Exploring Defi Land
Gamified Defi applications are gaining significant amounts of traction among crypto enthusiasts. Regardless of the blockchain they are built on, they are attracting more users.
Defi as a whole is in a strong position to use gamification to attract, educate, and retain new users. At the same time, the aligned interests and open structures of Defi projects and communities discourage the use of gamification strategies to exploit users, as has been the case in the conventional finance industry.
As Defi gains mainstream adoption, blockchain developers have an opportunity to use gamification more effectively than TradFi has been able to do, helping in its mission to build products that are more rewarding and fair than the legacy financial sector is capable of providing.
Defi is notorious for being complex. It is filled with jargon that is not easy to grasp without a background in crypto and/or finance. As a result, the TVL(Total Value Locked) in Defi is much smaller than the value of crypto in circulation. Most people prefer to simply hold their tokens. There is a very real barrier to entry to Defi, even for people relatively comfortable with crypto. Defi Land aims to onboard a new generation of retail investors into Defi through their game.
Explaining gamification in Defi Land
Accusations that gamification encourages irresponsible trading by people who don’t understand what they are buying ring hollow, given the role that complex and opaque assets like Mortgage-Backed Securities played in bringing about the Global Financial Crisis.
From beta testing to public launch to the launch of Gen-0 NFTs, Defi Land has created an engaging, rewarding trading experience and enhanced loyalty across the platform. Rather than being bolt-on extras, these features are a natural application of blockchain’s toolbox of functionality and an outworking of its community-driven culture. But let’s get to see what gamification entails.
“Gamification” is the application of game-style mechanics to non-game products and systems, with the aim of driving specific user activities. Elements of board game and video game design that may be added to platforms include point scoring, badges, rewards, competitions, leaderboards, avatars, performance metrics and charts, and other forms of real-time feedback that make using a service more fun and engaging.
Until a few years ago, integrating these kinds of features into conventional financial services would have felt incongruous, at best. Consider the TradFi investment platforms that are currently still the norm. People may not phone their stockbrokers anymore, but investment portals have more in common with paying a tax bill or banking online than, say, logging into a social media platform or a game.
Defi Land’s team worked hard to build principles of gamification that naturally attracted younger, tech-savvy users who were steeped in simulation games especially farming simulation games. The app is user-friendly, with a colorful, clean interface. An auto-updating Solana tokens portfolio performance gives a near real-time indication of whether users are up or down on their investments. Users can do more than Defi on Defi Land.
The entire user experience is designed to increase “stickiness” and fuel further engagement. It’s been successful enough since its launch. All of this has horrified the Old Guard of TradFi and the typical Defi protocols. Love them or hate them, though, the fact is that gamified financial apps have introduced a wary and jaded generation to investing in a way that TradFi and other typical Defi protocols could never hope to do.
Retail Onboarding Process
Signing up for Defi land is very straightforward. Just connect your SPL wallet. You will see a popup from your wallet requesting you sign a transaction. Once you do, the play button appears and you click it to proceed.
Sometimes, the internet connection of a user might be worrisome. You can enjoy a few minutes of playing Pac-Man so you don’t get bored staring at the screen for too long. This only happens the first time you are loading the game on your browser.
A day in Defi Land
You will be greeted by a nameless guide who will show you around the various areas in Defi land. Also, the in-game tracks are very welcoming.
You will be presented with three teams to choose one. This is to enable you to take part in Defi Land team challenges. As you can see below, there is a countdown timer to the end of a challenge, and the leading team is the team, Pepe. Your team statue is near your house. In the following paragraphs, you will get to see where things are being positioned and what they represent.
You start your day by heading to the market. The market works on a barter system — you can only swap goods. As I mentioned before, each token is mapped to a fruit/vegetable, making the market essentially an AMM(Automated Market Maker).
Once you have the fruits/vegetables you need, you head over to the laboratory to create hybrid seeds from your fruits/vegetables. In Defi terms, this translates to staking your tokens in a liquidity pool.
It is important to note that the seeds you make have to be on the farm table. Otherwise, you will be notified that there is insufficient liquidity for the pairs you try to combine.
After combining an adequate portion of a token with another, navigate to the seeds to view them.
After you get your seeds from the seeds lab, you head over to your farm. Here you can plant your seeds and watch them grow. You can start harvesting the crops(rewards) once they start growing, even by an inch. This is Defi Land taking yield farming very literally.
As night falls and it starts to rain, you decide to go home. On the way, you stop to pet your dogs, cows, chickens, and ducks and accumulate XPs to level up.
Settings
Adjust the in-game settings to suit your gameplay. Those using low-end devices can adjust the resolution for a smooth gameplay experience.
Games
Defi land also has a few in-game gameplays namely shooting, memory, farm invaders, and fishing games. There will be more games by the P2E launch including Harvester game, Hunting, and upgraded fishing.
The shooting game is a first-person shooter game. You’re required to shoot as many blackbirds as you can in a limited period.
Match the same fruits to eliminate the cards. The memory game tests your attention, concentration, and focus.
The fishing game tests your speed. Follow the directions displayed on the screen as fast as you can.
Shoot all birds and avoid coming in contact with them than their own “bullets”.
Bank
The in-game Bank feature on Defi Land may be used to access the staking capability. Users may choose between flexible and locked staking, enter their stake amount, and immediately begin earning rewards. Fixed emissions begin at 1 token per second and change over time as in-game dynamics and market fees take control of the emission schedule, ensuring long-term sustainability.
Audius Integration
Blockchain-powered music streaming platform Audius launched its first FM radio tower in Defi Land. This integration means that all in-game music within Defi Land will come exclusively from Audius, which currently features more than 100,000 artists, including well-known names like deadmau5 and Skrillex.
As it stands, Audius is also the largest crypto application ever built with more than 6 million users every month. With the explosion of blockchain-powered applications in recent years, Audius hopes that this partnership can ultimately lead to mass adoption of the gamified Defi space.
Here is a snapshot of the radio tower on Defi Land:
Users can also gain access to a variety of music genres via the “Defi FM”.
Wise statue
The wise statue is known for giving life tips or wise sayings. The wise statue has a new tip daily.
House
In your house, you get to see the coins in your wallet, your net worth, top and worse performers(tokens), achievements, inventory, and where you are on the leaderboard.
Campfire
We know a campfire as an open-air fire in a camp, used for cooking and as a focal point for social activity. In Defi land, rumors have been around the community that it will be a voice chat, a discord stage inside Defi land.
Thoughts on the gameplay
I like the music and weather in Defi Land. The vibes are immaculate. Also having a place to report bugs in your game map is a very nice way to do it.
Report Bugs
If you encounter any error during playing the game, reach out to the team through the report bug feature on the land. You see different categories and select the one your bug falls into.
Visit Friends
You can visit your friend’s land to see their land customization by inputting their address. You cannot interact with any item on another person’s land. It is only on view mode.
Edit your Land
If you want to customize your land to your taste, click on the icon on the bottom right corner of your screen. You can move virtually every object around and place it in locations suitable to you.
Preview a first person gameplay experience
Test the first-person gameplay experience by clicking on the icon.
Defi Land’s Gamification As Defi Education
Gamified apps like Defi Land gave these financially-curious users the means they needed to dive down the rabbit hole. A newbie can start with using Defi Land and catch up in knowledge, with virtually everything to know about Defi and the activities around the Defi ecosystem.
What the gamified UX of next-gen apps has achieved is to dissolve the pervasive sense of disinterest in trading and investing. People are excited again. Younger investors who felt disconnected from the financial system and excluded from opportunities not only had a way to access them but were able to enjoy doing so.
Play-To-Earn in Defi Land
Rather than using an in-game currency for in-game actions like most games today, Defi Land uses actual tokens from your wallet. Keeping with the farm theme, each token is mapped to a fruit/vegetable that reflects the price of the token in real-time. You can swap tokens, farms, and more, all of which reflects in your wallet in real-time. These Defi concepts are abstracted using game mechanics. All in-game actions are settled on Solana’s mainnet.
Defi is in a unique position to take advantage of this new trend toward gamifying financial services in a way that is impossible within TradFi and a vast majority of Defi protocols. With the ability to distribute rewards of real value on the blockchain comes new ways of engaging users.
The play-to-earn sector embodies this idea in its purest form, with titles like Axie Infinity and Gods Unchained enabling their users to earn significant incomes in in-game currency tokens and NFTs. But almost any Defi service has this new toolkit at its disposal, rewarding users for completing desirable activities. In Defi Land’s case, some of the most valuable game rewards will come from playing the integrated games on the platform to gain XPs.
Defi Land also has the opportunity to structure its incentives in a fairway. The criticism of Defi Land has been that its gamification strategies encourage users to trade more often. To take another example from Defi Land, liquidity providers and traders are both core and interdependent stakeholder groups; neither can exist without the other. Incentivizing LPs to stake funds makes markets more liquid and trading more efficient, and increasing trading volumes brings more fees to LPs, rewarding them for the service they provide.
Meanwhile, taking $DFL tokens out of circulation via different burning, locking, and gamification mechanisms unique to Defi Land benefits every $DFL holder. Other use cases include governance, staking, purchasing NFTs from the marketplace, energy boosting, upgrading NFT attributes (5 multiply levels), splitting NFT attributes, crafting new NFTs, and renaming your NFTs.
Additionally, NFTs are the core assets to be used for the P2E and they can be upgraded, crafted, and traded. Defi Land will be launching its NFT marketplace soon. On the 29th of April during the Farmer’s Hall Summary v34, Erwin announced that the NFT marketplace will be launching in 10 days. In the meantime, you can read about the Gen-0 NFTs and watch the recorded session for more.
The Golden Opportunity For Defi
Defi Land is currently in public beta so you can get in and explore the features in the gamified environment. Gamification enables the emerging Defi sector to attract and reward large and active new communities of financially-curious users, but simultaneously avoid the abuses that have arisen from companies deploying similar strategies within TradFi and early Defi protocols.
This combination of effectiveness and integrity is a superpower that Erwin with the rest of the team and developers has chosen to embrace at scale. The picture of Defi is starting to change with the coming release of other features in Defi Land enhancing gamification at its full scale.
Concluding Thoughts
Defi Land takes this a step further by having complex financial instruments in the game itself. Kids playing games can be the highest earners in their house. Playing Defi land can have a real economic impact on your life.
Unlike several other crypto projects, Defi Land is somewhat blockchain agnostic. They have plans to be a multichain platform. This makes the project more resilient. However, this may take team bandwidth away from improving the game, which is the most important factor for retention. For now, the team seems to be all in on Solana.
They have a very exciting roadmap, a strong community, and backing from several big names in the crypto space. I strongly believe in the problem that Defi land is trying to solve. I look forward to seeing how the game and the community grow.
