With the advent of the bull market in the entire crypto field in 2021, the soaring market values of various cryptocurrencies at that time were impressive. However, the most widespread concept throughout that year was Metaverse, which spurred a market boom in NFTs.

At that time, building Web3 communities and expanding the diverse applications of NFTs became a popular choice for many practitioners. For a while, using games, social platforms, and online communities as application scenarios for NFTs became the first choice for many project teams.

Placing Dex applications within games, while combining NFT and related gameplay, became a direction explored by numerous DeFi projects.

Among the projects that have achieved deep integration in this area, DeFi Kingdoms stands out as a typical example. It’s a noteworthy case of operating DeFi through gaming so far.

What is DeFi Kingdoms？

（Image source：game.defikingdoms.com）

DeFi Kingdoms was originally a Play-to-Earn (P2E) game developed on the Harmony Protocol blockchain. What set it apart from other projects in the same field was that the team started with DeFi, rather than gaming, as the foundation for the product.

$JEWEL is the native token within its platform, a functional and valuable governance token. However, in the subsequent evolution of the product, $JEWEL upgraded from just a governance and gaming token to a governance token for the entire ecosystem, expanding its reach across multiple blockchain networks.

DeFi Kingdoms managed to package traditional DeFi elements into a comprehensive functional ecosystem. Over the long-term development process, DeFi Kingdoms has become a benchmark project encountered by many users when delving into the DeFi and GameFi sectors.

The DeFi Kingdoms project team consistently describes this product as an RPG game presented in pixel style, achieving visualization of DeFi functions, and incorporating NFTs to enable users to participate and earn corresponding returns.

The project was launched in August 2021 and has undergone a series of fluctuations and changes. However, the overall game mechanics and gameplay have remained relatively fixed. From the very beginning, it was a product with well-developed DeFi designs.

The Ecosystem of DeFi Kingdoms

（Image source：docs.defikingdoms.com）

In its early stages, DeFi Kingdoms launched on Harmony and initiated a beta network outside of the mainnet. All transactions were synchronized, but the beta network provided a richer array of features, notably exemplified by the wider variety of early game tasks available on the beta network.

In its early days after launch, DeFi Kingdoms had a daily active user count of around 20,000, placing it among the top ten gaming applications on DappRadar. Since its inception, the project team has maintained a high pace of version iterations, even releasing two official versions within a month during the 2023 bear market, which was not uncommon.

Along with the frequent airdrops and community activities carried out by the project team in its early days, DeFi Kingdoms quickly attracted the attention of a group of users. This rapidly led to the accumulation of tens of thousands of members in communities on platforms like Discord and Telegram.

However, due to its strategy of operating on a smaller scale in the initial stages, DeFi Kingdoms’ early actions can be seen as the project team’s trial run. The team was only partially formed at that time. It was in March 2022, when the entire project officially launched on the AVAX blockchain, that the project team finally took shape, and Kingdom Studios was subsequently established.

For a game that only confirmed its project name on the eve of its release, DeFi Kingdoms, in its early stages, focused not only on improving the product itself but also prioritized achieving cross-chain expansion for the game.

The cross-chain operation method is similar to the logic of online game partitioning. Each major region is a new market that can attract and retain a wave of players.

The team officially announced its development on AVAX in December 2021, and DeFi Kingdoms immediately saw a surge in user growth. At that time, the Harmony mainnet and the beta network had gathered many players.

Interestingly, after DeFi Kingdoms had embedded all the participatory features of DeFi into the game, it differentiated the version set to launch on the AVAX chain from the original mainnet game. The version on the Harmony chain is called Serendale, while the version on the AVAX chain is known as Crystalvale. This Crystalvale version originated as the test version previously on the beta network.

（Image source：medium.com）

These two versions will share the main gameplay logic, but they will have independent economic systems while interacting with each other to some extent. Crystalvale possesses its own circulating token, $Crystal, akin to the early $Jewel in Serendale. Compared to the original main network Serendale, the Crystalvale version will introduce a variety of different Gen0 Hero NFTs and the attributes of these NFTs will vary from those of the Serendale version.

However, as the older server, users of Serendale possess certain early participation advantages. DeFi Kingdoms has reserved several methods for Serendale users to obtain airdrops, including $Crystal and Gen0 Hero NFTs. Users can potentially receive corresponding rewards simply by holding xJewel, upgrading Gen0 Hero, summoning Heroes, holding Jewel LP, or bridging $Jewel to Crystalvale.

At that time, DeFi Kingdoms airdropped approximately 1.09% of $Crystal and 13% of Gen0 Hero NFTs to users from Serendale. The remaining portions were gradually opened to new users according to economic design. DeFi Kingdoms, a DeFi economic system clothed in an RPG, consists of an array of elements that might seem overwhelming at first glance. Unlike many DeFi or GameFi projects, it doesn’t offer users an intuitive perception.

In fact, besides the briefly mentioned NFTs, governance tokens, and different chain-based versions, DeFi Kingdoms also includes land, buildings, equipment, instances, pets, breeding, cards, farming, PVE, and PVP, among many diverse gameplay options. All these conventional Web2 RPG elements are packaged into the game by the development team, and they have been progressively updated and refined over the subsequent year-plus.

Worth mentioning is the PVP gameplay. DeFi Kingdoms adopted the popular 3v3 combat mode among GameFi products at the time, with associated rewards being $Jewel. Other various gameplay modes also involve token output and DeFi applications. Many user-familiar activities such as staking, mining, leasing, burning, leveraging, and a variety of financial combination products in the form of in-game items are all presented in a gaming format.

All of these elements were part of DeFi Kingdoms’ early roadmap. It’s fair to say it is a highly polished product because, from the outset, DeFi Kingdoms was a game with a completed DeFi framework design. All in-game items, scenes, gameplay, etc., exist to fulfill the requirements of this pre-established framework. During the game’s nearly two-year operation time, all new items, gameplay, characters, and scenes are supplementing the original DeFi framework design and provide a trading and circulation venue for more on-chain funds.

This is what the project team has been emphasizing when introducing DeFi Kingdoms to the outside world. That is, DeFi Kingdoms is not only a game but also a DEX and a liquidity pool. It’s a market shaped and driven by NFTs (players need to hold at least three NFTs to participate in the game), and a complete economic ecosystem based on DeFi.

Digital Assets of DeFi Kingdoms

Stripping away the various disguises from its gaming facade, in reality, all digital assets within DeFi Kingdoms are composed of several different non-fungible and fungible tokens. These assets fall into the two broad categories of digital assets familiar to crypto users: NFTs and Tokens.

In terms of NFTs, DeFi Kingdoms initially launched the Gen 0 Hero NFTs. These can be viewed as an NFT series. Of course, the official release wasn’t done all at once but introduced different occupation NFTs progressively in subsequent updates.

（Image source：docs.defikingdoms.com）

In DeFi Kingdoms, the Hero character is the basic token of participation for players in the ecosystem. Beyond early airdrops and whitelist sale opportunities, subsequent transactions for players are primarily conducted on the secondary market.

Heroes enter the game through a summoning process, and the total number of NFTs is not fixed. Pairing two NFTs can summon a new Hero, although there are limits on the number of times this can occur. Each NFT carries unique attributes, professions, rarity, and capability values that all influence the properties and values of the newly summoned NFT.

This system of numeric design and NFT creation was common among many blockchain projects at the time, such as Axie Infinity and ZED Run. Despite being common, DeFi Kingdoms stands out due to its multi-chain characteristics. The fact that there are interactive windows between different versions of the economy on different chains broadens the economic boundaries of DeFi Kingdoms compared to similar single-chain products.

This multi-chain design plays a crucial role in the ecosystem’s overall risk resilience. When DeFi Kingdoms was affected by a Harmony protocol vulnerability, forcing the closure of Serendale, the game was safeguarded by Crystalvale on the AVAX chain. This action bridged many users and assets from Serendale, paving the way for the restart of Serendale 2.0 on the Klaytn chain.

Regarding the Tokens in DeFi Kingdoms, one can see from their names the meticulousness of the project team in GameFi. In two interconnected yet independent economic systems, $Jewel in Serendale and $Crystal in Crystalvale, these tokens are presented as in-game items rather than blunt forms of cryptocurrency.

Essentially, $Jewel served as the governance and circulation token in the Serendale era, but with the launch of Crystalvale, DeFi Kingdoms introduced $Crystal for the AVAX chain.

For a period, the two tokens coexisted, representing the same economic logic promoted by DeFi Kingdoms in different game versions. But because they were tied to different blockchains and systems, their circulation and correlation could have been more extensive.

With the closure of Serendale due to the Harmony protocol vulnerability incident, DeFi Kingdoms opened a bridge to Crystalvale and encouraged all Serendale players to migrate. Serendale on the Harmony chain was maintained at a minimum level for some time.

During this period, Crystalvale’s economic scale and system expanded rapidly. But the influx of assets for exchange also led Crystalvale to adopt a dual token economic operation model.

DeFi Kingdoms prepared extensively for the withdrawal from the Harmony chain. When news of Serendale’s closure was announced, the project team also announced the Serendale 2.0 plan, reaffirming that $Jewel would continue to play an essential role in the future.

Compared to $Jewel, the most significant change for $Crystal in Crystalvale was the launch of the DFK Chain on AVAX by DeFi Kingdoms.

Like Axie Infinity’s network capacity issues due to excessive user demand, DeFi Kingdoms wanted to prepare for the future, despite AVAX’s superior environment compared to Harmony. Soon after Crystalvale’s launch, the DFK Chain was officially introduced, carrying all the data from DeFi Kingdoms on the AVAX chain.

The DFK Chain can handle transactions and data more efficiently, better suiting DeFi Kingdoms’ needs as a game. It also became a crucial support for the project team to develop more cross-chain features.

With the complete shutdown of Serendale on the Harmony chain, DeFi Kingdoms announced the launch of Serendale 2.0 on the Klaytn chain and a new economic governance system.

During the migration process from Serendale to Crystalvale, a large number of $Jewels were returned to the official hands of DeFi Kingdoms through exchange and circulation. This made $Jewel a more influential governance token.

For Serendale 2.0 on the Klaytn chain, DeFi Kingdoms introduced a new token, $Jade, which will primarily function in Serendale 2.0. It will become a sister token to $Crystal, while the original $Jewel will serve as the governance token for the entire DeFi Kingdoms’ economic ecosystem across different blockchains.

（Image source：docs.defikingdoms.com）

For the new Serendale2.0, DeFi Kingdoms has launched a new round of bridging, guiding existing Serendale users from DFK Chain to the Klaytn chain. This move symbolizes their return from Crystalvale to their homeland, Serendale.

During this process, the link between $Crystal and $Jade has become tighter, and $Jade will refer to the governance model of $Crystal in Crystalvale for its future operations.

Other assets in DeFi Kingdoms, such as pets, cards, potions, and equipment, are essentially different tokens presented in the game. They are associated with numerous gameplay methods within the game and participate in circulation and burn mechanisms within the economic system.

The Successful Attempt at Gamifying DEX

As previously mentioned, compared to other blockchain games, DeFi Kingdoms is more about advancing game production from a DeFi perspective. Unlike many GameFi projects, it doesn’t seek to get players onboard through extreme gamification.

On the contrary, many characteristics and influences of DeFi projects can be seen in DeFi Kingdoms. It’s just that the project team has carefully packaged everything, making it all seem incredibly natural.

（Image source：game.defikingdoms.com）

For instance, DeFi Kingdoms now possesses numerous NFT jobs, each with unique tasks. Take early Foraging and Fishing, for example. These two tasks are incredibly straightforward and only require a minute or two for players to complete. Upon completion, players have a chance of receiving in-game item rewards. These rewards can be liquidated directly in the market or used as raw materials for crafting potions, indirectly participating in a staking method where the crafted items have a higher value.

If a player happens to acquire a rare item during a task, the additional profits can be significant. This task mechanism is a common profit model in DeFi projects, consisting of fixed and risk returns.

Similar game mechanics are abundant within DeFi Kingdoms. By turning various investment methods from DeFi projects into an engaging gaming format, the product mix in DeFi has become incredibly diverse.

Of course, the DEX emphasized by DeFi Kingdoms is also well-represented in the game. The theme of this game is a multiplayer online RPG, and with the added vast fantasy setting, autonomous interactions between users become the perfect foundation for DEX.

Aside from various DeFi scenarios designed for a balanced gaming experience, DeFi Kingdoms provides a P2P trading market and corresponding digital asset classes for players. Thanks to the rich gaming elements, players have a wide array of tradable goods. In the game’s trading market, there are no pre-set prices or artificially controlled market conditions designed by officials.

The players themselves conduct all asset circulation and exchange. The game only charges a fee for each transaction and supervises the safety of these trades, providing a distinct contrast to the existing CEX model.

（Image source：docs.defikingdoms.com）

This is quite rare, as it is uncommon for either major mainstream exchanges or blockchain games to dare to operate the circulation of assets within their ecosystem using a DEX model, especially when the project itself has a considerable scale.

This can be attributed to the powerful technical capabilities of the DeFi Kingdoms project team. Whether it’s the highly frequent game iterations that continue up until today or the stable operation of the DFK Chain, these are demonstrations of their strength to build and support this vast ecosystem. Just as the name DeFi Kingdoms implies, it represents a kingdom ambition based on the DeFi narrative.

Support and Changes from Harmony

From the various changes since the release of DeFi Kingdoms, its withdrawal from the Harmony chain had a significant impact, directly giving rise to a series of off-field factors beyond the game itself.

（Image source：guarda.com）

DeFi Kingdoms was originally launched on the Harmony chain, owing to the impressive features of this newly born public chain at the time. Harmony had several attractive highlights, such as using PoS rather than PoW, a sharded blockchain implementation, and consistency in transactions and communication between shards.

Through optimization of the protocol and network layers, Harmony provided a scalable, relatively safe, and decentralized blockchain network. This enabled it to support more mainstream decentralized application scenarios, including gaming and DEX.

Given Harmony’s decent data processing speed at the time, it was a relatively superior choice for the DeFi Kingdoms project team, which intended to create a game product based on the DEX model. After all, public chains such as Ethereum and Cosmos had difficulties handling complex gaming applications.

However, after launching on Harmony, the project team quickly started preparations for AVAX’s Crystalvale game version. The main consideration was still the ecosystem’s economic design, as this approach could provide more security for the project.

Harmony’s support for DeFi Kingdoms was evident. The project attracted a large number of users in a short time. Given that DeFi Kingdoms had launched a beta version early on, Harmony essentially met DeFi Kingdoms’ needs at the time.

As the game went live on the AVAX chain and was deployed on the subnet DFK Chain, DeFi Kingdoms became less dependent on Harmony. Meanwhile, due to Harmony’s characteristics, the increasing game content and higher demands on the underlying blockchain network from the entire ecosystem meant that Serendale gradually underperformed Crystalvale, based on DFK Chain, especially regarding the project team’s development needs.

Later, in June 2022, a severe hacking incident occurred on the Harmony chain, with the total value of the lost cryptocurrency nearing 100 million US dollars. It was widely believed at the time that a flaw in the Harmony protocol led to the private key being stolen. The hacker utilized the cross-chain bridge between it and Ethereum to transfer a large amount of cryptocurrency, dealing a severe blow to Harmony.

In response, users of various applications on this chain collectively decided to move their assets to other public chains urgently. Many project teams also chose to transfer their projects.

The DeFi Kingdoms project team had already prioritized the DFK Chain for their development. Two months after the incident with the Harmony protocol, they announced the closure of the Serendale game version on that chain. More precisely, they moved it to the Klaytn chain, leading to the creation of Serendale 2.0.

（Image source：medium.com）

Serendale on the Harmony chain was quickly shut down in September. During this period, DeFi Kingdoms built a cross-chain bridge between Serendale and Crystalvale, guiding users to transfer assets to the DFK Chain temporarily.

The new features brought by the Klaytn public chain allowed DeFi Kingdoms to match well with it. In December 2022, Serendale 2.0 officially launched on Klaytn, bringing with it a new economic governance system and a new token, $JADE.

Following this was the official transfer from Crystalvale to Serendale 2.0 organized by DeFi Kingdoms. The various types of assets affected in the game are gradually recovering.

By this point, the story of DeFi Kingdoms and Harmony had ended. As users outside the game, it is difficult to comment much on the final outcome of both. After all, after the crisis occurred, even though Harmony took many remedial measures, the stolen cryptocurrency couldn’t be recovered. Once protocol security is compromised, decentralization becomes a disaster. The loss of market confidence cannot be quickly compensated for in the short term, so the choice of DeFi Kingdoms is understandable.

The Development and Future of DeFi Kingdoms

The Development and Future of DeFi Kingdoms

Finally, let’s look at the performance of DeFi Kingdoms in the market, as well as its achievements as a cross-chain game.

DeFi Kingdoms made significant efforts in social media promotion upon its launch, even though the relative cost was low. Users of DeFi projects show certain differences from those of PFP NFTs and cryptocurrencies. They pay more attention to the economic design of the project itself and calculate the return on investment from it.

DeFi Kingdoms firstly guarantees quality in terms of its product. The gameplay has a certain appeal to users. The complete visualization of DeFi was a rare demonstration in the projects of that time. Moreover, the game provides players with various investment methods including fixed and risky ones. As the number of participating players grows, the in-game income has corresponding guarantees.

Therefore, DeFi Kingdoms’ operational strategy underwent several transformations. Although the game has always been the main attraction for users, the project provided a lot of event rewards to users in the early stages, including token airdrops and various NFT white listings. It also encouraged players to actively participate in the in-game PVP gameplay, adopting a community and game dual-activity model. This made the interaction frequency among users very high, quickly accumulating a certain degree of popularity for the game.

After the initial phase, DeFi Kingdoms began to retain users through frequent updates of version content and rich gameplay, attracting more new users. The game’s specific summoning events and different types of activity tasks such as PVP and PVE are often carried out to this day.

After the launch of DeFi Kingdoms, its popularity reached an astonishing level in just a few months. Its total trading volume in January 2022 even surpassed Axie Infinity, a benchmark blockchain game. For a long time afterward, the market performance of DeFi Kingdoms was representative enough to be referred to as a model project of its kind.

（Image source：dappradar.com）

An appropriate summary here would reveal why DeFi Kingdoms has achieved such an impressive market performance. Even when it was affected by the Harmony protocol vulnerability incident, it could still grow against the trend in a bear market.

First and foremost, the product itself has strong playability. In terms of gameplay, compared with other similar projects, DeFi Kingdoms’ gameplay features are quite rich. Although the gameplay is varied and complex, the relatively simple interaction logic makes it highly engaging for players and the game’s entry barrier is quite low.

Furthermore, the multi-chain operation mode makes a certain distinction in the game’s gameplay and content, but it greatly expands the scale of the ecosystem economy. Even though this mode has led DeFi Kingdoms to bridge several times between different game versions later, it must be considered that this has provided a good guarantee for the vitality of the project.

As for the various mainstream coins on other public chains in the crypto market, such as BTC, ETH, etc., DeFi Kingdoms has integrated them one by one into its own ecosystem, enabling their exchange and circulation. It has also expanded support for the game from a number of crypto wallets, including hardware wallet types. The project team has been consistently augmenting the economy of the ecosystem itself.

Another point is the characteristics of DeFi users themselves. They are willing to invest and participate in a mature economic system for a long time, as long as there is sufficient liquidity in the ecosystem, and the project itself has not stopped growing, then these users’ support for DeFi Kingdoms is relatively stable.

Especially, many users who participate in DeFi projects are not fighting alone. Guilds from all over the world and blockchain game studios often invest a lot of resources in leading projects like DeFi Kingdoms. From spontaneous gathering in the early stages to gaining renown later on, the clustering effect is very apparent in the DeFi Kingdoms project.

Conclusion

DeFi Kingdoms is a project worth trying, offering a pleasing experience whether you approach it from the perspective of DeFi or gaming.

If a game can hold its own as the “ninth art,” then the model of combining DeFi and gaming may only be recognized in the economic field. However, this does not mean that the two cannot create a product that is both fun and profitable.

Many Web2 games have already achieved considerable success through commercial operation. Fun and profit are not mutually exclusive. Thus, after the wild expansion in 2021, a balance between economic and gaming has become an exploration direction in blockchain games.

The achievements of DeFi Kingdoms aptly demonstrate this point. Many traits common to both Web2 and Web3 can be seen in it. The clever design by the project team communicates much through its gameplay. Coupled with a well-developed ecosystem, it’s hard not to become a memorable standout project.

Each time you enter the DeFi Kingdoms game page, it invariably brings to mind another excellent game — Octopath Traveler.

Perhaps this is the shared associative power that the art of gaming brings to players.

（Image source：docs.defikingdoms.com）