Astra Nova Launches NovaToon Webtoon dApp on SKALE

Astra Nova, an AGI-driven web3 entertainment ecosystem, has announced the official launch of both NovaToon and their comic collection on the SKALE network.

What Is NovaToon?

NovaToon is a webtoon dApp that is expanding the Astra Nova ecosystem by enabling readers to own, buy, and read digital comics on an accessible platform that is powered by the gas-free gaming blockchain SKALE. Through this dApp, the team hopes to build “the next generation of immersive storytelling and decentralized fandom” that is backed and secured by web3 tech to enable ownership while removing any barriers that come with traditional non-friendly web2 practices.

According to the official Medium post, the team picked SKALE for this launch because of its “unique architecture” that comes with perks such as free minting, near-instant transactions, and high throughput. Users have no gas costs to worry about, making dApps created on this scalable gaming chain more easily accessible for gamers and various web2 audiences in general, such as comic readers.

If you’d like to try out the new web3-powered comic platform for yourself and start enjoying a “next-gen” reading experience, you can download it for free on Android via the Google Play Store, with the link to the store page available in the official X announcement. Once you download, you’ll have to set up an account, which can be done via e-mail, but also through the passwordless social sign-in option that is X. With that set up, you can start reading free comic chapters while buying priced chapters using USDC. It’s also possible to refer friends and complete various ongoing and one-time quests, most of which are social tasks. Doing these activities is rewarded with Shards, a points system used to rank you up on a global leaderboard. It doesn’t seem quite clear what rewards await the top users on the leaderboard, but it does seem like the top 20 with the most amount of collected Shards could end up winning something for their efforts.

At the time of writing, the only comic users can read on this platform is the team’s own collection that is now also live on the same blockchain network: Deviants: Shards of the Forsaken.

What Is Deviants: Shards of the Forsaken?

Deviants: Shards of the Forsaken is Astra Nova’s very own NFT comic collection through which readers can experience a universe of action, lore, and cosmic mystery. It’s where the Astra Nova saga is said to begin its “visual journey” and you can start reading it now on the SKALE blockchain by using the new NovaToon comic platform.

Specifically, this comic is a coming-of-age fantasy epic that takes place in the aftermath of a forgotten war. Under the areas destroyed by war, 2 outcast children find a very powerful sealed artifact. Doing so opens up many buried secrets, broken legacies, and a prophecy that should never have been brought back to life.

As of writing, the collection contains only the first chapter that anyone can actually read for free. Titled Shards of Cataclysm, this first chapter takes place a couple of years after the sealed magical stone was found and has you follow the story of the same 2 children who are now older, but very much haunted by the choice they made years ago. They’re trying their best to live in a village under the illusion of peace, but the past is coming back in full force for a new disaster to deal with.

You don’t need to set up a wallet to read the first chapter for free. Simply tap the “Buy Now” option and proceed to have your transaction processed on-chain without any costs. Once finalized, the chapter should show up in the “Purchased” section in your library. From there, you can download the comic chapter, and then you can just head to the “Downloads” tab to open it and start reading. If you don’t have enough time to read through it all in one sitting, you can easily come back to it later and find a “Now Reading” section included on the main Explore page of the app to let you quickly get back to continuing your visual adventure.

The reading experience seems to be fairly basic at the moment, as you simply scroll your way down while reading without there being any numbered pages or zoom in options. When you want to come back to continue reading a chapter, the app doesn’t seem to save the position at which you stopped at previously in the comic, so you’ll have to scroll all the way to where you last stopped. But it’s early days, so hopefully this will all be improved over time to help make NovaToon a great decentralized platform that all comic fandoms will want to flock to.