Rediscovering the EverDragons, the First Cross-Chain NFTs

With a group of friends and crypto archeologists, digging into the early history of Ethereum NFTs we discovered the EverDragons, minted in June 2018.

The EverDragons are the first example of cross-chain NFTs (Ethereum, POA, Tron) and among the first to introduce games with NFTs. They are an incredible piece of history and technology and we're about to make them even better!

In the rest of this article I'm going to describe why we think the EverDragons have such historical importance and what we're doing, in collaboration with the original team, to restore and continue the project.

A Brief History of NFTs

If you're reading this article you probably know more about the history of NFTs than me, and I definitely don't want to start a war around who's been the first to do what, but I think it's important to discuss a few temporal references to contextualize the EverDragons.

The first example of NFTs on Ethereum were the CryptoPunks, back in 2017. Technically speaking they weren't ERC721 because the standard didn't exist yet, but they behaved like NFTs. Later that year, the CryptoKitties were born, and are widely accepted as the first ERC721 NFTs.

What came next? Nobody agrees. Articles about the history of NFTs are blurry. They mention the 2019 crypto winter, glow about the incredible ecosystem we have today, and conclude with the most expensive NFT sold at the time of writing. So… nothing in 2018!? Suddenly we had a standard for NFTs but no innovation that year!? Mmm...

But before we talk about 2018, let's mention what's happening on the different blockchains. There are multiple kinds of NFTs, not just from an artistic perspective, but from a technical one. The most popular NFTs are on Ethereum (ERC721 or sometimes ERC1155). However, the drawback of Ethereum today is the high transaction fees. It's not uncommon to pay more than $200 in fees alone to buy an NFT on Ethereum! As other blockchains develop, so do NFTs and marketplaces on these chains with lower gas fees, for example popular choices today are Polygon, Tezos, and Solana (and probably more, apologies if I didn't mention your favorite one.)

It's also worth noting that any given NFT collection is typically minted and exchanged on a single blockchain. But in parallel to NFTs, the blockchain technology is evolving with more and more cross-chain applications, that is to say applications that spawn across different blockchains. That means that in the near future, we'll likely see a flourishing of cross-chain NFTs, or NFTs that you can transition from one chain to another. For example, you could buy an NFT on Ethereum or Polygon and then move it or “bridge it” to Solana to play a game.

Now that we’ve covered early 2017 NFT projects, NFTs on different blockchains, and cross-chain NFTs, it's time to talk about 2018 and the EverDragons.

The Original EverDragons

As we mentioned at the very beginning, the EverDragons were the first example of cross-chain NFTs, the first NFTs on the Tron blockchain, minted in December 2018, and among the first to introduce games with NFTs. As if all of that is not cool enough, they're dragons!

They’re a form of generative art and were minted uniformly at random. They were never issued with the intent of being collectibles, but as tokens to participate in games and to explore the capabilities of different blockchains.

For example, dragons could join a "race" (on Ethereum) by betting on the price of different cryptocurrencies (e.g., BTC vs ETH vs...); after one hour a coinmarket cap oracle would check the difference in price of every coin, and the winning dragon would collect a price. This is an early example of a prediction market you could play by owning a NFT, back in 2018!

And there's more. As Ethereum is relatively slow and can get rather expensive, it's not suited for faster on-chain applications. This is where cross-chain NFTs come in. An EverDragon could be moved to a different chain to participate in different games. For example you could move your dragon to the Tron chain and play four in a row, in real time. Or Goldmine, the game that in the first week of January 2019 had more transactions than all the other games on Tron combined.

In summary, the EverDragons were a one of a kind NFT, not focused on being collectibles but designed to explore blockchain capabilities through games. Unfortunately, the 2019 crypto winter phased out the project and the team moved on to different things.

Discovery and Restoration

Discovering the EverDragons has been one surprise after another. We knew they were nearly mystical NFTs that could move across chains, but that was about it. On OpenSea the dragons no longer even had an image, the bridge for moving them cross-chain was down, and the community practically dead.

We reached out to the original team to see if they had any interest in reviving the project. In the weeks that followed we learned more about the original design, the games briefly described above, the structure of the dragons' DNA, and the generative art process. We really started to appreciate the quality and hard work that went into making the original EverDragons!

At this point, one thing became clear: the EverDragons had to be restored. We agreed to collaborate and began brainstorming ideas and weight in our time commitment and costs. Most importantly, we wanted to find a solution that would preserve the integrity of the original project.

Our first action as a newly formed team has been to work with the original team to restore the images of the dragons, so you can now appreciate them all on OpenSea. Each dragon has 7 layers (body, eyes, head, horns, tail, legs, and wings), an element (fire, air, water, and earth) and a color. There are 24 variations for each layer, leading to over 4.5B different combinations, and 10 color palettes for each element, that give the dragons an incredibly polished final touch.

And since they are randomly minted, there are only 1332 unique EverDragons in circulation (across Ethereum, POA, and Tron). By analyzing the DNA, we can see what we'd expect from a uniformly random generation: each type of head, body, eyes, etc. appears more or less in 1/24 of the dragons, so in about 70 of them. There's no real element of rarity, even though if you look at the images, certain elements like gold chains or ornaments on the horns stand out.

In recent years, the explosion of NFTs has shown us how people think about collectibles on the blockchain, what they want to see and own, the most appreciated rarity attributes, etc. All the basic ingredients that make for a great collectible were part of the EverDragons since the beginning. They simply weren't promoted as such.

This is what convinced us to launch a new set of EverDragons that we call -with great imagination- EverDragons2, that are designed to be collectible. We think this is a unique opportunity to help the community rediscover an early piece of blockchain history, and to finance the operations and restore and further the original project of a truly cross-chain NFT.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a new team has aimed to revive a dormant NFT project. We're working very closely with the original team and taking precautions to preserve the integrity of the original project. In a future article I’ll describe the EverDragons2 in detail... stay tuned!

P.S: this is my cat dressed up as an EverDragon 🙃😍

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