Why are so few blockchain items dropping in Lost Relics?
This question is beeing asked every day and there are some reasons why we are in this situation. At lostrelics.io/items you can check out all the different blockchain items that have been created by the developer so far. Here we can see that a lot of those items are out of stock. A big chunk has been looted by the players. Now, normally there would be some item sinks in which players would trade in items in return for something else, usually something better. The items they trade in would then go back into the item pool.
One type of item sink in Lost Relics is the bounty system. Here a player can accept a bounty where the task may be for example to kill a hundred monsters and hand in two blockchain items. In return, the player receives a chest, bounty bucks, and some XP.
This type of item sink is a great idea but is not effective enough to solve the lack of blockchain items dropping in Lost Relics. This is because a large amount of the items looted are held by a small group of players.
The number of bounties you can complete per week is around twelve bounties. And the number of blockchain items you have to hand in for these bounties is just a handful in total.
So with the limitations put on the bounty system where you only trade in a small number of items every week the system is unable to keep up with the demand, with an ever-increasing player base.
This bounty system is further weakened by the Ethereum gas price situation. Ethereum can only handle around 30 transactions per second. Every time someone performs a transaction they have to pay the miners a fee to get their transaction validated. Since the blockchain can only handle 30 transactions p/s and there are hundreds of thousands of transactions beeing done every day the network ends up beeing congested. As a result of this, the miners can pick and choose which transactions they want to validate based on how much users are willing to pay them in gas fees. Those that are willing to pay the most get in front of the line.
Gas “refers to the fee, or pricing value, required to successfully conduct a transaction or execute a contract on the Ethereum blockchain platform.”
What we end up with is a constant battle of the miner’s attention in which the minimum required gas needed goes up to a point where one transaction on the blockchain can cost you on average around 15USD per transaction or sometimes much more.
Enjin coin is built on the Ethereum platform and their marketplace https://enjinx.io/eth/marketplace requires you to pay a gas fee every time you put something on sale, edit sale, or buy an item. Since the fee for just one of these actions can be 15 USD or more it doesn’t make much sense to put a two-dollar item on sale with a 15 dollar gas fee. So to make money, players need to sell an item for more than what they spent on gas fees. As a result, only some items are worth putting on sale. This in turn limits what items players can get their hands on in the marketplace since so few are listed. And this makes it harder to complete bounties.
Don’t give up just yet though. Solutions to these gas fees problems are beeing built.
On the 6th of April, Jumpnet launched; “JumpNet is a high-speed bridge network that will allow free, instant on-chain transactions of Enjin Coin and ERC-1155 tokens.”
As long as the blockchain items are minted on Jumpnet these items will no longer require you to pay a gas fee to send, sell, trade, or buy. But, blockchain items already minted before Jumpnet went live will still require you to pay a gas fee to perform any type of transaction with the blockchain item. A solution here is to “move” those items over to Jumpnet, but ironically, this also will cost a lot of gas fees to do.
This means that items minted on Jumpnet will enjoy gasless transactions, and items minted under the “old rule” will continue to live under high gas prices.
Sometime this year Efinity will launch and will be the final and crucial part of the Enjin coin ecosystem; “Efinity is a decentralized blockchain for NFTs that will support next-generation token features and assets from any blockchain.”.
So why are so few blockchain items dropping in Lost Relics? As we can see, high gas prices have a big impact on the marketplace, making the bounty system not as effective as it could have been as an item sink, but we can also see that more item sinks are needed. At the same time, the Enjin Coin ecosystem is still under development. All we can do is to be patient and keep grinding!
Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion as an active Lost Relics player.
