The winners of the first City of Zion dApp competition, hal0x2328 and phetter, have moved onto a new project called HashPuppies, which will be the NEO equivalent of Ethereum’s CryptoKitties, a game that allows users to trade and breed digital pets.

hal0x2328 and phetter, who have formed a company called Splyse, won first prize in the inaugural City of Zion dApp competition with NEO Smart IoT, an application that enables a smart contract to receive GAS to perform an action in the real world such as playing a song on a jukebox or despensing an item from a vending machine.

Through the development of NEO Smart IoT, Splyse developed NeoLink, a Chrome extension similar to MetaMask which has now been added to the City of Zion GitHub. NeoLink will play an important role in the development of HashPuppies by allowing users to communicate with the NEO blockchain through their browser.

The addition of the CryptoKitties game to the Ethereum ecosystem has caused considerable network congestion, even forcing one particular project, SophiaTX, to postpone its crowd sale. HashPuppies is, in part, being developed to showcase the superior transaction capacity of NEO in comparison to Ethereum network. Other advantages that make NEO an ideal platform for this type of game include fee-less transactions, enabling real in-game micropayments, and the NEO/GAS pairing, which could enable players to generate income within the game without the need for constant transactions.

The HashPuppies team have announced they will be airdropping redeemable HashPuppy tokens to qualifying wallet addresses between December 25th, 2017 and January 1st, 2018. Addresses that qualify are those that sent or received NEO (not GAS or other assets/tokens) during the time period of December 8, 2017 00:00:00 UTC through December 24, 2017 23:59:59 UTC and had a final balance of between 1 and 99 NEO at the last block before December 25, 2017 00:00:00 UTC. These dates/times correspond to the range of blocks starting with block 1677683 and ending with block 1739381.

Although some community members felt that the distribution of tokens to wallets with less than 100 NEO fails to reward the biggest supporters of the NEO platform, Splyse have made clear that one of the main goals of HashPuppies is to generate more interest in the NEO ecosystem. The long term benefits realised by larger investors as a result of rewarding smaller holders with an airdrop is considered to be far greater than if large holders were to receive a single HashPuppies token.

In consideration of regulatory uncertainty, the airdrop is being held in lieu of a pre-sale. According to the rules, the number of qualifying addresses is 46,023. Splyse are reserving 13,977 tokens for additional community and team rewards for a total circulation of 60,000 tokens.

The Splyse team are currently moving into a new office where they will spend the next few months focusing on developing the game, with the mainnet release intended for April 2018.

For more information on the airdrop you can visit – https://medium.com/@hello_32466/the-great-puppy-airdrop-of-2017-a1e1ac43e0d5

You can also follow the project on Twitter, join the Discord, or sign up to the mailing list at hashpuppi.es.