February 9

I’ve taken a bit of time this week to recharge my batteries, but we nonetheless have a few exciting updates to share with everyone.

Recent Updates

Crafting

For those of you who may be out of the loop, beta crafting is out and is fully functional. Our tests thus far have been successful and everything is running very smoothly.

As a result of community feedback, we’ve decided to merge the current crafting UI from our test server into the main site, so you can now craft your very own Corn Hat, which may soon be a rather rare item (more on this below), for free, right from ethercraft.io. Consequently, we’re seeing a massive surge in Corn Hat-related transactions (more on this below, too).

Pepnet Updates

We’ve rolled some additional updates from the Pepnet into the main site:

the inventory improvements mentioned in one of our recent posts have been merged into the main site (right in time for us to be featured on Toshi!). The site should now work significantly better on mobile in general.

Timers have been added to ethercraft.io and now display for limited-run items that are ending soon; this currently includes all of our original 60 items, the entire crafting set, the Kings set, and the Lucky Bag. Many of these items, including the entire Leather Armor set, are completely free (for now). Many others will simply be discontinued forever.

Please let us know if you experience any issues.

News, metrics, and misc.

A lot has happened in the last week:

Our relatively modest marketing efforts in the Korean language sphere been quite successful, bringing Korean traffic volume to well above that of most other countries.

Ethercraft has been featured in Toshi, a browser for the Ethereum network available for both iOS and Android. Toshi is a fantastic app and makes it easy for mobile users to interact with ethercraft.io.

We’re currently topping the charts in terms of overall transaction volume, surpassing both Etheroll and Cryptokitties this week, undoubtedly thanks in part to Corn Helmet crafting as well as the current run of free items which are ending soon.

We’ve broken into the top 50 Ethereum tokens for the last 90 days with just a single item—the Gift Bag (which is still free for a limited time).

And this is just one item!

We’ve been noticed by the 0x project! 0x is an excellent way to trade Ethercraft items safely and directly with other players. We hadn’t been in contact with them beforehand, so this was a welcome surprise.

Lastly, we’re seeing steady, consistent growth in the community.

We’re up to nearly 300 users on Reddit,

over 850 followers on Twitter,

over 400 users on Telegram,

and 1000 users on Discord!

Join today and chat with us. 😃

Ongoing Development

Crafting

As we’ve said in the past, crafting in its current form is essentially a beta test. Since everything is running smoothly, we’re currently working on making our crafting system more robust, and from there we will roll out significantly more recipes.

As our current crafting UI is rather barebones and was essentially designed just to make interacting with the beta crafting contract on our test server a bit easier for some users, we’re also working on a much nicer UI more akin to what you’d see in your favorite games.

We’re also planning on rolling out another crafting recipe in the very short term, possibly even tomorrow. Stay tuned on social media!

RNG system

Our other top priority is our RNG system, a component of the crafting system. This is currently undergoing private testing and will be released in a similar fashion to crafting—first with a set of small-scale test contracts and later as a refined system. The first items to use this system on the main net after initial tests will be the Loot Crates as well as the Lucky Bag.

Regional Sets

While we’re abstaining from a new release today, work continues on our regional sets. The next regional release will likely occur on or around Friday, February 16th, exactly one week from today.

We’ve decided to forego a release this week in order to get more work done behind the scenes and to avoid conflicts with the end date of the current run of items (which is around four days from now; Unix timestamp 1518590610, or Wednesday, February 14, 2018 6:43:30 AM GMT).

An Important Note

It’s no secret that there are a lot of new Ethereum-based games and even outright clones popping up. While we don’t want to fling mud or otherwise disparage any other projects, we’d like to remind everyone of the importance of due diligence.

We are taking a deliberate, incremental approach to development, and it’s clear to us that some other projects, including some which reuse some of our source code (which was to be expected), are not taking this approach and are simply rushing their product to market. For example, one game currently features this code snippet:

This for-loop is not only inefficient on the EVM but is ultimately unsafe. While it may not produce any problems in practice, and while we ourselves are not perfect (we obviously have a lot of room for improvement, and we appreciate any and all feedback), this sort of code is, in our opinion, indicative of an inexperienced developer. The bottom line is that this is potentially dangerous and in theory could eventually put the contract into an unusable state.

In the same vein, another popular game which has released their own currency token similar to our own Gold Pieces features this:

The developers of this token can apparently freeze any tokens they want at any time. This is something we consider to be, at the very least, poor design, and it’s the kind of thing we’ve made a point to avoid.

Perhaps it’ll never be an issue in practice, but the simple fact is that when developers can freeze your tokens, the dApp is simply not decentralized.

How We’re Different

Our philosophy from the start has been one of transparency and true decentralization. These are fundamental tenets of our development philosophy, and we hope that they’re reflected in everything we do. For example:

Our items are individual tokens, minted straight to the user’s address, rather than proprietary objects stored in a totally arbitrary data contract.

We have no control over your items. We can not move them, freeze them, or anything else. We can’t arbitrarily mint additional tokens for existing items.

We explicitly made it impossible to withdraw any of our contracts’ reserve funds without a minimum two-week delay. This is publicly viewable in the code for all of our smart contracts. In short, this makes an “exit scam,” something which many of us have unfortunately been victims of, impossible.

The entire concept of Gold Pieces as governance tokens is designed to take power out of the hands of developers and distribute it amongst the users of the dApp.

The Bottom Lime

We’re in it for the long haul.

Through a process of deliberate, incremental development, we hope to bring you all a truly decentralized dApp, free of dangerous code, to the best of our ability.

We truly appreciate the overwhelming support we’ve received thus far, and we look forward to the road ahead.