EtherCup - Bringing Blockchain to the 2018 FIFA World Cup

From breedable kittens to pixelated punks — for the past year, Crypto Collectibles have been all the hype within the blockchain world. During the World Cup, this has even increased. When searching the tags “world-cup” or “world cup” on State of The DApps, one can find ten different DApps utilizing non-fungible tokens or lottery-models.

However, none of them are close to having the same background story as EtherCup. The game was developed by two university freshmen at the Minerva Schools at KGI, a University for the 21st century, with the aim to introducing football fans to Ethereum DApps in the simplest way possible, as expressed in their very community-oriented white paper.

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EtherCup offers cards featuring the football teams of various nations

Source: EtherCup

EtherCup is a football card collectible/auction house where anyone can buy the 32 Football Cup teams. Instead of speculating the value of digital inventions, EtherCup aims at digitizing something many football fans are aware of from back in the days — Football Collectible Cards. Using an ERC-721 standard, the smart contract stores 32 football nation cards as a uniquely identifiable token on the Ethereum Blockchain.

Instead of appealing to the humor of the already strong and fast-growing Ethereum community, the EtherCup team’s main objective is to get CryptoCurrency newcomers to experience first time interactions with a DApp by linking it to something familiar— football.

Become the proud owner of the football teams of countries like Brazil, England, and Germany

Source: EtherCup

Besides being able to verify one’s ownership of the unique cards, users can win prizes upon completion of the World Cup. The university freshmen have raised money that will be distributed at the end of the World Cup – with the largest pool currently being $100 worth of ETH to the owner of the winning team at the end of the World Cup.

By installing the MetaMask browser extension one can explore EtherCup with fake Ether on the Ropsten Test Network or with real Ether on the Main Network – as described in the tutorial below this tutorial.