<h1>Introduction</h1>

Hello Steemians, I’m Erik Johnson the creator of Cache, a winning project at the 2018 ETHDenver Conference, and in this #introduceyourself post I want to tell you all about Cache, and make some exciting announcements relating to the Steem blockchain. Hint: we’re big fans not just of the technology, but of you, the community. 

<h1>The Game</h1>
<a href="https://www.cache.gg" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Cache</a> is a social (and sometimes anti-social) cryptocurrency trading game, all set in an 8-bit dystopian cyberpunk universe. It originated as a winning project at the 2018 <a href="https://www.ethdenver.com/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">ETHDenver</a> conference, the world’s largest cryptocurrency hackathon.

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It is very important to us that Cache be free to play, which is only one of the reasons why we’re choosing Steem over Ethereum - and the upcoming public release is playable on the web, as well as iOS and Android. In Cache, you:

- earn crypto just for playing for free
- trade cryptocurrencies across exchanges to earn your way to the top
- own your tokens, your items, your avatars, even your own exchange
- import and export items to multiple blockchains including Steem and Ethereum
- choose your affiliation - and chat, trade with, or even hack other players

<p><img class="img-responsive" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/cache-promo/cache-social-arcade.jpg" alt="The social arcade..." /></p>

In the last year, the game progressed from a pretty simple hackathon project to beta release powered by several smart contracts published to the main Ethereum network.

During the beta release, we learned a lot of things that are powering the decisions we have made, which we are quite excited to share with you. So, with that, this post marks a couple important public announcements.

<h3>First Announcement</h3>
First announcement: After a year of developing exclusively on the Ethereum blockchain, we are building our core transactions on top of Steem! In addition, players will have the ability to import/export their hard-earned tokens and items to the Steem blockchain, as well as on Ethereum.

<img class="img-responsive" src="http://blog.cache.gg/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Cache-Steem-e1557377936374.jpg" alt="Cache on Steem!" />

<h3>Second Announcement</h3>
Our second announcement is that the development of a full release is now being accelerated with help of additional resources. We are quite excited to be targeting a full public release of the game in the Fall of this year!

<h1>Ethereum</h1>

As mentioned above, Cache was an overall winner of the <a href="https://www.ethdenver.com/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">ETHDenver Conference & Hackathon</a> in February 2018.

Naturally, we began development on the game building on top of the Ethereum blockchain - harnessing several types of smart contract - ERC-20 (for tokens) and ERC-721 (for avatars).

What we learned from our beta release was there are a couple fundamental aspects of Ethereum - the speed and costs - that are mismatched for what we are doing with Cache.

<h3>High Gas Prices</h3>
Costs associated with using the Ethereum network have been especially troubling. Shortly after we launched our beta version in June of last year - the <a href="https://cryptoticker.io/en/ethereum-gas/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">gas prices</a> spiked. Suddenly, transactions were hundreds of times more expensive. July 2 was especially brutal, "<a href="http://dailycryptotimes.com/2018/07/ethereum-eth-gas-prices-return-to-normal-after-suspected-intentional-network-overload/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">when transaction fees at one point required 5 ETH.</a>" We don't want our players to pay 0.005 ETH for a transaction, much less 5 ETH (thousands of dollars at the time)!

That stated, we will continue to support Ethereum transactions for importing/exporting items, as we believe Ethereum's strong consensus is a good use-case for moving your items into a safe place where you own them.

<h1>Why Steem?</h1>

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There are two major reasons for building on Steem: the technology and the community. Let's start with the technical reasons.

<h3>Fast and Feeless</h3>
Cache is a game full of transactions. Every move in the game of Cache is a new opportunity to buy and sell cryptos. In the span of ten minutes, you could be pushing 30 - 50 transactions to the ledger. For our game state - we need something that is both fast and doesn't cost our players anything. Steem fits the bill, as it is:

- Fast: Steem has three second block times. This is near-instant, and you will never notice transactions being published to the blockchain while playing.

- Feeless: There is no need to pay gas prices or mining fees. We strongly believe in making Cache free to play, and this is made possible by Steem!

<h3>Community</h3>
With <a href="https://www.steemit.com" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Steemit</a>, you have the community. Objectively, the Steemians are the biggest and most active blockchain community. If you don't believe us, <a href="https://steemit.com/steemit/@penguinpablo/daily-steem-stats-report-friday-may-10-2019" rel="noopener" target="_blank">check out these statistics from @penguinpablo</a>. 

Community is very much baked into the core of Steem - a place where real people interact with each other. This vibes well with Cache - a world where you can join, chat, trade with, and even hack with other players during gameplay.

That’s why we want to spearhead the #SwitchToSteem movement. After seeing how ridiculously easy it is to power our application with Steem, while making it even better, we know that we are just the beginning of a wave of converts who will switch from expensive, difficult to use, “smart contract” platforms, to Steem. We plan to help spread the word about why every app should #SwitchToSteem.

<h1>Accelerating Development</h1>
Let us share our other big announcement: Our other big announcement is that we are accelerating our pace of development! In addition to moving over our game state transactions to Steem - we have an amazing roadmap that is now rapidly underway. Stay tuned to the blog for an upcoming review of that roadmap.

<h1>Join us in the Cacheverse</h1>
We look forward to having you as one of the first to build your way to a crypto empire, and we invite you to pre-register for the upcoming full release of Cache. You get an in-game item just for putting in your email address at <a href="https://www.cache.gg" rel="noopener" target="_blank">https://www.cache.gg</a>! Thank you!