REVV Racing

The gamification of blockchain technology is in full swing. We've come a long way since CryptoKitties ground the ethereum blockchain to a halt in 2017. That game allowed players to purchase, breed, collect and sell virtual cats, and it was the first time I heard about non-fungible tokens (NFT's).

I've been involved in the crypto-sphere since 2017, but I never got around to really appreciating the NFT-craze. Even though I understand the concept of non-fungible assets on the blockchain, and believe with all my heart that this is the technology for the web and money of the future, I've held the position that selling jpeg images for hundreds of thousands of dollars is a step too far. For money the concept makes perfect sense, as money is not real to begin with; money is whatever we agree on, real or imagined, as the universal means of exchange for real stuff. Money is simply the thing we place our trust in as a placeholder for for value; it has no value in itself. This is why shells, wooden sticks with carvings (tally sticks), paper and digital numbers on a computer screen have all been used at some time as money.

Therefore I also have faith in using the non-fungibility of blockchains as a replacement for contracts, property deeds for real estate and so on; like money, these all entail an agreement of some sort, that can be "set in stone," so to speak, on a non-fungible blockchain. They don't have value in and of themselves, they merely represent value in the real world. Just like money. With that understanding in the back of my mind, I've had a hard time to make the jump to accepting the agreements themselves as having any value. I mean, a screenshot of an NFT jpeg has, in my mind at least, the same value as the original. "Am I missing something here? I must be missing something!" That thought has gone through my mind countless times ever since CryptoKitties connected thousands of MetaMask wallets and ground the ethereum blockchain to a halt four years ago. At one point CryptoKitties accounted for 25 percent of network traffic on the ethereum blockchain, shooting gas prices to the moon.

In the end though, NFT's are just a new market. There's demand and there's a supply, so no matter my personal opinion on this new trend, it seems that NFT's will become the new version of collectible baseball cards, jpeg "art" and in-game assets. There's a game I've played for years and still love, Diablo 3, and it had an in-game auction where players could buy and sell items like swords, shields, helmets and the likes. I remember that a legendary mace called "Echoing Fury" sold for 12,000 dollar at one time by player d2jsp. Here's the news item about that madness: ECHOING FURY SOLD FOR OVER $12,000 USD. The game still exists. I still play it from time to time. The in-game auction house has been removed after many complaints by players who felt like the game had become "pay to win." And the Echoing Fury still exists as well, but has become a fairly useless weapon and is worth nothing. This is also what I have in mind when following the news on NFT's...

But I'm slowly coming around. Like I said, it's a market like any other. And I've found a candidate for sucking me in to the whole NFT thing: Revv Racing. A week ago I shared with you some of my love for racing, Formula One in particular, in this post: Bleeding Edge Crypto. REVV is the ERC-20 token for branded motorsports blockchain games produced by Animoca Brands, a digital property rights company. This company has strong financial ties to Dapper Labs, the company behind CryptoKitties, so they have a lot of in-house experience with "NFT's and in-game assets. I stumbled upon the game REVV Racing while watching some of my favorite Formula One YouTube channels after the crazy Grand Prix in Saudi Arabia, and I immediately went to the website to see how I could play the game. You see, all the cars in the game are NFT's, so this would be a great way for me to finally take the hurdle and get me one for myself...

And I thought this would be easy, as the REVV token runs on the polygon network. But alas... I don't have any REVV tokens yet, and no MATIC tokens. So when I went to the OpenSea.io website to buy a racing car, and followed the onscreen instructions, I had to transfer some of the ETH in my MetaMask wallet over to the polygon network, which created a problem; this initial transfer would cost more than $100 in gas-fees! To buy a 13 dollar car would set me back 113 dollar! Needless to say that I've postponed my on-boarding in the NFT space for now. I literally tried all this on this evening, so I'll look for a cheaper method or wait until gas fees are somewhat more acceptable. I've already got a little bit of MATIC from a faucet site to pay for future transactions on the polygon network, and I've prepared my mining software to mine wrapped ETH (WETH) on polygon's second layer solution. I promise I'll come back if and when I've bought my first car to share with you my impressions of the actual game!

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