Collaborative DeFi game Wonder Game has launched its presale, marking a major step forward for ICON and its interoperable future.
As of writing this post, Wonder Game has minted 1,521 of 10,000 NFTs. And that’s in just over two hours.
According to Wonder Game’s Twitter feed, the game sold 10% of the collection in the first 40 minutes, with over 300 transactions via ICON Bridge. This represents one of the blockchain space’s first examples of interchain minting, if not the first.
ICON Twitter extraordinaire digitaldave.eth posted a screenshot from his mint:
Apparently, there’s a bridging cost of 0.25 ICX.
Wonder Game has been posting and retweeting images of some of the newly minted NFTs. The art is really quite lovely.
ICON Bridge is an early iteration of ICON’s cutting-edge interoperability product, BTP.
Basically, it does everything BTP is supposed to do, minus the trustless mechanism that verifies cross-chain transactions. For the time being, ICON will serve as the sole Relay operator that will pass messages and verify transactions between chains while the team works to resolve the high gas fee issue that has plagued the trustless mechanism.
Anyway, Wonder Game is using ICON Bridge to allow users to mint NFTs on the Harmony blockchain using ICX.
And if Twitter is anything to go by, the experience so far has been “smooth.”
As we’ve reported before, however, the Wonder Game presale does NOT represent the “launch” of ICON Bridge. For that, we need to wait until the Nexus frontend is complete, and perhaps some more testing.
Nevertheless, the presale gives the ICON team a valuable real-world use case from which to gather critical data they can use to perfect both ICON Bridge and the full-featured BTP.
Another thing to remember is that this is only the beginning for Wonder Game. The ICON Foundation’s Elise Shin explained:
“Each new chapter with distinct gameplay will debut on a different blockchain, which means that as the Wonder Game metaverse expands, the demand for Wonder Game NFTs will also grow–beyond blockchain borders!”
We know that ICON Bridge is integrating Harmony and BSC first, and Ethereum shortly after. The Ethereum integration is particularly intriguing. Though most NFTs and NFT marketplaces operate on Ethereum, minting on ETH has suffered from high gas fees, so an interoperability solution like ICON Bridge or BTP would seemingly present opportunities.
