Zoombies NFT World: A New Beginning

7 min readJul 31, 2021

New beginnings bring new opportunities, and NFTs are just beginning.

At Cardinal Entertainment, we feel that we have reached some level of maturity in our knowledge of the NFT space and Smart Contracts on EVM blockchains. The NFT space has blown up massively, in fact it may be the gateway for the rest of us to get into cryptocurrency, blockchains and have an interest in it.

From 2016 through the 2017 crypto boom and 2018 bust cycle, the wash out of 2019 and the rebuild in 2020, we would sit around and talk about the “killer app”.

That one tool that would cause the tipping point for the mass majority to adopt cryptocurrency as credible currency and more importantly, blockchain as a credible technology.

What would this killer app do ? or how would it empower people ? Which platform would it live on ? I don’t think we have a clear answer for that yet, but I feel that NFTs are opening up a new world of wonder and possibilities that has caught the eye of every demographic.

The rich who understand assets and how to leverage them, to the not-so-rich who understand a lottery win can change their life. Children who value their toys and their first sense of ownership, to a senior who treasures scarcity and the value of unique collections.

NFTs offer an entire Digital Universe of provable unique and truly owned catalog of these wonders. Inheriting all the conveniences of our digital world with none of it’s risk to value. Impossible to duplicate, complete ownership control, NFTs can be admired and be revered by digital world citizens.

Our story and the part we have played in building value in the NFT space is still small, but passionate. We continue to iterate, adapt and evolve with the intention to offer entertainment for our communities.

Universe 1.0 — Ethereum — Cryptoz Cards — didn’t really get off the ground, perhaps 20 NFTs were minted. The cost of Ether fees made the whole model prohibitive. We were gutted.. but we will return to Ethereum or a sister chain. We learned how to integrate into OpenSea NFT market and got our hands dirty by deploying into the real world and learned from that first crucial shipped product.

Universe 2.0 — Binance Smart Chain — The Cryptoz NFT Universe, is a roaring success. Over 150,000 NFTs minted by over 20,000 wallets. Real world value comes with real world risk and lessons. Very exciting, but the universe today while still in a slow expansion phase, will not continue to rapidly expand, as the minting model has some limits in the permanent code ( see the last blog post ). This universe is not dead, or forgotten, and limited minting, just means more scarcity. In the lifecycle, BSC Cryptoz awaits further NFT utility to be developed, while still being very active with NFT market integrations. Keep in mind each chain is also maturing over time, there are more and more creative infrastructure and tools being developed and the nature of NFTs being open standards, can integrate all kinds of future inventions. BSC Cryptoz is here to stay.

Universe 3.0 — Moonriver — Zoombies NFT World is the Cryptoz BSC NFT Universe improved. We took the lessons learned and economic dynamics and have built another iteration.

Universe 4.0 — Moonbeam — Zoombies NFT World has not been written yet. It will be another iteration of the Moonriver universe, taking the lessons learned again and another economic model

Universe 5.0 — Polygon — We are about to enter discussion with Matic to bring Cryptoz to their platform, Stay tuned !

Here are the Cryptoz lessons learned and how we addressed them :

Limited Edition Bug on Free cards — Stopped player from minting last card in the edition limit.
Resolved

Reward Affiliate 20% tokens — Math error resulted in sponsors only receiving 3% of affiliate earnings.
Resolved, and All actions from affiliates now pay the sponsor increasing the incentive to grow your affiliate network early

Minting Boosters from booster credit earnings — Did not earn a token reward.
ZWorld provides a +220 Zoom earnings per booster used

Sponsor link platinum minting — Resulted in high edition count platinum NFTs.
We will be loading a lot more Platinums on launch to provide a linking incentive for your affiliates

High edition commons from boosters — On launch with the rapid minting and 70% common odds, too many commons.
We will launch with many more commons proportionally so as to keep engagement high while seeking new low edition cards

Proportion of rarity on BSC— The Odds of pulling Epic(0.01%), Rare(0.05%), Uncommon(30%) and Common(70%) , resulted in not enough Epic or Rare.
Zoombies has Epic(0.01%), Rare(4.98%), Uncommon(29.9%) and Common(64.9%)

Highly requested features:

Liquidity for CZXP on BSC swaps — With low liquidity, buying or selling would swing the price of czxp too much resulting in market stagnation.
To ensure there is adequate liquidity for the ZOOM token market, CE will pre-mint 1 Billion ZOOM to provision the liquidity.

Limited Edition Boosters- On BSC all booster cards pulled randomly were unlimited edition numbered #1 and increment indefinitely.
Zoombies introduces limited edition boosters. These will be the most scarce of NFTs as they are random and limited. The unlimited editions are still there, it will be random to pull the limited or unlimited edition boosters.

Mass sacrifice — sacrificing 1 NFT at a time is costly in fees and painfully slow on BSC.
In Zoombies you will be able to select up to 256 cards in 1 sacrifice action, creating a savings of approx. 70% on gas fees

Free card minting unlock — On BSC , staking a number of CZXP tokens would unlock Shop NFT minting for higher level cards. The lack of CZXP liquidity means that most players could not mint Shop cards , leaving the CZXP leaders to always gain and continue to gain.
In Zoombies, all NFT minting is available for a cost. The ZOOM token balance will unlock selected FREE NFT minting and reduced cost minting. Thereby allowing later players an opportunity to new shop releases

Release of Shop card types had no schedule — BSC Cryptoz shop card type release times and dates were done manually. This was unfair for different time zones and did not provide people with a schedule for release.
Zoombies provides a release countdown timer per new card type, so the process is more fair and we will attempt to communicate the release schedule to Social media and Telegram

New experimental feature

Zoombies introduces a feature we really wanted to try in previous versions, but could not get the balance right. The functions exist in the Ethereum and the BSC versions, but are not presented in the front end Dapp.

We wanted the concept of a wager system to increase the odds of minting rarity from the boosters. Currently the odds for the rarity is hard coded into the contract.

A burn CZXP/ZOOM and Mint Booster NFT function would present a sliding shift in probability for minting by rarity. Simply put, the more ZOOM you wager ( burn ) the higher your chance to mint an Epic card. This does NOT guarantee you will mint in Epic, and in fact with our testing, you could burn millions of ZOOM and still receive a Common, but overall, you would mint more Epic cards with enough wager burns, that if you did not wager at all.

The feature is highly experimental but if we can get the balance of risk versus reward correct, we think it would be an interesting way to manage the ERC20 ZOOM tokenomics, supply rate.

The Story Continues

The mission and goals are still the same, Cardinal Entertainment want to bring a world of entertainment beyond just collecting NFT art to it’s collectors and players. We are pushing Smart contract utility to new applications while staying true to the standard specifications for ERC20 and ERC721. We want to build communities of NFT collectors, who want to be part of this new and exciting experience and accept the risks you assume with cutting edge technology.

So with that, we invite you to participate in our Free Open Beta for Zoombies.world on the Moonbase alpha testnet, as we prepare for live launch to Moonriver on Kusama ( Q3–2021 ) and Moonbeam on Polkadot ( Q4–2021 ).