Virtual Proof of Work: Cellula's Innovative Asset Distribution Model

Since 2017, Web3 projects have issued a large number of tokens and NFTs through ICOs, IDOs, and other methods. However, these methods often have issues such as lack of transparency and strong control, leading to frequent occurrences of Rug Pull phenomena. The recently emerged Cellula project proposes a novel asset distribution scheme, attempting to achieve a fairer and more reliable asset issuance by simulating PoW mining.

The core of Cellula is a mechanism known as virtual Proof of Work ( vPOW ). It is based on the famous "Conway's Game of Life" algorithm, allowing participants to breed clusters of cells in a virtual "petri dish". The more surviving cells in a participant's petri dish, the higher the mining power obtained and the greater the probability of receiving rewards. Essentially, this replaces the hashing operations in traditional PoW with a new computational approach, while still retaining the core feature of PoW - unpredictability of the results.

In Cellula, the petri dish is called BitLife, which is a 9x9 grid NFT. Players need to choose different initial cell distribution patterns to construct BitLife, and these patterns will evolve over time into different numbers of surviving cells. The cell state of BitLife changes with the block height, and the more surviving cells at a specific height, the higher the computing power of that BitLife.

This design cleverly simulates the industrial chain model of Bitcoin mining. Players can independently "develop" BitLife( equivalent to designing mining machines ), or they can purchase other people's BitLife( equivalent to buying mining machines ) on the secondary market. To balance supply and demand, Cellula introduces a variable rate progressive Dutch auction ( VRGDAs ) algorithm to dynamically adjust the minting price of BitLife, preventing inflation caused by a large number of following minting.

In general, Cellula implements a more fair and harder-to-manipulate asset distribution scheme on-chain through the vPOW mechanism and gamified design, compared to traditional ICOs/IDOs. It can not only be used in gaming scenarios but also provides a universal fair asset issuance protocol for other projects, bringing new possibilities for asset distribution in Web3.