Taking another step forward, Pontem is entering the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in an exciting partnership with PIP NFT Playing Cards (PIP Cards). Together, Pontem and PIPS will make cross-chain gaming available to crypto users.

PIPCards will launch 5,000 unique PFPs and decks of cards on Moonriver, a smart contract platform on the Kusama blockchain. Each PFP and deck of cards has its own on-chain rarity attributes , which allows the community to build games on top of the NFTs.

Pontem will be building the first game on top of the PIP platform by leveraging Moonriver NFTs executing game logic on the Move VM on their own network. To celebrate this integration, 1,000 mint passes have been reserved for the Pontem community, which users can qualify for by being pre-registered for the Pontem Kusama crowdloan.

This is a thrilling partnership for Pontem as the PIP NFTs will be integrated into other DeFi apps that the Pontem team builds in the future, innovating on the application of NFTs and DeFi. Possible innovations with NFTs include liquidity incentive multipliers and future airdrops.

You can also reserve up to 3 mint passes today by joining their whitelist on the PIPs Discord here and entering your MOVR/ETH Address. Minting will go live on Saturday Jan 29 6:22pm UTC (1:22pm EST)  with early access for those joining the whitelist so make sure to stay tuned on their Discord for the Mint URL.

In order to mint a deck you will need a total of 4.44 MOVR - first 2.22 for a mint pass (card back) which will later reveal your PFP champion card on Feb 22 and then another 2.22 for minting the deck of 54 cards on March 22.

About PIP Cards

PIP Cards is an NFT collective of randomly generated NFT playing cards for on-chain gaming. NFT holders can generate entire decks of custom cards to be used cross-chain. PIP NFTs have a series of more than 10 traits that determine how rare it is, some unique to the individual card, some shared across the deck. Card holders can trade their cards or use them in online games.

What Makes Pip Cards Unique?

To our knowledge, PIPs is the first project with the goal of creating traditional playing cards for use in cross-chain gaming throughout the metaverse. While there are many PFP or card-related NFT projects, PIPs has the goal of both utility and art in the creation of the project.

Perhaps most unique is their quest to create the building blocks for a spectrum of card games complete with programmatic art where distinct traits can be leveraged in gaming. Because these traits can play key roles/outcomes in games, it was important to construct the project with the most impartial and fair mechanics possible — we call this “Fairity” or (a fair rarity).

Instead of pre-determining rare cards upfront, we wanted to post-generate the rarity of each PIP so even the core team wouldn’t be able to “stack the deck” to get a rare card/deck. PIPs does this by leveraging an oracle where we bring in a VRF (verifiable random function) to the minting process. Think of this as "rolling the dice." PIPs calls this randomness the "Genesis Seed," a 32-byte word that looks similar to a wallet's public address. The Genesis Seed is essentially the PIP's DNA. Thus, each PIP's rarity is based on probability and no one — not even the project team — will have any idea of what each card will look like until they are minted.

How is this possible? Well, a custom rendering engine takes the Genesis Seed as input and outputs a unique Champion Court card (PIP) in a deterministic way parsing it to determine the card value (K, Q, J, Ace, Joker), card suit (spade, diamond, heart, club), color scheme, and card “parts” :

1. Color
2. Suit
3. Race
4. Head
5. Body
6. Weapon
7. Crown
8. Hair
9. Effects (card glam)
10. Arms
11. Belts
12. Etc...
    

For each of the parts, PIPs also checks for four levels or categories of rarity. They first check if the Genesis Seed "rolled" an ultra-rare part (currently 1 in 100). If the roll is missed, then they check if it is a "rare" part (currently 1 in 25), then "uncommon" (currently 1 in 5). If all of these rolls are “missed” then a "common" part is integrated.

As an example let's say they are checking for which head you will get and we have already determined that you have a King of Spades. We first check for an "ultra-rare" roll of the dice (determined by your Genesis Seed). If it is a hit, then we will pick one of many "ultra-rare" heads for a king. There is more than one!

A PIP’s total rarity value will be the aggregate rarity values of each part. e.g. an ultra-rare head = 100 (1 in 100 chances), a rare arm = 25 (1 in 25 chances), an uncommon sword = 5 (1 in 5 chances), and a common crown = 1, would have a rarity score of 131.

The total value of all these parts will vary from card to card.

About Pontem

Pontem is building a bridge to connect the Diem Blockchain to the decentralized ecosystem of public permissionless blockchains like Ethereum via Polkadot. This will expose Facebook’s 2.7 billion users to any crypto use-case, from decentralized finance (DeFi) to non-fungible tokens (NFTs). With Pontem Network and development platform, users can build and test apps on Polkadot and other popular blockchains before migrating their products to the Diem Blockchain.