InceptioNFT

The future of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) is now, and the superior blockchain technology that Phantasma has made available to us today makes it possible. Let’s take a look behind the curtain to behold the “magic” behind GOATi Entertainment’s 22 Racing Series smartNFT part packs.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C.Clarke

This quote from scientist and author Arthur C. Clarke immediately came to mind when researching the NFTs we purchased during Travala’s very own Esports tournament NFT sale. The successful event held on Nov. 27th — Jan. 22nd 2021 was the kickoff for Travala and GOATi Entertainment’s NFT part pack sale for the upcoming “Travala Cup” presented by 22 Racing Series. The part pack itself is an NFT. Once the pack is opened, 5 other car part NFTs are minted randomly on-demand and sent to your wallet. There is also a chance that your part pack may contain the limited edition Travala racer as well. This NFT mint on-demand process is incredibly seamless, quick and inexpensive. When compared to slower and more expensive NFT minting processes of legacy blockchains like Ethereum, Phantasma tech is absolutely spellbinding.

Phantasma powers up developers

At the conclusion of their 22 Racing Series pre-season NFT sale last year, GOATi had minted and sold in excess of 280,000 NFTs on-demand. The cost to do something like this on the Ethereum blockchain in comparison would have been approximately $100,000-$250,000 depending on gas fees and whether the NFTs were minted individually or as duplicates. However, on Phantasma the cost to mint this amount of NFTs cost GOATi less than $100 in trasnaction fees and approximately 10–15k SOUL staked to secure the decentralized metadata storage allocation. This inspired me to research the technology and walk through the process of purchasing these one of a kind smartNFTs. Let’s explore the mystifying technological advancements of Phantasma and how GOATi is using smartNFT technology to change the way media content is distributed.

The exclusive “22 Racing Series: Travala Cup” NFT part pack. These part packs are programmed to randomly create 5 NFT car parts once opened.

The Inception

Here is the initial transaction information for our NFT part packs. We can even check the date they were minted and in which block. These NFTs were minted on-demand on November 28th, 2020 at 4:32am UTC during the “22 Racing Series: Travala Cup” NFT sale. Let’s take a look at the actual transaction that resulted in the minting of these smartNFTs as they were recorded on Phantasma blockchain.

Upon purchasing the part pack NFTs were transferred into the Poltergeist wallet by GOATi through Phantasma.

The Travala part packs in Poltergeist wallet

Here are the smartNFT part packs inside the Poltergeist wallet. Next, we will open them to reveal the 5 randomly generated ” Travala Cup” parts that are programmed to auto generate once the pack is opened.

The Conjuring

The part pack can then be opened on either the GOATi Entertainment website or inside Pavillion. The process of opening a part pack is where some of the “magic” happens. The transaction involves the burning of the parent NFT which in this case is the part pack. This burning triggers a subsequent minting on-demand of 5 random NFT car parts.

Once the part pack NFT is opened it is burned, and 5 new random NFTs appeared in my wallet. One of which was the Travala hypercar!

All together, twenty-five car parts work in concert to form a hypercar which can reach speeds of up to 1000km/h. Here is a complete list of all 22 Racing Series car parts that can be randomly generated along with the dice roll probability that your part pack will contain one. Once the original part pack NFT is opened, it’s burned away and programmed to mint 5 random NFT car parts that are sent from the GOATi smart contract to the Poltergeist wallet. The details of the transaction are listed below. You can see each of the 5 parts being minted, the part pack being burned and the transaction and block hashes respectively.

Transaction details of the on-demand minting of the 5 random NFT car parts and the burning of the original parts pack along with the transaction and block hashes

A roll of the dice

The table below illustrates the probability of you receiving a certain part when opening a part pack. This is determined by a 6 dice roll and only the last one can generate a car. GOATi explained how the the logic behind their probability system works: “Initially, your part pack contains an encrypted random number in the ROM and the hash of the random number. Therefore, when a user opens the pack, the number is decrypted, written to RAM and the pack is burned”.

The probability of receiving any one specific part type in a dice roll is shown

GOATi also has an auditing tool that can then check the RAM and the hash in the ROM (and also check that the items you received correspond to that random number) to make sure that they’re using provably fair numbers in their off-chain logic. In addition, GOATi has published a project that allows you to run that off-chain logic yourself to audit that the transaction outcomes are correct. 22RS part packs are “blind bag” items, which contain a pre-determined number of other, randomly chosen items.

Transparency is the best policy

Many games contain probability systems, but often they are a “black box” that cannot be understood by users. GOATi believes that to be fair to the users who are purchasing these kinds of items, two criteria should be met:

The probabilities involved in deciding the contents of each bag should be made public, so that a decision to purchase a bag is informed.
The method of evaluating those probabilities should be auditable, so that it is known to be fair.

GOATi also stated: “Many games are beginning to adopt item number 1 above. We are not aware of any games that currently implement item number 2. We have altered our random number generation to now be user auditable. Neither the player, nor the game, should be able to influence the roll of the dice. This has the side effect that even we do not know for sure what is inside each “bag” until it is opened by the user”.

The process of purchasing and minting these NFTs was such a seamless and fast experience, gamers will not even realize they’re using blockchain technology. This can make for a seemingly magical experience. However, GOATi has made sure that the science driving their technology is open source for all to see. For a deeper dive into GOATi’s probability system, this repository contains the code to perform an audit of the random number generation for single pack opening transactions.

Until next time,

The Writer’s Lounge