On June 17, the French game developer Ubisoft launched the collectible blockchain game Rabbids Token based on Ethereum. Users can buy and collect cryptocurrency rabbits from the popular animated series Rabid Rabbits, and all proceeds from the game will go to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF). How the game is organized, what its launch means for the crypto market and what are the relationships between UNICEF and the blockchain industry, DeCenter figured out.
How Rabbids Token works
The French company Ubisoft is known for games such as Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Just Dance, Watch Dogs and Prince of Persia. As of June 2020, the company's capitalization is $ 9.25 billion.
Rabbids Token was developed by Ubisoft Strategic Innovation Labs, an internal Ubisoft project supporting startups and the Entrepreneurs Lab initiative . Ubisoft is also part of the Blockchain Game Alliance , an organization that promotes blockchain in the gaming industry.
Rabbids Token has been tested since February, but only now has become available to a wide audience. The game should help the company assess the potential of blockchain and games using tokens. If successful, these technologies can be used in the main Ubisoft games.
Kriptoroliki Rabbids Token - the heroes of the animated series the Rabbids Raving ( «Rabid Rabbits" ), based on the video game series Rayman from Ubisoft. Rabbit-like creatures love to bully, create chaos, curse, scream and generally behave eccentrically. According to the plot, they came to Earth from the moon and really want to return home. Initially, they were game antagonists, but the characters liked the audience so much that they were allocated to a separate franchise.
Russian-language trailer for the first season of "Rabbits Furious".
Rabbids Token is similar to the popular collectible game CryptoKitties , which blew up the market at the end of 2017, but quickly lost popularity (DeCenter recently wrote about the current state of the game and its move to the new Flow blockchain ). The essence of CryptoKitties is in breeding and selling the unique cryptocotics that exist in the Ethereum blockchain in a single copy.
A showcase with cryptocotics, where they are put up for auction. Source .
CryptoKitties was the first game to use the principle of non-interchangeable tokens (Non-Fungible Tokens, NFT) standard ERC721 . These tokens differ from ordinary tokens in that each of them is unique and indivisible - NFT cannot be divided into parts or replaced by another. Rabbids Token uses the same principle. Rabbits in the game exist in the form of the NFT standard ERC721.
The game has five different families of rabbits. On July 5, in the coming full moon, a limited collection of rabbits with an “unknown surprise for the participants” will be released . Source .
The game mechanics in Rabbids Token are different from other NFT games. If cryptocotics are freely sold and bought in CryptoKitties, then in Rabbids Token players cannot trade rabbits and keep them forever. At any time, another user can buy them without the consent of the owner - just click the "Grab this rabbit" button and pay the corresponding amount in ETH. This mechanism does not allow gamers to earn money on the game and create a secondary market for rabbits, but it supports UNICEF.
The page of the cryptocroller with full information about it: name, generation, price (0.13 ETN), properties, address of the owner, number of coins collected from his sale. Source .
You can buy a rabbit for ETN by connecting a wallet to the game's website. The cost of the token consists of two elements:
The price of a digital rabbit is from 0.05–0.15 ETH (≈ $ 5– $ 30), depending on its stage of evolution;
Payment for "gas" - transaction fees.
After the purchase, the rabbit “evolves” - changes its appearance, and the token is sent to the UNICEF fund. A new animal is also generated in the network, and the former owner receives the Proof of Plausible Ownership (POPO), a token confirming that the player once owned such a rabbit. POPOs remain in the players ’wallets forever, they cannot be sold or exchanged, and they can be collected. RORO also serves as evidence of a donation made to UNICEF. You can buy the same rabbit several times - there will also be several donations, but POPO will only have one.
Page with popo on rabbits. Source .
You can play Rabbids Token from smartphones or through Chrome or Firefox browsers. Ubisoft does not have access to user wallets - in case of loss of a private key, the company will not be able to restore the wallet. On the official website of the game, you can learn more about the rules and find answers to popular questions . It also emphasizes that Ubisoft does not have an officially concluded partnership with UNICEF: the game is a charity initiative and a test of technology.
Story of developers about Rabbids Token.
UNICEF Crypto Charity
UNICEF is increasingly interacting with blockchain and cryptocurrencies. In October 2019, UNICEF established the cryptocurrency fund - UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund. The organization accepts donations to BTC and ETH, investing in open source technologies aimed at supporting children and youth around the world. Donations are accepted by the national fund committees of France, USA, Australia and New Zealand. It’s impossible to transfer funds just like that - an organization under the auspices of the UN cannot be involved in money laundering, so all philanthropists undergo KYC / AML checks.
The first contribution to the fund in the amount of 100 ETH ($ 18,000) in October 2019 was made by the Ethereum Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports the Ethereum protocol and related technologies. Last October, the UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund announced its intention to use donated cryptocurrencies to finance the provision of Internet to public schools around the world as part of the Project Connect initiative. The Ethereum Foundation, by the way, has done a lot to ensure that UNICEF uses their protocol. Apparently, such lobbying pays off - ETN becomes the main coin for the fund's crypto transactions, and the Kazakhstan office of the organization even developed Ethereum-based internal payment processing system.
The UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund is just part of UNICEF’s work with the blockchain. The organization was going to launch Donercoin crypto donation platform in 2017 , and in December 2018 announced the investment of $ 100,000 in blockchain startups working on solving global problems. In turn, the UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund is part of the larger UNICEF initiative, the UNICEF Innovation Fund . It supports technologies that can be used to solve the social problems of mankind - for example, unmanned aerial vehicles, machine learning and blockchain networks, among others.
At the same time, UNICEF is also looking more closely at cryptocurrencies. In January of this year, Sunita Grote, manager of UNICEF Innovation Fund, said that “ digital finance will significantly change ” the work of the fund, therefore, it is now necessary to begin the restructuring of the organization. She also noted that the amount of donations in cryptocurrency will only grow in the coming years. UNICEF is an organization with an annual budget of $ 7 billion. Therefore, as the manager noted, " any increase in efficiency and transparency can have a significant impact on how the organization works ."
Donations to such a large organization as UNICEF go through many intermediate stages - sometimes transfers go to recipients for months. Blockchain allows you to transfer funds to a specific recipient in a few minutes, helps to track this process and makes it more open.
Grote also noted that UNICEF and the UN do not use cryptocurrencies on a larger scale due to several problems. First of all, these assets are very volatile. This is not very suitable for numerous organizations under the auspices of the UN, which need to pay bills in fiat currencies. UNICEF also fears crypto-hacking, fraud and the possibility of becoming involved in money laundering. Despite this, Grote noted that the UNICEF crypto fund works as a test platform to understand whether cryptocurrencies are suitable for use throughout the UN. If successful, UNICEF crypto initiatives can be the first step towards the adoption of digital assets by one of the world's leading organizations.
The UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund is the first time that an organization led by the UN has accepted cryptocurrencies. It looks bold, but in fact, UNICEF was late in accepting donations in cryptocurrencies. Earlier, DeCenter described in detail how the cryptocurrency market helps the development of charity - makes it more transparent, simplifies tracking money down to a specific recipient, reduces operating expenses, accelerates the flow of funds, and allows international transfers without legal restrictions.
Trillions of dollars are involved in charity . Crypto donations account for only a drop in the ocean. So, in 2019, the charity Fidelity Charitable reported that since 2015 it has received $ 106 million in cryptocurrencies. But I am glad that the volume of crypto-charity is growing. According to Global NGO Technology, last year the number of cryptocurrency donations in the world doubled. The number of organizations hosting them is also growing. Surely as the awareness of a wide range of donors about cryptocurrencies grows and the legislative uncertainty inherent in the regulation of crypto assets decreases, digital currencies will increase their share in raising funds, and the blockchain will significantly modernize the charity sphere, making it more transparent and effective.
Finally
NFT is one of the most promising areas of blockchain development. If these tokens manage to gain a foothold in the gaming industry, then a billionth audience will gain access to them. A single NFT standard can dramatically change the game market - because users can transfer in-game items, achievements and ratings from one game to another. In addition, NFT can be used in sports, tokenizing fan paraphernalia , in art and collecting to combat the black market of fakes, as well as to confirm identity, documents and ownership of property.
However, NFTs are not yet very popular in games: there are few active gamers, interest in games is quickly passing, projects are experiencing difficulties with scalability (CryptoKitties overloaded the Ethereum network in 2017). Users still have a poor understanding of why they need these tokens.
To become more popular, crypto items must be part of the gameplay in popular games that are played by millions of people. The fact that such a large publisher as Ubisoft is experimenting with blockchain and NFT gives us hope that this will not have to wait too long. Most likely, users would appreciate the ability to transfer in-game items from one Ubisoft game to another. So, if the publisher is successful, we can very soon see the rapid growth of the new market.
