Ethereum-based Gods Unchained Card Sells For $60,000 Setting Records

Move over CryptoKitties and watch your back Magic the Gathering. A card from the upcoming Gods Unchained, which uses Ethereum’s network to record the ownership of cards, just sold for $60,000.^[1][2]

$60,000 (or more specifically 137.8 ETH in early August, when ETH was around $425, which would make 137.8 ETH worth about $60k) means this purchase almost beat out the old record for the most money ever paid for a trading card game card.

The previous record was $27,000 for a Magic the Gathering Black Lotus. When the bid for the Gods Unchained card went up it was more than double that record! However, before the auction for the card closed the $60k record was retaken by another Black Lotus someone paid $87,000 for.

…moral of the story being, don’t underestimate collectables and their fans, be we talking about crypto or trading card games. 😀

That covered, the price tag isn’t the most interesting part of the story. The most interesting part is the potential of Gods Unchained and its relationship with Ethereum.

Gods Unchained by Fuel Games hasn’t launched yet, but it is an interesting project by one of the top Dapp developers (other projects include the relatively popular Etherbots).

The game is using the Ethereum network (its smart contracts, blockchain, etc) to record the ownership of cards (which will be non-fungible ERC-721 tokens, i.e. tokens that can’t be broken into fractions like money and are thus suited for things like virtual cards), but the developers are developing the game itself off-chain.

This will allow card ownership and trading to benefit from a trustless and secure system of ownership while allowing gameplay to avoid technical issues that are unfortunately present with the current Ethereum build (Ethereum is still being upgraded, and until it solves some scaling issues, software that runs entirely on the platform can be subject to performance issues).

The concept behind the game is cool, and specifically the $60,000 price tag of the card is rather impressive given that the game hasn’t even launched yet.

So will Gods Unchained be the new Killer Ethereum DApp everyone is waiting for? That sort of depends on how you define DApp, as Gods Unchained is really just a quasi DApp (only using crypto tech for part of the whole package). Will this bring a bunch of new users into the Ethereum network? I assume the answer to that is yes considering the way things are going.

For now this serves as another reminder as to why 1. Ethereum is still important, 2. how the Ethereum user-base has the potential to grow, and 3. why scaling issues can’t be solved soon enough.

FACT: According to CoinDesk, “Fuel Games has sold over 4,600 ether worth of cards for the game, worth around $1.3 million at the time of writing [August 22nd, 2018].”

1. A Crypto Card Game Is Testing Magic’s Records – And It Hasn’t Even Launched. CoinDesk.com.
2. An ethereum asset is now the 2nd most valuable TCG card in the world. HackerNoon.com.