Those watching the Rising Star server on Discord have already seen the announcements, made without pomp and circumstance in the general-chat channel. Invigorated by the impressive growth of STARPRO—which has gained around 50X value since 2021—Blockchain Gaming Technologies (www.blockchaingaming.com) had decided to launch an extensive new marketing campaign. This was the latest in a long line of initiatives to support our hedge fund’s Accelerator Program, of which Rising Star has become the most successful member.
This latest initiative is the most ambitious yet, though, incurring substantial costs which we are paying on the Rising Star community’s behalf. And it is culminating in a major expansion of Rising Stars token economy, one designed to reach new markets and widen the game’s base of supporters. I’m talking of course about bringing Rising Star to new blockchains, and here to explain exactly how it works.
The PR Campaign
We set the stage using some familiar tactics. Previously we have engaged in the STARBITS Destruction Program, wherein we buy massive amounts of STARBITS and burn them in the Promoter Pool to get STARPRO. In addition to reducing the STARBITS supply and absorbing sell pressure, this also reduces sell pressure on STARPRO by making it more difficult to acquire. The Promoter Pool is a STARBITS sink, and we are strengthening it.
It is these tokenomic principles which have allowed Rising Star to outlive so many games on the Hive blockchain. Therefore, we kickstarted the marketing campaign by burning around 1.4 billion STARBITS, with over 400 million more left in the Promoter Pool as of the time of this writing. To spread the word, we have contracted the services of River North Agency, a PR firm specialized in fintech. We hope in doing so to reach the ears of important decision makers in the industry and establish Rising Star as a serious high-caliber project.
They began by setting up a series of broadcast interviews with related shows and podcasts. One of the first was done live on fintech.tv, as teased on X. The recording of that one is not yet edited and available for viewing online; however, you can already listen to my interview with the CryptoCurrents podcast, summarized here on BlockTelegraph. Furthermore, on June 7 at 17:00 UTC time, Jux himself will be on a podcast hosted by the NASDAQ exchange called TradeTalks. And there could be more to come!
The Rising Star Bridge
The Rising Star Bridge is designed to bring STARPRO to other blockchains. The game itself remains solely on the Hive blockchain, so we are mostly targeting investors and traders with this service. While STARBITS are very important to players due to their in-game utility, long-term investors are more interested in STARPRO due to its more constrained supply; we thus decided to conserve and concentrate liquidity by focusing only on the STARPRO token.
The Ethereum ecosystem remains the most popular for blockchain gaming, so that is our first target. Many wallets and exchanges do not accept ticker symbols as long as STARPRO, however, and might shorten it on displays to something not of our choosing. We therefore decided in our smart contract to designate our own chosen shorthand, SPRO; this ERC-20 token is already live on the Polygon blockchain at contract address 0xe9E6b372a8bB30cf95387E10F66b9cA193416e5b. You can see all the smart contract’s functions on this page, but most of them are inaccessible to the public.
These tokens are backed 1:1 by STARPRO on the Hive blockchain. Development of decentralized means to accomplish this is still rather nascent, so for now we (Blockchain Gaming Technologies, not Jux or the core Rising Star team) are doing it manually. Each time we mint 1 SPRO, 1 STARPRO is correspondingly added to the reserve held at Hive address risingstarbridge; conversely, when someone burns SPRO, equivalent STARPRO are released from the reserve to their provided Hive address. To save on gas fees, the latter is done in bulk by the contract owner, to whom SPRO must be sent. A minimum amount for STARPRO->SPRO conversions is required for the same reason, and we maintain the right to charge fees for these services if necessary to recover costs.
Just message wagginston (it's also my Discord name) for now if you want to swap. You really just have to send your tokens to risingstarbridge on Hive or 0x6b5677d4c8EB5F24880f124C645dD2ba3BEdBA20 on Polygon, but I'll notice and conduct the process sooner if you call my attention to it. I also have to know where to send your coins on the other blockchain.
The First SPRO Pool
A cryptocurrency is useless without somewhere to trade it; to that end, we subsequently created a trading pool on the QuickSwap platform. We have chosen USDC as the counterparty token in order to limit exposure to crypto price fluctuations; it began with 2,500 USDC and 172.41 SPRO, implying a price of 14.5 dollars per STARPRO. This value was derived from the STARPRO swap pool on TribalDex using the price of HIVE at the time.
Henceforth, the effective price of STARPRO on these two different pools may diverge in the absence of market forces. Demand on different blockchains can vary over time, as can the price of HIVE (against which STARPRO trades on TribalDex). We therefore are anticipating and encouraging arbitrage; we will allow bridging requests to be processed before taking such opportunities ourselves, so others have a fair chance to participate.
The trading process itself is fairly simple. Just go to QuickSwap and click the “Swap” button at the top; on the page that brings you to, find the drop-down menu which defaults to “Best Trade” and instead select “Market (V3)”. You will see two places to have selected cryptocurrencies to swap between; USDC should be easy to find, but if you have trouble finding SPRO, try inputting its contract address. Click the button with two vertical arrows pointing oppositely to change the direction in which you are swapping.
The reason we are starting with Polygon is because it has lower fees, which makes it feasible to have smaller pools. That makes it the ideal starting point because STARPRO still has a relatively low market cap. As the wise Jux once said, “The biggest mistake I see projects make is to build something and think they will come. I prefer to ‘attract and retain’ using the game we already have.’”
Likewise, Blockchain Gaming Technologies shall create more and larger pools in the EVM ecosystem as the Rising Star project grows. We envision SPRO ultimately operating on a wide variety of layer 2 blockchains over Ethereum, each with their own bridges allowing conversion between them. This should ultimately culminate with a trade pool on UniSwap, where pools are typically large in order to cater to the whales who can afford gas fees on Ethereum mainnet. We hope you will join us on this journey to bring Rising Star to the crypto masses!