Ask any veteran Alien Worlds Explorer what keeps them coming back and they’ll rarely mention just one thing. They’ll wax lyrical about the kickass spinoff games they played, the lore they read and wrote, the tournaments in which they participated. Others will mention the NFTs they earned and traded, and that time they got to call the shots as a Custodian of one of the six Planetary Syndicates.
Such a varied game experience is only possible thanks to the efforts of the wider community, though a guiding hand exists in the form of Galactic Hubs. Indeed, this sprawling ecosystem wouldn’t exist at its current scale without GHubs.
Launched 3.5 years ago, Galactic Hubs started with a simple aim: to support anyone in the community who had the vision and talent to push Alien Worlds forward. This support could take many forms, from mentoring and marketing to long-term funding, and it’s safe to say players and developers have benefited from such a hands-on approach. What began as a grant program has quietly transformed into the single biggest growth engine in the Alien Worlds Metaverse.
From Bold Experiments to Foundational Infrastructure
Decentralized and community-led, Galactic Hubs was conceived as “a resource that would help fund any member of the Alien Worlds community who had the vision to catapult innovations in software development and community building.”
Among the first wave of grants many hit the bullseye, most notably the creation of an interoperable bridge that let Minecraft players step into the Web3 world and earn Trilium (TLM). PvP card battler Battledome, a free-to-play strategic space combat game from developer Restack.AI, was another early recipient of GHubs support, giving players a fresh way to utilize their Minion, Character, and Weapon NFTs.
While the aim of GHubs has always been to get more players through the virtual doors, as well as compel developers to recognize the merits of building on Alien Worlds, 2023 saw a renewed focus on building out crucial infrastructure in the form of SDKs, APIs, and oracle services.
Perhaps the best example of this was the WAX Cloud Wallet Mobile SDK, which made mobile development more palatable to devs. This unshowy behind-the-scenes work actually laid the groundwork for a more friction-free experience for creators and players who came along later.
From Mission Control’s revamped UI and Tool Loaning feature to comms tools like MSIG Chat, most of the major infrastructure upgrades of recent years can trace their roots back to a successful GHubs application. They mightn’t hog the headlines like the flashy game releases, but these projects were worth their weight in gold (or TLM). GHubs understood early that the metaverse isn’t built by one team but by dozens of small ones feeding off each other’s passion and progress.
Lore Takes Centre Stage
2025 has undoubtedly been the year of the story, following the launch of Tokenized Lore and its attendant tentacles, including a dedicated Lore DAO. Last year, GHubs rolled out Lore Community Grants and put an official Lore Scribe in place, and consequently writers felt a runway beneath their feet and a gentle hand on the back pushing them forward.
While the community chased Community Grants for story submissions, a number of projects gained support to build on Kevin J. Anderson’s foundational lore. These included LightningWorks’ Starblind, an immersive digital comic revolving around a Magor prison break with forgeable NFT covers (a first-person-shooter adaptation, Siege Worlds, is in the works), and deck-building strategy game Meta Battler which dropped new species-themed NFT packs. Meanwhile, Battlefleet Armageddon got a major narrative update to incorporate the latest lore.
Every project followed a similar route, in that it was conceived by those who already had some link to the Alien Worlds community; funding was dispensed based on the value the works could bring to the player base. In short, GHubs bet on storytellers the same way they once bet on coders.
Expect lore to remain a firm focus in 2026.
The Flywheel in Motion
Over the last 3.5 years, some 90+ projects have benefitted from direct GHubs support. From tournaments to tools, games to comics, APIs to oracles, the initiative is committed to onboarding and retaining players, and boosting the long-term health of the Alien Worlds ecosystem. Rather than being shots in the dark, projects that win support must meet milestones, show measurable impact, and leave the door open for the next imagineer.
The result is a flywheel: better tools bring more players, more players make the sandbox appealing to builders, and more builders means more games (plus increased competition for grants). While the Worker Proposal System and Union DAOs now handle much of the day-to-day funding, GHubs has been the true engine of ecosystem growth, always at hand to inform and support.
Dacoco Ecosystem Manager Evan Dean says it best: “Galactic Hubs will keep seeding studios, co-funding with DAOs, and tying support to measurable retention and decentralization.” Amen to that.