Thread by @rohamg

Mass consumer experiences are coming to the blockchain 🎮

I'm excited to announce I'm judging the @Ubisoft blockchain hackathon next month on behalf of @CryptoKitties with Yves Guillemot, Ubisoft’s legendary founder and CEO

Tweetstorm below ⤵️

Games have been the key driver for mainstream consumer adoption of every platform from Doom and PCs to Farmville and Facebook – blockchain will be no different

Games teach new behaviors to consumers and are a forcing function for technological innovation all through the stack

.@CryptoKitties is the first blockchain game. Each Kitty is a unique collectible artform born and raised on the blockchain; an ethereal anti-Westworld where the rules of the game are published transparently in programs called Smart Contracts (PSA: neither smart nor contracts!)

In 6 short months our community has created over 750K Kitties and processed almost 50k $ETH

We have spawned dozens of fast-followers as well as talented devs building on CK as a platform – we call this the #KittyVerse, some of the most user-centric teams in crypto today.

Three key threads

First: digital property rights and scarcity will redefine how we think about ownership and value. The same tech that secures $BTC can secure any digital asset

For the first time in history, digital items can be unique, authentic, and impossible to counterfeit

This comes in the middle of a decades-long shift in value accordance, away from the physical and onto the experiential and the digital

Future generations will prize achievements, experiences, and virtual goods more than lambos and rolexes

Case in point: coincentral.com/cryptokitty-14…

When you think in terms of ‘mixed reality’ technologies like AR/VR, you quickly realize we are at step zero of the creation of what will most likely quickly become the largest and most valuable asset class ever: digital goods.

@WIRED is catching on: wired.com/story/ethereal…

Second: token economies, non-fungible or otherwise, create an unprecedented bond between player and game – i have described this elsewhere as a “joint-venture” with your community the likes of which we’ve never seen in product design:

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by @rohamg view original on Twitter

The collectible bundle of code that is a CryptoKitty is a “token”. To differentiate Kitty tokens (which are all individually unique) from cryptocurrency tokens (which are all interchangeable – or “fungible”), our CTO coined “non-fungible token” and created a new standard: #ERC721

Before ERC721 and CryptoKitties, all blockchain tokens were “fungible”: it doesn’t matter which bitcoins you have, only how many. The same is not true for CryptoKitties, nor for most other assets in our lives: our homes, identities, artwork, friends, passions.

By making non-fungible assets into crypto-tokens, we give them access to the most open global marketplace ever: the blockchain. A CryptoKitty becomes as easy to trade, transfer, and store as a bitcoin.

Trade on our site, independently, or via 3rd parties like @rarebits_io

Third: blockchain will enable the most powerful and extensible developer platforms ever. Immutability gives devs confidence to build mods, assets, bots, and entire worlds knowing the platform can’t cut access. Implications are limitless. Follow @cdixon:
medium.com/@cdixon/why-de…

.@KittyHats_CK accessorizes your Kitties, kittyrace.com takes them driving, cryptopurr.co gets em talking – and four different battle games are in the works. You can even get your Kitties printed on SWAG: medium.com/@KittyHats/ann…

All completely permissionless

Among gaming giants, Ubisoft has impressed us with their commitment to innovate and explore blockchain natively – going deep on the value of crypto and exploring each thread.

As a 10,000 person company with marquee properties, we are excited to see what they can do!