Evolution Land Announces New Breeding And Reward Mechanics Powered By Chainlink VRF

5 min readOct 9, 2020

Today we’re thrilled to announce that Evolution Land — Darwinia Network’s ecological cross-chain game — will be integrating Chainlink VRF (Verifiable Randomness Function) as a whitelisted solution to generate secure, tamper-resistant randomness. Evolution Land will use Chainlink VRF to quickly and efficiently mint NFTs with randomly selected attributes and distribute those NFTs as random rewards when players open the treasure boxes or breed Apostles.

For those unfamiliar, Evolution Land is the world’s first cross-chain token economy system with game scenes. Players on Ethereum, Tron, and soon other blockchains can buy and sell land on different blockchain “continents,” mine resources, and construct buildings, as well as breed and battle NFT-backed “Apostles.” Evolution Land also features unique crypto-economic incentive structures, with each chain’s Continent competing for resources.

This integration with Chainlink VRF will empower Evolution Land to distribute random rewards to players on top of our structured game elements, ideally leading to an Evolution Land player state of “pleasure with surprises.”

Why Chainlink VRF?

Obtaining true randomness has long been a challenge for blockchain applications, including blockchain-based games. The deterministic nature of blockchain makes it extremely hard to generate a secret, such as a random number, without a third-party finding out about it beforehand. Solutions reliant on blockchain characteristics such as blockhash are also manipulatable to miners. This difficulty around generating randomness is especially acute for blockchain-based games, which rely on randomness to incorporate many fun and exciting elements prevalent in legacy game titles.

With Chainlink VRF, Evolution Land can incorporate a true random number source purpose-built for smart contracts. Chainlink VRF enables cost-effective randomness solutions so that game developers don’t have to take extra measures to prevent the various on-chain attacks and concentrate on building better game experiences. Chainlink VRF also allows players to verify on-chain that in-game outcomes relying on VRF were executed with provably fair and tamper proof randomness. This unique set of security guarantees can prove to players that no one, not even the Evolution Land game developers, tampered with the outcome.

The addition of Chainlink VRF will bolster our gameplay offerings, and is an ideal fit for Evolution Land as we push to become a leading cross-chain game by creating complex and dynamic gaming experiences. We look forward to working with Chainlink VRF to make secure and provably fair random rewards widely available!

Chainlink VRF Integration Details

Evolution Land will be integrating VRF to generate input randomness to determine NFT-backed player rewards that have economic impact for our game. This can include the opening of Evolution Land loot boxes, lucky draws with game credits, and the distribution of prizes for achieving Evolution Land in-game milestones.

There are two main use cases in Evolution Land requiring randomness seeds, including:

Apostle Breeding. An Apostle is an in-game character in Evolution Land. Each Apostle has a unique gene attribute that determines their characteristics and stats. Additionally, two Apostles may breed a new Apostle — the posterity Apostle’s genes are generated with a combination of the parents’ gene and on-chain randomness seeds provided by Chainlink VRF.
Draw Lottery Rewards Using Consumption Points. When users buy goods and consume them in the Evolution Land, a reward system will give back points recorded on-chain. Users can use these points to buy a ticket from the points lottery pool which are based on total Continent consumption fees. Chainlink VRF will be used to randomly and provably select lottery result winners.

These two use cases will add an additional layer of economic incentives for players on top of Evolution Land’s fun and engaging gameplay. We’re thrilled to be able to add these features with secure randomness provided by Chainlink VRF!

Future Use Cases

Additionally, Darwinia’s bridge protocol introduced a verification game as a sub-protocol in the system to build sub-linear chain relays. In the verification game process, the system periodically imposes forced errors in which a solver must offer a wrong solution to a task. This ensures that verifiers who diligently search for errors will eventually find them. Accordingly, Verifiers who correctly report forced errors receive substantial jackpot payouts. By design, Verifiers cannot predict when forced errors will occur and, therefore, are incentivized to check all tasks carefully. To achieve this random distribution of forced errors, Darwinia Network is researching using Chainlink VRF, and deploying it on Darwinia or providing it as Polkadot parachain/parathread cross-chain service.

“We’re excited to make Chainlink VRF part of Evolution Land, and believe that this integration of randomness will help us in our mission to create a complex, economically rich game experience that users can independently verify as true and unbiased,” said Denny Wang, Co-Founder of Darwinia Network.

About Chainlink

If you are a smart contract developer and want to take advantage of the Chainlink VRF feature, visit their developer documentation and join the technical discussion on Discord. If you want to schedule a call to discuss the integration more in-depth, reach out here.

Chainlink is an open source blockchain abstraction layer for building and running decentralized oracle networks that give smart contracts on any blockchain access to secure and reliable data inputs and outputs. It provides oracles to leading DeFi applications like Synthetix, Aave, and Bancor; numerous blockchains such as Ethereum, Polkadot, and Tezos; as well as large enterprises including Google, Oracle, and SWIFT.

About Evolution Land

Evolution Land is an ecological cross-chain game application of Darwinia Network, a decentralized heterogeneous cross-chain bridge protocol built on Substrate.

Evolution Land is a virtual simulation cross-chain blockchain game that has two continents deployed on Ethereum and Tron. More continents are going to be deployed on various blockchain networks. Players use their private key to login in the web3 style. Players can buy/sell lands on the continents, mine resources, and construct buildings. Apostles are characters based on genes with multiple attributes that make them suitable for various work or fight. All these in-game elements are NFTs on the underlying blockchain. Players can move assets across continents for “inter-continent trade.” Continents are evolving into independent yet competitive economic entities.

Gamers use RING as currency and KTON to vote for governance parameters such as tax rate and receive in-game revenue dividends. The rules of the game will be determined by all members of the DAO community to enable the game itself to evolve on its own.

Evolution Land presents gamification of DAO governance, cross-chain tokenized free-market economic system in a purely digital world. The game is still evolving; it continues to showcase Darwinia decentralized heterogeneous cross-chain technology.