First Time Experience Joining and Gaming with Cyberkongz Play & Kollect
We've discussed Cyberkongz in previous posts here, diving into smart contracts and metaverse concepts, because Cyberkongz is the OG PFP and VX project. So of course, they are also leading the way in pure on-chain gaming.
At a high level for Play & Kollect, holders of the Cyberkongz VX NFT collection play text-based games to collect a variety of tokens and NFTs. Gaming is done on the Polygon network.
How does it really work?
1. Buy a Cyberkongz VX
To play, I needed to acquire 1 Cyberkongz VX NFT. These are currently trading at a ~0.9 eth floor.
2. Deposit the Cyberkongz VX to Polygon
Once we have the NFT, all gaming is done on the Cyberkongz website. Go to the website, and deposit the Cyberkongz VX onto the Polygon network.
Do this by clicking on the 'Jungle' tab in the top menu. On the map, click the 'Polygon Bridge' icon.
This took two transactions ($5 and $20 with gas at 30gwei). At the cost of a traditional PC game, this is not cheap to get started playing. Though at a 1.1 eth entry point ($3.3k), this is no kid’s game! Maybe someday, although gas at today's 30gwei is the lowest we've seen all year. 2021 had us at 100+ gwei for the majority of the year.
Now that my Cyberkongz VX is locked, one step closer to Adventure. Interesting to note, when we look at our OpenSea profile, the VX is still in our wallet but it's technically on the Polygon network now, not Ethereum L1. When I search for my VX in the CyberKongz VX collection, it was no longer owned by me! It's now owned by a shared wallet (0xE6F45376f64e1F568BD1404C155e5fFD2F80F7AD) which owns a huge pile of other Kongz and Kongz accessories. So I own the corresponding VX now in a separate VX Polygon collection. Under the hood, what happened? A new NFT was minted on Polygon. I transferred my mainnet NFT to Cyberkongz. I was airdropped this Polygon representation, which trades at about the same floor price.
3. Build your crew
Head back to the Jungle tab. Click on the MS Kongz ship icon.
Switch to the Polygon network. Create a crew. I tried this right after Depositing my VX and it wasn't available yet. The docs say it will take 7-30 minutes to show up on Polygon. After 25 minutes, the VX has landed.
Add the VX and click Create Crew! Ooh! I have 0 MATIC. Head over to the Cyberkongz Discord, in the polygon-faucet channel, type !faucet, and get 2.2 Polygon. Very convenient. Otherwise, I'd be headed to a dex to swap for MATIC.
Send a DM to tip.cc, and say $withdraw matic.
Type in your Polygon address (same as the ethereum address you had your VX in).
Type all and confirm, boom we've got Matic to play with.
Now we click Create Crew and for only 0.01 Matic we make the transaction. Ok, now compared to our $25 spend on eth transactions, it makes a lot of sense why we'd want to be on the Polygon network.
Our 1 man crew is ready for adventures!
4. Adventure!
We still don't have any banana or fuel rods though. $BANANA we'll never get, unless we buy some. $BANANA is only accumulated, 10 per day, by a genesis kong. The floor for a genesis is a mere 47eth. Lower than I've seen in the past at 100+, but still out of our budget. But we will acquire 1 fuel rod per day our VX is locked up in the Polygon Deposit. It looks to accumulate over 24 hours, so after half a day, we'll have 0.5 fuel rod.
But I’m impatient and I don't want to wait that long, so I'll pick up some $BANANA.
5. Get Banana
This ended up being an entire adventure on Polygon network.
In the name of science, I'll investigate a few routes for crytpo transactions on various networks. This will look at the state of movement of funds around exchanges and the Polygon network.
Eth to $BANANA
Jump to the Discord to grab a link to a DEX from the official links section. I'll use the Uniswap link: https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap?inputCurrency=0x94e496474f1725f1c1824cb5bdb92d7691a4f03a&chain=mainnet.
Swapping .006 eth for 3 $BANANA, for $20 of $BANANA we're looking at a $25 gas fee with gas at ~50gwei. Can we do better?
MATIC to $BANANA
We can swap for $BANANA directly on Polygon, which should be much cheaper. So head over to Quickswap on Polygon https://quickswap.exchange/#/swap?inputCurrency=ETH&outputCurrency=0xbc91347e80886453f3f8bbd6d7ac07c122d87735. But we don’t have enough MATIC. Try buying MATIC on an exchange?
Kraken to buy MATIC
Try to swap, we have 2 MATIC still left over from the faucet earlier. This only gets us 0.5 $BANANA. For this approach, we can try to buy MATIC and exchange that for $BANANA. Using Transak through the 'Buy' button on Metamask, we're looking at $10 in fees. If we instead use a traditional exchange, Kraken, it charges $0.07 in fees for $50 of MATIC, which is about 35 MATIC at the current price of $1.40/MATIC. Much more reasonable.
Now we Withdraw from Kranken, directly to the Polygon address that we’re using for the Cyberkongz adventure. The address is the same as the original layer 1 eth address we used to buy the Cyberkongz VX on Opensea. But interestingly, Kraken charges a 15 MATIC fee minimum to withdraw any MATIC. This is just the state of things on Kraken. Looking at the fee list, even an Ethereum withdrawal will cost you a $10 fee, which is absurd. The network will already hit us, the extra exchange fee is terrible.
Do we have no way to get around this $20 fee to play on Polygon network? This is not sustainable for the masses!
Coinbase to buy MATIC
Looking at Coinbase, it charges only a $0.30 fee to again buy $50 of MATIC. Now for the withdrawal! To pull out 30 or 100 MATIC I'm charged the same fee, 2.5 MATIC. Still not ideal, but for a few bucks, we do have a winner. I pull the MATIC to my ETH address this time from Coinbase.
Bridge MATIC from Ethereum to Polygon
With Coinbase, we were dealing with the ERC-20 MATIC token on the Ethereum network. To use the cheap Polygon bridge, we need to bridge our MATIC to the Polygon network. https://wallet.polygon.technology/bridge Things are getting slightly complicated, but we'll do the work to save the cash!
Unfortunately, the bridge is going to kill us too. We need to make 2 transactions to move our MATIC to Polygon. The first, $5 for it to access our MATIC. Again, we're in a 30 gwei eth network environment here. And to confirm the transfer, another $15. The $20 fee is unavoidable! Amazing. And it's going to take 7-8 minutes to get this done. Fucking crypto today man.
Finally, we're back to Quickswap. I'll swap 18 MATIC for 4 $BANANA, with a 0.1 MATIC fee. Shows how things are very nice once we're here, but getting here was not easy. Now with our fresh 4 $BANANA, we game!
6. Ok really, now, Adventure!
My wallet back at cyberkongz.com shows 4.09 BANANA. I head back to the Jungle tab and click the Portal icon. In the portal, I can now do an Adventure Run by clicking the Approve button. Only a $0.01 fee this time to approve interaction. Slightly annoying side note, I've been using a Trezor wallet which I've had to click hardware approvals on for each of these transactions. Now click Start to start an adventure run. I get a dialog that tells me 'Adventure Run In Progress’.
What is happening at this time? Chainlink? We’ll dive into the contract interaction in a later post. For now, just play.
Adventure is Completed. I found loot! +4 Kongium and +2 EXP.
PLAY AGAIN!
Click Start, I need more Kongium. Perhaps I'm addicted. Less loot this time though. +3 Kongium, +1 EXP. I'm still only a level 1 Kong.
Wrap up
As we've seen it's still quite expensive to get onto the Polygon network. It took $25 to get a Kong bridged over at very low gas prices. However, it seems we shouldn't need to go back and forth much, so some planning ahead can make this quite reasonable. All $BANANA should be bought in one transaction if needed, but it isn't actually needed if you're willing to play entirely using Fuel Rods.
Play and Kollect is currently in its infancy as a simple text-based game. However, it shows the potential for on-chain interaction with NFTs and tokens. It sets up huge potential for further games to be built out around these core concepts. Anyone could build a traditional game that uses $BANANA to gain entry to a new session, derives logic from a Kong VX's EXP and Kong level data stored in Polygon, and pays out Kongium. This project is moving at a rapid pace and I expect to see them continue to push the limits of the NFT and on-chain gaming space.