Shaban Shaame built Spells of Genesis, a blockchain card game, in 2015 on Bitcoin's Counterparty layer. Rare cards now sell for over $500,000 each, with investors flipping 20-25 collectibles daily. Shaame wanted players to truly own their assets, even if the game shut down.
Questions this video answers
About 20–25 per day.
As high as 10 bitcoin.
Some of the rarest cards have sold for over $500,000.
September 2015.
About $236.
Chapters
Foreign.
Hunters are suddenly rediscovering forgotten vintage collectibles. An old NFT game, Spells of Genesis is experiencing a record breaking resurgence in popularity.
The increase in sales to new buyers has been astounding. Spells of Genesis is a blockchain based card game built on Counterparty, an early contract layer of the bitcoin blockchain that allowed creators to mint and distribute their own tokens.
However, as Bitcoin's fees rose and Ethereum's soared, Counterparty became largely obsolete. But in mid-2021 suddenly began to attract fresh interest from NFT collectors, all because of the rare NFT cards from Spells of Genesis.
Now investors are flipping 20 to 25 counterparty collectibles per day, some for as high as 10 bitcoin.
A year ago no one cared. You could have bought one for a couple of hundred bucks. Today that club is for millionaires only. Some of the rarest Bells of Genesis cards have recently sold for over $500,000.
According to Shaban Chame, blockchain pioneer and CEO of software company EverdreamSoft. It comes down to accessibility and the times they are a changin'.
It amazed me how this I would say vintage project suddenly got that much attention. But that's Blockchain. Everything stays forever.
Let's step into our time machine for a moment and travel back to the year 2:15. It's September. The price of Bitcoin is $236. Ethereum's genesis block isn't even two months old. And Shaban Shamay has just launched a token sale for the first ever blockchain based mobile game Spells of Genesis.
So we were a game company at that time. We had an up and down. Then the whole market shifted to free to play and big names like Warner Bros. Or Blizzard came. So it was very hard to compet us. Doing things in Switzerland is much more expensive than a lot of other places. So we had to come with an idea that is completely different. And then I found Blockchain and I found Blockchain very fascinating because there was new idea coming every day. So first it was very on speculation. So I saw article and I see oh, there is this bitcoin. The price went from $50 to $100 and I thought yeah, I should buy some. And then I started to get interested of what it is ex exactly how it works and I was completely blown away. It's a big technological innovation, but it also redefines economics, governance and it's a big thing as big as the invention of Internet. When you start Understanding it. Previously we had a game called Munga on mobile and we saw that items has real value and people were ready to pay to other player a lot of money. And I thought okay, with crypto we could give people the liberty to really own what they purchase and to do whatever they want with it without us being in control. And this emulates the physical world. Giving something physical or on chain will survive for years. When the game is closed or stopped, the assets stayed. I think that's a defining point I wanted to base my strategy on. In 2015, people barely understood Bitcoin in terms of money. So telling people that we're going to put game assets, it was really hard to explain to people. Family and friends didn't understood what I was doing. Also the community, the gamers didn't understood that true ownership was real added value for them. Even one of my former employees who came back to work, she thought when she heard that we're using blockchain, maybe that we're doing some illegal drug trafficking or something. But the crypto community, I found I would say a new family because I really loved to discuss and see the innovative projects that people were building. And that was a very interesting experience to meet these people who are genius and a bit crazy. I'm quite happy that everything is taking on and took on and gave us the time to build the ground for the future grow.
While the game surged in popularity for a year or two around the time of the ICO boom, it was eventually overtaken by non fungible projects like Cryptokitties and its collectibles more or less faded into obscurity for the next years.
The completed spells of Genesis mobile game was gathering dust on the favorite app stores until.
One of the things I was telling everybody in 2015 is we want our cards to be on Museum in 50 years from now. Because we know blockchain will change the world and we know that at some point people will look back and see how it all started. So we designed the cards to survive even the game. So it was expected that the card will take value over time. But we weren't prepared as sudden rush like we saw three months ago. We got a spike of usage, but especially on the price. But I always value achievement and doing things over receiving easy money. I can never be bored in that field and I already have a project that I will do in the future that will revolutionize the use of computer in general. So once I'm big enough on the blockchain gaming, that would be my next thing. I really want to come with something that changed people's lives, Sam.
