What CryptoKitties and you have in common! Tokenizing your Unique Combination of Talents

Alvaro Mancilla
Skyllz
3 min readMay 15, 2018

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“Education should learn from the positive side of gaming — reward, accomplishment, and fun.” — Sebastian Thrun, innovator, entrepreneur educator, and computer scientist.

Gamification is a major and fast-growing trend in several areas of application, such as marketing and learning.

By definition, gamification is the use of game elements such as points, and achievements to enhance the learning experience. Adding game elements to an eLearning application makes the user experience more enjoyable and motivating.

Rewarding is a strong retention and engagement tool.

As humans we feel proud of participating in a challenge, reaching goals and being compensated.

This is the reason why gaming applications have such a great success and gaming as a motivational model, can be applied to personal and professional improvement.

A very popular example…

CryptoKitties is a blockchain-based virtual game operating on Ethereum’s blockchain network, where players can purchase, collect, breed and sell virtual cats. It’s one of the first solutions to use blockchain technology in the leisure segment.

CryptoKitties are non-fungible tokens, unique to each CryptoKitty, and each CryptoKitty is inimitable, validated through the blockchain. These virtual kitties can be nurtured. They have unique traits, and users can buy and sell their CryptoKitties, while their values will increase or decrease depending on the market.

This game has been so successful to a point of saturating the Ethereum network at the end of 2017 or reaching $140,000 kitty-sale during the Ethereal Summit NYC 2018…

(Proof-of-what-I-said)

But, why are you telling me that?

Behind the hype and the craziness of the human behavior that is able to pay $140k for a digital (and super cute 😻) cat, there are great enhancements in token standards.

The ERC721 Non-fungible Token Standard (behind Cryptokitties) is far more useful than collectables. But first thing first… (for millennials and Gen Zers as ourselves…)

Non-fungible goods: goods that cannot be interchanged. Non-fungible goods are often unique (artwork, land, events,…) limited in time or location or source or accessibility.

In contrast, fungible goods are interchangeable, and in economics is applied to things like gasoline, electrical power, commodities, currencies (🤑) or chemicals. (source: Quora)

BTW, persons, are not fungible.

So, think about that.

You are non-fungible. Unique. Your Unique Combination of Talents (that differentiates you from the rest of human beings) is unique. Non-fungible.

Such as Cryptokitties are.

Do you think that someday you will be able to “trade” or “monetize” it?

Keep thinking (just one more second, promise)… what is the labor market all about? Bingo!

We, at Skyllz, envision a future where your Unique Combination of Talents (UCT) will be tokenized (ERC721?) and will be traded freely on a “work market” (similar to an exchange) only affected by the demand and the offer (people that want to work with YOU vs people that want to work with OTHERS).

We are kind of crazy, we know. But you can join us and our revolution in Talent Branding and its monetization, at Skyllz! 😬

What do you think about a possible exchange of professional time? We would love to know your opinion and feedback.

Clap, clap, clap 👏 (up to 50x) if you liked it and help us gain (cute😻) visibility!

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