SimThunder Beta 1.0

4 min readApr 15, 2021

A week ago we released the initial beta version of SimThunder, our sim racing assets/NFTs marketplace, being developed in partnership with Cartesi. SimThunder is powered by Descartes, Cartesi’s decentralized computational oracle and will be one of the first integrations of GG Dapp, a blockchain gaming ecosystem with NFTs at its core, that rewards players, developers and liquidity providers.

Although you can try yourself by requesting access to the private beta, if you are a GGTK or SRC holder, we want in this article to provide everyone a sneak peak of it, explaining current stage, features and plans for the future.

Accessing the private Beta

SimThunder private beta is available at https://simthunder.com and in the website you can request access to it. You’ll get an invite to join our Discord and, if you are a GG Token (GGTK) or Simracer Coin (SRC) holder, you can leave your Metamask address in the #simthunder channel and follow the instructions provided there so that your address is whitelisted. You can also request help and information there and feedback about the beta is very well welcomed!

Current stage

At this point SimThunder Beta is deployed in our own private testnet but we plan to migrate to a public soon, hopefuly during next week. In our marketplace you will be able to buy and sell several kinds of sim racing assets. In the current beta the homepage shows three categories of items that you’ll be able to buy/sell: car ownership NFTs, car setup files and car skins/paints.

Mintable Car Ownership NFTs

List of car ownership NFTs in the homepage of SimThunder Beta 1.0

Car ownership NFTs represent entries in private sim racing leagues. As a private league owner, and using SimThunder, you’ll be able to mint an NFT representing ownership of a particular car in the league, represented by its number. You’ll be able to sell that entry or auction it. For example, a private league with a big prize for the winners and limited entries could benefit from auctioning it’s entries NFTs.

League owners will be able to mint NFTs, for example representing car ownership, directly from SimThunder.

Car Setup Files

Car setup files represent files with mechanical adjustments for the cars, in different racing games (or racing simulators, because they are much more then games these days!). These are like gold for sim racers because, as in real life, good mechanical adjustments might be the difference between having a winning car or to be stuck in the rear of the field. In this case it’s not an NFT but “private content” that can be traded in our marketplace. In current beta you can only upload .sto setup files, the ones used in iRacing but, in the future, can be any other sim.

Form where users enter all the details about the car setup file.

Car Skin/Paints

Car skins, or paints schemes, are files with the liveries that can be used in a particular car of a racing sim. Every sim racer wants to race with the best looking car and in SimThunder you will be able to buy/sell this kind of files for different racing sims.

Ford Mustang paint scheme available to buy in SimThunder.

It’s in this last 2 types of sim racing assets that Cartesi’s Descartes plays a fundamental role, enabling the use of an automatic mechanism to solve disputes in case a problem occurs retrieving a specific file.

Next steps

Future developments include making the UI more user-friendly and easier to explore the different categories of sim racing assets that you can buy/sell in the marketplace, inspired in the way you can do it nowadays in OpenSea.io, for example.

We also plan to add other kinds of sim racing assets and NFTs, for example, private league or streamer collectibles and coaching services. Each private league will also be able to create it’s own collection of car ownership NFTs and, depending if the particular racing simulator permits, even it’s own car parts.

It was an intense development cycle but was totally worth it and we can’t wait to show you what’s coming next!