The Red Village: Blood Portal Drop
A thousand storms of arrows raged
And poured upon the earth for days
The sky was black and choked with smoke
And bodies hang’d from lengths of rope
Evil beings prowled the land;
Death delivered by Her hand
The Red Village has had fantastic traction over the last fortnight, with partnership announcements coming in hot from The Sandbox, Metakey, ZED RUN’s founders, and BYOPills, and more on the way. The Village community is growing stronger and more battle-ready by the minute. Hordes from inside the NFT community— and many from outside the NFT community — are surging toward the village gates in the hopes of becoming a famed Battlemaster.
In this article, we’ll run through how the first drop will work, explain what a Blood Portal is, talk about the blockchain that the game will use, and outline how the Champions themselves are going to be distributed.
The Blood Portal Drop
Let’s get this out of the way…
The Red Village Blood Portal drop (public sale) is set to go live on Wednesday the 17th of November, 2021 at 4PM EST/1PM PST/9PM UTC. Bear in mind that for us Aussies (and anyone else in this part of the world), this means Thursday the 18th of November, 2021 at 8AM AEDT/6AM JST.
The drop will be held on the official The Red Village website:
www.theredvillage.com. This is the only place to mint.
The Blood Portal is a sacred artefact that holds the power to transport elements of The Red Village universe into the outside world. These intricately designed, incredibly detailed Blood Portals are ERC-1155 tokens and will be minted on the Ethereum mainnet. There will only ever be 5,000 Blood Portals in The Red Village ecosystem.
Each Blood Portal is identical in looks and in utility. Everyone who mints during the drop will get a Blood Portal — so whether you mint one or you mint ten, you will receive the corresponding amount of Blood Portals in your wallet. Imbued with strong and sinister energy, these ancient demonic portals will give their owners special access utility within The Red Village ecosystem.
So what does a Blood Portal entitle its holder to?
Holding a Blood Portal is like holding a key to the village gates. We’ve thought long and hard about how to ensure that early holders of The Red Village tokens get real utility and privilege for believing in the vision from day one. Holding a Blood Portal in your wallet will entitle you to:
- 1 x Genesis Pureblood Champion NFT on the Polygon network (Champions are ERC-721 tokens. One Champion per Blood Portal token will air-dropped to your wallet — that means that, for example, if you mint five Blood Portals, you’ll get five Champions)
- 1 x Free Access Pass to each of the Blood Portal Championship Tournaments (these are events sponsored by The Red Village and will be held at intervals)
- Early access to an allocation of future drops — this could include future Champion drops
- Airdrops of things such as special collectible wearables and The Sandbox NFTs
- Early access to The Red Village apparel
- Plus more to be announced as we progress and grow — we have taken cues from some of the best NFT projects in the space and have seen the way that tokens such as the Blood Portal can add fantastic value to their holders and strengthen the community
Cherish your Blood Portal. It will forever be the first token from The Red Village, and will grant its owner privileges and power in perpetuity.
Will there be a whitelist?
Our whitelist for presale is closed. Our goal is to build our community organically, with truly committed Battlemasters. We allocated a parcel of Blood Portals to early adopters who entered into a raffle to have the opportunity to purchase during the presale. Entry to the whitelist was not based on shilling or mandatory actions such as inviting others to our Discord, but was purely organic. It was based on rewarding those who are early and truly believe in The Red Village, in the hopes of avoiding flippers and opportunists.
This raffle was done with Chainlink Verifiable Random Function (VRF) to select the 1,000 people who were eligible for the whitelist from the pool of entries.
How many of each Champion are available?
There are 5,000 Blood Portals available during the entire first drop (combining the presale and public sale). Each Blood Portal entitles its holder to one Genesis Pureblood Champion — this means that there are 5,000 Genesis Pureblood Champions in the Red Village ecosystem, occupying the rarest Genotypes R1-R3. There will never be any other Genesis Champions available.
There is an equal distribution of each character class in each drop. There are 1,000 Champions available in each of the five classes, the Barbarian, Wizard, Ranger, Paladin, and Druid. These will be distributed randomly to Blood Portal holders.
So, how are the Champions going to be distributed?
Once the Blood Portal collection sells out, the holders of Blood Portal tokens will be airdropped their Genesis Champions (one Champion per Blood Portal) on the Polygon network within 24 to 48 hours. To ensure that there is no confusion about ownership, trading will be paused on the ERC-1155 Blood Portals for a 24–48 hour window whilst we complete the airdrop.
The Champions themselves are ERC-721 tokens, meaning that each is unique; each has its own name and cosmetic traits. See our introduction article for more details on the Champions.
In order to ensure that the distribution of Champions to Blood Portal holders is totally fair and verifiably random, we will integrate with Chainlink and its Verifiable Random Function (VRF) to help govern the distribution process.
Chainlink VRF works by combining block data that is still unknown when the request is made with the oracle node’s pre-committed private key to generate both a random number and a cryptographic proof. The Red Village smart contract will only accept the random number input if it has a valid cryptographic proof, and the cryptographic proof can only be generated if the VRF process is tamper-proof. This provides our users with automated and verifiable assurances directly on-chain that Blood Portal distribution is provably fair and was not tampered with by the oracle, outside entities, or the The Red Village team.
It’s pretty advanced stuff, so we have dedicated an entire article to the VRF tech, how it works, and why we’ve chosen it, which we will be releasing along with our official Chainlink integration announcement in the coming days.
So which blockchain is The Red Village game on?
Our goal is to encourage the widest adoption of The Red Village possible. This means making gameplay smooth and enjoyable, making transactions quick and cost-effective, and making it easy to enter Tournaments and claim winnings. Whilst launching the Blood Portal tokens on Ethereum will ensure that NFT-native and non-NFT-native communities alike will be able to access the first drop with minimal friction, building further on Ethereum is not currently feasible from a scalibility standpoint. High transaction (or ‘gas’) fees and low throughput limit the ability of the Ethereum mainnet to host The Red Village.
As a solution, The Red Village has partnered with the Polygon network for the game and in-game transactions. On Polygon, every interaction with the blockchain will be substantially cheaper and faster, but just as secure — providing the perfect solution for The Red Village game.
The best bit about this whole process is that for Battlemasters, you probably won’t notice a difference at all. The gaming experience will be the same; with potentially expensive in-game gas fees no longer an issue. Many other large scale NFT gaming projects also use the Polygon network for the same reasons, including ZED RUN, Decentraland, Neon District, Aavegotchi, and Ethermon to name but a few.
End game
The overarching goal for us here at The Red Village is to get as many people playing as we possibly can, and build our community alongside the game. The success of the game is intimately tied to the success of the community, and the bigger and more robust that the community is, the better. Blood Portal tokens will have fantastic utility and access, but beware; your Champion will emerge angry, vicious, and out for blood — so make sure you are prepared for battle.
We’ll see you at the drop.
Blood is coming, my friends.
Blood is coming.
