Since the very beginning, one of our major goals for Steem Monsters was to market the game and bring in large numbers of players from outside the existing Steem community. This is something we have felt that none of the apps on the platform have been able to do to any significant degree, which makes it really hard for the platform to grow.
To date, Steem Monsters has created over 2,500 new Steem accounts and has brought in over $80,000 of other cryptocurrencies directly converted to STEEM in the open market. While this is great, it's also still a relatively small amount and we know we can do a lot better.
With that in mind, today we are extremely excited to announce our first major initiative to bring Steem Monsters to another very large and active crypto/blockchain community - TRON!
Steem Monsters has partnered with the Sesameseed organization who are the top block producer (known as Super Representative) on the TRON blockchain. Sesameseed has their own token - SEED - on the TRON blockchain which is backed by their block producer rewards, and they run a crowdfunding platform called SEEDGerminator which allows projects to raise funding from the Sesameseed and TRON community for their project.
Unlike platforms like Kickstarter or Indiegogo where anyone can list a project for funding, the Sesameseed team hand picks only a select few projects that they feel will bring significant value to their community and to SEED token holders to be listed on the SEEDGerminator platform. Steem Monsters is proud and excited to have been chosen to be the next listing which is expected to be open for funding on Monday, April 15th!
The funds raised from the SEEDGerminator campaign will go towards creating a new front-end website for the game which will be integrated in certain ways with the TRON blockchain and various TRON wallet software. This new website will also be rebranded as "Splinterlands" and over time the entire product will slowly transition to this new name.
We want to be very clear, however, that in no way is Steem Monsters leaving the Steem platform, or even reducing our dependency on the Steem blockchain in any way. The exact opposite is true, in fact, as we are using this as a mechanism to promote the Steem blockchain to the wider crypto and blockchain community.
The new Splinterlands website will still operate on the Steem blockchain just like the current Steem Monsters website does. This is very similar to how steemit.com, steempeak.com, and busy.org are all different websites with different branding that all still run on the same underlying Steem blockchain.
Additionally, all of the cards will remain exactly the same and players coming through the new website will be purchasing packs from the same existing pool of 900,000 Beta edition booster packs as everyone else. Aside from four new promotional cards offered through the crowdfunding campaign (more on that later) no new cards or packs are being added to the game. While the supply of cards is not increasing, we expect a significant amount of new demand to be added as we introduce an entire new community to the game, which should be a huge benefit to our existing community of players and hodlers.
Any new player who signs up through the Splinterlands website will still be creating a Steem account and all of the transactions within the game will still be published to the Steem blockchain and require Resource Credits. The main differences will be that the new site will integrate with the TronLink browser extension (which is similar to Metamask for Ethereum or Steem Keychain for Steem) and will allow players to link their TRON wallet address to their game/Steem account, easily make purchases with TRX and other TRON-based tokens, and in the future we plan to even have a TRX-based market for buying/selling cards.
Regarding the rebranding of the product name to Splinterlands, we feel that this change is necessary and very important in order to give us the best chance of success in spreading the game to other crypto communities, of which TRON is hopefully just the first of many. At the very least, it avoids confusion about the spelling of Steem and/or association with the popular game platform which is coincidentally called Steam.
The transition will be gradual, and for the foreseeable future the Steem Monsters name and website will run alongside the new Splinterlands name and website in exactly the same way that steemit.com runs alongside busy.org and are simply separate interfaces to the same exact underlying platform.
We hope that the Steem community can see how important this partnership is towards our goal of promoting the game to as large of an audience as possible and thereby bringing many more people to Steem in addition to rewarding our earliest supporters - you!
The upcoming crowdfunding campaign through the SEEDGerminator platform will be open to everyone, and we welcome all of our existing players from the Steem community to participate.
It will work very similarly to our previous Kickstarter campaign, except that contributions must be made in either TRX or the Sesameseed SEED token. There will be significant advantages to contributing via the SEED token over TRX, and information on the various ways to acquire SEED tokens will be made available before the campaign goes live.
Like with the Kickstarter, there will be a set of four new, exclusive promo cards added to the game (shown above) which will only ever be obtainable via contribution to this campaign. Once the campaign has ended, the only way to acquire these cards in the future will be to purchase them on the market from other players, which, as we have seen with the Kickstarter cards, can be quite expensive! While the stats and abilities for these new cards are still TBD, you can rest assured that they will be very competitive in ranked and tournament play and should therefore be highly sought after.
The campaign is scheduled to go live for funding on Monday, April 15th, and run for up to 2 weeks. There will be a hard-cap of 5,000,000 TRX/SEED that can be contributed, so if you want to participate don't wait too long! If you don't make it into the first campaign, don't worry, as we are planning to run this as a two-part campaign, with a second opportunity to contribute and pick up the exclusive cards sometime in May or June of this year.
You can find the full details and information about the campaign at https://seedgerminator.sesameseed.org/ as well as on their Steem post at: https://steempeak.com/sesameseed/@sesameseedorg/seedgerminator-introduces-splinterlands
Since this partnership goes both ways, we also strongly encourage everyone here to learn more about the Sesameseed organization at https://sesameseed.org and some of the fantastic opportunities they have to offer through voting for them as Tron Super Representative with staked TRX and through their own SEED token.
Sesameseed has also recently set up a Steem account where they will be posting future news and updates for their organization, so please give them a follow and an upvote at https://steempeak.com/@sesameseedorg
This partnership is effectively adding TRON community members to the existing Steem Monsters ecosystem. As mentioned above, the card supply is not increasing aside from the four new promo cards, but the demand may increase significantly. When we're adding a community of thousands of crypto gamers it has a massive potential to bring a lot players who are looking to grab high level decks very quickly. This may be your last opportunities to get into the game before the floodgates open!
