Background

In this short article, we will briefly introduce the motivation of Bitfuture and what it is.

Bitfuture is inspired by the recently-popular NFT collectibles (i.e. CryptoPunks). Normally, these projects will release a fixed number of ERC-721 tokens for users to buy. Each token is associated with one piece of art work, either an image, an audio or a video clip such that each token is unique from each other. While no two NFT tokens are the same, there are some art works may worth more than others in the same collectible, due to for example some rare properties of the works.

Motivation

In order to have some fun part sell as much as their ERC721 tokens, many NFT projects choose to not reveal the artworks associated when users buy tokens, but after a certain time or majority tokens have been sold, developers of the project will reveal the art works backed by tokens. However, this may induce the unfairness: developers of the project can in fact know which tokenId is associated with more valuable artworks, even they can manipulate the mapping between tokens and artworks after the sale.

To have a fair distribution of artworks to token holders, some projects introduce a on-chain random mechanism. That is, artworks are assigned randomly to token holders when they choose to reveal. Here comes our Bitfuture concept, Bitfuture is triggered by this idea and going one step further. After this one-time random distribution, Bitfuture has the voting mechanism which can trigger the next random assignment under certain conditions.

Core concept

As said above, one-time random assignment is to ensure a fair distributions (like a blindbox). To have higher level of fairness and get token holders involved in this distribution, Bitfuture introduce the voting mechanism. Any token holders can vote to contribute to the petition of another random assignment. If the total number of votes cast has reached some threshold, another random assignment is automatically triggered. And each token holder will be reassigned a new artwork for every token they hold randomly.

Note the happening of following random redistribution is determined by the whole community, if more tokens have voted to ask for a assignment, it will then happen. And there is no guarantee if he/she will get a rarer works or not. And once one assignment is triggered and finished, the next round of voting can be opened immediately.

However, in practice, there may be unlimited reassignments triggered by the voting mechanism if there's zero cost to vote. To help shape a healthy community and fix artworks of token holders, it is recommended to pay a cost in order to vote and the cost can increase in later rounds. With the cost increasing over the voting rounds, there'll be some point when no enough votes can be accumulated such that no redistribution can happen, therefore we can say artworks of token holders are finally fixed.

At this point, we deem Bitfuture not a traditional NFT tokens nor fungible tokens: it is the superposition of both. At first, even though an artwork is associated, due to the voting and redistribution mechanism, each token in fact represents a possibility of being reassigned a new artwork randomly. From this point of view, every tokens carry the same possibilities. However, with more voting rounds executed and the cost goes higher, the probability of another redistribution is declining. If the probility is very low, then artworks are more or less fixed, which in this case Bitfuture tokens eventually are behaving like normal NFT tokens.

Implementation

To help better understand the Bitfuture concept, the first Bitfuture project has been launched to further illustrate the concept: BitPandas.

In this project, except the voting and reassignment machanism mentioned above, another feature is added. The total number of artworks is deliberately larger than the number of total tokens. With this design, the reassignment can be more interesting since it can mint totally new artworks that are not revealed before.

Future

With this new concept proposed, we are planning to continue to explore more possibilities of Bitfuture and also applications built in the Block Chain technology. We believe the future of Bitfuture!

If you have any questions or thoughts, please feel free stop by our twitter and discord to join the community!