Non Fungible Investment — A Solid Investment Win in 2018 (Our Choice is Etheremon)
Author: Idon
Feb 2018, after several month into the market (since the 2017 year end peak), BTC market dominance starting to creep up (over 55% now at time of this writing), with both the ICO hype over, and further ICO regulation, alts were anticipated to be taking a real hard hit. We wanted to look into investing our crypto generation from mining into something more stable or with a store of value, to de-risk from only holding BTC as it expect to continue to increase dominance.
We started to look seriously into Non Fungible Token (NFT) as an alternative store of value, much like fine art, but maintaining in crypto vs fiat based. Of these, the earliest and first one we looked at was CryptoKitties. Backward looking from it’s later success. At the time of our evaluation the economy of CryptoKitties didn’t really feel like a decentralized asset, the never ending release of kitties by the developer at random intervals instantly gave us a eerie feel of a pyramid. The original kitties are always first owned or created by the developer and players can then breed later generation (less value) kitties for never ending more kitties. The creation and value chain analysis told us to avoid this. But nevertheless, the simplicity of it, which we think is what made the game a success so far. But on we go with our search on a NFT to use as a store of value.
Somewhere in between our research for the right NFT to invest we looked at many other NFT, with ones mimicking RPG selling your armours and weapons, others selling your parts for robot battles, collectable cards such as Popstars characters or Baseball cards, and even ones selling you planet and stars for some promised inter galactic battle on the blockchain. All in all, there were many of them, but aside from the pyramid scheme which we avoided like a plague, many of them had no proof of concept and worst yet, a development team which we have no way of getting contact with. Just when we stopped looking and given up, we were delighted to have found Etheremon, from their partnership announcement with Decentraland.
Etheremon was quite interesting, the first thing that stood out was the very active community with both the developer team and many heart warming community members that’s almost always there to answer question on their discord. In fact, not just about the game, surprisingly effective, their discord is a place for reporting bugs. It is probably one of the only game I have ever seen where developers are solving bugs almost immediately. This is what gave us the most confidence about the development team. They are so actively involved and paying attention to feedback as well as taking bugs and glitches very very seriously. In fact for the 8 months I have been watching, I have never ever seen a bug that lasted more then 1 hour before something was done about it.
Next to our criterion was about how the NFT are distributed and whether the problem with insta-mined was solved. Etheremon dev have solve this very elegantly. All etheremon NFT tokens are generated by smart contract on Ethereum, so guess what? Even if the developer wanted an etheremon for them selves they would need to catch it like everyone else. More on this later as it gets even better..
A combination of strong and caring development team that listens and trying to make a NFT distribution fair and as decentralized as possible is one that really strike a cord with our teams. This is exactly something we are looking for and one that rhyme very well with the rest of the decentralized blockchain technology investment.
Fast forward 8 months later, our total asset on Etheremon ~100 ETH, with rarest mons such as #1 Catch Siberizen (Ruffski Evo3) at level 100, with hundreds of Level Up Stones, and over 20 active accounts being played by several members on our team daily. With a total investment around ~30 ETH since the start. By our estimate, we have about triple our investment in ETH during this period.
One of the interesting long term appeal for us is the future anticipation of integration of Etheremon into DCL. We know that 3D models have all been made for the mons (viewable in the games when you click on a mon and press the 3D model icon.) As there is the much anticipated VR or 3D gaming is in the roadmap. So things would get very interesting when you can have your little cutty pie #1 catch mon(s) circling around your Avatar in DCL
Finally, we need to to talk about Adventures. The concept was another revolutionary concept to empower the players. Each time a player take their mon on adventures to try to catch awesome loot and possibly some other super rare mons (including legendary mon that’s worth 6–12 ETH). The player would pay a fee for going on such adventure. Of course, guess who gets the fees? Yes the developer of course? NO WRONG!!
This is where Etheremon took another huge step forward. Whenever new etheremon is released, one would think the devs get all the income from the proceed. In fact, the players who own the adventure site gets all the income. Sites were original sold for 0.5 ETH (to the public), and many sites were indeed sold for just over 0.5 ETH, doing a quick check today, one of our site had 288 visits and that equals to about 0.25 ETH, that’s 50% of what some of the sites had sold for.
Just recap the concept a little bit, this is like saying, every time a new Crypto-kitty is released, the proceeds of the sale goes to the player base themselves!! Wow, isn’t this revolutionary? This completely solve the insta-mined problem, and the allocation problem. The devs have no incentive to sell as many as they can, and no longer is there a pyramid build of never ending unlimited kitty, and continue release of mons that just adds to the warchest of the developers.
In summary, Etheremon is definitely one of the mostly evolved and advanced blockchain collectable, game, and economy in the blockchain NFT world today. We anticipate that the developers will surprise us again and again in the future with heart pounding releases and hours of game fun and pride holding the tokens, and best of all, with increasing collectable value in ETH/crypto over time.
