While still being a mystery to many, so called crypto NFTs (non-fungible Tokens) are finding more and more appreciation in the communities of the crypto collecting and gaming industry.

Fungible Tokens Came First

In the beginning, there has only been Bitcoin: A fungible cryptocurrency where all coins, apart of their transactional history, are identical to another. Therefore, each Bitcoin can be exchanged to any other Bitcoin – they are interchangeable. And thirdly, a Bitcoin is divisible and can be split into smaller parts, just like regular currencies. However, Bitcoin is even further divisible. A Dollar is divisible to two digits after the decimal point whereas Bitcoin can be split to eight digits after the decimal point.

Following Bitcoin’s principles of fungibility, many thousands other cryptocurrencies emerged since Bitcoin’s inception. But in 2015, one project started doing things differently.

Counterparty: Beginning of the Crypto NFT

The Counterparty (XCP) project understood the need of a different kind of token. As a protocol running on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, Counterparty has been enabling the creation of the first crypto NFTs.

By paying a fee of 0.5 XCP (its native cryptocurrency), Counterparty lets its users create an alphabetic, non-divisible token (e.g. GUARDIANCARD), the first kind of a crypto NFT. This gave rise to a unique use case for blockchain: Crypto collectible trading cards.

As a result, a variety of blockchain trading card projects started building on top of Counterparty: Spells of Genesis, Sarutobi Island, RarePepe, Bitcorn and of course Age of Chains, to name a few.

Due to their design, Counterparty based crypto NFTs can be seen as a hybrid. On one side, they are non-divisible, thus resembling the classic design of an NFT. On the other side, they aren’t unique but uniform, making them interchangeable.

Let’s take a look at an example: You want create a digital trading card with a supply of 1000. As each card represents the same trading card, you don’t need it to be unique. Hence, Counterparty serves as a great solution here.

Limits of Counterparty’s Crypto NFTS

However, your goal might be to add more unique information to a token. You might want to number each individual of the 1000 cards to know which the #1, #2, etc. of the 1000 cards is. This will be rather difficult to do over XCP. Yet, for anything else, Counterparty even today is probably the simplest, most secure protocol to issue crypto collectibles, also thanks to using the Bitcoin blockchain.

In fact, even creating truly unique, non-interchangeable crypto collectibles over Counterparty is possible, e.g. by limiting the token’s total supply to 1 during the issuance process. But people were asking for more flexibility and so came the time for Ethereum to shine.

The ERC-721 NFT: Home of Crypto Kitties & Punks

The Ethereum community expanded the existing crypto NFT landscape by creating the ERC-721 token standard. Besides being indivisible, its special feature has been the attachment of meta data directly into the token.

It quickly sparked adoption within Ethereum based projects. In particular, CryptoKitties and CryptoPunks. Using the ERC-721 standard, these projects created unique looking crypto punks and kitties. Each of them exists as an ERC-721 token on the Ethereum blockchain. Their inherent metadata defines their look and makes them unique.

Observing the commercial success of these two projects, a whole wave of crypto collectible projects emerged on top of Ethereum. But it wasn’t too long that the community proposed another token standard for the crypto NFT: ERC-1155.

ERC-1155: Ethereum’s Multi-Send Token

The previous Ethereum token standards required a separate smart contract to be deployed for each token type. The result had been a lot of redundant on-chain code slowing the network down.

As a solution, the community came up with the ERC-1155 token standard. It enables the sending of multiple tokens within a single transaction. These can be both: fungible tokens (such as divisible ingame currencies) and NFTs. Due to this design, it can save a lot of the now present congestion within the Ethereum network.

Counterparty: Inventor of the Multi-Send

Finally, let’s take a look again at Counterparty (XCP) while the majority of the crypto world looks at Ethereum only.

Similar to Ethereum, XCP also does have a multi-send feature for sending both NFTs and fungible tokens in one single transaction. It has been proposed years ago and finally got implemented recently. Hence, it has become extremely easy to send multiple crypto NFTs to a variety of recipients.

All in all, one can say that crypto NFTs aren’t that new of a phenomenon. Years before Ethereum, Counterparty laid the foundation for the first projects to use NFTs and over time, Ethereum built their interpretation of a crypto NFT.

During these days, the hype certainly goes with Ethereum but with similar features in place, the Counterparty community has shown their ability of being able to compete on all levels with Ethereum.

Choosing Counterparty over Ethereum for NFTs

By building on top of Bitcoin, XCP benefits a lot from BTC’s inherently secure design. Conversely, Ethereum offers more general flexibility by sacrificing security.

When we started Age of Chains in 2016, we chose Counterparty for three main reasons:

1. Existing infrastructure: There were already a few crypto collectible projects using the protocol.
2. Ease of use: XCP made it very easy to issue your NFT
3. Security: By using Bitcoin as a backbone blockchain, you also get all of its distinctive security benefits.

As crypto is still in its infancy, the future of the NFT is going to be an interesting one. Certainly, more and more projects from inside the blockchain community, as well as from the outside world are going to adopt the crypto NFT. By design it serves as the perfect tool for creating digital collectibles, now and even more so in the future to come.

If you are curious to learning more about our crypto collectible trading card NFTs, feel free to check out our art gallery.

We’d be happy to hear from you!

Additional information: After having received feedback from the community, it is to say that the first ever NFTs were created through the Namecoin protocol, as early as 2011. They mainly served domain name registration within Namecoin’s decentralized DNS. Namecoin even already supported some kind of multi-send to trade NFTs (names) for its native cryptocurrency (NMC).

Recently, more and more key players of the sports are announcing their plans to release their trading cards as crypto collectibles.

This comes at no surprise, considering that the sports industry served as an attractive collector’s market for a long time. In particular, trading cards have been very sought-after since the very early days.

Before Crypto Collectibles: The Most Expensive Trading Card

In detail, the first company started printing baseball trading cards in the 1860s. The most expensive trading card of all time being the Honus Wagner T-206 from 1909 (see above). To be precise, an anonymous buyer paid a total of $2.1 million for the card in 2016.

Therefore, we can see that trading cards not only have the ability to maintain their value over a long period of time, but also that they can even increase their value considerably.

Art as Crypto Collectibles

Just years ago, the invention of the blockchain sparked the emergence of crypto collectibles. The first application of blockchain trading cards came from the art and video gaming industry.

Age of Chains also is one of the earliest projects to create crypto collectible cards with a focus on art and video gaming. We depicture blockchains as highly advanced characters in an intergalactic setting. See for example Thanatos the Rippler :

Our focus is on high-quality art. You can easily start your own collection of crypto collectible cards by shopping some of our Series 2 cards.

Sports Themed Crypto Collectibles

Another example is the Rare Pepe project. They not only put art on the blockchain, but also the very first sports themed blockchain trading card (JORDANPEPE):

Throughout the the past years, more and more projects focusing on crypto collectibles entered the market. While the majority of these projects were oriented around art and video gaming, a few also centered around sport as a topic.

MLB Crypto Baseball had been the first project to release baseball blockchain collectibles. However, it did not get the mainstream attention of the traditional sports collectors industry.

But 2020 seems to be the start of something big. Just recently, key industry players of the traditional trading card industry announced their plans to release sports themed crypto collectibles on the blockchain.

The most relevant names include Panini, the UFC and Bayern Munich. Panini already auctioned the first sports themed blockchain trading cards for prices of up to more than $40.000. This truly highlights the sheer potential of sports themed crypto collectible cards.

Soccer Clubs Are Jumping On Board

Not long ago, soccer clubs such as the FC Barcelona, Bayer Leverkusen and Juventus Turin declared their plans to release crypto collectibles. So likely we soon will see Cristiano Ronaldo on the blockchain.

In summary, this is just the beginning of a market that just began to evolve. Over time, more people will begin to understand and use the blockchain. Its ability to verifiably limit digital goods of any kind makes it a perfect fit for trading cards of all sorts. The sports industry is a huge and established market for trading cards. It is just natural for that market to merge with the blockchain space in order to produce crypto collectible cards.

With Age of Chains, we also are creating blockchain trading cards. If you are into crypto collectibles, why not start your own Age of Chains card collection?

Together, we can keep the galaxy decentralized!

Cosmic Hugs
Kilian Kunst
CEO & Founder

Today we launched the world’s most intergalactic blockchain trading card shop on our website.

Truly built on the Bitcoin blockchain, we are focusing on creating high quality crypto collectibles with finest artworks since 2016. As a result, we already were able to secure the Crypto Games Conference Choice Award 2018 in Minsk.

Build Your Collection of Blockchain Trading Cards

Above all, opening of our intergalactic trading card shop grants supporters the opportunity to build their own collection of futuristic blockchain cards. We are using the funds obtained to follow our vision of creating a blockchain trading card video game, wherein collectors will be able to use their cards to play.

Our vision for Age of Chains is to enable the global paradigm shift towards decentralization. Consequently, the game serves to experience the benefits and beauty of blockchain technology in our world.

The launch of the shop allows us to ignite the fundraising process in collaboration with our community. We put a lot of work in the creation of each single Age of Chains card to conform to the high-quality standard of our art and project.”

At the moment, the shop offers a selection of seven different blockchain trading cards. In detail, their prices range from 0.1€ to 15€ per card, depending on their scarcity and future capabilities within the game.

The rarest and latest of the available Series 2 cards right now is Ascendency. It comes as an animated blockchain card and a circulating supply of 550 cards (total supply: 1000 cards).

Crypto Collectibles Are The Future

The trading card industry is changing at a rapid speed. Specifically, large traditional trading card players like Panini have been entering the crypto collectibles market. Certainly, we are just at the beginning of a paradigm shift in which we have established a position as supplier of superb blockchain trading cards.”

So far, supporters of the project have purchased more than 30.000 Age of Chains trading cards. Finally, the shop opening also has been featured on Cryptoandgamers.com

Most importantly, thank you for your support. You are the ones making this project possible!

Cosmic Hugs,
Kilian Kunst
CEO & Founder

Since the inception of Age of Chains in November 2016, our vision to create an intergalactic video game with blockchain trading cards, designed to bring peace and harmony to our world, has been guiding us through the unknown terrain that we entered. At that time, blockchain wasn’t a mainstream topic yet and we intuitively worked our way towards realizing our vision.

During 2017, mainstream attention for the crypto space began to rise and as predicted, more and more people began to understand the sheer possibilities of this revolutionary technology for our society & planet as a whole.

However, at that time, a lot of malicious actors began to jump on the hype tain, only to see an opportunity to become rich fast. Plenty of ICO projects popped up from the ether and while a selected few had their eligibility, the only intention of the majority of the projects was to profit from the losses of others. The peak and turning point of this ICO wave came with the boom and bust of pyramid-schemes like BitConnect in January 2018.

At that time I was presenting Age of Chains as a speaker at the Rare Digital Art Festival in NYC. Being the first time for me to visit this incredible city, it has been an extreme honor to be presenting our project here, in front of such an amazing crowd.

A day after the conference though, I already was taking the flight to San Francisco to be with my father who peacefully transitioned to the upper world soon after. The time around this event was not spent on thinking about blockchain or cryptocurrencies. My only goal had been to travel into nature and connect with the grand spirit of our universe to ask for peace and energy for my father.

After this phase, the aftermath of the preceding ICO wave had become more apparent. The vastness of ICO scams in the industry caused a lot of unpredictability about how strong regulators around the globe are going to oppose the blockchain space. This uncertainty had been quite disencouraging. Therefore, prior to creating further card sales, we first concentrated on getting the accounting side of the project on solid feet.

Simultaenously, we presented our project at various blockchain conferences across the world. First and foremost at the Crypto Games Conference in Minsk, where we connected with a great variety of likeminded people and secured the Conference Choice Award.

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Now, in 2020, adoption of blockchain technology has been further accelerating and luckily, the legal institutions of our world mostly have taken a thoughtful approach towards the legality of blockchain based tokens.

More motivated than ever before, we now are back to delivering you the epic blockchain trading card game that Age of Chains thought to be. While our vision remains the same, the past showed us that way more resources in time and funds are needed in order to make it happen. As Age of Chains is a project that by heart, we do not mind how steep or long the way is. What counts are the steps that we undertake in order to achieve our vision.

While Age of Chains as a video game remains our end-vision, we have decided to expand our work upon a physical Age of Chains game as this will enable us a much faster completion while still being able to follow our quality standards.

As a first step, we are creating more wax sealed paper wallets to enable physical production of high quality Age of Chains blockchain trading cards and booster packs. We are looking to use the sale of digital and physical Age of Chains trading cards and collectibles to gather the needed resources to bring the project’s vision to full fruition.

Multiple big industry players now begin to understand the relevance of blockchain trading cards, such as Panini, FC Barcelona, Juventus Turin, AS Roma and the UFC. They all announced to enter the sought after blockchain trading card market.

Since 2016, Age of Chains has positioned itself in this space and we have a great future ahead. Follow us along on our mission to keep the galaxy decentralized!

Cosmic Hugs,
Kilian Kunst
CEO & Founder