Introduction
In the few short years since DeFi has been around, it has already managed to translate many legacy financial products into the decentralized world. Today DeFi offers a much more convenient, faster, and overall better user experience for use cases such as lending and borrowing, and buying and selling cryptocurrencies than its traditional counterpart.
As a result of the pent-up demand for scarce digital assets, stirred up by multiple macroeconomic factors but mainly triggered by the Coronavirus crisis and fears of inflation caused by rampant money printing, the crypto space and DeFi in particular are seeing exponential growth.
The current state of play in DeFi is one of breakneck speed of development and innovation. Even though it’s still a very niche market, today’s total value locked in DeFi protocols (not market cap or transaction volume numbers, but capital locked in smart contracts for use in various financial purposes) approaches $59 billion. This marks a staggering 9000% year-to-date increase, up from just $650 million locked at the beginning of the year.
The number of new users, as measured by the number of unique wallet addresses interacting with DeFi protocols, has grown from ten thousand to over one million during the same period. Furthermore, Crypto.com estimates that over 100 million people have a cryptocurrency wallet and direct exposure to crypto assets.
AsWhile the above numbers may seem unsubstantial compared to traditional finance, they are not to be underestimated. The available data indicates that the trend will keep increasing; the crypto industry draws some of the brightest minds from IT, FinTech, and traditional finance to the space. To further substantiate the point, blockchain developers were the top sought-after talent in 2018, and institutional investors observing the space are noticing that.
As a result, financial institutions, publicly traded companies, even sovereign wealth and pension funds are slowly entering the space. Some are merely dipping their toes, while others, like MicroStrategy, Tesla, PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard are doing it with a bang.
Simply put, what we’re witnessing in 2021 is the second coming of crypto. With decentralized finance, the industry finally found the perfect product-market fit. What started as a handful of preliminary projects quickly gave way to a new, radical wave of experimentation and financial innovation. However, while there’s no doubt that DeFi will, in time, eat traditional finance, as things currently stand, it’s still lagging behind in many aspects.
Problem vs Solution
New DeFi products, each with their own peculiarities, are launching almost every single day. Many of these are brilliant protocols that everyone should have the opportunity to experience. However, unless one operates a dedicated research firm or goes full-time into crypto, there’s simply no way to catch up with everything that’s out there.
The information is overwhelming, and the barriers to entry are too high. The user experience is lacking, the risks and benefits of interacting with different protocols are often opaque, the necessary information is scattered all over, and the whole process of yield farming in DeFi is too technical, unnecessarily stressful, and frankly — dull.
Providing liquidity on multiple protocols or “operating multiple farms” means visiting a dozen different websites to monitor the KPIs and interact with the assets on a daily basis, which results in a significant waste of time and money.
Various DeFi products are trying to solve these issues in different ways. The so-called yield farm aggregators like yEarn, Vesper, Harvest, and Rari Capital are working on socializing the gas costs and providing simplified one-click products that optimize yield farming. Other projects like APY.vision, Zapper, and Nansen are offering analytics tools that give liquidity providers an overview of their overall performance.
These solutions, however, are far from optimal. Yield-farming aggregators are often late to implement the newest pool farming strategies, which ends up bringing significant opportunity costs to the users. At the same time, the different analytics tools are often too hard to navigate and lack the necessary data.
This brings us to our vision: We believe that decentralized finance shouldn’t be a privilege reserved only for tech-savvy DeFi power users. Interacting with DeFi products and protocols should be intuitive and straightforward, even for people without the slightest crypto experience.
For this reason, we’re creating an NFT-based game that lowers the barriers to entry and allows everyone — from the utmost beginners to DeFi yield-farming veterans — to visualize and manage their farms and track key performance yield farming indicators from a single, visually appealing in-game dashboard.
DeFi City’s ultimate goal is to blur the boundaries between work time and playtime by making yield farming fun and simple.
The DeFi City game will be an all-in-one yield-farming tool — an interactive DeFi learning center and a central hub for people’s farms. The game will provide players with all the necessary information regarding their key performance yield farming indicators (KPIs) at a glance. The city’s dashboard will showcase stats on the total tokens staked, a breakdown of farming profits across different protocols, average daily APY, impermanent loss calculations, airdrops, yields ready for harvest, and many more.
By gamifying DeFi, we’re making the whole yield-farming process feel effortless and accessible to everyone. DeFi City will incorporate all the necessary learning materials, step-by-step guides, and valuable tips & tricks in the form of in-game pop-ups and quests.
The concept
DeFi City is a browser-based virtual world where users can build beautiful interactive cities and manage and monitor their farms across many different chains and protocols in a gamified and engaging way.
The game will allow users to provide liquidity, borrow, lend, stake, unstake, and harvest their farming yields across different DeFi platforms with a single click — directly from their city! Our ultimate goal here is to make the yield-farming experience feel seamless by minimizing the number of authentication steps required to stake, unstake, provide liquidity, harvest, and so on.
The idea is to keep farming and interacting with various DeFi protocols without ever leaving the game. The cities built in DeFi City will represent a central hub for all of the users’ staking assets and provide players with intuitive visualizations of all the necessary KPIs to support their farming decisions.
By connecting their MetaMask wallets with DeFi City, the game will be able to read and automatically incorporate all of their farms and staking assets and merge them into a statistical dashboard. This way, users will be able to manage and monitor their entire DeFi activities from a single entry point without continually switching to other platforms to check their daily incomes, harvest their yields, or otherwise interact with the protocols.
This will be especially useful for experienced DeFi farmers with significant capital scattered across different farms as well as for beginners looking for a fun, simple, and engaging way to enter the space and earn passive income.
Starting point
To begin playing the game, the players will have to purchase and open Golden Scrolls to obtain a unique city. The Golden Scrolls are NFTs that can be bought with DeFi City’s native token DFC and can either be opened to obtain a city or sold to other players on the open market.
Each Golden Scroll will grant the player who opens it a randomly selected city with unique properties, including different cosmetics and opportunities for random token and NFT airdrops. Moreover, opening a Golden Scroll will burn part of the DFC tokens used to purchase it, thus deflating the total token supply.
The cities will be set up in squares of 256 tiles, whereby each tile can hold a unique building representing a farm or an extra in-game item like NFT art purchased on OpenSea, statues, or other cosmetic items. Every item will be fully customizable and comes with its own set of statistics depending on what the item is representing. For example, if the item is a building representing a farm, players will see all the relevant KPIs of their staking position by clicking on it. If the item is an NFT art, players will be able to open and see it directly in-game and flex their digital art collection to other DeFi City players.
The goal is to visually represent the player’s entire yield-farming portfolio, including how their LP positions perform over time, their average APY, impermanent loss, and so on. Moreover, users will also be able to stake their DFC tokens in their city’s Townhouse and earn DFC rewards. The staking rewards will have varying premiums based on the tiers of the cities. The higher the level of the city NFT, the higher the reward APY.
The city NFTs will not differ merely in cosmetics but also in their properties and actual use cases within the game. The idea here is to create a prosperous marketplace for DeFi City NFTs and create demand for the more scarce, higher-tier cities. Moreover, part of the DFC tokens used to purchase the cities will be burned to create a deflationary ecosystem. Simultaneously, the remaining amount will be deposited into the staking vault, allowing players to compound their DFC staking rewards.
DeFi City will also have an in-game shop where users will be able to buy different cosmetics, staking boosters, and other visual items in the form of NFTs using DFC tokens. The DFC tokens used in the DeFy City Shop will also be burned.
Upon releasing the game, early adopters will be rewarded with booster packs containing special NFTs issued by our partners, rare cool-looking skins for farms, random token airdrops, and other bonuses. Players can either bring these items to life by placing them throughout their DeFi city or trade them with other NFT collectors on the open market.
Finally, we believe that great decentralized applications are built for interoperability; they must integrate, work with, and build on top of each other — hence why they’re often called money legos. With this in mind, most of our early efforts went into building relationships with related projects and partnering up with Layer 2 scaling solution providers in the gaming and NFT space.
Detailed visuals and metadata
DeFi City’s flagship product and primary growth driver will be the detailed visuals and the ability to integrate vast sets of external metadata into the game easily. DeFi City will significantly simplify the yield-farming experience in DeFi by allowing users to visualize all of their farms and manage them from a single platform.
Deflationary tokenomics and valuable NFTs
DeFi City is a non-custodial platform, meaning that all of the farms and assets integrated into the game will remain in full custody of the users.
The two main building blocks of the DeFi City ecosystem are our native NFTs and our native DFC token. DeFi City’s native token DFC is a scarce token with deflationary properties, with a total market cap of 10 million tokens. The NFTs, on the other hand, will represent valuable collectibles for DeFi farmers because based on their individual properties and rarity, they’ll grant players certain benefits, including opportunities for in-game token airdrops, booster packs, staking reward boosters, and so on.
We also partnered up with notorious crypto YouTubers and created in-game statues, visually representing the personalities. These statues can be sold as NFTs or used for boosting staking rewards inside the game.
