Origin Story
Around this time last year, I was taking note of the NFT happening on the Ethereum Blockchain. I was unfamiliar with crypto in general and had only bought Bitcoin and Ethereum for a short amount of time in 2018 before selling. A coworker of made me aware of smart contracts and so my descent down the rabbit hole began.
After studying up on how smart contracts work and why Bitcoin is essentially a polluting dinosaur, I thought that Ethereum would eventually overtake it. This feeling quickly dissipated after using it and seeing how expensive and slow it was. I began looking into Alt Coins such as Cardano before nestling into Algorand, the blockchain I still use to this day.
The path into Algorand was a long and windy, but it checked all of the boxes. First it was good for the environment. In 2021, Algorand became Carbon Negative. The fees are super cheap (0.001A/tx), it is fast (<4 second finality), and it is secure. Happy with the underlying technology, I started an experiment, which was my first project: The United States of Algorand.
Like most of you, I was thinking to myself what is the point of owning a jpeg I could just copy and paste. I wanted to play games on Ethereum, but I didn’t want to pay hundreds for the NFT and hundreds for the gas fees. In response, I decided to create my own series with my own set of rules.
USAlgo was simple: Each weekday I would post an NFT card of a different State and the quantity was set to the number of Electoral College votes each State had. I wanted to create a series with a sense of commonality, yet create it where some were scarcer than others and the Electoral College turned out to be a perfect medium. Not having a clue of what to charge, nor wanting to charge for what was essentially an experiment, I set up a daily auction format where all the bids started at 0 Algo. The highest bids took precedence over, but every card could have been distributed for free. I kept this format up for over the course of the series, and by the end of the series I had made over 2,400 Algo. This is when I knew that this place was for real.
At the time, I had no idea how early I was in the space, but upon series end, I knew that I wanted to help create a game on the blockchain. Algorand provides the perfect medium for blockchain games due to it’s speed, low costs, and near instant finality. Each transaction could be mapped out to prove authenticity and each NFT could act as an individualized game token. Imagine playing a game, making the protagonist better, then being able to sell that protagonist? This is only the cusp of how blockchain can revolutionized the gaming industry. I was hooked.
I first got started with game making on the PHX Server where I was invited by the creator to host the USAlgo Elections which was a grand Random Number Generated Giveaway to reward holders for giving me the chance. Over the course of helping add utility to low cost, easily accessible NFTs on Algorand, I teamed up with three more like minded individuals, and it is where I met Thurstobertay.
At this time Thurstobertay was only getting started with her first series STUPIDHORSE. Wanting to add a gaming element, we thought it would be funny to create a dice generated race where the horses can move forwards and backwards. I figured that this could be done in an Excel Spreadsheet and the first gamified Avatar Series on Algorand was born. Each week, four lucky STUPIDHORSEs would face off in an epic battle of titans where one would come out on top and win that week’s host of prizes.
Seeing the way that an individualized game token can directly work as a giveaway medium, we wanted to continue pushing the limits. The next step was to create a race where anyone can race their horses. By September we had commissions out on a discord racing bot. In the meantime STUPIDHORSE came to a close in October. Trying to figure out what to do as a follow-up, one faithful evening Thurstober sent me a 25x25 pixel horse and tinyhorse was born.
