DeFi Kingdoms Game Overview

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I’ve been an MMORPG fan my whole life. As cliche as it may be, ever since I touched World of Warcraft, my life has been changed completely.

I love the game’s social aspect – thousands of people worldwide come together to experience something online. I think I realized the genre’s full potential when I started playing The Elder Scrolls Online. I logged hundreds of hours on that game, and I genuinely think I’ve explored everything that game has to offer.

I think it’s completely changed how I see the world: we can live in a digital landscape, and we can expect to experience real feelings from occurrences online.

I know it’s not an MMORPG, but imagine all the times you’ve died in Minecraft fully equipped and lost everything. It genuinely hurts. All those hours spent grinding for full armor just lost cause you slipped in the End in Minecraft. 

Anyway, I hope it’s clear by now that when I learned about DeFi Kingdoms, I just had to jump at the opportunity to play the game. I have about six months of experience with it – and I’m only looking forward to what the game can bring. Excited? Let’s get right into it. 

What is DeFi Kingdoms?

DefiKingdomsSC
DeFi Kingdoms Home Page – Photo Taken By Matthew Du

Cross-Chain Multiplayer. Play-To-Earn. A Developing MMORPG.

You could use so many words to define DeFi Kingdoms, but I’d describe it as addictive. It’s a growing MMORPG in the rather early phases of development, and if you haven’t tried it out yet, you should.

The game features heroes, marketplace trading, and awesome 8-bit art. DeFi Kingdoms is your type of game if you played Legend of Zelda growing up.

On top of what you’d usually expect from an MMORPG, you’ll also experience the blockchain and all the decentralized earning features it offers, like peer-to-peer marketplaces, liquidity pools, and utility-driven NFTs

The game is pay-to-play. This means you can’t play it for free, but once you have a Hero (which you’ll need to pay to unlock, you can get immediate ROI on your investment by building up your Hero through quests.

Later, you’ll be able to construct buildings that accumulate resources and help you inch slowly to the rare equipment you want for PVP (coming soon as of last week, check out their Twitter for more updates).

The game’s utility tokens, JEWEL and CRYSTAL, are used to interact with the game’s features. We’ll discuss these two again in later sections of this overview. 

With the game bridging from Serendale to Crystalvale as the Harmony Chain won’t be supported anymore, I think it’s the perfect time to get in on the game at a discount. Think about it – people are worried about a key aspect of the game (the chain on which the game is built), and the currency is continuously downtrend.

Yet the markets are cyclical; if the project is good, this shouldn’t last forever. We’ll get into that later on, but if you’re looking for an MMORPG blockchain play-to-earn game, then DeFi Kingdoms is the perfect game to get into, and now is the best time to get in. 

Of course, this isn’t financial advice, and you should always do your research before doing anything – I think it’s just a cool concept to have the gamified version of a decentralized exchange available for play. 

It’s History

DeFi Kingdoms isn’t an old, established project – it launched in August of 2021 intending to make the obviously highly technical and boring world of decentralized exchanges fun.

That’s a tall task – but the development team behind Defi kingdoms has made it a point to “truly embrace the blockchain in game form.” 

Those are their words from the whitepaper. 

Because the project is new, there’s not much else to say about it. It would be interesting to point out that the project team has avoided venture funding and instead turned to the community and created incentives to help grow the project organically.

Whether that’s a questionable decision is entirely up to you to decide. Still, I find it extremely interesting how the team’s choice to turn down venture funding further proves their commitment to being a real decentralized exchange. 

However, it has a partnership with Klaytn, granting them access to capital and other resources. This partnership deters any possible claims that the team behind DeFi Kingdoms might be looking to rug pull (it’s a serious threat in every fledgling crypto project, right?). 

As the project grows, I admire their emphasis on humanitarian and community workshops to bring under-resourced groups into the development ecosystem of the game.

Alongside their detailed project roadmap that specifies target dates for quests, buyable land, buildings, equipment, and their battle system, I see a bright future in this project, one that might rival even that of WoW or Ragnarok Online if they manage to pull out a great battle system.

But What Do You Do?

the map
TIme to explore the Defi Kingdoms Map – Photo Take By Matthew Du (Yes, I made a dummy account just for these articles)

I’ve talked about a big game, but I never really touched on DeFi Kingdoms and what you do, right?

Well, here’s the interesting part. Right now, DeFi Kingdoms is more of a Decentralized Exchange than an actual MMORPG – though they’re rapidly working towards that.

The gameplay of DeFi Kingdoms revolves around Heroes and making money using those heroes. Right now, Heroes serve as utility-based NFTs that can gather resources with the help of their professions. With the introduction of PVP and PVE combat later this year, you can imagine the additional value they’ll bring and the eventual price appreciation that’ll come.

Aside from the heroic work you could be doing (questing and whatnot), you could also accomplish more normal dex stuff like liquidity pooling and fee sharing. Head to The Gardens or the Jeweler in the browser for more information on this stuff. You don’t want to check out the game just yet? Don’t worry; we’ll also be covering this in the later sections.

The way it stands right now, DeFi Kingdoms is just a reskinned and flavored DeX where your heroes act as utility tokens that could earn you more coins. It won’t stay this way, though, as their roadmap outlines key features such as building construction, equipment upgrades, and a battle system.

You don’t see a DeX incentivize their users to send utility tokens to battle every day now, do you?

The Tokenomics

jewel isn't the only coin anymore
You’re not the only coin anymore – Photo Taken By Matthew Du

A lot is going on in DeFi Kingdoms right now. Their transfer into the Klaytn network has added a lot of confusion to the tokenomics of the game. 

As always, however, it’s good to keep updated. So in this section, we’ll explain how the two DeFi Kingdom tokens, CRYSTAL and JEWEL, work, how they’ll likely be used later on, what you can use them for now, and where all these fees go. 

Jewel

JEWEL is what you’ll have used if you already play DeFi Kingdoms. If you’ve been playing before reading this overview, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you much else about the coin.

But if you’re someone looking to start in the game, here’s what you should know: unlike the average crypto token, Jewel acts as the main token of value in this metaverse game.

Therefore, it provides real utility above that of being a simple investment. You get to play and use your coins – you cannot say the same about Bitcoin, Ethereum, or even the usual equities you purchase in the stock market.

JEWEL has a hard cap of 500,000,000 tokens, and 10,000,000 were pre-minted and distributed last year, with 2,000,000 of these allocated for initial liquidity.

Crystal

On the other hand, we have CRYSTAL, which is basically JEWEL’s twin brother. CRYSTAL does the same thing as JEWEL but within Crystalvale, which is what DeFi Kingdoms plans to call the version within the Klaytn network.

There’s not much difference between JEWEL and CRYSTAL; the most glaringly obvious is that CRYSTAL is hard capped at ¼ the total supply of JEWEL. However, this will increase twofold as soon as Crystalvale comes out. 

Once the bridge to the Klaytn network has been completed, JEWEL will no longer be the in-game token. Instead, it will be used for governance and fee sharing.

What I particularly like about JEWEL and CRYSTAL is that their supplies aren’t infinite. Axie Infinity uses SLP, which means that their supply is infinite. I don’t know if you realize this. Still, nothing should ever be able to go infinite because that means the developers could continue churning out SLP without a care in the world and easily crash the token’s price or submit its hodlers to massive amounts of inflation. This is what’s happening right now with the USD.

Current Usecases

the marketplace
Here’s How You Can Get Some Liquidity. – Photo Taken By Matthew Du

In their current state, the two tokens are mirror copies of each other but on different chains. Their use cases are as follows:

  • Purchase Hero NFTs
  • Summoning Hero NFTs to mint new Heroes
  • Swapped for other tokens
  • Purchasing in-game items
  • Liquidity Pooling
  • Governance Rights

With Heros being the main asset of the game, Summoning Fees and Tavern Fees are the main ways you get taxed to use the game. 

Essentially, every time you summon a hero, you have to pay a $Jewel cost for each Hero. The cost is derived from the Hero’s generation and how many times it has been summoned. Unfortunately, summoning doesn’t have a fixed price – though you can check the price breakdown at the bottom of the summoner’s table. 

The other main source of in-game fees that help feed the DFK ecosystem is Tavern fees, incurred whenever you sell a hero through the Tavern or rent your Hero out for summoning. Thankfully, the proceeds are fixed – the game always takes a 3.75% cut of your proceeds no matter how much you sell or rent your Hero. 

Where Do These Fees Go?

The developers did a great job highlighting how they spend the players’ fees. Unlike in other blockchain games, which quite literally state that all the players paid fees will end up being burned because the developers forgot to set up a fully-functional burning system, DFK has made it so that the fees, like government taxes, are used productively. 

  • 1% – Burned
  • 10% – Sent to the Jeweler to reward JEWEL/CRYSTAL holders
  • 30% – Sent to the Quest Rewards Fund
  • 25% – Sent to the Development Fund to pay for future game development and bounties
  • 17% – Sent to the Marketing Fund to pay for advertising, airdrops, etc
  • 17% – Sent to the Founders Fund to pay milestone bonuses to the dev team 

While you might be worried that the developers are paying themselves for the work they put in and are skeptical of the number of coins they hold, remember that this system of “paying yourself” already exists in centralized markets. They take a small percentage of your profits every time you use their product. I see no harm in that so long as the money is put to good use. 

How does DFK Burn Tokens?

Burning tokens is the crypto equivalent of the Federal Reserve taking money out of circulation. Burning is derived from the period before the internet, credit, debits, and the rest of the accounting system were created. This was the time when fiat, paper money was the mainstay.

Having physical money meant that they had to set them on fire to destroy them physically. It’s also where the phrase: “Money to burn” comes from. 

Burning is essential as it is deflationary in practice. Intentional burning is done to fend off price inflation and increase the coin’s value. By reducing the total number of coins in the supply, the burning mechanic makes the token more valuable and less attainable for the everyday user. 

Luckily, we don’t have to set our crypto ablaze physically. DFK does that for us.

Aside from the 1% of fees being consistently burned, DFK also has burning mechanics in-grained into the heart of the game through their in-game items and “special events.” When in-game items (all tokens, by the way) are used to make things like potions or when Gaia’s Tears are summoned, the coins are burned. But that’s boring and as expected.

Here’s where it gets interesting. 

DFK holds special events that burn their NFT heroes to reduce inflation risk. The “Perilous Journey” quest is a one-time special event where players can choose to send their Hero on a dangerous journey to discover a safe passage to Crystalvale. The heroes that “die” will be burned and forever lost.

Aside from the burning mechanic, this event adds lore to the game. It helps connect the dots between the current Serendale and the upcoming Crystalvale Expansion, which, I think, is absolutely essential if they want to make DFK a full-fledged MMORPG. 

To further incentivize people to join this event and burn some of their minted NFTs, the rewards of just sending your heroes in (even if they don’t win anything) are immense.

This includes in-game items that can only be obtained through this specific quest. This crate valuable new opportunities and creates a feedback loop that further promotes gameplay that should, theoretically, also boost the ecosystem. 

I think it’s an ingenious move that provides a calculated risk and reward structure for all players participating in it. Regardless of the size of your wallet (and I mean this in the most literal sense), the risks you face are the same. 

Events are so much more fun than sending tokens to a “burn” wallet. 

Heroes Are The Core Of The Game

a hero
Hero Example – Photo Taken By Matthew Du

History of the game, tokenomics, basic definitions, that’s all boring. Essential, yes. But boring.

Let’s talk about the cool stuff that earns money: heroes, questing, and gardening.

At the moment, DFK doesn’t have a world you could freely explore the same way you would in Pokemon. Playing the game involves buying NFT heroes, breeding new ones, and sending them out on quests.

This part of the game is what makes DFK so unique. Most NFT projects promise an x number of limited edition art pieces for release. Nothing separates them from other NFTs other than what they look like and a rarity table made by the artist.

Nope, that’s not what’s happening here in DFK.

Each NFT Hero is unique with real value. Looking at the cards, you’ll find that each Hero has a different combination of stamina, exp, HP, attribute points, and skill points. They all interact with the game differently. Once more questing and PvP arrives, it’ll be amazing to see the depth of the strategy going into the game.

That’s what makes each Hero unique and why you must pay extra attention to their stats, rarity, and attunements.

The Hero’s rarity could be anything from the following: common, uncommon, rare, legendary, and mythic. The rarity is decided during summoning and influenced by the rarity of the Heroes used to infuse the summoning crystal.

With the way the quests are currently set up, you only need one to get started. Once you have your first Hero (make sure to check out their stats beforehand), you could immediately start participating in quests or renting it out. While these are the only two things you could do with these games at the moment, DFK recently announced that for PVP, you’ll need teams of three to participate, so it’s best to get a move on that.

How To Summon A Hero

To summon a hero, you have to go through the Tavern.

The Tavern is the in-game marketplace and serves as the interface to view any hero minted.

Head to the marketplace and look for the NFT “Agent.” Through her, you can do one of three things: 1.) buy a hero, 2.) sell a currently owned hero, or 3.) list your Hero for hire.

You’re interested in buying a hero right now, so check out the marketplace and filter out the stats you’re looking for.

After finding the Hero you want, select “purchase” and approve the MetaMask confirmation.

Congrats! You’ve bought your first Hero.

Once you have your Hero, you can begin summoning them instead through the Summoning Portal. It’s also probably the more fun way of doing things. To do this, you’ll need two things: 1.) A hero and 2.) Gaia’s tears.

A hero, at this point, is probably something you already have.

Gaia’s tears are something you could purchase from the Marketplace Trader or earn from wishing well and profession quests.

To summon a basic hero, you’ll need 10 Gaia’s tears. To summon advanced Hero, you’ll need 40 tears. An elite hero will require you 70 tears.

Did we forget to mention that you also need Jewel to pay for the summoning cost? That cost is determined based on the generation of a hero plus two jewels for every subsequent summon after the first one.

How Does Questing Work?

Quests
Ready To Go On An Adventure? – Photo Taken By Matthew Du

Now that you have your heroes, let’s discuss what they can do. Quests are a huge part of the game and how you interact with the world.

To send a hero on a quest, you’ll need stamina. Now, it’s important to note that one stamina will be replenished every 20 minutes. 

As of this writing, five hero quests are available: 1.) The wishing well, 2.) Foraging Profession Quest, 3.) Fishing Profession Quest, 4.) Gardening Profession Quest, and 5.) Mining Profession Quest.

There are also training quests available, but they don’t do much other than provide some gold and XP, in my experience. You might be able to get a Shvas rune or an attunement crystal out of it, but it’s not important once your heroes get past a certain level. 

Of the five types of quests mentioned above, I highly recommend that you stay away from the wishing well. The wishing well was introduced to have an influx of Gaia’s tears into the economy and simply as a testing ground for the Devs to test the experience and the questing mechanics.

Instead of wishing well, the best use of your Hero’s stamina is to do the professional quests. It takes seven stamina to send out a hero for these quests – and about 20 seconds for the quest to be accomplished.

There’s also a whole method to the madness of stacking the heroes together to reduce the time it takes to finish a test. In my opinion, the benefits of doing this are minimal, so there’s no point in concerning yourself with stacking heroes for now. 

To further speed up the process of Profession quests, there are things called Profession Skills. These specifically impact the rewards you can get each time you send your Hero out to perform a quest.

Profession skill is ⅔ of the weight when determining your rewards. User Samichpunch on Medium does a great job breaking down Gardening and Mining on Medium, so check those out when you have the time. 

When picking out heroes in a tavern, make sure to pick out those with an affinity to the profession you want to build them into. 

Finally, we mentioned that occasionally, questing would drop equipment. Heroes will be able to find and equip valuable equipment NFTs that grant them special passive and active abilities that increase their statistics.

While this system is still in development, I think it should level the expectations of the players looking to grind their heroes moving forward. Right now, it should take about three to six months of serious grinding before your Hero reaches level 10.

With the introduction of equipment and general power scaling, reaching a level 10 character should take about one month of grinding at the maximum. Why level 10? Because the developers have said that they’ll eventually have level 10 profession quests that require you to have at least level 10 of the applicable profession to finish it. 

This is, of course, based on previous MMORPGs and their experience of power scaling. Not much to discuss yet in the way of Defi Kingdoms, but it should be a worry for the community if it gets out of hand.

The Gardens

gardens
Check Out The LP Farm! – Photo Taken By Matthew Du

The more boring but perhaps even more profitable option for earning through DFK is through the gardens, which are staking but cooler. How so? Because aside from the usual staking that you do that’s essentially just locking tokens to earn rewards, you can actually send your Hero on Gardening quests.

The gardening quest literally drops you JEWEL, with the yield increasing based on the number of seeds that that player in the garden planted.

The whitepaper also highlights everything you can earn from the gardening quest:” (There is a) chance for Heroes to be rewarded with plantsGaia’s Tears, Shvās runes, and Green Eggs whether the player has seeds in the garden or not.” 

You might want to focus on the gardens because they offer great returns and a diversified investment portfolio whose strategy falls entirely up to you. There are withdrawal fees, however, and the amount of JEWEL rewarded to liquidity providers goes down over time, so check out the current rates to see if it’s best for you. 

FAQs

Question: When did Defi Kingdoms come out?

Answer: Defi Kingdoms came out on August 22, 2021. While it’s continuously developing, the game currently allows LP farming opportunities, hero summoning, trading, and questing. Later this year, PvP and PvE battles will be released.

Question: How Do You Get Heroes in Defi Kingdoms?

Answer: You can get heroes in DeFi Kingdoms through the Tavern or the summoning portal. The Tavern will allow you to purchase a hero outright. Doing so will allow you to pick the Hero with the features you want.
The summoning portal will play around with the genetics system and bring about the possibility of making advanced classes or other desirable heroes.

Question: What is Defi Kingdoms?

Answer: Defi Kingdoms is a pay-to-play blockchain game whose play-to-earn model is centered around NFTs and their currencies. It’s a DEX but gamified, allowing for so many more interesting interactions in a beautiful, immersive, 8-bit world than what would be allowed in any other Decentralized Exchange.

Conclusion

DeFi Kingdoms took a big hit when the crypto market crashed earlier this year. If you look at the graphs, it is flatlined. But what I admire the most about the community is that it never seemed to go away.

I mean, sure, the users took a hit, and dAPPRadar isn’t ranking the game so well, but you seem to be forgetting that that’s likely because of the move to the Klaytn network scheduled for literally this month.

DeFi Kingdoms hasn’t even shown off PvP and PvE combat yet, and people are already writing the game off? That’s madness. By the sheer amount of times I’ve mentioned it in this article, I’m sure you can tell how excited I am about it.

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