership works, how state is shared between applications, how one developer's system can interact with another developer's system, how history is recorded and how all of that is secured.

Blockchain doesn't make those problems disappear, obviously. It does give them an existing architecture for a lot of it.

Frontier migrated from Ethereum to Sui on 11 March 2026 with Cycle 5. Sui is an object-centric Layer 1 blockchain and I think the object-centric part is particularly relevant to Frontier.

The Frontier whitepaper talks about eventually targeting 100,000 unique star systems containing huge numbers of player-built ships, bases and infrastructure. On Sui an object can have its own identity, ownership and history. Fenris specifically describes that as fitting its existing item-centric approach to building EVE games.

So rather than one enormous contract containing the entire world state, a gate can be an object. A storage unit can be an object. An item can be an object. Those objects have defined rules and interfaces and player-written Move code can extend what they do within those boundaries.

That also gives you composability.

If I write a system against those objects, somebody else doesn't necessarily need Fenris to build a special endpoint so their system can interact with mine. They can build against the same state and the same contracts. One player's market, currency, access-control system or reputation system can potentially become an input to something another player has built.

That's quite different from the normal ESI model.

With ESI, Fenris decides what an application can ask for. They expose an endpoint, document it, maintain it and decide which scopes are required. If the data or action I want isn't exposed, I can't just invent the endpoint myself.

That doesn't make ESI bad. I've built against it quite extensively recently and it does exactly what it is designed to do. But it is fundamentally an interface into a private game operated by Fenris.

Sui is being used for selected parts of Frontier as part of the game itself.

There's also the execution model. Independent transactions on Sui can be processed in parallel rather than every transaction having to wait behind unrelated transactions touching completely different objects. Fenris gives parallel execution, low latency and near-instant finality as some of the reasons it chose Sui.

That matters if you're trying to put potentially billions of game objects and player interactions onto a chain without the whole thing behaving like the older mental image people understandably have of blockchain where you press a button and stare at a confirmation spinner for 30 seconds.

It doesn't mean every calculation in Frontier is happening on Sui. It isn't.

You're still playing a normal real-time MMO running on Fenris' Carbon engine. Your ship isn't submitting a blockchain transaction every frame because you've moved your mouse slightly to the left. The blockchain is being used where persistence, ownership, programmability and shared state actually matter.

There is also the history and verification side.

If the authoritative state of something is on-chain, I don't necessarily need to trust an API operator or somebody else's database when they tell me what happened to it. The transaction history exists independently and can be indexed by anybody.

That has already been useful for tools. Rather than waiting for Fenris to build a historical endpoint for every possible question, you can index the underlying state yourself.

There are obviously limits to how desirable that is in EVE. Information asymmetry matters. Knowing things other people don't know is part of the game.

Fenris is aware of that and its Sui architecture also includes Walrus and Seal for data storage and access control. So "blockchain means everybody can see absolutely everything" isn't really the intended model either.

Then there is the other reason that I don't think is worth trying to hide behind technical terminology.

Money.

Frontier is deliberately being built so value can cross the boundary of the game.

Its whitepaper describes the Frontier economy as a participant in the global economy which can interact with virtual or real economies. $EVE is planned as an external token on Sui and has an actual game use, with the current design requiring it for the advanced Crude Mining Lenses used to extract Crude Matter.

That's very different from EVE Online.

EVE Online lets money travel quite a long way in one direction. I can buy PLEX for real money and sell it for ISK. What I cannot legitimately do is decide I've had enough of EVE, sell my 100 billion ISK and withdraw the proceeds into my bank account. Fenris' EVE Online RMT rules explicitly prohibit selling ISK or in-game items for real money.

Frontier is intentionally opening that boundary.

Whether that's a brilliant idea or a terrible idea is a completely separate discussion. I think there are perfectly reasonable arguments on both sides, especially once speculation starts affecting something that is supposed to be a game.

But it absolutely belongs in the answer. Blockchain isn't just being used because somebody decided databases weren't fashionable enough. The external economic layer is part of Frontier's design.

There are downsides to all of this as well.

If I was building a game and didn't want these properties, I'd take the database and API every time.

A database is simpler. It's under your control. Private information stays private. Updating something is straightforward. If somebody finds a catastrophic exploit you can stop the server, fix the data and carry on. You don't have an external consensus network, smart contracts, keys, transaction fees, chain infrastructure or another ecosystem to worry about.

An API is also extremely good for things which don't need shared execution. I don't need a blockchain transaction to ask how many people are in Jita. I don't need cryptographic ownership to download a list of solar systems. There would be no benefit.

There is also additional security risk when you're deliberately allowing other people to deploy code that affects your universe.

Sui's Move language is designed around assets and ownership and removes or makes much harder some classes of smart-contract bug, but that isn't the same thing as saying player-written code can't contain bugs. It obviously can.

Fenris still has to design the interface between player code and the game extremely carefully. The fact that my contract can control a gate does not mean it should be able to give my character a billion hit points. The underlying object defines what actions are available and the mod operates within that boundary.

Scaling isn't free either.

Sui's object model and parallel transaction execution are a much better fit for this than some older blockchain architectures, which is one of the reasons Fenris moved to it, but running a distributed blockchain is still more complicated than updating a row in PostgreSQL.

And there is dependency risk. Fenris is deliberately building part of its universe on infrastructure it doesn't completely control. That's partly the point, but it's still a trade.

So I don't think I would describe blockchain as "better than an API".

I think that is asking the wrong question.

Frontier already has an API, because APIs are very good at some things. It also has Sui because Fenris wants selected parts of the universe to have shared programmable state, object-level ownership and provenance, composability between things different people build, independently verifiable history and an economy that can interact with the world outside the game.

Could Fenris build its own centralised version of all of that?

I think so.

But by the time you've built a globally accessible state layer, cryptographic ownership, signed transactions, a secure execution environment for arbitrary third-party code, permanent history, composability between applications, asset settlement and an external economic layer, you're starting to recreate quite a lot of the functionality the blockchain is providing anyway.

Whether that trade eventually turns out to have been worth making is probably something we won't really know until Frontier is much further along.

But yeah, that's my current understanding of why it's there rather than just being ESI 2.0.

Had another go at turning EO-Map data into a video (Well, zKillboard data - thank you zKill, love you guys)

This is one full 24 hour period played back chronologically - 15,218 mapped kills, almost exactly 2 trillion ISK destroyed, compressed into just under 4 minutes

At the PLEX/ISK and CCP store rates I checked when making it, that works out at roughly $14,000 PLEX equivalent - which is a slightly ridiculous way to look at a day in EVE

I've been building out historical sovereignty playback in EO-Map and this was too tempting not to try.

This is New Eden from 23 June 2007 through to today, played back chronologically. Nothing particularly clever was done for the video itself beyond recording the map and adding the music. This is basically just the sovereignty history playback running from start to finish.

This probably only means anything to people in the UK, but Argos has just been sold for £120 million.

Fenris Creations bought itself back from Pearl Abyss for $120 million, which is roughly £89 million at the current exchange rate.

So broadly speaking, the company behind EVE Online and EVE Frontier changed hands for about the same sort of money as the entire Argos business.

Obviously the deals are not directly comparable. The Argos figure includes deferred payments, while part of the Fenris deal was reportedly paid in EVE Frontier tokens, and neither sale price is a perfect measure of what the business is actually worth.

Still, seeing the two figures beside each other puts the scale of the Fenris deal into perspective. Argos is one of those brands that feels enormous if you grew up in the UK, with stores everywhere and catalogues in nearly every house, but the whole chain has now sold for a figure in broadly the same range as FC!

I posted an earlier version of this here about two weeks ago, when I had just rebuilt the star rendering and selective bloom for my Three.js map of the EVE Frontier universe.

I apparently wasn’t finished.

Since then I have added a procedural universe-effects layer built around the actual distribution of the 24,000+ star systems rather than using a static background.

The denser stellar regions now drive an unresolved stellar-density glow, with volumetric interstellar dust and gas layered through the galaxy and separate dark extinction structures cutting through the brighter regions.

The part I have probably spent the most time on is getting all of that to behave coherently while the camera moves. The volumetric effects are sampled in world space and the extinction layer needed additional sub-stepping and filtering to stop fine structure visibly changing or fading as the camera moved through different viewing angles.

I also reworked the stellar events. Supernovae, novae and pulsars are anchored to stars in the actual map, and their emitted light now feeds into the interstellar-medium rendering so nearby gas and dust visibly illuminate when an event occurs rather than the event just being an isolated sprite/effect on top of the scene.

The original spectral bloom system is still there as well. Individual stars have emissive intensity derived from their spectral properties, so hotter/brighter stars seed more bloom, but I ended up rebuilding that path too so distant stars retained the same relative hierarchy without all of them turning into equally sized glowing blobs.

This video is a continuous slow orbit captured from the live site rather than a scripted camera sequence. The first minute or so has a little narration, then I just let the ambient track and the simulation run.

My graphics card continues to hate me.

Putting the cat among the pigeons a bit, because this is one of those EVE Frontier topics that could eventually matter to normal EVE Online players.

To be clear, I have not seen any announcement of this. I am asking the hypothetical.

Right now PLEX is basically one way real money value. You can buy PLEX with cash, sell it for ISK, use it for Omega, NES items, services, etc. What you cannot do, within the rules, is go the other way and sell your PLEX, ISK or assets back out for real money. That is RMT and gets you nuked.

EVE Frontier is different. It is being built around LUX as the in-game currency, $EVE as the token layer, and an economy where in-game activity creates demand for things like lenses and fuel. Fenris/CCP has also just gone independent again, and the buyout reportedly included a token-related component. So it does not feel insane to ask whether PLEX and $EVE eventually meet somewhere.

Suppose at some point Fenris introduces a formal PLEX to $EVE conversion, or some other bridge between EVE Online premium value and the Frontier token economy.

Would that change anything for you?

Would you carry on treating PLEX as game time and a store of ISK value?

Would you cash some out if there was a legitimate route?

Would you expect PLEX prices to go mad?

Would you worry about botting/RMT pressure getting worse?

Would you see it as just PLEX doing what PLEX has always done, but with an official exit path?

Or would you hate the idea entirely because it links EVE Online to crypto more directly?

I know the word crypto usually kills the conversation here, but I think the PLEX angle is the interesting part. EVE already has dollars to PLEX to ISK. The missing step has always been a legal ISK/PLEX back to dollars path.

Would that be good, bad, or just another Monday?