The Doomsday Garden
Hidden in a bunker beneath the Apocalypse, food and resources are scarce.Careful cultivation of an underground Garden is the survivors’ only source of nourishment.The few Trees which are able to grow must be Harvested sparingly.
Put on your radiation-proof gardening gloves and sharpen those hedge-clippers because today we’re going to run through the code and design of my new project, Doomsday Garden.
Scarcity
This project is the culmination of the last two projects I created, POW NFT and Doomsday NFT. While both are very different, they both have scarcity as a central design element. Scarcity is the primary mechanism through which anything has value, so it must be a core consideration in blockchain.
In the case of POW NFT, the scarcity of tokens is achieved by requiring users to mine them and making it increasingly difficult and more costly to create new tokens. To balance this effect, rarer tokens only become available as the supply grows. This allows for a natural equilibrium to occur, meaning the final total supply was neither artificially too low or too high.
As laid out in the POW NFT Whitepaper, mineable NFTs and the scarcity models that they enable allows for fairer NFT distribution. The experimental nature of blockchain means we shouldn’t be tethered to outdated processes merely because it’s convention or because we aren’t bold enough to try something new. And while POW NFT has unquestionably been a success, with a few more years working in the trenches as a dev in this space, I’ve often thought about how the scarcity model could be improved.
Doomsday NFT on the other hand was a game with scarcity built into the lore. NFTs were Bunkers trying to survive the Apocalypse, slowly eliminated from the game by debris from space. The total supply of tokens slowly decreased, increasing the value of remaining tokens, until the final player won a 250 ETH prize.
The themes of scarcity that come from post-apocalyptic setting have been a rich tapestry for many works of fiction, and as a creator I’ve enjoyed the world-building of Doomsday NFT as it lends itself very well to the blockchain tech it was built on. The aesthetic is based on cold-war-era technology, in a retro computer terminal style.
The Lore
In the last remaining Bunker at the end of the world, gone are the days of plenty. The only way to survive is by carefully conserving and maintaining the extremely limited food supply.
Food can be grown, but even Plants consume precious resources, so any additions to the Garden will come at a cost. Plants can be Harvested for nourishment, but can not be regrown easily.
Doomsday Garden takes place after the conclusion of the Doomsday NFT game, the only surviving members of the human race are carefully cultivating an underground Garden to maintain their food supply.
As the Garden grows, resources become stretched, making Planting new crops difficult. But the greater diversity also increases the chance of mutation among the plants. As crops are Harvested, there is less strain on resources but also lower biodiversity.
The Tech
Doomsday Garden has two main pillars that enforce scarcity, the mining tech and the metadata algorithm.
Mining
Doomsday Garden Trees can only be created through mining. This process ensures true scarcity while preventing front-running or gas spikes. The benefits and basic mechanisms of the mining process are laid out in the POW NFT Whitepaper, so I will avoid repeating myself here.
The key difference to POW NFT is the improved scarcity mechanism that the mining process uses. All Proof-of-Work mining has a difficulty value, a number which determines how hard it is to successfully mine a coin or token. It’s like a target, and the smaller it is the harder it is to hit.
In POW NFT, the difficulty target becomes smaller and smaller over time until it’s no longer feasible for anyone to mine new tokens. As the difficulty increases, this pushes up the value of existing tokens as they become harder and harder to create (thus, more naturally scarce). The supply is designed to expand whenever demand requires it, but without devaluing the existing supply.
In Doomsday Garden, the assumption was made that demand could fluctuate over time. At times when demand was higher, the supply can grow. If demand decreases below what the current supply provides, the supply can contract. In either case, the difficulty should adjust itself to match the inferred level of demand.
As mining becomes more difficult, the mint cost also increases. This is an important element in the scarcity model, as it prevents people with custom mining hardware from controlling the production of tokens. However, the ETH gained from increasing costs is distributed back into all existing Trees. This creates extra incentive for token holders not to sell, which should cause positive pressure on secondary market prices.
However, as Trees are destroyed when the ETH is Harvested, this creates extra negative pressure on the token supply, further driving scarcity and counteracting the internal inflation that many crypto projects suffer from.
Metadata
While it’s important to balance the incentives of individuals currently within the system, it’s also important to balance the incentives of individuals who are currently in the system against those who are entering.
Basically, people should be rewarded regardless of when they Planted their Tree. This is achieved by a few dynamic features of the metadata.
Firstly, the artwork of the Trees is not static. They all begin as sprouts, and grow as they accumulate ETH. It’s impossible to get a fully formed Tree straight away.
The algorithm which draws the Trees also uses the token’s hash as a source of randomness. This means that every Tree is visually unique, with a leaf and branching pattern different to any other Tree. The likelihood of two Trees being identical is on a similar order of magnitude as the likelihood of guessing someone’s private key.
Secondly, the metadata algorithm is designed to favour those who Plant Trees when the token supply is higher. Rarer traits only occur in Trees which are Planted during this time, meaning the rarest tokens will only be awarded to users who accept the added risk of mining and Planting Trees during times when it’s more difficult.
All of these systems are designed to act against each-other, creating a dynamic, non-inflationary system for fair token distribution.
Fertile Ground
A lot of consideration has been put into designing counterbalanced incentives, as well as creating an aesthetic and narrative which reflects the core principles. As such, it’s possible we’ll witness emergent or unexpected behaviour from participants.
In any case, I hope this project acts as further demonstration of the benefits and possibilities granted by implementing NFT mining. The crypto space prides itself on being built upon and driven by innovation. Yet it often seems that many projects are afraid to stray from well established practices. In this way we risk mirroring the centralised world we hope to leave behind. New technology demands new paradigms.
For now though, I’ll see you in the Garden.
