What is CryptoEmoji?

Complexity through token mining and crafting

At first sight, CryptoEmoji is just another CryptoKitties clone; one that swaps cats for emojis. But there’s a lot more complexity in this simple blockchain game than meets the eye.

Of course, the core of the experience are the emojis. Based on the unicode standard, these graphical items are ERC-721 tokens. At time of writing, 240 have been released.

When emojis are traded, the seller and the buyer both receive an ERC-20 Crafting Token

Neatly, each can also store 32 bytes of information so if you own one, you can give it a clever name or label.

More importantly, when these emojis are traded, they perform a mining mechanic, with the seller and the buyer both receiving an ERC-20 Crafting Token, which graphically looks the same as its ERC-721 source but can be combined with other Crafting Tokens to create a ‘story’, each of which is an ERC-721 token.

The price of each story is inherited from its parents and once a story is created, each Crafting Token used is consumed. Similarly, once a story combination has been crafted, no other player can create it again, even if they have the appropriate tokens.

A crafty mechanic

Both emojis and stories can be bought and sold on the game’s marketplace for ETH, with the price rising each time they’re bought. Prices double up to .05 ETH, then increase by 1.3x to 0.5, when the multipler drops to 1.15x.

Another small but important point is 5% of each transaction is held by the smart contract to ensure players don’t inflate a token’s value by self trading.

CryptoEmoji contains a strong in-game loop encouraging transactions

The most significant aspect of CryptoEmoji, however, is provided by the Crafting Token.

Because both the seller and buyer get a token for each transaction and because they are consumed making stories, there’s a strong in-game loop encouraging transactions.

And because making stories and labelling them allows players to express their creativity in a more open way that happens with, say, the breeding mechanic of CryptoKitties, CryptoEmoji is more open to mass market players.

The game’s developer Lucid Sight also argues the Crafting Tokens bring additional agency to the game, as they are divisible up to 8 decimals place (like Bitcoin) and can be traded, sold or gifted as well as potentially used in any other ERC-20 app. In this way, it say they are a real universal digital collectible.

Read more about Lucid Sight’s approach to blockchain gaming in our interview with COO Octavio Ferrera

Source CryptoEmoji white paper

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