Play to Earn crypto games

Maciej Zieliński

17 May 2022
Play to Earn crypto games

The gaming industry has gained tremendous popularity both among children and adults. Seeing the potential in digitizing reality, technology companies are constantly trying to come up with new ideas and offers for their customers. An interesting idea is the concept of introducing games that allow us to earn money while we play. It's an even more interesting idea to earn money on games that are connected with blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. Is it possible? How do Play to Earn games work and which of them are worth your attention? We're writing about it below!

​What are Play to Earn crypto games?

These special and original games have tokens that support the economics of the title. You buy, trade, sell and play for these currencies in the game. Some games need to be paid for and require an initial investment, while others can be played for free from the outset. It should be noted that a large number of Play to Earn titles are not as advanced as the most popular PC or console games. Cryptocurrency-based games that allow you to earn capital will not blow the minds of people looking for sophisticated graphic, for example. It is an interesting concept, however, to make money from having fun.

Play to Earn

What traits does a Play to Earn game have?

Play to Earn crypto games are the initial phase of gaming connected with crypto. As such, both good and bad projects are being released. The bad ones can be focused on obtaining as much capital as possible from us. The good ones will help us multiply it. So it's a good idea to see who is behind the creation of a title before we start playing it. What should you look out for? Definitely tokenomics – that is, the complete supply of tokens, the cycle of dispensing them, forms that encourage token ownership, and the ways you can use them. It is better to avoid of (or pay special attention to) titles that have tokens without any limit. The unlimited supply of tokens makes them less valuable. In addition, in order to stake or sell tokens, they must have some value. There is no single solution that will make it possible to evaluate a game in a complex manner. The additional advice that comes to mind is that, during the game (especially at the beginning), you should avoid making larger purchases, as if they were not there, as it is a form of investment that could lead to a loss of capital. But if you're doing it responsibly and enjoy having fun, check out the titles we've described below!

Play to Earn

​Axie Infinity

Axie Infinity is one of the most popular Play to Earn crypto games. It enjoys considerable trust and interest because it allows households that are in difficult geopolitical situations, such as those in the Philippines, Venezuela, etc to obtain income. The game requires owning three virtual creatures that can be purchased on the market. You can also buy eggs in the Axies labs and wait for the creatures to hatch. Animals can also be bred and sold on the market. This is a form of NFT. The animals serve as merchandise. They can fight against other pets and earn the Axie Infinity Shards (AXS) token as a result. This is a token that can also be redeemed for real cash. In addition to AXS, the game offers another ERC-20 token, the Smooth Love Potions (SLP), which is used for Axies breeding. Like AXS, SLP can be converted into fiat currencies on the most popular crypto exchanges.

​Plant Vs. Undead

This is a tower defense game. Moreover, it is a multiplayer game. The story itself is about a planet that was destroyed by a meteorite and due to this, the animals living on it turned into zombies. These animals want to destroy trees, but after the disaster, plants have mutated as well. As such, trees can defend themselves. Playing as the flora, you fight the animals. In this game you earn a PVU token that has been placed on the Binance Smart Chain. In the game, the currency is Light Energy (LE). You can earn tokens during the game by making progress, or simply purchase tokens for cash. You don't have to invest any capital at the start of the game. Each player receives a certain amount of NFT and trees used to fight zombies from the outset. The combat gives you plant seeds that you can later sell.

The Sandbox

The Sandbox game allows you to earn cryptocurrencies in a variety of ways. You can be an artist, a game developer, or a landowner to earn SAND, a metaverse cryptocurrency. This is an extremely original form of financing and raising capital. As an artist, you can create useful resources with the help of the VoxEdit tool. Such a solution has a catch - first you need to get permission from the creators of the platform to put the earned NFT tokens on your marketplace. Another concept is to buy land for rent in the game or create mini-games. This is not easy as in this case you should have programming skills. If you have a knack for it, then as a land creator you can charge other players for it. The SAND token can be staked, bought, or sold on major cryptocurrency platforms.

Pegaxy

Who hasn't wanted to race in horse racing? Pegaxy gives you that opportunity. You can race against the best players for NFT tokens. You can buy or rent your horse at the beginning and earn VIS tokens. Unfortunately, the problem is that players have little control over the race. They can only check the elements of the track, choose the right horse and select the equipment. The rest of the activities are random. You can create breeding of horses and then sell them for tokens and buy them for USDT. Earning cryptocurrencies takes place in races, renting, or selling horses. A system to earn from staking is also being implemented.

Decentraland

Decentraland is one of the most popular cryptocurrency-related games. The main form of earning is buying land and then subletting or selling it. You can also organize events and mini-games to target the general public for a fee. To construct the game world and earn on it we need a tool, which is free. Nevertheless, we need to buy the plot for MANA - the game's token, which is its currency. Another possibility to earn money is offering to oversee the land of other participants in exchange for tokens. An additional source of income is designing wearable clothes and items that require community approval.

Blankos Block Party

Blankos Block Party involves playing with small, toy-looking blankos. We earn money here based on collecting blankos, gaining levels, and selling them. The value of the character depends on its abilities and uniqueness. The cheapest creatures cost about ten dollars. The most expensive - even 5 million dollars. The vast majority of animals are valued at thousands of dollars. In the game, you can also create pages and mini-games for other players, but this phase is recently at the beta stage.

Thetan Arena

Thetan Arena is a free Play to Earn game that lets you earn cryptocurrencies. With it, you get three free characters that you can develop. As part of your human development, you get a Thetan Coin (THC) token. With this currency, you can unlock advanced characters, or you can buy them already converted on the market. Advanced characters develop quickly and can be traded as NFT. Additionally, our folk can take part in organized events. Funding is based on THG (Thetan Gem), a utility and management token that supports in-game settlement. It can also be staked. You can also convert crypto into fiat through the most popular exchanges.

Summary Play to Earn games

Play to Earn games are great for people who want to make money from cryptocurrencies and have fun at the same time. However, remember to check at the beginning of the platform is free and has not been constructed to get as much capital from us as possible. It is worth being interested in whether the supply of tokens is unlimited, as this may cause a situation in which their value will be negligible. Nevertheless, we hope that after reading this article many people will consider this form of entertainment which is not only enjoyable but also profitable.

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Aethir Tokenomics – Case Study

Kajetan Olas

22 Nov 2024
Aethir Tokenomics – Case Study

Authors of the contents are not affiliated to the reviewed project in any way and none of the information presented should be taken as financial advice.

In this article we analyze tokenomics of Aethir - a project providing on-demand cloud compute resources for the AI, Gaming, and virtualized compute sectors.
Aethir aims to aggregate enterprise-grade GPUs from multiple providers into a DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network). Its competitive edge comes from utlizing the GPUs for very specific use-cases, such as low-latency rendering for online games.
Due to decentralized nature of its infrastructure Aethir can meet the demands of online-gaming in any region. This is especially important for some gamer-abundant regions in Asia with underdeveloped cloud infrastructure that causes high latency ("lags").
We will analyze Aethir's tokenomics, give our opinion on what was done well, and provide specific recommendations on how to improve it.

Evaluation Summary

Aethir Tokenomics Structure

The total supply of ATH tokens is capped at 42 billion ATH. This fixed cap provides a predictable supply environment, and the complete emissions schedule is listed here. As of November 2024 there are approximately 5.2 Billion ATH in circulation. In a year from now (November 2025), the circulating supply will almost triple, and will amount to approximately 15 Billion ATH. By November 2028, today's circulating supply will be diluted by around 86%.

From an investor standpoint the rational decision would be to stake their tokens and hope for rewards that will balance the inflation. Currently the estimated APR for 3-year staking is 195% and for 4-year staking APR is 261%. The rewards are paid out weekly. Furthermore, stakers can expect to get additional rewards from partnered AI projects.

Staking Incentives

Rewards are calculated based on the staking duration and staked amount. These factors are equally important and they linearly influence weekly rewards. This means that someone who stakes 100 ATH for 2 weeks will have the same weekly rewards as someone who stakes 200 ATH for 1 week. This mechanism greatly emphasizes long-term holding. That's because holding a token makes sense only if you go for long-term staking. E.g. a whale staking $200k with 1 week lockup. will have the same weekly rewards as person staking $1k with 4 year lockup. Furthermore the ATH staking rewards are fixed and divided among stakers. Therefore Increase of user base is likely to come with decrease in rewards.
We believe the main weak-point of Aethirs staking is the lack of equivalency between rewards paid out to the users and value generated for the protocol as a result of staking.

Token Distribution

The token distribution of $ATH is well designed and comes with long vesting time-frames. 18-month cliff and 36-moths subsequent linear vesting is applied to team's allocation. This is higher than industry standard and is a sign of long-term commitment.

  • Checkers and Compute Providers: 50%
  • Ecosystem: 15%
  • Team: 12.5%
  • Investors: 11.5%
  • Airdrop: 6%
  • Advisors: 5%

Aethir's airdrop is divided into 3 phases to ensure that only loyal users get rewarded. This mechanism is very-well thought and we rate it highly. It fosters high community engagement within the first months of the project and sets the ground for potentially giving more-control to the DAO.

Governance and Community-Led Development

Aethir’s governance model promotes community-led decision-making in a very practical way. Instead of rushing with creation of a DAO for PR and marketing purposes Aethir is trying to make it the right way. They support projects building on their infrastructure and regularly share updates with their community in the most professional manner.

We believe Aethir would benefit from implementing reputation boosted voting. An example of such system is described here. The core assumption is to abandon the simplistic: 1 token = 1 vote and go towards: Votes = tokens * reputation_based_multiplication_factor.

In the attached example, reputation_based_multiplication_factor rises exponentially with the number of standard deviations above norm, with regard to user's rating. For compute compute providers at Aethir, user's rating could be replaced by provider's uptime.

Perspectives for the future

While it's important to analyze aspects such as supply-side tokenomics, or governance, we must keep in mind that 95% of project's success depends on demand-side. In this regard the outlook for Aethir may be very bright. The project declares $36M annual reccuring revenue. Revenue like this is very rare in the web3 space. Many projects are not able to generate any revenue after succesfull ICO event, due to lack fo product-market-fit.

If you're looking to create a robust tokenomics model and go through institutional-grade testing please reach out to contact@nextrope.com. Our team is ready to help you with the token engineering process and ensure your project’s resilience in the long term.

Quadratic Voting in Web3

Kajetan Olas

04 Dec 2024
Quadratic Voting in Web3

Decentralized systems are reshaping how we interact, conduct transactions, and govern online communities. As Web3 continues to advance, the necessity for effective and fair voting mechanisms becomes apparent. Traditional voting systems, such as the one-token-one-vote model, often fall short in capturing the intensity of individual preferences, which can result in centralization. Quadratic Voting (QV) addresses this challenge by enabling individuals to express not only their choices but also the strength of their preferences.

In QV, voters are allocated a budget of credits that they can spend to cast votes on various issues. The cost of casting multiple votes on a single issue increases quadratically, meaning that each additional vote costs more than the last. This system allows for a more precise expression of preferences, as individuals can invest more heavily in issues they care deeply about while conserving credits on matters of lesser importance.

Understanding Quadratic Voting

Quadratic Voting (QV) is a voting system designed to capture not only the choices of individuals but also the strength of their preferences. In most DAO voting mechanisms, each person typically has one vote per token, which limits the ability to express how strongly they feel about a particular matter. Furthermore, QV limits the power of whales and founding team who typically have large token allocations. These problems are adressed by making the cost of each additional vote increase quadratically.

In QV, each voter is given a budget of credits or tokens that they can spend to cast votes on various issues. The key principle is that the cost to cast n votes on a single issue is proportional to the square of n. This quadratic cost function ensures that while voters can express stronger preferences, doing so requires a disproportionately higher expenditure of their voting credits. This mechanism discourages voters from concentrating all their influence on a single issue unless they feel very strongly about it. In the context of DAOs, it means that large holders will have a hard-time pushing through with a proposal if they'll try to do it on their own.

Practical Example

Consider a voter who has been allocated 25 voting credits to spend on several proposals. The voter has varying degrees of interest in three proposals: Proposal A, Proposal B, and Proposal C.

  • Proposal A: High interest.
  • Proposal B: Moderate interest.
  • Proposal C: Low interest.

The voter might allocate their credits as follows:

Proposal A:

  • Votes cast: 3
  • Cost: 9 delegated tokens

Proposal B:

  • Votes cast: 2
  • Cost: 4 delegated tokens

Proposal C:

  • Votes cast: 1
  • Cost: 1 delegated token

Total delegated tokens: 14
Remaining tokens: 11

With the remaining tokens, the voter can choose to allocate additional votes to the proposals based on their preferences or save for future proposals. If they feel particularly strong about Proposal A, they might decide to cast one more vote:

Additional vote on Proposal A:

  • New total votes: 4
  • New cost: 16 delegated tokens
  • Additional cost: 16−9 = 7 delegated tokens

Updated total delegated tokens: 14+7 = 21

Updated remaining tokens: 25−21 = 425 - 21 = 4

This additional vote on Proposal A costs 7 credits, significantly more than the previous vote, illustrating how the quadratic cost discourages excessive influence on a single issue without strong conviction.

Benefits of Implementing Quadratic Voting

Key Characteristics of the Quadratic Cost Function

  • Marginal Cost Increases Linearly: The marginal cost of each additional vote increases linearly. The cost difference between casting n and n−1 votes is 2n−1.
  • Total Cost Increases Quadratically: The total cost to cast multiple votes rises steeply, discouraging voters from concentrating too many votes on a single issue without significant reason.
  • Promotes Egalitarian Voting: Small voters are encouraged to participate, because relatively they have a much higher impact.

Advantages Over Traditional Voting Systems

Quadratic Voting offers several benefits compared to traditional one-person-one-vote systems:

  • Captures Preference Intensity: By allowing voters to express how strongly they feel about an issue, QV leads to outcomes that better reflect the collective welfare.
  • Reduces Majority Domination: The quadratic cost makes it costly for majority groups to overpower minority interests on every issue.
  • Encourages Honest Voting: Voters are incentivized to allocate votes in proportion to their true preferences, reducing manipulation.

By understanding the foundation of Quadratic Voting, stakeholders in Web3 communities can appreciate how this system supports more representative governance.

Conclusion

Quadratic voting is a novel voting system that may be used within DAOs to foster decentralization. The key idea is to make the cost of voting on a certain issue increase quadratically. The leading player that makes use of this mechanism is Optimism. If you're pondering about the design of your DAO, we highly recommend taking a look at their research on quadratic funding.

If you're looking to create a robust governance model and go through institutional-grade testing please reach out to contact@nextrope.com. Our team is ready to help you with the token engineering process and ensure that your DAO will stand out as a beacon of innovation and resilience in the long term.