I owe finding this current Roblox job listing to the sharp eyes of Roblox_RTC, a Roblox-related news source -- the massive metaverse platform is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Web3 to complete tasks including "develop web3 solutions and integrate them with existing Roblox tech stack across Roblox", and "help decide the future of web3 in Roblox and the nature of our web3 solution". Specifically:
This is an opportunity for you to challenge your engineering talents by building something new, sharing expertise, adopting innovations contributed by other engineering teams and improving our bottom line. As a senior engineer you will help Roblox Marketplace to be web3 ready and support billions of items and transactions to happen both on the blockchain and Roblox.
Virtual items registered on the blockchain are more typically called by another name: Non-fungible tokens, i.e. NFTs. But I wouldn't assume Roblox is about to put out NFTs, because the job description strongly suggests "the future of web3 in Roblox" is still being decided.
Whatever the senior engineer does, it's a pretty mysterious move into web3 for Roblox:
Roblox is HIRING people to bring Web3 & similar related “NFT technology” to the catalog..
— RTC (@Roblox_RTC) July 9, 2022
Many players are upset about this as of the “implications” of crypto for them 💻
Other players say it’s needed to “mature” the platform’s economy 💻 pic.twitter.com/2Q0pBpyNzr
As I've written about frequently, nearly all* metaverse platforms which boast about their web3 features (blockchain, NFTs, crypto) have little or no active users. It would be extremely odd for Roblox, which has tens of millions of daily active users, to shift any content to the blockchain, which is notoriously slow and inefficient. But seeing as this seems to be the only web3 job listing on Roblox's board, this could just be more of an R&D hire, than any active implementation.
*I say "nearly all" as opposed to "none" because there many be an exception to this. More on that, hopefully, tomorrow.
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