LoveBlock started as a weekend development-diversion which has now evolved into a full-fledged product. LoveBlock is by the same team that’s behind Karachain who are building India’s First Smart Contract enabled Blockchain that has its specific focus on developers with features such as 10,000 transactions/second and a Self Governed Treasury along with multiple APIs and SDKs to give a very abstracted access to developers, hence bringing developers closer to the blockchain. Karachain’s primary motive is to make blockchain human friendly. The treasury is going to fund non-profit as well as for-profit projects in a completely decentralized manner.
On the situation of a long weekend, a perfect escape scenario for the developers on the Karachain’s team was forged when someone fired a discussion about the upcoming Valentine’s Week (then) and how couples follow a tradition of locking padlocks to bridges or fences to symbolise an unbreakable love that exists forever. Someone else proclaimed that such locks are being removed by authorities across popular areas on the account of damage to heritage, amongst other reasons. The team knew they had to do something - something that can actually symbolise an unbreakable love and be truly forever. They built LoveBlock, over the weekend. An implementation on the blockchain where people in a relationship can devote a lock to their counterpart. Now, that’s truly eternal, because anything on the blockchain stays forever.
While building LoveBlock, a very crucial decision was needed to be taken - which token architecture was to be followed. The team’s choice of ERC721 introduces several changes to the concepts, first of which is that every lock is different. Each lock can have separate characteristics, even though the locks would still be considered as just tokens. In case ERC20 token standard was followed, every token would have been exactly the same. This wouldn’t allow a lock’s owner to invest in the lock. Following the ERC721 standard allowed the locks to be created as non-fungible tokens (which just means that every token is different), which could allow trading of individual locks. Hence, a user can gift a love lock to his beloved, which upon expiration could be sold on the Marketplace as well, just like a fresh lock but with the different characteristics that the lock would have taken up over time based on upgrades et. al. committed by the owner.
