If you know about Cryptokitties, you might wonder what it has done for Ethereum. Because yes, as much as it is “just a game”, Cryptokitties was the introduction of a new concept called non-fungible tokens: tokens that are different from one another and that can be traded for different prices. After the success of Cryptokitties, a number of non-fungible tokens contracts followed with the same recipe: cryptocelebrities, ethermon, … The idea became so popular that it started to make sense to standardize the concept.

We got many questions on how CityMayor, our dApp to trade cities with Ethereum, was working under the hood. We will try to explain it in this blog post and the reasons behind those decisions. For our requirements: We wanted to offer the best dApp experience to the CityMayor users and avoid a slow dApp. Non-ethereum users should to be able to take a look at what we were doing without the need to install metamask or use something like Mist/MetaMask.

On March 7th, we noticed some weird transactions happening on CityMayor. First, someone used our contract directly instead of going through the dAPP. We know that, because a nickname is mandatory if you want to use the DAPP to interact with the CityMayor contract. Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s pretty neat! We are not against people using the contract directly, and we actually encourage you to do so :) We’ve extensively documented the smart contract on etherscan.

We just proceeded with CityMayor's soft launch on the weekend of March 2nd, 2018. It's been exciting and we've spent a lot of time polishing things and fixing bugs. Fortunately after weeks and weeks of testing, bugs are now only front end bugs and the smart contract at the foundation of this project remains solid. If you're reading these words, it's probably because CityMayor ended up being a success or because you're an early beta user of the CityMayor world.