This week, MineX took full ownership of its infrastructure. We now officially own every inch of these paths.
Most Minecraft economies, and most videogame economies, are built to extract wealth from the players. MineX is building the opposite. Roads where the wealth flows between players, in a free market, instead of up to a single owner.
We spent 10 months building on someone else's infrastructure. It was the right way to start at our company stage, but we always knew that to build what we really wanted, one day we would need to own it ourselves.
How It Started: Tokyo, August 2025
It all started during the Solana Startup Village in Tokyo, in August 2025, almost a year ago. By those times, MineX was more like a concept. We hadn't opened the server to the public, but we had released some videos on how MineX works. During that week in Japan, we started deploying on Solana's devnet. We got important feedback from builders in the ecosystem, as well as from the Superteam Japan members.
While building this infrastructure, I met Karthik, who basically introduced something perfect for us, in the perfect moment. An API service built by Solana Labs in partnership with Google Cloud, made for games. At the beginning, we were a bit skeptical to delegate and host our economy on a third party, but after talking more, we knew it was the most wise path at our stage.
By the end of September, after releasing some test servers with our own infrastructure, we decided to start building on GameShift. It had a lot of functions for our transactions, and the security features, including the non-custodial ones, through MetaKeep. Our public announcement with GameShift came on the 4th of October, 2025. And by the 28th of October, we finished, published and released a scanner, scan.minex.gg, where we showcased in our own way our vision to integrate crypto into the world's most sold game.
Testnet, Mainnet, and a Player Explosion
The game was still not live. We were internally testing and developing our MMORPG mode. Then the day came. On the 3rd of December, we released our testnet version of MineX MMORPG. We also started marketing right away. We were ready for the Breakpoint Abu Dhabi.
When we launched our mainnet version in April, still running on GameShift, and released it with a new game mode, we got a player explosion, multiplying our player count by six within a single month.
That growth made something clear. Instead of running our economy on someone else's platform, we wanted to own the whole thing, end to end. So in June we started developing our own API platform.
A Checkout Counter Is Not an Economy
Building our own infrastructure made us see it from a different angle. We no longer wanted to just create Minecraft servers, we wanted to also put Minecraft's underground economy on chain. We want to become the essential infrastructure for this revolution, inside the world's most famous game.
We realised how unfair and rotten the current system is in video games. All games in the world are built as a wealth extraction from the user, a pyramid where the ultimate winner is the owner, and all the money flows in the same direction.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, an economy is "the system of trade by which the wealth of a country is made and used." On all Minecraft servers, money flows one way. And that's not an economy. That's a checkout counter.
On MineX, it works the other way. When players trade, 90% of the value stays with the player, and 10% keeps the world running. The money moves between players, not up to the owner.
Why Minecraft Is the Only Place This Can Exist
Minecraft is one of the few games in the world where we are able to build this kind of system. In other games, there is no freedom. Minecraft has payments, self-hosting, and total independence. It is also the most sold game in history, with over 300 million copies out there. That is the reason why we have been building crypto servers here for five years.
What We Own Now
Our own API is now the core of the economy. We broke down exactly how that economy works here. And our plan is not only to keep developing our network of Minecraft servers using it, but also to leverage this API platform to become the foundation for the future of the whole Minecraft ecosystem. And not only Minecraft. In the future, our own API could also allow us to expand to other games as well, and become an infrastructure provider.
Just join our Minecraft servers and check your wallet anytime, or use our now improved scanner. Now, thanks to using our own API, we can provide better functions like the transaction history of every item and user, sellable trades where other players can pay with card, and more.
What Comes Next
In another article, I will expand on why virtual economies have a big chance of playing a key role in the economy of the future. A society that spends more of its social life online every day, and how AI will only speed up that shift. And why MineX is one of the best-positioned companies for it, because we're building on the game the players are already on, instead of building our own from zero.
Originally published on X, August 6, 2026 by Yeray, Co-Founder of MineX.