Introduction
Hello Steemians, I’m Erik Johnson the creator of Cache, a winning project at the 2018 ETHDenver Conference, and in this #introduceyourself post I want to tell you all about Cache, and make some exciting announcements relating to the Steem blockchain. Hint: we’re big fans not just of the technology, but of you, the community.
The Game
Cache is a social (and sometimes anti-social) cryptocurrency trading game, all set in an 8-bit dystopian cyberpunk universe. It originated as a winning project at the 2018 ETHDenver conference, the world’s largest cryptocurrency hackathon.
It is very important to us that Cache be free to play, which is only one of the reasons why we’re choosing Steem over Ethereum - and the upcoming public release is playable on the web, as well as iOS and Android. In Cache, you:
- earn crypto just for playing for free
- trade cryptocurrencies across exchanges to earn your way to the top
- own your tokens, your items, your avatars, even your own exchange
- import and export items to multiple blockchains including Steem and Ethereum
- choose your affiliation - and chat, trade with, or even hack other players
In the last year, the game progressed from a pretty simple hackathon project to beta release powered by several smart contracts published to the main Ethereum network.
During the beta release, we learned a lot of things that are powering the decisions we have made, which we are quite excited to share with you. So, with that, this post marks a couple important public announcements.
First Announcement
First announcement: After a year of developing exclusively on the Ethereum blockchain, we are building our core transactions on top of Steem! In addition, players will have the ability to import/export their hard-earned tokens and items to the Steem blockchain, as well as on Ethereum.
Second Announcement
Our second announcement is that the development of a full release is now being accelerated with help of additional resources. We are quite excited to be targeting a full public release of the game in the Fall of this year!
Ethereum
As mentioned above, Cache was an overall winner of the ETHDenver Conference & Hackathon in February 2018.
Naturally, we began development on the game building on top of the Ethereum blockchain - harnessing several types of smart contract - ERC-20 (for tokens) and ERC-721 (for avatars).
What we learned from our beta release was there are a couple fundamental aspects of Ethereum - the speed and costs - that are mismatched for what we are doing with Cache.
High Gas Prices
Costs associated with using the Ethereum network have been especially troubling. Shortly after we launched our beta version in June of last year - the gas prices spiked. Suddenly, transactions were hundreds of times more expensive. July 2 was especially brutal, "when transaction fees at one point required 5 ETH." We don't want our players to pay 0.005 ETH for a transaction, much less 5 ETH (thousands of dollars at the time)!
That stated, we will continue to support Ethereum transactions for importing/exporting items, as we believe Ethereum's strong consensus is a good use-case for moving your items into a safe place where you own them.
Why Steem?
There are two major reasons for building on Steem: the technology and the community. Let's start with the technical reasons.
Fast and Feeless
Cache is a game full of transactions. Every move in the game of Cache is a new opportunity to buy and sell cryptos. In the span of ten minutes, you could be pushing 30 - 50 transactions to the ledger. For our game state - we need something that is both fast and doesn't cost our players anything. Steem fits the bill, as it is:
Fast: Steem has three second block times. This is near-instant, and you will never notice transactions being published to the blockchain while playing.
Feeless: There is no need to pay gas prices or mining fees. We strongly believe in making Cache free to play, and this is made possible by Steem!
Community
With Steemit, you have the community. Objectively, the Steemians are the biggest and most active blockchain community. If you don't believe us, check out these statistics from @penguinpablo.
Community is very much baked into the core of Steem - a place where real people interact with each other. This vibes well with Cache - a world where you can join, chat, trade with, and even hack with other players during gameplay.
That’s why we want to spearhead the #SwitchToSteem movement. After seeing how ridiculously easy it is to power our application with Steem, while making it even better, we know that we are just the beginning of a wave of converts who will switch from expensive, difficult to use, “smart contract” platforms, to Steem. We plan to help spread the word about why every app should #SwitchToSteem.
Accelerating Development
Let us share our other big announcement: Our other big announcement is that we are accelerating our pace of development! In addition to moving over our game state transactions to Steem - we have an amazing roadmap that is now rapidly underway. Stay tuned to the blog for an upcoming review of that roadmap.
Join us in the Cacheverse
We look forward to having you as one of the first to build your way to a crypto empire, and we invite you to pre-register for the upcoming full release of Cache. You get an in-game item just for putting in your email address at https://www.cache.gg! Thank you!