Altura Integrating Chainlink VRF to Power Provably Random Loot Boxes
Fortnite, Overwatch, Call of Duty, Fifa, and League of Legends are just a few examples of games that utilize loot boxes. Loot boxes are a significant part of many video games. They provide users with the ability to unlock their favorite in-game items and provide game developers with an excellent source of revenue.
As part of Altura’s mission to represent loot boxes as smart NFTs, we’re excited to announce that Altura will integrate Chainlink VRF (Verifiable Random Function) to achieve complete transparency and unbiasedness in determining the contents of on-chain loot boxes. Chainlink VRF will provide Altura smart NFTs with a provably fair and tamper-proof source of randomness used to determine which NFT is dropped from the loot box.
Loot boxes on the blockchain
Game developers currently have complete control over their loot boxes and don’t provide users with the ability to verify the legitimacy of the loot boxes due to the centralized nature of traditional game development. This prevents users from being able to verify that the odds of receiving certain items from loot boxes are in accordance with what is promised in-game. Altura wants to move loot boxes to the blockchain by providing developers with a decentralized and verifiable way of creating loot boxes for their video games that drop gaming NFTs.
Altura provides game developers with the ability to create NFTs that represent in-game items, which can be seamlessly integrated in-game using APIs and SDKs. These NFTs may be introduced into the economy through loot boxes. Loot boxes on Altura require the user to pay a fee determined by the game developer to unlock the loot boxes. Similarly, traditional video games require the user to purchase the loot box or the key necessary to open a loot box. After the fee is paid, an in-game item in the form of an NFT will be randomly selected and awarded to the user.
The issue of Fairness and Transparency
With traditional loot boxes, there is no guarantee that the system will allocate rewards in a fair manner. Game developers may skew the results of loot box drops to maximize revenue and may outright lie to their users. Additionally, users have no way of guaranteeing that loot box drops are genuinely random, and thus are forced to blindly trust that the process is legitimate and fair, which may not always be the case.
Gamers are becoming frustrated with the lack of transparency surrounding loot boxes. They often feel that loot boxes may be rigged and designed to maximize revenue rather than providing gamers with a legitimate loot box experience. Additionally, game developers don’t always provide users with the odds of receiving each in-game item, leaving their users in the dark and making it hard to verify an item’s rarity value. These issues can be addressed and overcome by using verifiable, transparent, and decentralized smart contracts.
Verifiable Randomness provided by Chainlink
Selecting a random NFT to be awarded to the user in a verifiable and tamper-proof way requires the use of a verifiable random number function (VRF). Chainlink provides just that. Altura will integrate Chainlink VRF to generate and supply a verifiable random number to the loot box smart contracts, which is used to select the NFT awarded to the user. In addition to the random number, Chainlink VRF generates a verifiable cryptographic proof to prove the tamper-proof integrity of the VRF process. This technology ensures that the NFT selected cannot be tampered with or predicted by anyone, including Altura, Chainlink, players, and the game developers.
According to Altura Founder & Lead Developer Majd Hailat, “Chainlink is the leading oracle solution in the blockchain space and has proven to provide trustworthy security-focused oracle solutions. Altura is immensely excited to work with Chainlink to integrate true, verifiable randomness into Altura’s secure smart contracts to create tamper-proof loot boxes. Ultimately, this will bring unprecedented transparency and fairness to loot boxes within games.”
Additionally, Altura plans to utilize other Chainlink oracle solutions, such as Chainlink Price Feeds, to develop smart NFTs. Smart NFTs are NFTs with dynamic properties that may be programmed to change based on external, uncontrollable conditions, such as the price of Bitcoin or the occurrence of a real-world event. Chainlink makes oracle-based smart NFTs possible in a secure, tamper-proof, and universally connected way.
As of right now, the Altura testnet is live and can be used to buy, sell, and mint NFTs. Loot boxes will be added to the marketplace a couple of weeks after the launch of the mainnet.
About Chainlink
Chainlink is the industry standard oracle network for powering hybrid smart contracts. Chainlink Decentralized Oracle Networks provide developers with the largest collection of high-quality data sources and secure off-chain computations to expand the capabilities of smart contracts on any blockchain. Managed by a global, decentralized community, Chainlink currently secures billions of dollars in value for smart contracts across decentralized finance (DeFi), insurance, gaming, and other major industries.
Chainlink is trusted by hundreds of organizations, from global enterprises to projects at the forefront of the blockchain economy, to deliver definitive truth via secure, reliable oracle networks. To learn more about Chainlink, visit chain.link, subscribe to the Chainlink newsletter, and follow @chainlink on Twitter. To understand the full vision of the Chainlink Network, read the Chainlink 2.0 whitepaper.
Solutions | Docs | Discord | Reddit | YouTube | Telegram | GitHub
About Altura
Altura is a smart contract platform that allows game developers to mint, distribute and transact Smart NFTs representing in-game items. Smart NFTs are NFTs with dynamic properties that can change based on certain conditions. Smart NFTs are the next step to making decentralized in-game items mainstream and offer a massive range of potential opportunities that are not possible with traditional NFTs. We want to create an easy-to-use interface and API for creating Smart NFTs, an open marketplace for transacting NFTs using the Altura token, and we want to introduce truly random smart loot boxes to the blockchain.
Discord | Twitter | Telegram | GitHub | Whitepaper
