F1 Delta Time

» see f1deltatime.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Animoca Brands signed a licensing deal with Formula 1 in March 2019 and built the sport's first blockchain game on top of it. The assets came first. Cars and drivers were issued as ERC-721 tokens on Ethereum and traded by people who owned them well before there was much to do with them.

In May 2019 the first auction closed. A car called the 1-1-1 went for 415.9 ETH, roughly $113,000 at the time, which was then the highest price anyone had paid for a licensed game asset of the kind. A later car raised about $288,000 in a sale for Australian bushfire relief, and the first crate sale took more than $364,000.

The racing arrived afterward. Phase one was collecting and phase two was the game, and through 2019 that second phase was a line in press releases describing something still in development. Time trials and events did eventually run, with a REVV token for rewards and a wider Animoca racing platform growing up around them.

Istanbul Park hosted a Turkish Grand Prix from 2005 to 2011, then got two more races in 2020 and 2021 when the calendar was being rebuilt around a pandemic. That was the Formula 1 within reach from here: a circuit outside Istanbul and a race on television. The version where a token for a car went for six figures belonged to a different internet, and I read about that one rather than joining it.

~ the record ~

~ the 1-1-1 ~

The 1-1-1 was the first car, auctioned as a one-of-one on 2019 terms, when a licensed Formula 1 token was a new category of object and the price made the trade press. Stockhead wrote it up that May as a record. The buyer got a car with no race to enter yet, which at the time was described as phase two.

That gap between owning and doing is most of what F1 Delta Time was in its first year. The collectibles market ran well ahead of the game, because the collectibles were the part that already worked.

~ what the holders got ~

On 16 March 2022 the game ceased operations. The statement came from REVV Motorsport, Animoca's racing platform, and said that the license had not been renewed and that current owners of F1 Delta Time assets would be rewarded for their loyalty and support.

The reward was a swap. Holders were offered replacement cars of comparable rarity in Animoca's other racing titles, plus proxy assets standing in for what they had bought. The tokens themselves survive on Ethereum, because surviving is what the chain does, and they point at a game that has not run since March 2022. Nothing answers at f1deltatime.com now, and the last page the Internet Archive managed to save is a JavaScript shell with nothing in it to read.

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