Netmarble's Four-Year Crypto Experiment With Ni no Kuni Is Over. What Happened?

On 17 September 2026, at 06:00 UTC, a small piece of blockchain-gaming history switched itself off. The original global servers of Ni no Kuni: Cross Worlds, the forum that went with them and the MARBLEX service tied to the game all closed at once. A week earlier, the web shop where players had swapped in-game resources for crypto tokens had already shut its doors.

The game itself lives on. Since 23 July 2026, Netmarble has run a brand-new global unified server under the slogan "One Universe, One Journey", and it has no cryptocurrency and no NFTs. Nothing carries over from the old servers: every player starts a fresh character. Four years after Netmarble chose Ni no Kuni as the flagship of its blockchain push, the company has quietly taken the blockchain out.

A Ghibli-flavoured world meets a token economy

To understand why this mattered, start with the name. Ni no Kuni began as a collaboration between Level-5 and Studio Ghibli, whose animators drew the cutscenes of the first game, with music by Joe Hisaishi. It is one of the gentlest, most storybook-like series in Japanese RPGs.

Netmarble's Cross Worlds turned that world into a mobile MMORPG. It launched in Korea and Japan in June 2021 as a conventional game. When the global edition arrived on 25 May 2022, for iOS, Android and PC with cross-play, it came with something extra: a token economy.

In the global build, two in-game resources could be converted into crypto tokens through MARBLEX: Territe became Territe Token (NKT) and Asterite became Asterite Token (NKA). Those tokens could in turn be swapped for MBX, MARBLEX's own coin. Korean players never got any of this. Korea's game-rating rules do not allow play-to-earn games, so the domestic version shipped without the MARBLEX layer.

Inside MARBLEX: six games in a year

Ni no Kuni was not a one-off. In early 2022, Netmarble announced its own blockchain ecosystem, MARBLEX, built around the MBX token on the Klaytn network (the chain created by Kakao's blockchain arm). The ecosystem went live in March 2022, first in the global version of A3: Still Alive, and Netmarble said it planned six blockchain games that year. Netmarble was no small studio dabbling: it had earned about $2.2 billion in revenue in 2021.

The lineup included the global Ni no Kuni, Meta World: My City (a board-game-style metaverse built on Netmarble's Modoo Marble) and Monster Arena. In May 2022, MBX was listed on the Korean exchange Bithumb, with a listing event that handed out small amounts of the token to traders.

MARBLEX built the full kit of a crypto ecosystem: a wallet app, a decentralised exchange, staking and an NFT marketplace. On paper it was one of the most complete blockchain-gaming platforms any major publisher had built.

By the numbers

• 25 May 2022: global launch of Ni no Kuni: Cross Worlds with token features.
• 6: blockchain games Netmarble said it planned for 2022.
• About 67%: share of MBX's unplanned distribution supply that MARBLEX voted to burn (destroy) in July 2023, with 99% approval from voters.
• $20 million: joint fund Netmarble and Immutable announced in June 2024 to support web3 developers.
• 23 July 2026: crypto-free global unified server opens.
• 17 September 2026: original blockchain servers and the game's MARBLEX service close.

Why the economy wobbled

The trouble with putting a token economy inside an MMORPG is that two very different groups of people show up. Some come to play. Others come to farm resources and sell them. When the price of the token falls, the second group leaves, and the economy shrinks with it.

MARBLEX's own moves tell the story. In July 2023, it asked MBX holders to approve burning up to 67% of its unplanned token supply, to reduce uncertainty about how many coins might hit the market. Voters said yes with 99% support. A year later, in June 2024, Netmarble announced a plan to move MARBLEX from Klaytn to Immutable zkEVM, an Ethereum-based network popular with game studios, and to put $20 million with Immutable into a fund for developers. Reporting at the time said the 2022 and 2023 launches had not kept players engaged.

Two games under one name

For four years, Cross Worlds was really two products. Korean players got a normal MMORPG with a normal shop. Players abroad got the same world with an exchange bolted on, where an hour of farming had a price that moved every minute. Two communities played the same quests under very different incentives, and only one of them ever had to read a token chart.

That split was not unique to Netmarble. Korea's ban on play-to-earn games pushed several local publishers to build "global-only" blockchain editions, which meant the companies' home audience, the players who knew their games best, never saw the feature their parent companies were promoting to investors.

The quiet exit

The ending was gradual, then sudden. On 25 June 2026, Netmarble announced the server change. On 2 July it took a snapshot of every account's highest Combat Power to decide migration rewards, paid through a programme called CROWN FUND, and stopped selling paid items on the old service. On 23 July the unified server opened. Players had until 10 September to convert their last resources into tokens before the exchange closed, and on 17 September the lights went off.

MARBLEX itself has not closed. It rebranded in early 2026 with a goblin mascot named Gobi and the slogan "Fun Comes First", and said it wanted to bring more than ten new games into its ecosystem. But its most famous game no longer needs it, and a separate Seven Deadly Sins NFT service also closed on 11 November 2026.

WGC's take

Netmarble did more than most publishers to make blockchain gaming work. It built its own token, a full exchange, a wallet and a lineup, and it attached all of it to a famous, well-loved brand. It still ended up where so many others did: a game whose crypto layer became a burden rather than a draw.

The lesson is not that big companies cannot build these systems. It is that a token economy changes who plays and why. A game built for people who love its world struggles when part of its audience is there for the exchange rate. Rebuilding Cross Worlds without crypto is Netmarble's admission that the game's future depends on players, not traders.

What to watch

• Whether the crypto-free unified server brings lapsed players back.
• Whether MARBLEX finds a new flagship, or becomes a smaller side platform.
• How other Korean publishers with global blockchain versions respond: Netmarble's exit gives them a clear template for winding one down.

Token prices are volatile; nothing in this article is investment advice.