Where do Piggies live?
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SmartPiggies are non-fungible tokens that live on the Ethereum network (well, technically on L2, more on this below). They are "smart" piggy banks that hold value, and can be "broken" open under certain conditions in the future. The creation, auctioning, and execution of SmartPiggies are handled by a smart contract on the Ethereum network. There is no third party responsible for the interaction between users of smart piggies, all interaction is peer-to-peer.
The SmartPiggies contracts are deployed on the Arbitrum network which is layer 2 extension of the Ethereum network.
The smart contract that describes the rules of SmartPiggies, from creating a piggy to claiming payouts, can be found here. (add link to smart contracts)
Utilizing the Arbitrum network reduces transaction fee costs to a fraction of Ethereum mainnet while inheriting it's security guarantees and decentralization properties.
The demand and growth of decentralized finance (DeFi) on Ethereum throughout 2020 has made transaction fees prohibitive for many decentralized applications (dApps) that use Ethereum as a transaction and execution layer. This has been a consistent and growing concern, most recently evidenced by the yield farming, token swapping, NFT art boom of 2020-2021 .
SmartPiggies was conceived as a public, permissionless project allowing anyone with an internet connection to access advanced financial tools, a luxury most in the world are never given. When fees began to increase on Ethereum, the SmartPiggies team became concerned that some users would be priced out of participation in the piggy ecosystem. In view of this, the decision was made to deploy the SmartPiggies contracts on a layer-2 network, bringing the cost of participation more in line with the mandate of the project.
A move to a layer-2 solution means that all of the infrastructure moves to the layer-2 network as well. The SmartPiggies team desired the scalability and cost reduction in moving off of the Ethereum mainnet, but still required the security guarantees of the Ethereum network. With these goals in mind, SmartPiggies runs on the Arbitrum layer-2 network, as a scaling solution for Ethereum. Arbitrum offers many benefits, including scaling, and leverages optimistic rollups which inherit the security of Ethereum.
1 One may also add in Flash Loan and Fee Sniping craze.