Non-fungible tokens (NFT) haven’t experienced such a good year as 2021 has been in terms of adoption and visibility. NFTs have passed from being only interacted with by crypto enthusiasts to being widely used by celebrities like Taylor Swift, Snoop Dogg, Doja Cat, Tony Hawk, and more. However, this craze has resulted in many investors and developers ignoring what is probably the use case with the most potential for NFTs: Gaming.
With gaming being widely considered the gateway toward the mass adoption of crypto and blockchain technologies, it is surprising that the spotlight is going away from it. Altura NFT is going back to the roots of NFTs by applying them to the gaming industry. However, the project is not limiting itself to repeating the same formula used by so many projects but is bringing smart contracts and NFTs together.
Unlocking New Use Cases With Smart NFTs
Historically, NFTs have been limited by most projects to represent ownership over and the authenticity of an asset. However, they were dynamic in nature and couldn’t be easily modified according to changes in the ecosystem. Altura has taken a new approach to NFTs by providing them with smart functionality that allows them to react to both internal and external events.
Smart NFTs also allow developers and creators to mint tokens with no initial values at all, which adds flexibility to how they can be used. This means that an NFT could be “activated” once a certain event takes place, such as a football team winning a match or the price of a token reaching a certain point, all while having been already minted.
By making NFTs more dynamic, Altura is aiming to provide developers with new ways to integrate them into their virtual worlds. This has proven difficult in the past as NFTs required their attributes to be determined before being minted, which made them unable to serve a bigger purpose in video games.
Ending The Loot Box Controversy With NFTs
Loot boxes have been a controversial mechanic for gamers around the world since their inception. On top of being arguably a form of gambling, their “black box” nature means that players were unable to know the real chances of getting certain rewards.
The result was a relationship between players and developers in which players were forced to trust developers, while these had to continually try to gain their player base’s trust. While this worked in some cases, there were instances in which gaming giants like EA games suffered a massive backlash from players and governments alike.
Altura NFT’s loot boxes allow players to be confident of the randomness of loot boxes by using third-party sources of randomness. In this case, the randomness of the loot boxes is possible due to the use of ChailLink’s Verifiable Random Function (VRF) function.
These loot boxes can also be easily minted and given qualities as all of Altura’s smart NFTs… Which they essentially are.
Connecting Blockchain and Gaming For Real
Blockchain and gaming have had an increasingly close relationship over the past years. Games like The Sandbox, Decentraland, and Axie Infinity have transformed blockchain games from what in reality were collectible platforms (like CryptoKitties) to video games.
However, the use of NFTs in gaming has been limited to indie games that are far from the biggest titles in the mainstream gaming ecosystem. In addition to this, these games have limited themselves to using NFTs as a “key” and “certificate” of sorts instead of an actual mechanic of their design.
By making NFTs smarter and more dynamic, Altura is seeking to make it easier for developers to integrate them with their existing games, an approach that could lead big game titles to join the craze in a truly revolutionary manner.
NFTs truly seems to be the future of gaming but this won’t be possible in their current state. To achieve mass adoption, NFTs will need to move on from being just a fad based on value and speculation to a true source of gameplay.
