Turf is a wonderful shining gift that is beloved by myself and my team as it has given us an opportunity to enter into this world a being of pure creation and delight.
It is also an experimental social platform that we refer to it as a casual-ultraverse. This label is critical to our progress as it describes the nature by which we execute upon our ideas. In the spirit of forging new paths, we’ve tried to understand value generation from a newborn’s perspective.
So how do we best create value for our community? One concept that often comes up is staking. From high and low we hear Geographers call out… “why doesn’t Turf do staking?”, or “wen can I stake my plot?”, or “wen moon? wen stake?”. We went on a ride to discover the answer to these questions and have come to a conclusion.
Turf will probably never do a staking mechanic…
Staking simplistically is a mechanism by which one puts up an asset as collateral and in return receives another asset of some value (typically a $coin). We have seen this practically employed by crypto-coins (“proof of stake”) as well as more recently in p2e games (“staking mechanics”).
Benefits of staking:
For our purposes we will focus on staking in the context of NFT game mechanics.
Staking game mechanics are like a golden $cash train barreling down the tracks at a thousand miles per hour with the rails intersecting a discrete chasm. Opportunistic folks risk jumping on and off the train with bags of $cash. Some speak of the chasm, unseeable from the train’s vantage, while the economy class rides in back toasting their good fortune. What is missing is a sturdy bridge that ensures a future beyond the void.
Most often there is no bridge only handwaving and warm salutations. We have witnessed the majority of staking games pump value by harnessing the speculative power of ambiguity. We do not intend to latch on to this trend.
Yes we want to give back wealth for our community, but no we aren’t prepared to shout, “all aboard the $Turf Express! Toot Toot!”.
Turf does not aspire to be a walled off garden or crypto-silo. It is not a city that exists with its own esoteric language or local coin. Rather we as the trailblazers of this new land hope to promote commerce from one end of the NFT universe to the other. Turf is the dusty outpost somewhere between exits 420 and 69 - we are Mos Eisley.
Our goal is to use established currencies as opposed to a native Turf coin which is susceptible to fluctuating exchange rates that we would be responsible for nurturing.
We want to use market places that already exist instead of creating our own which would have to compete in an ongoing popularity contest.
From a philosophical perspective we are far more fascinated by the implications of value as it directly relates to art than we are to the proxy value of coins.
This is all to get to the ultimate question, “why not just give people Ethereum?”
Instead of focusing our attention upon creating a novel coin we would rather build features that imbue Turf NFTs with real value weaved from the social fibers of our wonderful community.
Tune in next week where we’ll explain how we plan to bridge the discrete chasm by sharing profits and promoting social value.
Michael & Doug with special thanks to SpaceDog for their input