DeFi Kingdoms is a browser-based game launched on August 22 2021: all you need in order to play the game is a compatible browser and a MetaMask extension properly installed.Additionally, you need the Harmony ONE token for the gas fees and for converting it into JEWEL (the native currency of the game).
DeFi Kingdoms combine all the most powerful tools available in crypto into a single game.So DFK is a DEX, a liquidity pool, a market of rare NFTs all combined into a nostalgic fantasy pixel art game.
The creators of DeFi Kingdoms wanted to make a more compelling system for the end user approaching the DeFi mechanisms, so they mixed the innovative technology of the decentralized finance and made it way funnier by giving utility to the native token used in DFK (JEWEL).
At its heart DFK has a decentralized exchange that uses the Uniswap V2 Protocol.
In the game this area is called “The Market” and here you can basically do everything you are able to do in a DEX, swap tokens, provide liquidity and stake your token to earn JEWEL as a reward.
Another cool feature of DFK is “The Bank” where you can deposit JEWEL to receive xJEWEL shares: essentially the bank receives the fees from all the transactions made in the DEX and will promptly market buy JEWEL meaning that your xJEWEL shares will always be worth more than the JEWELs you put in.
Here’s an example: Let’s say the xJewel exchange rate is 1.5. If you deposit 150 Jewel into the bank, you will receive 100 xJewel. Later on, the xJewel exchange rate goes up to 1.7. If you withdraw your 100 xJewel now you get 170 Jewel instead of the original 150 Jewel you put in.
The Gardens is the core place to stake liquidity provider tokens and receive JEWEL.
I will quote from their whitepaper which I assume is the vision of their liquidity pool mining:
We’re building an epic world and gardens in which to represent token pairs and liquidity pool mining. Within each garden (i.e. LP pairing), you will be able to see your portion of the total share within the plot represented by your owned plants. The gardener busies himself with tending to your plants (this represents the countdown timer between blocks mined) and once harvested, the gardener deposits your yield in the storehouse representing your share of JEWEL tokens of the block mined. There will be ways to augment and increase your yield through in-game items that will provide you with increased JEWEL token rewards!
The issuance of JEWEL as a reward for staking LP tokens will change during each Epoch: the “Epoch” in DFK is based on 302,400 blocks from the Harmony Blockchain, so obviously each length of the Epoch is based on the block speed of the Harmony Blockchain.Each time you advance the Epoch, the multiplier will lower and give less and less reward as Yield.
To balance some of the high and attractive yield, some of the tokens coming from the early adopters who have provided liquidity via Gardens will be locked till the Epoch 51 (which atcurrent speed of the Harmony Blockchain it is estimated to be Q3 2022). At which point the token will begin the unlocking over time and will be fully unlocked by Q3 2023.
I will also quote another important thing from their whitepaper that says:
Starting the first Epoch, 5% of any rewards claimed from the Gardens were unlocked and immediately accessible and 95% of rewards claimed from the Gardens were locked. The percentage of rewards CLAIMED from the Garden that are unlocked will increase by 2% every Epoch until after Epoch 51 where any rewards claimed thereafter will be 100% unlocked. This 2% increase of unlocked rewards per Epoch applies only to unclaimed rewards (i.e. once claimed, locked rewards do not benefit from this increasing unlock rate per Epoch and will remain locked until after Epoch 51 when they will start to unlock)So, for example, Garden staking rewards claimed during Epoch 1 will be 5% unlocked, 95% locked; during Epoch 2 will be 7% unlocked, 93% locked; during Epoch 3 will be 9% unlocked, 91% locked, and so on, until after Epoch 51, when no more locking of staked rewards will occur for newly claimed Garden rewards.
Now I do understand the reason for that, and it’s primarily to keep the whole ecosystem healthy and not inflate it with the humongous rewards farmed in the gardens.
What you’ll notice is that early adopters gain the most rewards, but those rewards start off mostly locked up. Over time, total rewards are lower but the mix shifts towards mostly unlocked.
Reading and understanding all that can give you a headache if you are not ready for it.
Jokes aside, I do appreciate the articulate locking method, where the team truly cares about the longevity of the game itself and see this as a way to increase the lifetime of DFK.
It is also worth mentioning that to prevent flash loans and pump and dumps, the team has implemented a withdrawal fee for the staked LP tokens: the more Epochs you provide liquidity for, the less the fees you will pay when withdrawing your tokens. If you stake more LP tokens in a liquidity pool, your withdrawal fee timer will not restart.
The Heroes are basically the NFTs of DeFi Kingdoms, and as every other game that is blockchain based they come with an utility in the game itself. You can assign heroes to complete quests, battle in PVP and dress them up to maximize their stats, as a return they will be leveling up and earning tokens through the whole adventure.
“The tavern” is the place to buy, rent or sell your heroes.
The heroes can also be combined and summoned through a portal and there won’t be any duplicate. Each hero comes with unique stats and appearances.
Adding to that you can also summon new ones by mixing two genes from your existing heroes and you could end up with a more valuable one. If you ever played Axie Infinity you should be familiar with the “breeding” mechanism and the “genes”. As you should also be aware that the act of summoning comes with a cost and a cooldown to it.
The team has distributed 50 Gen 0 Shiny Heroes to the early adopters that had in their bank balance at least 5,000 xJEWEL when the screenshot took place on Sept 15, 2021. So this is the highest rarity Hero that you can have in DFK.
As for the sale of the Gen 0 Heroes the team sold 2000 of it with an initial price of 750 JEWEL and each and every purchase increased the overall price by 1.25 JEWELs, the last Gen 0 was sold for 3000 JEWEL.
The overall Gen 0 sale sold out in just 11 minutes.
For the breaking down of the Gen 0 below a medium article straight from the DFK team.
The Gen 0 Heroes are the only ones that have no limit on the amount of summon you can generate.
Keep in mind that the new Hero’s Gen will be based on whichever Hero used to summon is more ‘recent’+ 1. If you summon with a Gen 0 and a Gen 3, the summoned Hero will be a Gen 4. The genes of the Heroes are divided into appearance one and playable attributes (professions, class, subclass, passive and active abilities).
When summoning a new Hero it will acquire genes from both their “parents” used for the summoning, with a chance of generating new rare abilities and classes.
I won’t go any deeper in details on the summoning of Heroes because it is actually very delicate to understand, so please go ahead in the DFK whitepaper under the Gameplay -> Heroes > Summoning section, where it is explained with clear examples on what you might need.
Heroes have Stats that will determine how effective they can be at performing different quests and these stats can be increased as long as the hero gains experience.These stats can be upgraded in the “Meditation circle” and there is actually a very specific way of leveling up based on many factors, please check this medium article for more info:
As per the Quest you have both professions quests that will give you in-game resources and currency while gaining experience or increase the yield from the Gardens, and adventure quests that will reveal part of the lore and reward the player with a variety of loot.During their adventure the hero can also find rare eggs which will hatch into a pet, this one will guarantee additional bonuses and passive abilities.
The Hero will be also able to participate in PvP tournaments in parties of 3 and compete against other players to earn JEWEL.
You might be wondering how much does a Hero cost if you have to buy from the tavern, with the current price of JEWEL around 19$ you need around 45–50 JEWEL to buy a hero.
I had the pleasure to speak with one of the dev and admin of the community and here are some of the conversation that we had:
On his point I also added that it might be the case for the player that you get a higher rarity hero from your initial investment of 100 JEWEL for 2 Heroes, so while it might be cheaper to buy your hero from the tavern it can also happen that you summon a higher tier rarity hero to sell for more JEWEL.
I would like to highlight a guide made by the DFK team to choose your first hero, here is the link: https://defikingdoms.medium.com/a-beginners-guide-on-picking-the-perfect-hero-for-you-3c9ffe83c973
Of course in a blockchain game what can’t miss the call is the Land System: in DFK you will be able to buy and sell your land through the real estate office at the capital.
Obviously, not all lands are equal and some will have advantages being closer to certain areas than another.
You can construct buildings and foraging inside your land. While the first helps accumulate resources to improve your hero or provides certain passive stats to it, the second is made to forage rare resources every day that can give you the chance to find rare and valuable materials and equipment for your hero. I was quite confused at first when reading this, but apparently these two are different types of construction that you can have in your land.
As for the land there were some plots allocated to the early adopters too, with the same allocation method used for the Hero, basically on the amount of xJEWEL you had staked in the bank.
The Bank is the place to stake your JEWEL tokens and earn rewards that come from “fee sharing”. You can interact with the Bank via the ‘Teller’. This brings you an interface with three main functions: Deposit, Claim and Withdraw.
The interface shows the total value locked (TVL) on DeFi Kingdoms and your xJEWEL token balance.
‘Deposit’ allows you to deposit your JEWEL tokens to receive xJEWEL in the Bank. This is also known as ‘staking’ your JEWEL tokens, where you will receive a portion of 1/3 of the trading fees from the DEX (The Marketplace).
‘Claim’ allows you to use these LP fees collected from the entire DEX to market buy JEWEL. These purchased JEWEL tokens are then distributed to all Bank stakers (xJEWEL holders) as staking rewards.
‘Withdraw’ allows you to remove your xJEWEL tokens, and exchange them back for JEWEL at the current ratio. As accumulated trading fees are distributed to xJEWEL holders, this ratio will continue to increase over time. Since returns from the Bank are based on trading activity and fees, there is no traditional APY.
We mentioned a lot of things regarding the bank already, and by now you should have most of the functionalities of the bank cleared out, although one thing to add is that to incentivize people to stake their JEWEL the devs run airdrops and raffle (as it was for the Heroes and Kingdoms) and starting on December 15th you have a chance to win mythic, legendary or rare drops.
JEWEL is a token of the Harmony blockchain and it’s used to buy items, heroes and many more things that will help you throughout your journey inside DFK.
Other than buying in-game utility, JEWEL will be used for the whole ecosystem. I mentioned previously that DFK is also a Dex, and so with JEWEL you will be able to use it in liquidity mining, allowing you to farm even more through staking.
Adding to the above mentioned JEWEL will also be the governance token and so you will have a say in the growth and evolution of the project.
Each transaction of JEWEL is proportioned and allocated to crucial part of the ecosystem to keep the economy healthy, we have the bank that rewards xJEWEL to holders of JEWEL, some are recycled back into the community treasury to reward the players from completing their quest, and others are used to develop the DeFi system to keep DFK strong and healthy.
As per every other game the early adopters will get rewarded a higher multiplier to stimulate the interest and involve loyal investors.
The hard cap of JEWEL is 500,000,000 and reading from the whitepaper we can only see how the first 10,000,000 are distributed during the pre-minthing phase:
If you have read previous reports from us, you already know how much importance we give to the transparency of the tokenomics and where all the tokens will be allocated. Unfortunately we are missing here the rest of the supply and it is a huge part of it.
It looks like the DFK team is in line on the step achieved for the roadmap, although I would like to see more details on what is coming in the next phases, unfortunately little to small details are provided in the whitepaper as of now.
At the time of writing this it looks like the phases 0.5 (Community) and 1 (Capital & Jewels) have been achieved successfully, but for the upcoming ones I can’t find more information on what is coming next in the specific details.
The team unfortunately is fully anonymous.
As of now everyone works behind “nicknames” and you cannot do any analysis on someone that has a virtual nickname and no Linkedin or any past experience linked to it.Although I must be honest, I am incredibly impressed, the team has builded a community that is welcoming and truly believes in the project. It looks like most of the community actually enjoy playing the game and it is how I feel the project can have a future.No amount of money can buy you a real community, the only asset you should be aware of, if you are building a game, is your community.
I love what DFK was able to accomplish till now, and I think it is also amazing considering you don’t know any single person behind the team, but to me it’s crucial to understand who is doing what and what kind of experience this individual has. This was probably the only “meh” impression I had of analyzing DFK.One additional good point regarding the team is their newsletter, on a weekly basis you have a summary on the main news and events of the DeFi Kingdom world.
I will include a screenshot below on how their organization is divided based on their weekly newsletter #4.
One thing that makes DFK attractive is the cross-chain function that the team is implementing with the ongoing game development. The idea of the team is to release an expansion each and every time they implement a new blockchain inside DeFi Kingdom.On the 6th of December 2021, the team announced Crystalvale Realm with the upcoming partnership with Avalance blockchain. This is exactly a new start for the upcoming Crystalvale expansion, and guess what? This also means whole new Gen 0 Heroes available and the introduction of a new token in DFK called CRYSTAL. All of the core features of DeFi Kingdoms: Serendale (on Harmony) will be available in Crystalvale. The CRYSTAL token will essentially power the Crystavale realm. You will be able to earn CRYSTAL through single staking your JEWEL tokens (bridged over from Harmony). Much like JEWEL on DeFi Kingdoms: Serendale, CRYSTAL is used for summoning, purchasing in-game NFTs and more.
Closing this I want to highlight that Avax is in order of community way larger compared to Harmony, so theoretically this means more adoption of DFK.
Quoting from their discord announcement channel, here are some criteria to be eligible for the airdrop of CRYSTAL token:
The Bank has historically been the best way to qualify for Airdrops, and that isn’t changing. We are allocating 600k CRYSTAL to be awarded to xJEWEL holders according to their average holdings between Jan 3, 2022 and Jan 24, 2022.
In addition, we will be giving away 25 Shiny Crystalvale Gen 0 Heroes in a raffle for these xJEWEL holders.
Players will receive 1 entry for 100 xJEWELs, and 2 additional entries for every additional 100 xJEWELs, according to their average xJEWEL holdings between Jan 3, 2022 and Jan 24, 2022.
Hero owners rejoice! We will be airdropping CRYSTALs to Hero owners shortly after the launch of Crystalvale according to the following schedule:
Common — 1 CRYSTAL
Uncommon — 2 CRYSTAL
Rare — 4 CRYSTAL
Legendary — 8 CRYSTAL
Mythic — 16 CRYSTAL
We will be taking a snapshot on Jan 21, 2022 for this.
Each new Hero summoned from Jan 1, 2022 until Jan 21st, 2022 (EST) will result in 1 raffle entry for the summoner (player) to win a Shiny Gen 0 Crystalvale Hero Crystal. There will be 10 drawings for a total of 10 Gen 0s.
Holders of Bridged Avalanche JEWELs will receive a collective 100k CRYSTAL tokens shortly after the launch of Crystalvale, according to their average Avalanche JEWEL holdings between Jan 3, 2022 and Jan 24, 2022.
Staking just became even more rewarding! We’ve gotten many requests to include JEWEL LP stakers in some Crystalvale Airdrops. As such, we will be airdropping a collective 300k CRYSTAL tokens to our liquidity providers who have staked in our gardens, according to their average staked LP holdings between Jan 3, 2022 and Jan 31, 2022.
If the team analysis left me with a “meh” impression, I was incredibly surprised when I knew that the project had 0, yes ZERO VC funding. Most of the upcoming games in the blockchain space sit on piles and piles of cash without even providing a small detail of the game they are building, while games such as DFK have all that traction without even a percentage of the project being funded by VC, this is pure music to my ears.
Worth nothing is the $1MM fund provided from the Harmony foundation that will enhance the overall experience on the Harmony Network.
More info here: https://talk.harmony.one/t/defi-kingdoms-1mm-grant-application-to-partner-with-harmony-in-impact-initiatives/8022?u=dreamerdfk
As I had an unprecedented experience analyzing this project I want to make sure to give proper credit to the community of DFK.
Our job isn’t easy and we want our best both for your knowledge and for our investments, so we make it sure to scavenge and go through all the tiny piece of information that we can retrieve from all the sources possible, most of the time we nail it, but for bigger project it might be the case that we will miss something, it’s a human error we might go through.
Although DFK is huge we had some hard times finding more information or understanding some mechanics, and let me say that the DFK discord community always came in handy and supportive, all the questions I had were always answered with a level of accuracy that was always surprising to me, major props to the team and the whole community of DFK.
With that said the DFK community also builded a variety of tools that come in handy for your your journey and I will leave it below:
DFKWiki — https://dfkwiki.com/heroesComplete analytics on the whole DeFi Kingdom world and many more resources.
DFKWatch — https://dfkwatch.web.app/personalThe analysis of your DFK portfolio.
DFKTavern — http://dfktavern.com/Different tools like floor analytics, hero and population.
DFKTavern (2) — https://dfk-tavern.herokuapp.com/Tavern Data
Unofficial Hero Calculator — https://grid.is/@jmjpattinson/dfk-hero-calculator-:2CMnWrPRa2NNocluTIlAATool to calculate stat growth and so on for your hero.
Hero Base Stats — Google Sheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jfG6E6otW1V6ZLQycF5DumoBr_LrpQaz7cTmDPpwV2s/edit#gid=655220330Keep track of which Hero type is ideal for a certain Profession or combat.
Useful DFK Articles regarding their active community members supporting the projecthttps://defikingdoms.medium.com/meet-our-bards-videos-articles-more-e9e3496276f1
In one of the recent AMAs the team actually revealed the plan to implement a Bug Bounty program to incentivize those who are willing to help find possible discrepancies on the smart contract of JEWEL and the relative ecosystem.
For our fellow technical brothers out there, the auditing of the smart contract for the Jewel Token has been conducted by Solidity Finance and it produced the following results:
“For this audit we reviewed Defi Kingdoms’s JewelToken, MasterGardener, Profile, AirDrop, AirdropClaim, Bank, Banker, and supporting contracts at commit aa0e6387ea18aa600e205a8d1a1b232b2295ce2f on GitHub.
Audit Findings Summary:
Date: September 24th, 2021.
You can find more details of the audit here:https://solidity.finance/audits/DefiKingdoms/
At this point, it is clear how much the DFK team is working towards being one of the most adopted GameFi platforms of 2022. Despite being still an anonymous team, you have to give credits to them for what they were able to achieve and for the amount of details and community they successfully builded.
If you have enough time to actually enjoy the game I would give it a try and see how much is the return on the investment, otherwise it is also ok to buy their native token and get exposure to the DFK ecosystem by only using their DeFi tools.
As the game is quite articulate I would also suggest combining and using all the tools available to better understand what could be the best road that suits your needs.
Very positive note on the cross-chain infrastructure and the way it’s been implemented, I like the idea that each L1 coin will get the relative expansion.
One point of caution tho is towards the possible upcoming regulations in the DeFi world: in general DeFi has been quite under the eye of the hurricane lately and it might be the case that if regulations kicks in you might see scared sellers running away from their DeFi investments, and so a depreciation of those tokens involved in DeFi protocols.
This is not in any case financial advice, the goal of my research will always be to dive deepinto projects and study it from different angles, I do include personal opinion based on myexperience with similar projects that I have recently studied.I am and will always be open to discussion.
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