Duskbreakers: a Play-to-Mint (P2M) NFT Project
At Metatheory, we aim to constantly challenge ourselves to build fun experiences for the Web3 and gaming communities, to push boundaries and develop together. There are so many awesome NFT projects out there, and we are just as excited and committed as all of you to discover what the future holds for the decentralized ownership of digital goods. Serving as thoughtful stewards in the crypto space, we believe in the importance of provable fairness, transparency, and very importantly, constant innovation.
Having observed numerous NFT projects — some wildly successful, others less so — we quickly realized the importance of developing a NFT collection (and the games and media experiences associated with it) that would be transformative to the space rather than participatory. At the core, all NFT projects need to showcase provable rarity, and in parallel address the key question of “who gets to mint?” We believe that we have settled on a novel method to answer that question, and we’re excited to share this with the world.
About Play-to-Mint (P2M)
NFT projects to date have worked hard to ensure that access to the project is both provably fair and interesting for participants. Various systems to reduce gas wars, mitigate botting, enable quality provenance, and design sweepstakes that randomly distribute mint access are quickly becoming the industry standard. With that in mind, we wanted to take things one step further and ensure that “fun” was a primary element of our mint. We believe that Play-to-Mint is a potentially superior process for certain applications and is particularly well aligned with the search for utility in the NFT space.
With Play-to-Mint, we do not simply gate access behind sweepstakes mechanics, but instead have created a unique, limited arcade gaming experience crafted exclusively for the mint process. This game allows our community to not only immerse themselves in the universe powering the NFT and have fun, but also to prove that they are not a bot via gameplay. You will be able to access a Duskbreakers mini-game pre-mint and play through a short experience. That experience will validate your entry into the sweepstakes which will determine who is allowed to mint the Duskbreakers NFT.
While many other NFT projects have done amazing work in making their mint or sweepstakes entry a fun experience, we felt we could further elevate this while still achieving the goals that we believe will serve our community.
The Experience
Duskbreakers is an interactive world-building experience powered by gaming, comics, and animation. In the Duskbreakers Play-to-Mint, you will ride the space elevator to the Dusk, an enormous, dormant alien spaceship filled with world-changing technologies. You will direct your Breaker to explore the ship, mining for exotic materials that the Dusk provides while fending off mysterious alien creatures that inhabit the Dusk. Break as much as you can until the gribbles and barnies get you. Just by playing the game, you gain access to the sweepstakes. Your highest score will then be uploaded to our global leaderboard, which serves as the public record for those eligible to mint. Top ranked players on the global leaderboard will gain guaranteed access to the mint. The rest of the players are automatically entered into our sweepstakes and will be randomly selected to determine their ability to mint.
Difficulty To Implement
In a space where anonymity is strongly respected, the ability to discern team strength is a key indicator. Strong and qualified teams will be able to deliver on the roadmaps and promises made pre-mint and will be dedicated long term to the project. We believe that a team that is able to execute a fun and sound Play-to-Mint process demonstrates both dedication and skill. We want to show the community our commitment by implementing more interesting systems.
Gas Costs
Anyone that has completed an NFT mint has probably suffered from extreme gas prices. The most hyped projects can set off gas wars, with prices sometimes rising to multiple ETH in order to execute the contract without even the guarantee of a successful mint. While there are many people that benefit from — or even prefer — projects that spawn gas wars, we believe that gaming is built around community, and that efforts to reduce gas costs will make projects fundamentally more democratic and more fair to participate in. Like other “randomly selected mint access” projects, Play-to-Mint whitelists the wallets of winners, who then can mint their NFT when gas costs are lower. You will also know if you have access to mint before you send your mint function to Mainnet, which further reduces competition for gas.
Getting a Handle on Bots
The ability of some users in the space to bring to bear large networks of wallets in order to sidestep anti-bot mechanisms can create an atmosphere of unfairness and ultimately undermine projects. In addition to adding some flavor to the mint experience, Play-to-Mint is an attempt to combat bots, as leveraging a game allows us to use traditional and well-tested anti-cheat mechanics from games to combat botting of the mint. The complex decisions and actions required to successfully complete a gaming session, paired with our bot and cheat detection and removal technologies, raises the difficulty of creating a successful bot. While no system is perfect, we commit to doing our part of trying to ensure that actual human individuals participate.
Fun
While sweepstakes mechanics do have a built-in “fun” element, we want to go above and beyond a simple register-and-hope system. We are creating engaging games and multimedia experiences, and we want to give you a taste of what we can do. We are confident that you have not experienced a mint like this, and we hope that this is a valuable reference for other projects who wish to create new engaging experiences for the community to rally behind. You may not have the most ETH in your wallet, but if you have the time and skill to reach a certain threshold on the leaderboard, you will ensure yourself a Duskbreakers NFT. And everyone that registers and plays a session will get a chance to earn a mint slot.
Additional Mint Details
Firstly, we will have a post mint reveal to ensure we have a trusted provenance hash for our NFTs. Currently, on-chain randomness systems have too high of a cost to bear for the community, but proving that no one — including ourselves — can know what NFTs go to which wallets in advance is key to building your trust. We are big fans of how Bored Ape Yacht Club ensured fair provenance with their Hash of Hashes and Started Index generated by the blockchain itself, and we have built similar systems inside of our contract.
In order to select wallets for which to grant mint ability, we will take a snapshot of the leaderboard at a specific time, record that metadata in IPFS, get a provable source of randomness as a random seed, and specify the deterministic but random algorithm we will use to make the mint selection.
All of this will be published so you can check the math for yourself and know that the selection process is fair, honest and transparent.
In Conclusion
We want to build trust with you, our community. We want to create an engaging mint experience, reduce botting, grant more fair access to our NFTs, and innovate in this exciting space. We promise to do right by you, not with only words but with proof of our work. Ultimately, we want to continue to set new standards for NFT projects.
We hope to see you all on The Dusk, and for the entire community to have super fun experiences as Breakers!
-J
