Witnet funding Thndr Mystery Boxes

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The Witnet Oracle Blog

5 min readOct 6, 2022

The Witnet Foundation’s grant program has been a massive success after launching on September 1st. We’re proud to share the first grant given out.

Witnet launched the first grant program

Back in the beginning of the year, the Witnet Foundation launched it’s first grant program; focusing on outreach, community, and technology. This program funded a small community out of Uganda that wanted to spread awareness of blockchain and Witnet to varying colleges across the country. Witnet funded their first meetup at Kampala University with $1,700.

Since the launch of V1.0, we decided to restructure and update the program to coincide with the needs of the protocol at the time. Enter grant program V2.0. On September 1st, we announced the launch of the second grant program; focusing on technology and innovation using the Witnet oracle. The Island Thunder Mystery Box project is the first project funded with V2.0.

A little bit about the project

The Island Thunder Mystery Box project spawned out of an excitement of a community on Crypto.com’s Cronos chain, a fully EVM compatible Cosmos SDK blockchain network. The mystery boxes are NFTs that have a unique tie to the real world, something that we have yet to see within the web3 space.

Every box is tied to some real world article of clothing, the person who purchases the NFT is allowed to use it to claim in-real-life merchandise. This merchandise can range from simple t-shirts to shoes, and all the way up to designer hoodies; a vastly different concept from what we are all used to, and yet something that has already had a ton of traction.

Brian, the core developer of the project said this:

The idea of Mystery boxes has existed for a long time. In the game industry CS:GO was the pioneer of offering a digital box that has random contents.
In the fashion industry, some brands have been selling boxes with random clothing pieces as well.
But we haven’t seen a Mystery box NFT, claimable for IRL clothing yet.
Since the Founder of ISLAND THUNDER has been collecting sneakers and clothing for a couple years now, we wanted to connect the best of both worlds, and make NFTs that are claimable for IRL merchandise.

These mystery boxes are super interesting because they not only bring people into the idea of web3 and NFTs, but they can also provide the ability to tie physical value to string of data stored on a network of computers, in this case, Cronos. Projects like these are the ones that will help non-web3 natives adopt the technology and its part of the reason why Witnet was so on board with funding this project.

The project is also using token standards on Cronos to strengthen the Island Thunder community, and protect the boxes from varying attacks such as gaming the system to receive high value merchandise at the expense of the project. This guardrail is 4200 units of $THNDR, the token that is native to the Island Thunder community.

Brian spoke a bit about ISLAND THUNDER:

ISLAND THUNDER is a growing community on the Cronos blockchain. The Founder, Alpha, hosts 2 Twitter Spaces every day, with 100+ listeners. The main topics of every Space are DeFi, NFTs, and Cryptocurrency security practices. Everyone is welcome to join the Spaces and engage with people, learn, and uplift each other.

The outcomes

The project went live on September 27th of 2022. Within 48 hours the project had 400 mints. At this moment in time, the project has 721 mints among 65 holders of the token. Take a look at the contract address and the token address.

On the Witnet side, this is a massive use case. The Island Thunder is using the Witnet randomness oracle to allow for a random number to be generated, unpredictable, and verified on-chain. When users purchase one of the Island Thunder mystery boxes, they are requesting a random number between 0–3, the request is communicated to the Witnet protocol and fulfilled by varying nodes. This request is then sent back to the Cronos chain for fulfillment as the NFT is finally minted.

A true decentralized oracle is lucrative for this use case because with centralized solutions it is feasible to game the protocol and predict or select a random number to increase your favor, something that can be incredibly unfair, especially when utilizing NFTs for physical items.

Brian said he fell in love with Witnet after doing some research:

When the idea of the Mystery boxes was born, we knew we want to use an Oracle. We knew we want to build the project on Cronos, since that is the home of ISLAND THUNDER. After we started looking for Oracle projects that are working on Cronos, Witnet was the only one we found. After diving deeper, reading the well-structured documentation and getting help in building the dApp, we fell in love with Witnet.

Additionally, Witnet was proud to work with a real world project that is beyond on-chain NFT projects that we often see. Witnet funded the project immediately because of the passion and excitement the project and it’s community held.

I am most excited about the fun of this project. Most NFTs are digital and don’t really have a connection with the physical world. We find the connection between fashion and the blockchain really interesting, and believe this project can get fashion fans excited about blockchain, and blockchain fans excited about fashion.

We believe Brian said it best above; getting people into blockchain through interesting ways that are uncommon in web3’s current setting, but are incredibly important.

The logistics

The Witnet Foundation has given out a $1,250 grant to the Island Thunder Mystery Box project, and we’re so excited to continue the journey with this ambitious project. Minting hasn’t slowed down since launch, and we believe this is a project that will require funding in the future to help pay for operating expenses; something the Witnet Foundation is willing to do.

We definitely want to do more stuff with random numbers. The current editions of the boxes are centered around clothing, but there is potential for other forms of merchandise, whether those would be books, NFTs, physical art pieces, or even furniture. Another exciting use case would be creating a series of NFTs that can be used as game characters, that would have different traits based on randomness.

The grant was paid in 0.9248 Ether and you can see the resulting transaction hash here. This grant is going to be used for marketing and funding future merchandise for the continuation of the loot boxes.

We’re so thankful for all the initial applicants for the first grant.

We’re especially thankful to Brian, the developer for the Island Thunder Mystery Boxes. He was so helpful and eager within the entire process and we couldn’t have asked for a better project partner. Cheers to Island Thunder!

Connect with Witnet:

Check out Island Thunder:

Project Website | Twitter | Island Thunder Website | Discord