Newsletter #4: What is the value of an NFT?

Hello Folks,

Another week passed by, so here’s another newsletter from our team.

In this newsletter, we wanted to share some things that we consider important to take into account from a Software Engineer point of view (that we think everyone out there should know)

1. What is the value of an NFT?

I’m sure this was the first question many of us asked ourselves when we wanted to understand how there were some projects with a good amount of earnings and some insane prices out there.

At first, I was confused because I was only seeing images that have some false “sense” of value. This is mainly because usually NFT projects have a really short life cycle, about 3–5 months if you’re lucky enough and your undoxxed development team is still around(If they even have one).

Creating an NFT is so easy that people should be aware that even though a project might not be a scam, the only fact that you are holding an image with some properties on it doesn’t give it any value if the project doesn’t move on.

It’s sad to see a lot of people over-investing in some projects just because everyone is buying in when things might flip and end up in a position where all of the money sits in hands of a team that isn’t prepared. Remember that when you mint an NFT project all the cryptocurrency goes directly to the contract wallet: this means that at that point, the team can just quit the project with all of your money or even just leave it open and keep earning from secondary sales while holders and people who trusted in the project are the only ones affected.

It’s important to understand that most of the NFT projects create a speculative market from images. And this will only benefit those at the beginning of the project and the developing team.

Since NFT gaming is a hot topic out there and we are currently building one, we wanted to make sure to constantly share our vision and knowledge about what is a good NFT game for us. In case you were not aware, NFT games are built on top of the blockchain network, which means that most if not all of their mechanics live inside the blockchain.

This makes it hard for developers to create games (due to the amount of time and skills that takes up to make a good game). In that way, the more complex the game is, the harder it will be for it to succeed without the proper software development cycle.

In the software development industry, every single update should have been extremely tested before its release. A good software development cycle will at least have unit tests (tests for every single core function of the code), integration tests (tests for every single integration with third-party providers), and manual tests (tests that relates to the manual execution of the software you’re developing).

As a Software Developer, bugs should be prevented with all the tools available. In that sense, Ethereum Network even recommends running a bounty program before releasing any contract that will interact with transactions.

It’s sad to see a lot of gaming NFT projects minting for 0.08 eth+ (about 200USD today) without the minimal consideration about those things mentioned above. That number of bugs, delays, and poor development decisions shouldn’t be permitted.

For example, if you were to buy a game in a retail store that costs you around 200USD you wouldn’t expect (nor accept) any bug or error. And in case it happened you would get an instant refund (or the community backlash would’ve been enormous).

However, in the crypto ecosystem, this can’t happen due to how the network is made. This is why we consider it extremely important to know how to pick and what are risks you are willing to take because you could end up begging in the discord group for the team to come back.

Recently, we’ve been thinking a lot about the value of an NFT project because we wanted to do things differently. Through this process of constantly thinking, we realized that we can do things way better. For us, one of our most important goals is that our investors/gamers feel safe without the fear that we as a team will run with their money without providing any value. And, as an answer to this, we propose the formation of DAOs. But wait, what is a DAO?

A Decentralized Autonomous Organization or better known as DAO in easy terms is a group of people with a shared wallet that can democratically execute actions with no chairperson. To put an example to make this idea clearer, this means that if the majority of the Stakeholders would like to use the money available in that wallet in a specific way, they can put forward a proposal to the group (or the organization), and with the tokens or shares that they own, they can either accept or reject that action. The more tokens you own, the more weight your vote has. Since DAOs fully run on the blockchain, this ensures that all stakeholders have the power to decide in a democratic way what to do.

Why is this important to us?

The concept is really simple. Our game will be as transparent as it can be. For that reason, treasury will be our DAOs wallet. We intend to make it so all the money from the transactions will have a percentage that will go directly to the DAOs, creating a backing for our project that can be later on redeemed & used by all the holders democratically for the sake of the project.

The idea is to eventually let players decide how things from the game will be ruled. Things such as Ingame Market, Balance Changes, Season Rewards, InGame Rewards, and many other parameters will be controlled democratically to let everyone own the game & survive without the need of a Dev team if needed.

There are a lot of details that are still under discussion and have been tested but we wanted to share our goal to protect everyone’s investment and let everyone enjoy the game without the worry of a floor price or a bubble that might explode at any moment and let some users lose their investment.

We would like to do things the right way because we truly care about our community and wanted them to be part of our journey.

Thanks for being around and reading until here.

Until the next newsletter,

Giuseppe Marotta

Discord: https://discord.gg/PkZCq4jNDe