Shi-San-Sei Million Arthur (資産性ミリオンアーサー)

» see million-arthurs.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Square Enix announced this on 17 March 2021 as the first thing it had ever built on a blockchain, and what it chose to build was a joke. The art and the writing came from Chobora Unyopomi, whose comedy spin-off of the Million Arthur franchise had been running since 2015, so the company walked into the most self-serious corner of the internet carrying a gag strip. A teaser site followed on 9 June naming the chain, LINE Blockchain, built in-house by the messaging company.

Selling opened on 14 October 2021 at eight in the evening. One digital sticker cost 500 yen including tax, and a bundle called the Million Press cost 15,000. You bought a sticker and pressed it open. After that it went onto a holder, where it quietly accrued points. Popular drops sold out somewhere between tens of seconds and a few minutes after going up.

In April 2023 the project bolted an actual game on, a factory-management sim called Sticker Laboratory that ran in a browser and on phones, and that lasted thirteen months. The shop closed on 31 May 2024. The rest of the service followed on 15 October at 13:59, three years and one day after the first sale, under a notice that apologized for how sudden this was and never said why.

~ the dossier ~

~ omanju points ~

The vocabulary did a great deal of work here. Minting was called pressing or opening, and staking was described as sticking your sticker onto a holder to earn OMJ points. OMJ stood for omanju, a steamed bun. The stated aim was that a user could work the whole thing without being conscious of industry jargon or of the blockchain underneath it.

Five hundred yen is roughly what a coffee costs, and what it bought was a drawing of a joke character with a token sitting behind it. The pricing says who this was for. People who already read the comic, paying about what a comic costs. Most NFT coverage in 2021 ran on auction figures with six zeros in them, a different market entirely. The service was Japan-only and ran on a chain built by a Japanese messaging company.

~ the shop closed first ~

The closures came in a specific order. Buying stopped on 31 May 2024 at 14:00, and so did the window for turning gear stickers into NFTs. The service itself then ran another four and a half months with nothing new to buy inside it before it stopped. After 13:59 on 15 October there was a two-week tail, out to 31 October at 13:59, during which stickers nobody had transferred were pressed automatically on the owner's behalf. Then every function stopped.

~ what happened to the stickers ~

Square Enix said the NFTs remained yours and would stay in your wallet after the shutdown. There was one asterisk, and the notice put it in small print: the images attached to them might stop displaying.

Then the ground moved. The chain had already been renamed to Finschia in December 2022 and folded into Kaia in August 2024, while the marketplace went from LINE NFT to DOSI. In December 2025 DOSI closed as well, which meant holders had to migrate their stickers onto Kaia before a deadline or lose the use of them. Three commemorative stickers handed out free on launch day could not be migrated at all, for technical reasons nobody elaborated on.

Square Enix did build an afterlife, briefly. Gear Press opened on 5 March 2025 and let a holder burn a gear sticker for one point, flat, whatever the sticker's rarity. The points expired after 180 days and could be sold to nobody. It closed on 31 July 2025 at 13:59, and the collaborations it fed ended that September. The first thing the service ever gave away is the one thing nobody was able to take with them.

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