A sudden development from World of Ether in their beta; they’re closing their long awaited ERC-20 crystal sale. From their Twitter:

“We’ve listened and heard your feedback, and for this reason are closing the Anti-Matter / Crystal sale. The sale will end at 2 PM EST tomorrow [10/17/2018] to be fair to international markets and people waiting to get in.”

On their Discord it appears that the sale is closing because the crystal items are too strong, and the game studio wants to limit their amount.



An accompanying Medium post describes the decision:

“A countdown to the removal of this feature can be found at worldofether.com/crystals. Additionally, getting crystals in game will still be rare as planned or even rarer than planned. All egg holders will also be getting one random crystal, as planned, and Astral crystals are still limited, as planned.”

ERC-20 vs. ERC-721 In Game Items?

Most blockchain based games use ERC-721 tokens. World of Ether has attracted attention for using ERC-20 within their game.

ERC-721 tokens were made most popular by CryptoKitties – cryptokitties.co – a game that used each ERC-721 token as a digital cat. These cats could be bred, traded, sold, etc. The game was a huge hit, completely clogging the Ethereum mainnet, which inspired future games.

CryptoKitties was launched in December of 2017, and since then, few crypto games have ventured away from the ERC-721 standard.

ERC-20 tokens are stackable. This means that unlike ERC-721, where each token is unique, ERC-20 tokens are identical. Think of a uniform stack of coins. The stack is uniform because each coin is identical.

ERC-20 has long been sold as being a “utility token,” something that users need in order to use some dapp. This was good in theory, but the problem was that ICOs would sell their ERC-20 tokens in huge presales, the tokens would turn into a currency, and the teams would never deliver their projects. This hurt crypto dramatically and was the trend of 2017.

World of Ether is different because:

The dapp is already delivered (it’s in beta on Rinkeby Test Network). Users don’t need this ERC-20 token to use the game, this is a bonus. Any previous ERC-20 usage in blockchain games has been using ERC-20 tokens as currency. World of Ether uses these tokens as crystalline power ups for monsters. There are five different ERC-20 tokens, each representing a different in-game power up.

The most unique thing about this system is that the strongest crystal, the ‘Astral crystal’, is limited to a few thousand ERC-20 tokens, and once one is used it does not get replenished in the World of Ether universe. This means the supply of Astral crystals will decrease until somebody uses the final one, and since this is a tradable token, as the supply goes down, interesting things can happen. This is a unique use case for ERC-20 tokens, as most and probably all ERC-20 tokens for blockchain projects don’t delete themselves after use, and are used, again, as a currency.

About

World of Ether, in development since December, describes itself as a project that “seeks to bridge the gap between mainstream games and those on blockchain by providing a game that is as fluid, fun and intuitive as is expected by the casual gamer.”

In World of Ether, users discover, collect, battle, breed, sire, and sell a variety of monsters while earning real money in the form of the Ethereum cryptocurrency by putting these monsters up on the marketplace for other players. Players gain experience from battling, which allows them to level up and breed more powerful and rare monsters.

World of Ether opened its free Beta on 9/22/18, clogging the Rinkeby Test Network within an hour of opening. The game offered $10,000 in prize money to players who were first to find certain monsters and said they will have an even bigger contest (rumored to be a quarter million USD) come full launch in Q4, 2018.