January 2022 was all about the Gas Challenge!
It’s not that gas prices are high. Just think about how things were in the ancient past of 2–3 years ago…
Nevertheless, being a greedy and ambitious bunch, we decided to tackle gas prices. The Goal we set for our Gas Task force was at least 50% reduction in gas fees.
The result we are presenting today (live and working on our testnet) reflects an 81–88% reduction in gas fees on the mainnet.
To call it an optimization is a bit funny
Here’s what we did:
- Smart contract optimizations — up to 39% reduction 7% gas usage reduced when minting 1 snook and about 32% less gas use when minting 5 or more snooks (or 39% less per single snook)
- Integration of cheaper L1 & L2 chains
That brought us close to the goal. But it wasn’t enough.
So we came up with the Fahrenheit Cat approach
The Fahrenheit Cat approach
What we did next was a game changer (no pun intended).
We increased the lives of each snook from 1 to 5 (or in cat terms by 5/9).
This means that:
- Each time you mint a snook, it has 5 lives
- The price per snook did not change ⇒ The cost of minting a Ferenhight cat snook with 5 lives is now equal to $1.25 USDC
- Each time snook loses a life (dies) its lives-counter will decrease by 1 with no Traits penalty
- The PPK mechanism does not change ⇒ each mint will increase PPK by 5 and each life lost will decrease it by 1
- Once the snook dies for the fifth time, and only then, the resurrection option will become available.
NOTE: Resurrecting a snook will give it one life…not five ;)
This immediately reduces gas costs by ~80%!
Moreover, the savings described above are on top of this 80% reduction, so combined the saving is up to ~90%.
We’re pretty proud of that.
It also makes the gaming experience better. Fewer transactions, faster return to the game, more net gaming time.
As Spike Lee would say: Mo’ Better.
