by Real-world items are increasingly being tied to nonfungible tokens — and it’s a trend that’s set to shake up the world of gaming.
The NFT market is continually evolving — and there’s one intriguing trend that’s enhancing their utility even further: tying digital assets to real-world items.
Some applications have been more tongue-in-cheek than others. Charmin got in on the action by transforming toilet rolls into digital art, accompanied by a physical display that could become the centerpiece in the owner’s bathroom.
On the other end of the spectrum, CryptoPunk holders were given the chance to transform their avatars into bespoke Tiffany & Co. pendants, in which a small number of nonfungible tokens were sold that entitled the owner to an exclusive piece of physical jewelry, which sold out in a blink.
Linking NFTs to rare collectibles can also have advantages. Vintage bottles of Japanese whiskey recently made the leap, with tokens verifying authenticity and ownership.
Under this model, luxury items can be held in a secure environment, and owners can use their digital assets to redeem them at a later date. This ensures there’s much less chance of accidentally breaking a $75,000 bottle or spontaneously opening it on a Saturday night.
We’ve even seen how nonfungible tokens are being used to spark a discussion about the future of art. Legendary artist Damien Hirst famously created The Currency — a collection of 10,000 pieces. Owners were given a choice:
they could either keep the artwork as an NFT, or exchange it for a physical painting. There was a catch, however: choosing the crypto collectible meant its real-world counterpart would be destroyed forever. Overall, 4,851 were (literally) burned.
Now, an NFT game is taking this concept to a whole new level, and offering a twist on the play-to-earn genre. The Fruits Eco-Blockchain Project says it plans to give gamers a chance to win a physical golden egg when Golden Egg Wonderland launches in Q3 of 2023.
The game and all assets incorporated in it will be hosted on the Fruits’ native blockchain. Explaining its rationale, the game’s founders pointed to how the value of gold has risen considerably over the past 12 months, driven by concerns over inflation and quantitative easing. There’s also some literary inspiration, as it’s a nod to the goose that laid golden eggs in Aesop’s famous fable.
Golden Egg Wonderland operates on a simple yet intriguing mechanism involving virtual birds and their ability to lay nonfungible tokens (NFTs) in the form of eggs, which in some occasions, are golden. Users begin their journey by acquiring birds and entering the game, where the adventure unfolds.
The primary objective revolves around breeding the birds based on their properties and characteristics, a process that yields NFT eggs as a result.
The true excitement stems from the potential of these eggs to be gold, which subsequently can be exchanged for real-life golden eggs marked with identical serial numbers. This functionality embeds a unique “gold standard” within the game, and introduces the revolutionary play-for-gold (P4G) model.
What’s more, the game relies on a powerful AI structure in the background, which helps with the distribution of golden eggs. The game is linked to real gold, and the gold generated in the real world is traceable on the Fruits Blockchain.
When the generated gold is recorded on the Fruits blockchain, the AI model automatically matches and links the amount of numbered gold and the number of gold eggs generated in the game.
This ensures transparency of the amount of gold held by the management team and provides a high level of security, as the real gold eggs and the in-game gold eggs generated are linked in real-time.
