What are the benefits of forging?

Forging has various benefits for different types of people or entities within our digital collectibles ecosystem.

Forging Creates Scarcity

When users forge two (or more) into one, the overall supply of that collection is reduced. So we may start with 10,000 of a comic, but over time it may be less than a thousand or even less than 100!

Simulates Paper Comics

In the non-digital world, it's partly the scarcity that makes something collectible, whether it’s antique furniture, baseball cards, or paper comics. Adding a forging mechanism to digital collectibles simulates this reduction in supply over time. The older the asset, the more scarce it will become.

Forging is super fun!

Collecting digital collectibles should be more fun. Forging is fun because you get another chance to get something special and valuable. Not only are you guaranteed a better tier, you could get a tier as much as 5 tiers higher! And you could also get an “Ultra Rare” cover or a unique Cover that has super rare traits.

Buying Up the Floor Price

With digital collectibles, the “Floor Price” is the lowest price for any of the collection, and it’s a much-watched metric by collectors, and the primary way of evaluating the actual value of the collection. With forging, collectors will buy up anything dumped on the market by others, so that they can use it for forging. This keeps the value of the collection high, the fans engaged, and growing scarcity.

Cheap Mint Price = Bigger Community

Because we can sell our comics very inexpensively, or perhaps even give away much of the supply, we can get far more people into our ecosystem. Large volumes of users gives LightningWorks (and the artists using our platform) more chances to convert these curious new users into a hard core base of superfans. This is an important new way of thinking about digital collectibles and why we plan to give away a million or more comics to spread awareness of our brand, our characters, and our technology.

Extra Content with Higher Tiers

Our comics often have extra content at higher tiers. That might be extra pages of story, or special pin-up art, new hidden easter eggs, or extra digital collectibles hidden somewhere in the comic, such as a relic or weapon usable in our video games or one of our partners.

How do you forge?

You will need two covers with the same tier. Then you go to https://lightningworks.io/forge and the system will show you what comics you have that can be forged.

If you have one of your items Favorited, by clicking the HEART ICON on the top, then it will not be forgeable until you un-click the heart again.

Use the sort selecting features on the page, to show the various tiers and see what’s forgeable in each tier.

Select the two items that you want to forge, and then confirm you want to forge them, and then the magic will happen. Blockchain transactions are going on in the background, a new comic is being created for you, and you can go through the unpackaging and cover reveal process again, hoping to get lucky.

Once they do this they will often starting wanting a special high tier and so they will go and buy a block of 10 or 20 at a time, and then Unpackage and Reveal all of them, sort through the ones they want to keep or sell (clicking the Heart Icon on top to make sure they don’t accidentally forge them) and then they’ll go through a whole bunch of forging and reforging.

It takes a while and there’s a lot of fun and dopamine hits involved, so it can become a bit addicting, and some people will buy a couple of blocks and keep going until they finally get the Apocalyptic Tier or something else special they’re looking for, such as a favorite Ultra Rare cover they want.

WHY forge?

The main reason to forge is that you’re interested in trying to get a higher, special tier. When you forge, you will take two comics and end up with one, but at a higher tier than before. You are guaranteed to get one tier higher, but could get up to FIVE tiers higher!

This diagram shows the 9 tiers that we are currently attributing to most of our digital collectibles:

What Happens with You Forge?

1. 1- Two becomes one

   You will take two comics or other digital collectibles and they will merge to become one.

2. 2- The supply of the whole collection is reduced by ONE

   The comic with the higher mint number will get “burned” (lost forever.)

3. 3- A new cover is created

   The comic with the lower mint number will be recreated with a NEW COVER, and a higher tier.

4. 4- It will now be PACKAGED again

   This new cover will now be packaged, so you won’t know what Tier it is. You could give it as a gift to someone, or sell it like this so someone else can have the fun of a guaranteed higher tier when they Unpackage it. For example, a father might forge two high-tiered comics and then give it away to a child or friend, who will have the joy of Unpackaging a very special tier. You could even forge to Rainbows and then it’s guaranteed to be an Apocalyptic!

5. 5- The new cover could be special

   The two old covers disappear and the new cover could be rare and valuable, in addition to being a higher tier. It could be an “Ultra Rare” cover type, or could be a unique generated cover with a very rare trait.

So it’s a lot of fun seeing how far up the tier rarity scale you go.

What does it cost to forge?

Right now it’s free for Polygon digital collectibles… there’s some “gas” charge for multiple blockchain transactions going on, but we’re covering it.

In the future we might charge a small fee, or perhaps owning a LightningWorks Portal will cover these charges for you.

For Ethereum-based digital collectibles, when we activate forging, it will be a lot more expensive and the user will have to pay it