Turning Kitties into Cards
On Monday, just as Status was announcing us as the first startup accepted into their Incubate program, we officially launched CryptoStrikers to the public.
48 hours and just under 400 packs sold later, we’ve gotten some awesome product feedback from our early adopters, and we have a vibrant community of traders and collectors forming in our Discord channels.
As detailed in our intro post, we think sports trading cards are the perfect vehicle to introduce digital ownership to the masses, and we’ve done our best to build a product that makes concepts like provable scarcity and trustless exchange approachable to people with no crypto background.
However, there was one core principle that we hadn’t yet played with, and that’s the interoperability of digital assets. Since CryptoStrikers is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, our game can interact with any other project that is running on this same network. This stands in stark contrast to the walled gardens of Facebook, Google, and Apple, where data is siloed to a specific company’s servers and is more or less inaccessible to outside services.
Related to this theme, we’d also been kicking around a few questions, namely:
- In a future where people will be accumulating more and more digital assets, what does the disposal of unwanted items look like?
- How would a “crafting” mechanism work? That is, could you combine and/or transform your old collectibles into new and exciting ones? (h/t Brian Flynn)
Introducing the CryptoStrikers Kitty Exchange
I love CryptoKitties (and not just because I’m a fellow Canadian 🇨🇦). From what I can tell, they’re genuinely awesome people who built a kick-ass product. However, my hypothesis is that there are a lot of cats that were bought during the December CryptoKitties mania that are now gathering dust in various digital wallets. There seems to be data to back this up as well:
Let’s give those kitties new life! What if you could send them to a Sanctuary for Unwanted Cats in exchange for a free pack of CryptoStrikers cards? 🤔
(Sidenote: the common term for taking a digital asset out of circulation is “burning” — there was actually a brief point in time where I thought imagery of burning CryptoKitties would be a Good Product Feature. Shout-out to our awesome designer Preston Attebery for talking me out of it!)
How It Works
We’re going live with our Kitty Exchange feature this morning. Here’s how it works:
- Click the BUY WITH CRYPTOKITTY button below the Standard Pack Sale. (Note: this button disappears after you use up your allowance of one kitty exchange)
2. Find your Kitty’s ID here and enter it in Step 1
3. Approve our smart contract for the swap
4. Transfer the kitty to our smart contract
5. Get your cards!
Closing Thoughts
We would love to hear your feedback on this feature, either here on Medium, or over on Discord. Our Premium Pack Sale goes live tomorrow to coincide with the tournament’s kickoff — will you get lucky and snag one of the 100 Iconic inserts in that day’s sale?
