What is Wolf Game?
Wolf Game is a new GameFi concept on the Ethereum blockchain that’s been taking the community by storm, generating over $52 million within the first five days alone, making it the most traded NFT game behind Axie Infinity and The Sandbox.
What sets them apart from other NFT staking projects is their unique twist to the passive income model, introducing what their whitepaper calls “protocol-level risk”. Players’ in-game decisions will directly impact their staking rewards and even the fate of their NFT itself – because the NFTs have the power to steal tokens from other players’ wallets.
Here’s how it works:
Of the 10,000 NFTs in the collection, 90% are Sheep and 10% are Wolves.
- Sheep can be staked in the Barn to earn $WOOL tokens at a rate of 10k $WOOL per day.
- Players can shear their sheep to harvest $WOOL at any time, but this incurs a 20% tax payable to the Wolves.
- If Players want to take all their $WOOL, they could unstake their sheep – but there’s a 50% chance for all the $WOOL to be stolen by the Wolves.
Essentially, the Sheep pay tribute to the Wolves, in exchange for the Barn remaining a safe zone. But any Sheep that leaves the barn is fair game. Wolves also have a 10% chance of stealing newly-bred sheep or wolves, resulting in the NFT going to a random wolf owner instead of the player who spent $WOOL to mint it.
Trouble on the Farm
Despite Wolf Game’s initial success, the developers had to pause staking because a bug was found in some of their code that provided a potential exploit. Players were able to claim excess $WOOL, disrupting the game’s mechanics and calling fairness into question.
To the developers’ credit, they’ve publicly disclosed the bug, introduced a bug bounty system, and announced plans for a third-party audit of the code. Due to the immutability of the blockchain, the devs have had to recreate the entire game from scratch and issue entirely new tokens.
Wolf Game’s hiccup has highlighted a key challenge in the development of blockchain games. It’s extremely difficult to deploy a program that is entirely bug-free from day one, especially as the complexity of the game increases. If additional bugs are found, the devs will have to redeploy the entire game and re-issue new tokens. This has brought to light the need for more secure development practices, including security audits prior to deploying on the mainnet.
What’s next for Wolf Game?
Wolf Game migrated to a new smart contract on 27 November to keep the game safe and maintain its integrity. The migration created exact copies of holders’ legacy NFTs, with the same traits and metadata, while locking the legacy NFTs containing the vulnerability.
Gen 0 and Gen 1 Sheep & Wolves will be a core part of the full-feature game coming in 2022, with unique capabilities and tokenomics. This may relate to (and may go beyond):
- breeding
- resource accumulation
- stealing other players’ resources
They are also introducing new elements called Land and Farmers, which will be revealed before the game’s launch in 2022.
For more information, check out the Wolf Game whitepaper V2.
