Mighty Llama Integrates Chainlink VRF and Automation to Help Power Lucky Draw Games
We’re excited to announce that Mighty Llama NFT — a Web3 gaming and animation project based on NFT technology — has integrated Chainlink VRF and Automation on Ethereum mainnet to help power lucky draw games meant to provide value to NFT holders. By integrating the industry-leading decentralized oracle network, we’re able to access secure off-chain services needed for a reliable and automated lucky draw game system — ultimately giving our users a better experience and high assurances of security, reliability, and timeliness.
The Growth of Mighty Llama NFT Through Chainlink Service Support
Mighty Llama NFT is a 3D NFT gaming, animation, and metaverse brand that focuses on entertainment, art, and creative uses of blockchain technology. Mighty Llamas’ Genesis collection will be a complimentary NFT mint on Ethereum that will be released at the end of October 2022.
Helping Secure On-chain Lucky Draw Games With Chainlink VRF
Our primary focus is to create games and fun experiments for our users and community. One of the ways that we’re accomplishing this goal is by enabling Mighty Llama NFT holders to earn native tokens and in-game digital items through lucky draw games.
Our desired technical implementation was to create an on-chain decentralized raffle that can be called on a consistent basis, and that automatically selects a random tokenID as the winner. However, when attempting to bring this vision to reality, our team found it was harder than initially thought to find a secure random number generator until we found Chainlink VRF.
Chainlink VRF works by combining block data that is still unknown when the request is made with the oracle node’s pre-committed private key to generate both a random number and a cryptographic proof. The Mighty Llama smart contract will only accept the random number input if it has a valid cryptographic proof, and the cryptographic proof can only be generated if the VRF process is tamper-proof. This helps provide users with automated and publicly verifiable proof directly on-chain that the winner selection process is provably fair and cannot be tampered with or predicted by the oracle, outside entities, or the Mighty Llama team.
Helping Start and Stop Lucky Draw Rounds With Chainlink Automation
Another key goal for our team when building the lucky draw game was to have it run on autopilot once it was done. While this would be a breeze in traditional development, smart contracts have a unique property — functions must be triggered by an external entity; automatic execution cannot be coded into the smart contract itself. In practical terms, this meant that some entity has to start and stop lucky draw game rounds in order for them to execute on a consistent basis.
This limitation required us to do one of two things:
- Create our own centralized infrastructure to trigger lucky draw game rounds to start and stop.
- Find a decentralized automation service.
We ultimately decided to go with the second option because it required less maintenance for our developers and gave users higher assurances that there is no centralized control over any aspect of the game. After comparing multiple solutions, Chainlink Automation’s smart contract automation service stood out as the clear winner, with proven performance and low gas costs.
A few critical features that informed our decision include:
Highly reliable, performant, and decentralized automation — Chainlink Automation ensures transactions are identified and confirmed quickly even during periods of heavy network congestion by leveraging Chainlink’s battle-tested transaction manager.
- Time-tested infrastructure that helps save costs — Chainlink Automation enables us to eliminate in-house automation infrastructure costs, reduce resources spent on DevOps, and increase speed and efficiency.
- Built to enable faster scaling — Chainlink Automation enables us to scale faster and avoid the challenges that come with building and maintaining the infrastructure needed to reliably automate across multiple chains.
- Unlocks new use cases — With smart contract automation, we’re able to explore new use cases and unlock capabilities that would otherwise not have been possible.
- Easy-to-use — Developers are able to schedule time-based automation jobs in seconds using the Chainlink Automation Job Scheduler’s no-code UI.
“At Mighty Llama we focus on delivering secure, decentralized, entertaining experiences, and Chainlink oracle solutions were the last piece of the puzzle for our genesis smart contract. Their services are well documented, developer friendly, and easy to implement.” –Bardia Suny, Founder and CTO of Mighty Llamas NFT.
