EtherCats Ushers In a New Era of NFT Card Collecting Utilizing Chainlink VRF
NFT investors understand that non-fungible tokens bring generationally guaranteed provenance to the table. They know collectors far into the future will know the address, block, and contract code used to create the NFT. The value inherent in digital assets is not so much the file itself, but who created it, its absolute supply, and in some cases, who has owned it. Decentralized blockchains make storing this value possible. Your assets don’t disappear when a company decides to wind down.
The fourth quarter of 2020 opened the eyes of the crypto world to numerous nascent NFT projects. They demonstrated the high demand for trading fine art, game assets, music, and memes. While adapting established business models to the new decentralized paradigm is an expected evolution in the marketplace, the spectrum of what is possible with NFTs is wider than just traditional types of assets being immutably tokenized. It’s about the process, categorization, and documentation of these assets too.
Many efforts have been made to facilitate trading, staking, lending, and collecting NFTs, but up until recently, innovations requiring verifiably random input were not viable on-chain in a secure manner. Chainlink VRF changes all of that, and EtherCats is primed to take full advantage of a secure, provably fair, and unbiased random number generation (RNG) solution.
Previous NFT game asset projects have been hampered by deterministic logic allowing those in the know to exploit, predict, and hoard the most valuable NFTs in a collection. While others have been too centralized, and at the mercy of a single company exerting intense control over the market. EtherCats on the other hand is platform-agnostic and free of built-in royalties; just the way truly decentralized NFT projects are supposed to be.
Chainlink VRF aligns with this greater NFT vision, as all users are able to prove that the randomness used to generate EtherCats was not gamed by any of the stakeholders, whether it be the developers, miners, or various users. It does so via an on-chain cryptographic proof generated using a user-supplied seed, which cannot be falsified.
As a card collecting game, EtherCats allows users to mint random packs of animated NFTs that come with random ratings and random multipliers. These combine to form a total score. Collectors will then be able to compete for places on the ranking lists (e.g. highest or specific collection score) to earn token rewards (in ECAT) on a recurring basis. Once minted, every cat NFT can immediately be traded on the secondary market through NFT exchanges such as OpenSea.
You can mint EtherCats on https://www.ethercats.io, or find existing EtherCats on the secondary market on OpenSea at https://opensea.io/collection/ethercats.
The supply of a particular series is limited by the length of time the series of cats is on sale (dependent on sales/governance), and every minted pack comes with equal odds for ratings and multipliers. It is possible to pull multiple cats of the same score, but there is no guarantee that a specific rating or multiplier for a particular cat will ever exist. This is especially true when it comes to the rarest cats. Once a series’ minting contract is switched off, no more cats from that series will ever exist. It is permanent.
In addition to the nine Founders Series cats, the cats you can mint randomly from the start, included in the game will be periodic limited and special edition ‘Bonus Cats’. These NFTs will not only serve as trophies for accomplishments, but augment the scores of those holding them on the ranking lists. Bonus Cats will be awarded to early adopters, Telegram participants, and milestones reached in the project. They will be minted in a separate contract in fixed amounts, and with fixed scores.
The future of EtherCats involves a roadmap of governance via the ECAT token and the development of a real-time card game with industry specialists. The founders of EtherCats come from poker, Magic the Gathering, and game development backgrounds. Please be sure to subscribe to the Telegram channel and group for further updates.
“We’re excited to integrate Chainlink VRF to guarantee that all EtherCats are assigned provably random ratings and multipliers in a manner that cannot be tampered with or influenced by anyone,” stated Woody Deck, Founder of EtherCats. “This brings unprecedented transparency and reliability to NFT assets like EtherCats, ultimately allowing users to trust the long-term viability of these assets and the built-in rules that govern their distribution and usage.”
About Chainlink
Chainlink is the most widely used and secure way to power universally connected smart contracts. With Chainlink, developers can connect any blockchain with high-quality data sources from other blockchains as well as real-world data. Managed by a global, decentralized community of hundreds of thousands of people, Chainlink is introducing a fairer model for contracts. Its network currently secures billions of dollars in value for smart contracts across the decentralized finance (DeFi), insurance and gaming ecosystems, among others.
Chainlink is trusted by hundreds of organizations to deliver definitive truth via secure, reliable data feeds. To learn more, visit chain.link, subscribe to the Chainlink newsletter, and follow @chainlink on Twitter.
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About EtherCats
EtherCats was developed by a diverse international assortment of early NFT believers who were all brought together online by the 2020 pandemic. The founding artist and animator, Nadia Khuzina, worked on creating tokenized art trading before the ERC721 standard even was published in early 2018 with her husband Woody Deck. Coming from a card collecting, and card playing background, Deck soon discovered how many NFT projects were being manipulated by collectors exploiting the quasi-random, and deterministic nature of many early NFT asset contracts. It was that revelation that lead to Chainlink VRF being integrated into EtherCats.
EtherCats.io (Mint New Cats) | OpenSea (Trade Existing Cats) | Telegram Channel | Telegram Discussion | Twitter | Email
