What is TACO? What does it do? Who is it for?
Those questions and more is what I am going to answer for you today. Originally I was going to write a very long post about this topic in a Discord server to explain it but I figured I should write a more thorough guide over on Publish0x. So here we are.
What is Taco?
Well the short answer is that it is a cryptocurrency built on the WAX blockchain. The silly coingecko widget Publish0x has doesn't allow $TACO to be shown so this is the best I can do.
Oh but what are ONI and SHING you ask? We will get to those later. I would be remise if I didn't just point you to the Taco whitepaper which is here.
And to that end their Discord Server is here: https://discord.gg/tacocrypto
Now with that out of the way lets dive into the TACO ecosystem. Taco (not all capitalized) is the ecosystem that includes games, tokens, NFT's and a thriving community. Before we get into the games and tokens we should talk about the NFT's to get a fundamental base layer down.
Taco NFT's:
There are a few so we are going to break them up by Schema's and I will describe each one.
Venues:
A Venue NFT is just like it sounds. It is a Food Truck or a Kiosk or Restaurant that is upgradable. Think of these as the "lands" of the Taco ecosystem.
Here is what is unlocked when you level up your Venue. keep in mind that at level 10 it unlocked the ability to turn 200,000 SHING into an ingredient.
Most of these we will get into later so I won't detail them now.
Ingredients:
Ingredient NFT's are well ingredients you would find in a kitchen to make things.
Ingredients are needed for a few things. They are needed to upgrade Venue's. They are also needed to burn into Taco-Cores.
Extractors:
Extractors are NFT's that's' sole purpose is to earn SHING passively.
You purchase a Extractor on the secondary market and it will automatically start earning SHING for you. The beauty of it is that you don't have to claim your earning at any given time. You could let it sit for a year before you collect it if you wanted to. Or you could claim it every 10 seconds if you wanted.
Automator's:
Automators are for the game Brigade. There sole purpose is to work automatically to earn you SHING. Again we will get into Brigade later but for now all you need to know is there are various rarities of Automators and the more powerful ones can earn your more SHING.
Collectors:
Collectors are ONI collectors of sorts. What they do is act as little Banks.
There is a place where you can stake ONI and TACO and it will earn you ONI which collects into these. Now unlike Extractors these guys have a limit as to how much they can hold until they won't hold anymore until you collect your earnings.
Brigade Equipment:
These NFT's give you a little bonus when playing Brigade. Each one has various stats that improve your earnings in Brigade.
Acryptia Gear:
These guys are for the game Acryptia. As of the time of writing only Helmets have been released so you can only have 1 of these equipped but over time more slots will open and more items will get released.
The way they work are passive stats in the game. If a NFT says it has a 2% reduction in damage that means that every time you get hit there is a 2% chance it will do 1 less damage.
Promos:
Every Tuesday (Taco Tuesday) the team sends out TACO to accounts holding specific NFT's. Here you can see what holding each NFT will get you. Me personally I think buying these items on secondary is way overpriced for what you get but if you are lucky enough to already have some then you are a lucky duck.
Taco Games:
Brigade:
Brigade is a simple faucet of sorts. You work at it every 1, 2, or 3 hours (depending on how much equipment you have) and it pays out in SHING.
Now remember how we talked about Venues and their levels? Once a Venue hits level 100 it unlocks Brigade. Which means that anyone can work at your Venue. You want people to work at your Venue because if they do then you will earn a percentage of their SHING.
Brigade Venues that are level 120 or higher can also give out NFT's to random workers.
You can see here that the Venue I am working at right now is the CryptoMonkey venue. It has a 5% Venue fee which means they keep 5% of the SHING earned when working there. The little present icon that is zero displays how many NFT's it gives out each day. The 320.1k number is the SHING pool it has to give out as well.
Remember those Automator's we talked about earlier? Automator's can be assigned to Venues to work at well automatically. They require energy to work and you purchase energy with ONI. They will keep working every 4 hours until they run out of energy.
Acryptia:
Not to say Brigade isn't a game but Acryptia is a true game. It's a card based game where there are 50 levels of increasing difficulty that you need to progress as far as you can through.
Acryptia works on Seasons and each season there are tasks you get every few days to complete. If you complete them then you level up and unlock the rewards. Keep in mind that the Season rewards are free to everyone to earn. You do not need to pay anything to play Acryptia.
Here is where ONI comes into play. Every day you get 1 free ranked game that you can play. You can purchase 3 ranked games for 1 ONI if you want to keep progressing through the levels faster.
Taco Tokens:
TACO:
TACO is the main currency of the ecosystem. You need TACO to upgrade Venues. You need TACO to stake on Taco Swap. From what I have seen Taco prices usually stays around the 2 WAX price. It fluctuates but stays around 1.5 to 2.5 WAX.
SHING:
I like to think of SHING as the payment token in the ecosystem. SHING can be used to purchase ingredients first and foremost. It can also be used to unlock utilities and to craft various items. When the Taco team releases a new collab Brigade gear it costs SHING. So keep some of this on hand is quite handy.
ONI:
Taco calls this the "Strategic token" of the ecosystem. I call it the premium game currency. You can use SHING in Acryptia to buy more ranked matches. You can use it in Brigade to power your Automator's.
Websites:
https://app.tacocrypto.io/
On this website you do many things. This is the main hub for the Taco Ecosystem.
You can play Brigade.
You can collect from your collectors.
You can interact with your Venue.
You can collect from your Extractors.
There is also the Market, Crafting and Voting.
https://swap.tacocrypto.io/
Here you can swap tokens, and you can also stake into their S.A.L.S.A and M.E.A.L pools. I highly recommend you look into what projects you want to stake into before just blindly staking.
This is not a definitive list of everything the Taco ecosystem has to offer but it does offer a great starting place for new players.
Do Your Own Research!
