Gamifying DeFi – Using Zapper
As we all know, due to the recent explosion within the NFT industry, we have seen new users flooding into our ecosystem from the traditional world looking to get a taste of this emerging industry. Whether this is just to ride the hype train and make a quick profit, or they may be looking to snap up their favourite celebrities first NFT drop? Or who knows, maybe its something more and they are coming in to gain exposure to this industry and truly learn about the technology that powers this explosive growth. Either way, it doesn’t really matter, and I believe that it’s healthy for the ecosystem and bullish over the long term.
Zapper Launches Season 2
If you have been reading my newsletters for a while, you would have seen one of my earlier articles that covered Zapper (back in season 1). Basically, users were able to earn ‘xp’ by completing specific daily/weekly tasks laid out by the project, and once you earned yourself a certain amount of ‘xp’, you would level up through Zapper’s gamified levelling system. Upon levelling up, users were awarded an NFT based on the level that they reached, essentially ‘gamifying’ their DeFi experience.
With the launch of season two, Zapper expands on its questing system for its users. This time around, when you earn ‘xp’ by completing your daily/weekly tasks, you will also earn ‘volts’ for completing the quest and levelling up. The number of volts varies depending on the quest that you complete, and the level that you reach. Now this is where the experience gets a lot more interesting than season one. The volts you earn by completing quests and levelling up can be used to purchase an NFT from the Zapper ‘rewards’ interface. The NFT’s that are available for purchase all come with different tiers of rarity. And in some cases you may need to have a specific number of ‘volts’ as well as a specific number of cards from a lower rarity in order to purchase the higher tier card.
From my own perspective, I am a huge fan of zapper, and I am very happy with the changes that season 2 has brought. Instead of merely just adding more NFT’s to the season one model, the team went ahead and changed the experience all together and really innovated what they have already built. Zapper has successfully been able to take the gamification experience further, users will now have to think hard and consider their options when purchasing a higher tear card, because in order to do so, they will need to give up a selection of cards that they have already collected. It’s a very interesting concept, and I am intrigued to see how it plays out.
Keep in mind as well that Zapper is fully integrated with the Polygon network, meaning that by bridging some MATIC to Polygon users will be able to complete all of the quests for a much lower price than what they would experience on the Ethereum mainnet. That’s certainly what I have been doing.
All in all, I think that this is a brilliant move by Zapper, and I think they are really pioneering the effort by exploring the area of gamifying the DeFi space. I believe that this is really healthy for the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole due to the appeal it will have on new adopters. Some people may find DeFi boring and some may find DeFi not worth it for the amount they are willing to invest, however, I think gamifying the DeFi experience will help this cause a lot. Afterall, as I said above, most of our newer users at the moment are the younger generation looking to gain exposure to the NFT industry. This way Zapper gives the end user the best of both worlds.
Thanks for reading everyone!
Liam Donald
This newsletter is for educational purposes only and should never be considered as financial or investment advice