MapleStory Universe Dev Details 5 Years of Blockchain Trial and Error at NDC26
The presentation offers a rare public reckoning from a major game company on the practical contradictions between blockchain's promise of open freedom and the operational need for control.
Reporting from 1 sources: 4Gamer.net.
At NEXON Developers Conference 26, NEXPACE blockchain lead Ryu Gi-hyeok presented a postmortem of five years building MapleStory Universe, the blockchain ecosystem around MapleStory. He described three walls the project hit after launch: the security risk of asset approvals, the friction of transaction fees, and the cost of vetting external builders on a permissioned chain. The talk centered on whether blockchain's permissionless ideal can coexist with a developer's responsibility to protect users.
Ryu Gi-hyeok, who oversees blockchain development at NEXON's Abu Dhabi entity NEXPACE, walked attendees through the project's evolution at NDC26. MapleStory N (MSN), the blockchain game based on the MapleStory IP, launched worldwide in May 2025 and has been live for over a year. The broader MapleStory Universe (MSU) encompasses MSN, a marketplace, tokens (NXPC for fees, NESO for in-game use), NFT items, and third-party builder apps, all running on the Henesys Chain, a permissioned chain built on Avalanche.
Ryu framed the talk around one question: can blockchain's permissionless freedom and the operator's responsibility coexist? He laid out three interconnected walls the team hit after launch. The first was the approve mechanism, where users must sign permission for a program to move assets from their wallet, a common phishing vector. The team solved it with a whitelist system that only allows pre-approved addresses to interact with their tokens and items. The second wall was transaction fees, which they absorbed entirely. The third was the cost of vetting external builders' smart contracts for KYC and AML compliance, which ballooned operational costs and throttled ecosystem growth.
Ryu admitted the team only realized later that these three fixes formed a domino chain: each protective choice pushed them deeper into a permissioned architecture that contradicted the openness they wanted. He said they decided to start over from that point.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.