Polyient Games: The Ultimate NFT + DeFi Ecosystem?

Probably the hottest trend in crypto since the 2017 ICO boom has been the recent explosion of DeFi and the yield farming / fair launch movement that has come with it. This has opened up a highly profitable and engaging set of composable blocks for agile developers to swiftly put together. While the first wave of that trend seems to be fizzling out, it has no doubt paved the way for more innovation. A particularly interesting topic has now taken over the conversation: the resurgence of NFTs – which had laid dormant since the 2017 CryptoKitties mania. One ambitious project in particular aims to bring the world of NFTs and DeFi together under one umbrella and be the ultimate one-stop shop for everything NFTs, going by the name “Polyient Games”.

Polyient Games

Polyient Games (PG) bills itself as the industry’s first investment firm focused on non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and blockchain gaming. Their parent company Polyient Labs is an early-stage blockchain startup incubator that has made investments into prominent up-and-comers in the space such as NonFungible.com and Cargo.build. With PG, the goal is to make investments into promising and preferably cross-chain blockchain projects that “unlock the full value potential of the non-fungible token (NFT) asset class”. Besides being an incubator and supporting partners with a wide range of services, the team also aims to build their own products and platforms leveraging some of the cutting-edge tech driven by their portfolio companies.

Just a few of the blockchain startups in the Polyient Labs portfolio.

The first of these is a collaborative environment dubbed the Polyient Games Ecosystem (PGE) which aims to bring together a wide array of entities from a range of networks and verticals to collectively take the space to the next level and grow the pie for all involved in what is still a very nascent industry. Luckily for crypto investors wanting to be involved in this exciting environment, Polyient Games recently conducted a sale of tokens that exposes investors to a lot of the cool stuff going on in the ecosystem in the form of the Polyient Games Founders Key (PGFK).

The early PGE partners include some of the biggest blockchain games on the market.

Polyient Games Ecosystem

The Polyient Games Ecosystem is powered by the PGFK token and understanding either requires a closer look at the four key pillars that will constitute the PG Ecosystem.

Polyient Games Vault

At its very root, the PGFK token is an ultra-rare NFT enabling holders to gain lifetime rewards and membership to exclusive sections of the PG Ecosystem. The PG Vault is where you can take your PGFK tokens and stake them to earn from a range of rewards including chance based drops (made possible by Chainlink’s VRF – a provably-fair and verifiable source of randomness on-chain) and yield farming rewards coming from a combination of third-party partner token distributions and Polyient Games-specific rewards.

What’s interesting is that the amount of PGFK you hold and their generations (explained later) will serve to amplify your chances at the random drops and improve your farming power. There’s even been talk by the team of earning participation and achievement ‘badges’ that will go towards further boosting yield rates in a gamification layer that serves to seamlessly merge NFT, DeFi, and gaming.

Cargo gems are only the first of a perpetual set of rewards that PGFK holders will receive by simply staking their tokens inside the Vault.

There will be reward airdrops monthly and the first announced reward for PGFK holders is a share of the main utility token for Cargo – a NFT creation and trading platform similar to Rarible. It’s expected that the more the PG ecosystem grows – whether through direct investment by Polyient Games or through projects wanting to join the PG Ecosystem – the larger the potential reward pool will be for PGFK holders.

Polyient Games Dex

One of the main products being developed is the Polyient Games DEX. This is a crucial aspect of the ecosystem because it addresses the illiquid state of current NFT projects and those who invest in them. This fungible token exchange will be fueled exclusively by PGFK Particles in a token called XPGP (a utility token that represents a 1:1000  fraction of a PGFK). You will be able to put a PGFK (ERC-721) into the “Particle Bridge”, effectively burning them and receiving in return 1000 XPGP (ERC-20). You can similarly take 1000 XPGP (burn them) and send it through the Bridge to mint 1 PGFK NFT. We noted earlier that PGFK tokens have generations and each time a PGFK is sent through the bridge and deconstructed into XPGPs (or vica versa), the received PGFK or XPGP loses its previous generation number and is minted into a new generation. This thus creates a deflationary aspect for older generations which will favor ‘hodlers’ in PGFK Vault yield farming situations. This organic incentive for early gen0 PGFK holders to keep their NFTs is expected to trickle onto the rest of the ecosystem in terms of removing selling pressure, and ultimately raise prices given demand for either PGFKs or XPGPs grows over time.

The Polyient Games DEX will come in two waves – the first version is on the verge of release and will essentially be an adapted Uniswap fork that will quickly get things up and running on the Ethereum network. What’s much more interesting is version 2 that is slated for the end of 2020. V2 is a fast and cheap DEX built on the recently released Avalanche network by Ava Labs on their X-Chain. Combining the widely adopted token standards of Ethereum with the speed and cost of the Avalanche network could be a huge boon for a sector of the market that lives or dies by gas costs, in no small part due to the low-dollar-value of a lot of the transactions that take place. To incentivize liquidity on the XPGP-token pairs, you’ll be able to take your LP token and stake it inside the PGFK vault for further rewards beyond the trading fees generated – similar to what we’ve seen recently become popularized by the likes of Yams and Sushi yield farm projects.

Polyient Games Marketplace

The Marketplace is the wider umbrella under which the PG DEX sits, but it’s important to note it as a separate entity because of what it can potential bring the NFT space. Currently, one of the main problems plaguing the NFT space is a lack of liquidity (especially for the non-fungible tokens that can’t be traded on your usual exchanges) and no central flexible marketplace on which to explore the vast happenings in the space.

An NFT-focused marketplace that solves UX deal-breakers centered around speed and cost currently plaguing the Ethereum network is desperately needed.

The PG marketplace has the potential to be the Steam of NFTs as beside from benefiting from the DEX and the Vault mentioned above, it will be a curated place where traders, investors, liquidity providers will all be interacting with each other. With all the money and eyeballs already locked into the ecosystem, it can serve as a concentrated and integrated platform where new NFTs can be showcased, presales conducted, and auctions can be had. This will naturally depend on how well Polyient Games is able to bring the different players in the wider NFT world together but the incentives are certainly there.

Polyient Games DAO

PGT is the native governance token for the Polyient Games Ecosystem and has been given to all participants in the initial PGFK sale on a 1:1 ratio. While the DAO is not expected to be operational this calendar year, the founding team have made their intentions clear that they plan to migrate the majority of decision making authority to PGT holders over time. Some of the areas under review for decision making migration include:

● PGFK Reward Vault Yields
● PGFK to XPGP conversion ratios
● PG partner participation criteria
● PG DEX rewards for liquidity providers
● Distribution of rewards generated by PG DEX transaction fees

As we’ve seen with many successful projects, the initial build-out by a centralized team to then transition to have the decision making be passed on to the community is a great way to live by the crypto ethos of decentralization as well as better fight any potential future regulations that could more easily target centralized entities.

The three tokens in the ecosystem revolve around reward drops (PGFK), marketplace currency (XPGP), and governance (PGT).

Polyient Games Founders Key (PGFK) Token

The majority of PGFK tokens (12,000 out of total 20,000) were sold during a week-long sale that started on September 15 and sold out just few hours before the September 22 end date. They were sold at a price fixed to 1 PGFK equaling 400 DAI and the only cheaper tokens available were sold at a 20% discount in a presale for 500 PGFK conducted in mid-July. The rest of the 7,500 tokens were divided as follows:

— Partners & Giveaways: 7.26%
— XPGP Liquidity: 66.67%
— Team: 26.07%

As you can probably appreciate when we discussed the PG Ecosystem, the PGFK token is one of the most unique tokens to have hit the crypto scene in quite a while. The dual state in which a non-fungible ERC-721 can fluidly alternate between being a utility token fueling the marketplace side to a rare NFT with MMORPG-like traits that generates a lifetime worth of NFT lootbox-like rewards on the other is quite a fascinating dynamic. Let’s look again at the benefits that have been announced by the team to consider the active token tradeoffs  for holders in the ecosystem.

PGFK

● PGFK Holders-only Lobby: PGFK Holders can directly communicate with the Polyient  Games team, Ecosystem partners, Games, and other PGFK community members.

● PGFK Member Rank: Given the scarce supply of PGFKs, PG will be leveraging a number of  random-chance events to reward holders, including loot box and NFT airdrops.

● Early-Access to the Polyient Games Marketplace

● Polyient Games Marketplace Fee Reductions: All transactions within the Polyient Games Marketplace will include fees that will be collected by Polyient Games to reinvest in the  Ecosystem.
○ Early Polyient Games adopters will have the opportunity to reduce and even  remove these fees by stacking PGFKs. With the roll-out of the full PG Marketplace,  PG will reduce 1% of the transaction fees with each PGFK held in a user’s wallet.
○ Fee reductions will initially be associated with NFT purchases, but it will likely be  extended to the PG DEX. This fee will only be factored into Polyient Games’ fees  and not transactional fees destined for liquidity pool participants.

● Early-Access to the Polyient Games Particle Bridge: The more PGFKs you hold, the  sooner you will have access to the smart contracts necessary to convert them into XPGPs.

● Early-Access to Polyient Games Usernames: The more PGFKs you hold, the sooner you  will be able to claim your official Polyient Games Web 3.0 username.

XPGP

● Main transactional unit for all purchases made within the PGE platform.

● Main payment option for NFT pre-sales and auctions conducted within the PGM.

● Main trading pair for all fungible tokens listed on the PG DEX, including Ecosystem member  in-game currencies, Polyient-backed token projects, and more.

PGFK Investment Potential

The NFT and DeFi space is moving fast and PGFK seems to be in prime position to capitalize on that trend by taking the focused investment approach of the Polyient Games team and using that to build out a wider ecosystem that will invite both the big developers / creators in the space as well as the technological partners such as Ava Labs and Chainlink to give the whole sector a chance to flourish at scale. While as a PGFK holder you don’t get any equity or direct stake in the companies within the PG portfolio or the wider PG ecosystem, there’s so far been conceited efforts demonstrated by the PG team to see PGFK holders rewarded, whether that’s through direct distribution of the main utility token in the case of Cargo or through the recent investment in Community Games which utilizes their decentralized tournament hosting capabilities to run exclusive tournaments with prizes for PGFK holders.

A look at what’s to come in the near future.

At a $8m fully diluted marketcap during the sale, the project was very competitively-priced when compared to the valuations of platforms such as $MEME which have a much smaller scope on the surface. Of course at the end of the day, it will come down to the execution of the different parts mentioned above and how well they use their position and network to stay ahead of the field by being the one-stop shop for NFTs in combination with the exciting doors that DeFi opens up. It cannot be understated that blockchain games/projects are greatly incentivized to join the PG ecosystem, not only due to instant exposure to a highly targeted and invested userbase but also near-instant liquidity provided by the PG DEX, allowing them to spend their valuable development resources on what they do best: make great products.

Seeing as DeFi and NFTs are the two hottest sectors in crypto right now and will remain so for the foreseeable future, this seems like an exciting ecosystem to be a part of both for developers and investors alike. Whether Polyient Games ends up being the ultimate NFT + DeFi ecosystem as the title questions remains to be seen, but they currently seem to be ahead of the pack in terms of bringing all these concepts together and having a cohesive scalable plan to make it a reality. Even though games and art are the logical kickstarters of today’s NFT ecosystems, anything from the real world can and will eventually be made into NFTs, and a flexible (incentives + marketplace + DEX), cheap (AVAX), and community-driven (DAO) ecosystem has as good of a chance to capture a piece of the much bigger pie of the future as any proposed solutions we have seen to date.

The scope of areas that Polyient Games aims to cover in the future is wide and vast..

How To Invest

Since the sale is over, the only place to get a hold of PGFK tokens is on NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea. The price as of this writing is slightly above the initial sale price but good deals may be found for those willing to wait for sellers in need of fast liquidity.

If you’d like to learn more about Polyient Games, check them out on their official channels: website, Twitter, Discord, and Telegram.

The author as of this writing holds tokens relating to this project. None of this is financial advice and you should conduct your own research before making any decisions relating to the topics discussed in this article.