Counterparty Spells of Genesis

Information

Created: 11 March 2015 FDCARD, from 1 June 2015 rest of the Spells of Genesis cards
Creator: EverdreamSoft
Blockchain: Bitcoin / Counterparty

Description

What would you do if someone offered you a digital trading card for $1,000?

If the card existed only inside a mobile game, you might reasonably wonder what you were actually buying. The company running the game could change the card, create another thousand copies, or shut down the servers. Your valuable card might end up as nothing more than a picture on a screen. Yet people were paying real money for digital cards.

This was the problem that eventually led a small Swiss game company to Bitcoin.

EverdreamSoft, founded in Geneva by game developer Shaban Shaame, had already encountered the strange economics of digital collectibles with its first major game, Moonga. Players collected fantasy cards and used them to battle, but some also wanted to trade them. Rare cards could change hands for more than US$1,000, even though the game's rules did not officially allow trading. The unofficial market moved outside the game, through PayPal and other informal arrangements. There were disputes over payments, fraud and chargebacks, and no independent record showing who actually owned a card. Ultimately, everything depended on EverdreamSoft's own database.

Shaame later described this experience as the reason the company began thinking about genuine ownership of digital game assets. A game company could tell you that you owned a card. A blockchain could provide a public record showing that your wallet controlled it. Those were not quite the same thing.

In 2014, this was an unusual idea. Ethereum had not launched. CryptoPunks did not exist. OpenSea did not exist. The word “NFT” was not part of everyday cryptocurrency vocabulary.

There was, however, Bitcoin. And sitting on top of it was Counterparty.

Counterparty allowed users to create and transfer digital assets using Bitcoin's blockchain as the underlying record. Bitcoin had been designed primarily as digital money, but Counterparty made it possible to use that infrastructure for tokens representing other things. For EverdreamSoft, this offered a way to experiment with digital game assets without creating a new blockchain. A card could exist as a blockchain asset, be held in a wallet and be transferred between people without every transaction having to pass through EverdreamSoft's servers.

The idea became the foundation of Spells of Genesis.

The game itself was still some way off.

Before Spells of Genesis, there was Moonga

The story begins with Moonga, EverdreamSoft's mobile trading-card game. The company dates its release to January 2010, although Shaame has referred elsewhere to 2009. The game eventually passed 250,000 downloads and became particularly popular in Japan, where it reached the top of the App Store's role-playing category.

For EverdreamSoft, Moonga became an unexpected experiment in digital property. Players collected cards and fought with them, but some cards became valuable enough that people wanted to trade them. The company had not intended to create a marketplace for digital objects, and its rules did not permit those trades. That did not stop the players.

The unofficial market created a problem that was difficult to solve with an ordinary game database. If two people made a deal outside the game and one claimed the card had been stolen, there was no independent ledger to settle the argument. EverdreamSoft remained the final authority.

The obvious answer would have been to build a better marketplace. Instead, the company started wondering whether it could remove itself from the middle of the transaction altogether. What if a player could take a card out of the game, put it in a wallet, send it to somebody else and still use it in the game afterwards?

That was the idea EverdreamSoft took to Bitcoin.

Spells of Orbital

The first public traces of the new project appeared in October 2014. It was not called Spells of Genesis yet. The early project was known as Spells of Orbital, reflecting a collaboration with Bitforge, the developer of the arcade game Orbital.

The concept combined two different types of game. Players would build decks from cards, but the cards would also become objects inside the game. Rather than simply selecting a card from a menu, players could fire it across the screen, bouncing it around the battlefield to attack enemies. It was part trading-card game, part arcade shooter.

The economic experiment was even more unusual. The original plan involved mines. Players would buy mines using Bitcoin, and those mines would produce in-game gems. The gems could be spent inside the game or sold to other players for Bitcoin through a marketplace using Counterparty.

EverdreamSoft planned to sell 100 mines before launch and proposed giving mines to people who helped build the project, including artists, reviewers and people who brought new players. The company was careful about how it described the scheme. These were not simply rewards for early supporters. The proposal suggested that people buying the mines would share financially in the success of the game.

The mines-and-gems economy did not survive. By 2015 it had been replaced by BitCrystals.

The central idea did survive. Game assets could be issued as blockchain tokens. Their scarcity could be checked independently. They could move between people without EverdreamSoft approving every transaction. They could also exist before the finished game did.

That last detail would turn out to matter.

March 11, 2015: FDCARD

On 11 March 2015, EverdreamSoft issued FDCARD, also known as The Healing Formula. The game it was eventually associated with would not launch for another two years.

FDCARD was created in collaboration with FoldingCoin, a Counterparty project that rewarded people for contributing computing power to Folding@home, the distributed scientific-computing project. Participants could earn the card by taking part in the FoldingCoin programme during a limited 75-day period. Only 300 FDCARDs were to be distributed.

There was something unusual about the combination. Spare computer power was being donated to scientific research, a cryptocurrency token was being used to reward the participants, and a Swiss game company was turning that reward into a collectible card.

The card was not merely a picture with a token attached to it. EverdreamSoft connected Moonga to the blockchain, allowing a player to create a Counterwallet, associate it with a game account and use FDCARD in a deck.

In late April 2015, FDCARD became the first blockchain card playable in Moonga.

And yet Spells of Genesis still did not exist as a finished game.

FDCARD had arrived before the game it would eventually be associated with. EverdreamSoft had created a blockchain game asset before there was a finished blockchain game for it to belong to.

When cryptocurrency became the subject of the cards

Once the first experiment worked, EverdreamSoft kept making cards. The company could have filled the collection with fantasy characters. Instead, it began turning the real cryptocurrency world into card art.

There were cards associated with Storj, Gemz, Counterparty, Ripple, Dogecoin and other projects. There were cards depicting Satoshi Nakamoto, the Mt. Gox collapse and the Bitcoin block-size debate.

The collection gradually became a visual diary of the cryptocurrency world in which EverdreamSoft was operating. The timing makes these cards particularly interesting. They were not historical illustrations made years later by somebody looking back at the early days of cryptocurrency. They were being created while those events were happening.

One of the clearest examples was ETHEREUMCARD, issued on 24 June 2015. Ethereum's mainnet would not officially launch until 30 July 2015. So a collectible card depicting Ethereum existed on Bitcoin's Counterparty protocol before Ethereum itself had become a live blockchain.

Today it is easy to forget how new Ethereum was at the time. EverdreamSoft was making a card about it before its own mainnet had launched.

The same collection included SATOSHICARD, issued in June 2015. The original issue was larger, but cards were subsequently burned, leaving roughly 200 according to the project's historical account. The artwork avoided pretending to know what Satoshi Nakamoto actually looked like. Instead, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin was turned into a character within the mythology of Spells of Genesis.

That mythology was built around the world of Askian. The decentralised Askian world stood in opposition to the empire ruled by Emperor Daryen, an allegory for the older centralised financial system. The analogy was not exactly subtle. Cryptocurrency projects became tribes, characters and magical objects. Blockchain protocols became cards. Events from cryptocurrency history became part of the game's mythology.

EverdreamSoft was turning its own contemporary world into game material while that world was still changing.

SATOSHICARD and the emergence of crypto-art

SATOSHICARD would later acquire another historical connection.

According to Rare Pepe Wallet creator Joe Looney, interviewed by Artnome in 2018, Spells of Genesis came before Rare Pepe as a blockchain crypto-art project. Looney explained that the important difference was that Spells of Genesis cards were created by a company, whereas Rare Pepe opened the door for artists and the wider community to create their own cards.

The first Rare Pepe, Rarepepe Nakamoto, was itself an ironic reinterpretation of the SATOSHICARD design.

EverdreamSoft has subsequently described Spells of Genesis as an influence on the Rare Pepe movement. That is the company's account of the project's influence, so it is better treated as an attributed interpretation than as something that can be established with the same certainty as the dates of the card issuances.

The timing is nevertheless revealing. By 2016, Counterparty was being used for more than financial tokens. People were experimenting with art, humour and collectibles on the blockchain. Spells of Genesis was part of that small ecosystem.

BitCrystals

The next part of the experiment was money.

In August 2015, EverdreamSoft launched the BitCrystals (BCY) token sale. BitCrystals was created on Counterparty and intended to become the currency of the Spells of Genesis ecosystem.

The original supply was 100 million BCY. EverdreamSoft retained 30 percent and offered the remaining 70 percent to the public. The sale lasted 30 days and raised 934 BTC, worth more than US$200,000 at the time. Unsold tokens were later destroyed. EverdreamSoft's historical records state that 55,566,099 BCY were burned. Several promotional cards associated with the sale were also deliberately destroyed.

The sale is often described as an early ICO, although the terminology needs some care. The modern ICO industry had not yet taken shape. The basic mechanism was already there: issue a blockchain token, sell it to supporters and use the proceeds to build a project.

BitCrystals was also intended to have a practical role. Players could use BCY to purchase cards and other game assets.

By January 2016, Shaame reported that Spells of Genesis cards and BitCrystals were among the most traded assets on Counterparty. The company reported that roughly 3.09 million BCY worth of cards had been sold over three months, with about half of that amount burned. BCY was trading around US$0.037 and was listed on exchanges including Poloniex and Bittrex.

There were even vending-machine-like systems called Swapbots, where users could buy cards using BCY. The basic pieces of a blockchain collectible economy were already there: wallets, scarce digital assets, a token and secondary markets.

The word “NFT” was still waiting in the wings.

The game takes its time

The game itself was proving harder to finish. EverdreamSoft had hoped to release Spells of Genesis in 2015, with more than 100 levels and more than 150 cards.

It did not happen.

Development continued through 2016. The surviving announcements show a small studio trying to build a mobile game, a blockchain economy and the infrastructure connecting the two.

The project was also becoming part of a wider Counterparty gaming scene. By September 2016, Spells of Genesis had introduced guilds and undergone its first game reset. Another card game, Force of Will, was preparing to bring its cards into the same ecosystem, with discussion of possible cross-compatibility.

In October, EverdreamSoft announced a partnership with All 4 Games, the mobile-games arm of Britain's Channel 4, to help polish and publish Spells of Genesis. The blockchain side needed its own infrastructure. EverdreamSoft worked with Japanese wallet maker IndieSquare on Book of Orbs, a mobile wallet designed to manage blockchain game assets.

Even the terminology was still being worked out. The company referred to its blockchain assets as ORBs, partly because some of the tokens were technically fungible rather than unique individual tokens. Shaame later used “Ownership Read on Blockchain” to explain the name.

The vocabulary had not settled because the technology had not settled either.

Finally, the game arrives

After years of development, Spells of Genesis launched worldwide on 20 April 2017 for iOS and Android.

The game combined deck-building with an arcade mechanic. Players collected cards, levelled them up, fused duplicates and used them as projectiles in battles. Cards bounced around the battlefield, hitting enemies and each other.

It was less like sitting down to play a traditional trading-card game and more like putting a pinball machine inside one.

By then, some of the game's most historically interesting cards were already two years old. The blockchain collectibles had preceded the finished game by a considerable margin.

And EverdreamSoft had another idea.

Blockchainization

On 28 November 2017, the company announced a feature it called blockchainization.

The idea reversed the original process.

The first collection had consisted of cards deliberately created as blockchain assets. Now an ordinary game card could start life inside EverdreamSoft's database and only become a blockchain asset later.

The feature went live on 6 December 2017. A player could take a card they had fully developed and fused, connect a wallet and turn that card into a blockchain asset. There was a monthly limit of three cards, which EverdreamSoft said was intended to discourage speculation and preserve scarcity. The company also paid the blockchain transaction fees.

The player played first. They improved the card, fused it and then, if they wanted, turned it into something that could leave the game.

This became the distinction between the project's First Collection and Second Collection. The original cards had been created as blockchain assets. The later cards started as ordinary game objects and could be blockchainized by the player.

It was a practical solution to a practical problem. A game did not need to put every object on a blockchain. Only the objects worth taking outside the game needed to become blockchain assets.

The world changes around it

For Spells of Genesis, 2017 was not simply the year blockchain games suddenly became fashionable. The game had finally launched, but the market remained small, and it was competing with the mobile free-to-play industry.

The public record for 2018 and 2019 is comparatively quiet. Later accounts describe flat sales and a difficult competitive environment. By early 2020, DappRadar reported only around 1,300 active monthly users for the game on iOS and Android.

There was another problem. The Counterparty ecosystem that had made the original project possible was shrinking into a niche.

Ethereum, meanwhile, had become the centre of a much larger developer and token ecosystem.

So EverdreamSoft added another blockchain.

Going on Ethereum

On 13 December 2019, EverdreamSoft published an announcement titled “Spells of Genesis Going on Ethereum!”

The reasoning was straightforward. Counterparty was still active, but it had become a niche community. Ethereum had a much larger user base and had become the main platform for many blockchain games.

There was an important distinction, though.

Spells of Genesis did not migrate from Bitcoin to Ethereum.

It became multichain.

The original Counterparty cards remained where they were. Ethereum cards were separate assets. Some historically important cards were issued on both chains, but a Counterparty card did not simply transform into its Ethereum equivalent.

For a collector, that difference matters. A later representation of an old card is not necessarily the same historical object as the original.

The first Ethereum cards appeared in February 2020 as the Askian: Blockchain History series. The first was Vitali Buter Ethermage, depicting Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

Five years earlier, EverdreamSoft had made an Ethereum card before Ethereum's mainnet existed. Now Ethereum had become part of the project's future.

The move also brought practical problems. A game needs speed. It needs lots of small actions. Players do not want to think about gas fees, private keys and blockchain explorers every time they play.

Ethereum's popularity was making transactions more expensive.

EverdreamSoft now had to make several blockchains work alongside the same game.

The plumbing gets complicated

This is where the history becomes less glamorous and more revealing.

EverdreamSoft developed tools under the Crystal Suite umbrella to manage assets across different blockchains. Its infrastructure eventually incorporated Ethereum, Counterparty and Klaytn.

A custodial system called First Oasis was introduced for blockchainized cards. A newly blockchainized card could initially sit at a First Oasis address associated with the player's account. From there, the player could withdraw it to a wallet they controlled.

The arrangement was solving a genuine problem. The game needed to know about the card, the player needed to use it, the blockchain needed to record it, and eventually the player needed to be able to take it outside the game.

“True ownership” was therefore never quite as simple as the phrase suggested.

There was still a game server. There were still accounts and wallets, and interfaces sitting between the player and the blockchain. The blockchain solved one particular problem: it provided a public ownership record for the token. It did not make the rest of the game decentralised.

That distinction is easy to lose when looking at the project through the language of the later NFT boom.

BitCrystals crosses the bridge

The currency had to follow the same multichain logic.

In 2019, EverdreamSoft burned 18 million BCY on Counterparty and reissued the equivalent amount on Ethereum as an ERC-20 token. The company was destroying tokens on one blockchain and recreating an equivalent supply on another. The aim was to make BitCrystals part of the Ethereum ecosystem without treating the two versions as though they were literally the same on-chain token.

A Klaytn version was later added as well.

The old Bitcoin-based economy had become a three-chain affair.

There was another experiment in 2020. Spells of Genesis joined MakerDAO's Dai Gaming Initiative, allowing players competing on the monthly leaderboard to receive Dai, the dollar-pegged cryptocurrency associated with MakerDAO.

The distinction between a game reward and money was becoming less clear. That idea would become much more familiar during the play-to-earn boom a few years later. Spells of Genesis had already experimented with a version of it.

Then Ethereum became expensive

The irony of moving towards Ethereum was that Ethereum itself created a new problem.

As network activity increased, transaction fees rose. In April and May 2021, EverdreamSoft temporarily disabled withdrawals because Ethereum gas costs had become too expensive.

The company explored Klaytn as a cheaper route, particularly because of its integration with NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea.

The project had gone from Bitcoin and Counterparty to a system involving Bitcoin, Counterparty, Ethereum and Klaytn, with wallets, custodians and specialised software helping everything work together.

It was not what the 2014 forum posts had promised.

It was what the technology demanded.

The same thing happened with the supporting infrastructure. Book of Orbs, the wallet developed with IndieSquare and closely associated with the early Counterparty gaming ecosystem, was shut down on 31 May 2021.

For an ordinary game, the closure of an obscure wallet would barely deserve a footnote. For blockchain collectibles, it matters.

A digital asset can be theoretically permanent while the tools needed to access it are not.

Wallets disappear. Exchanges disappear. Websites disappear. Blockchains change.

That tension runs through the history of Spells of Genesis.

Then the collectors came back

For several years, the original cards were mostly obscure curiosities.

Then the NFT market exploded. CryptoKitties had already demonstrated that blockchain objects could become collectibles. CryptoPunks became famous. OpenSea grew into a major marketplace. In 2021, a new generation of collectors began looking backwards.

And there, sitting on Bitcoin's Counterparty layer, were cards from 2015.

They had been created years before the modern NFT market existed.

The old collectors had not changed their cards.

The world had changed its understanding of them.

EverdreamSoft described this period as a resurgence of interest in the early cards. Shaame spoke about finding a new generation of collectors and imagined the cards eventually being displayed in a museum.

The phrase digital antiquity began to make sense.

The cards had become old enough for their age to matter.

The FDCARD that sold for $363,809

The clearest example was FDCARD.

On 13 January 2022, one FDCARD sold for 110 ETH, which EverdreamSoft records as approximately US$363,809.60 at the time.

The price is striking, but the history behind the card is more interesting.

FDCARD had a documented creation date, a known original supply, a connection to FoldingCoin and Folding@home, and a history of being playable in Moonga. It had existed on Bitcoin's Counterparty layer since March 2015, two years before Spells of Genesis itself launched.

The card had acquired something familiar from the world of physical collecting: provenance.

The blockchain did not make the picture rare. The picture was already associated with a scarce token. What the blockchain provided was a public record of that token's history and ownership.

That helps explain why the earliest cards became interesting to collectors.

A game becomes a historical object

In April 2022, Spells of Genesis celebrated its fifth anniversary. EverdreamSoft created an NFT history museum in Cryptovoxels and released a voxelised collection in The Sandbox with Nabiya Studios.

The project had begun by trying to give digital objects a life outside a game. Now the history of those objects was being put into another virtual world as museum pieces.

Then, in April 2023, EverdreamSoft returned to one of its oldest ideas with ChainChronicles.

ChainChronicles was a monthly NFT subscription built around blockchain history. Subscribers received new cards based on events in the blockchain world, together with artwork, vintage NFTs and in-game benefits.

It was a later version of something EverdreamSoft had been doing since 2015. The first collection had turned the contemporary cryptocurrency world into collectible cards. ChainChronicles did much the same thing almost a decade later.

The subscription was later phased out, leaving ChainChronicles as the third historical chapter of the project rather than a continuously expanding monthly service.

By this point, the three collections described three different approaches to the same idea.

The First Collection, beginning with FDCARD in 2015, consisted of cards created directly as blockchain assets.

The Second Collection, beginning around the launch of the game, consisted of ordinary game cards that players could develop and eventually blockchainize.

The Third Collection, represented by ChainChronicles, returned to the idea of turning blockchain history itself into collectible cards.

The game never disappeared

There is another part of the story that is easy to lose when concentrating on the NFTs.

The game itself is still there.

Spells of Genesis combines trading-card strategy with point-and-shoot arcade play. Players collect cards, combine them, build decks and fight through the Askian world.

The current system still separates ordinary game cards from blockchain cards. Players can collect ordinary cards through gameplay, upgrade and fuse them, and eventually blockchainize fully developed cards.

That gives the old cards an unusual status.

They are historical artefacts that can still have a relationship with the game for which they were created.

Most digital objects from 2015 do not have that luxury.

What did “true ownership” actually mean?

The phrase EverdreamSoft used from the beginning was true ownership.

It sounds obvious now.

It wasn't.

Before blockchain games, owning a digital game object generally meant owning a record in somebody else's database. If the company shut down the game, your ownership ended with it.

The blockchain model separated two things that had previously been inseparable. The game could know that you owned a card. The blockchain could independently record that a particular wallet controlled the token.

The card could then potentially leave the game. It could be sold or transferred. Another system could potentially recognise it. EverdreamSoft did not have to be the sole authority over the ownership record.

That is the technical idea underneath the entire Spells of Genesis story.

But the limits matter too.

The blockchain does not preserve everything. It does not guarantee that the game will exist forever. It does not guarantee that an image stored somewhere off-chain will remain available. It does not guarantee that a marketplace will survive.

It does not eliminate companies.

What it provides is a public ownership record for a digital asset.

That is less grand than “true ownership”, but it is closer to what the technology actually does.

Was Spells of Genesis the first NFT?

This is where the history needs some care.

EverdreamSoft now describes Spells of Genesis as the first NFT mobile game, dating its history to 2015. Calling it simply “the first NFT”, however, would flatten a much messier history.

There were blockchain-based art and token experiments before Spells of Genesis. Namecoin projects such as Monegraph existed in 2014, and Counterparty already had experiments involving collectible and art assets before FDCARD was issued. The historical record contains several candidates depending on exactly what is meant by “NFT”.

There is also a technical distinction. The original Counterparty system did not use Ethereum's later ERC-721 standard. Many Spells of Genesis cards were issued as limited quantities of a particular Counterparty asset. Some early Counterparty assets could even be fractionalised.

A more defensible description is that FDCARD, issued on 11 March 2015, was one of the earliest scarce tokenised gaming assets and the beginning of one of the earliest blockchain collectible-card collections.

That does not make the history less interesting. It makes the claim easier to stand behind.

From game card to digital antiquity

In June 2026, EverdreamSoft announced that FDCARD would be shown and offered for acquisition at Art Basel in Switzerland, running from 18 to 21 June.

The company presented it as a “digital antiquity”, emphasising the combination of digital art, gaming and medical research represented by the card.

In 2015, FDCARD was a reward for people lending computer power to scientific research. It was also an experiment.

Could a game card exist on Bitcoin?

Could somebody own it?

Could it be used in a game?

Could it be transferred independently of the developer?

Eleven years later, the same card was being presented in the contemporary art world.

The card itself had not become more real.

Its history had become more visible.

What remains

The story of Spells of Genesis is not really a story about predicting the NFT market.

The project did not create that market. It did not make blockchain gaming mainstream. Counterparty remained a small ecosystem, and the game itself never became a mass-market mobile phenomenon.

Much of the infrastructure around it changed or disappeared. Book of Orbs closed. Counterparty became increasingly niche. Ethereum became expensive enough to force EverdreamSoft to explore alternatives. The project had to adapt to new wallets, new chains and new marketplaces.

For much of its life, Spells of Genesis was solving problems created by the technology it had chosen.

What remains interesting is the original problem.

A digital game card could be valuable, but who actually owned it?

EverdreamSoft tried answering that question with Bitcoin and Counterparty in 2015. The answer was imperfect. The game still needed servers. Wallets still disappeared. Images still depended on infrastructure outside the blockchain. The company itself never disappeared from the equation.

But something had changed.

A card could exist outside the game's database. It could be transferred to another wallet. Its scarcity could be recorded publicly. And years after it was created, someone could still inspect its history.

FDCARD was issued on Bitcoin's Counterparty layer on 11 March 2015.

The game it was meant to belong to did not launch until April 2017.

Ethereum did not become part of the project until 2020.

The NFT boom did not bring the old cards to wider attention until years later.

Through all of that, the card remained the same.

What changed was what people thought a digital card could be.