Welcome to Everdragons2
Everdragons2 is a collection of 10,001 non-fungible token (NFT) assets — some rarer than others. Each NFT is created in the form of a mystery egg, which you can hatch in order to get your dragon. In this post, you will learn the story of how I got involved in this NFT project and why it is so exciting!
(Technical) Background Story
First of all, sorry for all the jargon and tech names! They are necessary to keep this article short.
In September of 2018, I joined Tron Foundation to work on their developer tools. The plan was to release the smart contract platform in early October. Tools like Web3, Truffle, and Ganache were needed. It was hard for me to start because I worked remotely from Italy and knew very little about Tron. Still, I forked Truffle and created Tronbox. I also collaborated with Kondax to build Tronweb.
Trongrid was not reliable at that time so using Shasta (Tron TestNet) was not ideal. Therefore, I set up Tron-Quickstart, a developer environment based on Docker to allow developers to test their apps locally without spending money on the blockchain. I moved back to San Francisco on October 2. On October 5, we launched the smart contract platform as planned.
Later, in the middle of December, I realized that Trongrid needed a complete rewrite and therefore wrote Trongrid 2. My intention was to provide a fast and highly scalable service, similar to Infura. My team presented it in time for niTROn 2019, the first Tron summit in San Francisco.
I remember these months with warm feelings. Everything was new, exciting, and challenging.
Then I met Patrick and Jacqueline — cofounders of Everdragons.
Everdragons: One of the Earliest NFT Projects
For the niTROn conference, our marketing team launched a contest to reward the best decentralized applications (dApps) built on Tron. My favorite finalist was Everdragons so I approached Patrick Rieger and Jacqueline Hardy, two of the three founders. I brought them to Tron’s offices where we had lunch and talked a lot. The same day, I met other great people from around the world.
Patrick, Jacqueline, and Marc Scherer launched their non-fungible token (NFT) platform on Ethereum in the summer of 2018, creating a bridge to move dragons from Ethereum to POA Network and back. Later that year, they deployed the first NFT ever on Tron and added Tron to their bridge.
It was magical that people could move dragons among Ethereum, POA Network, and Tron to play games that make sense only on these specific networks.
You may not know that Tron uses a Delegated Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism to validate the veracity of the network. The primary advantage of this is, every three seconds, a new block is mined. To be 100% positive that a transaction is safe, you have to wait one minute. Generally, developers would trust the first confirmation due to low risk. They would move minimal amounts of coins, supporting compelling games on blockchain technology, creating fantastic things as a result.
Sadly, I believe a different approach to the community would have made Tron one of the most important chains out there. Instead, Tron preferred to reward games that winked to a popular audience instead of celebrating technologies that many others could have used. As you can guess, I did not have a voice in high level decisions, but that is another story.
In the end, the Everdragons team did not receive the award they deserved.
Everdragons2: The Following Years
This period of time, called Crypto Winter, was very dark. The Everdragons team could not raise funding to survive and their marvelous project started dying slowly.
I stayed in touch and tried to help, but I could not do much. I tried to buy as many dragons as I could on OpenSea to attract attention to the project. It somehow worked because the floor passed from 0.07 ETH to 0.5 ETH, and a few dragons sold for 1 ETH. It made me happy but it was not enough.
Recently, I developed an idea to relaunch the project and tried to engage friends. I spoke with them for weeks and checked in with Patrick many times to convince him that Everdragons 2 can come to life.
Finally, a group of Italian friends between San Francisco and Menlo Park decided to invest time and money to work on it. Although I have been working on a new decentralized finance (DeFi) technology since July, I could not resist and happily joined the team 😅
The result is Everdragons2, the first decentralized project by ‘ndujaLabs.
In a future post, I will give details about the project and introduce our first initiative to award the early ED2 community on Discord. Stay in touch!
If you like this post, please 👏 and share it!
PS: In the banner picture up top, some of the beautiful original Everdragons in my personal collection.
