???? Play 2 Earn – the underrated onboarding tool will only continue to attract users into the space

Dive into the ins & outs of Play 2 Earn to see what the MASSIVE hype is about!

DeFi Slate Fam!

As we all know (unless you’ve been living under a rock the last few months), the market downturn has hit the world of Crypto. As we make our way back out of Goblin Town we reflect on some major happenings in the space.

NFTs and Play 2 Earn continue to prove their staying power as well as attract new users.

Today, we have a very special piece by our good friend— George Harrap, CEO of Step Finance. George will break down how the Play 2 Earn genre of gaming on blockchain has risen in popular and acclaim by spawning handfuls of new games with tons of rewards!

Learn more about this as well as how Play 2 Earn will without a doubt continue to pull in new users into the world of crypto. Mass adoption is here!

Enjoy,

DeFi Slate

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Play 2 Earn – the underrated onboarding tool will only continue to attract users into the space 

Author: George Harrap, Co-founder of Step Finance, the Solana portfolio manager. A veteran crypto entrepreneur and former CEO and Co-founder of Bitspark, George started in the crypto world almost a decade ago as an early miner and brings a wealth of experience having built the first crypto remittance startup in the world, and 6 cryptocurrency exchanges.

Op-ed:

The market downturn has hit crypto but there have been surprising results this time around. New worlds like NFTs and Play 2 Earn are proving their staying power despite short-term price drops.This is providing some insight into how more dynamic entries into crypto will offer a new way to onboard and maintain users. 

Play 2 Earn is a genre of gaming built on blockchain technology. In standard games, players earn in-game tokens to redeem for various items, but in Play 2 Earn games, they are earning crypto tokens, commonly NFTs, which they then own and can sell or trade outside of the game for transactable cryptocurrency. 

These games have risen in acclaim as stories of people rising out of poverty with Axie Infinity captured attention last year. The platform reached $4 billion in all-time sales in February. 

While Axie Infinity has been onboarding players on Ethereum, these reward-based games have been growing on various blockchains. Star Atlas on Solana aims to be a 24-hour virtual economy with factions that trade and form alliances in its metaverse. 

Web2 companies are also seeing the potential, with companies like GameStop putting out hints that they are looking to the metaverse for the next best thing. 

As these games prove their worth, the interest and benefit in building across blockchains will likely follow. With this expansion will come improved crypto adoption. 

Play 2 Earn will drive adoption 

Currently, onboarding into crypto is admittedly difficult and frustrating. Users used to the simplicity of centralized Web2 are not fond of the complicated, siloed state of cryptocurrency, and struggle with understanding how to do basic things like set up a crypto wallet. 

While a user may manage to navigate one blockchain and its related decentralized apps (dApps), it requires them to re-educate themselves just to try out a different Layer 1. 

This is where NFTs and Play 2 Earn games are already proving their worth to the crypto world. NFTs saw a huge boom in non-crypto natives cashing in their fiat for crypto in order to buy a certain pfp project or artwork they liked. 

Play 2 Earn offers something similar by hiding the obvious mechanics and making participating in crypto both more fun and more intuitive through the universes these games create. 

By combining a whole ecosystem and novel game theory mechanics, P2E games provide an enticing world for those who love a more immersive, well-rounded gaming experience while also providing the new crypto-based incentive mechanism. 

While Axie may exist on Ronin, a side chain of Ethereum and Star Atlas on Solana, players are unlikely to be drawn to one because of specific chain loyalty. Rather the elements that make gaming enjoyable and enticing – such as the storytelling, skills development and overall challenge are the first point of interest. 

Already, non-crypto natives are drawn into participating. Axie Infinity founder Aleksander Leonard Larsen said during a panel at Token 2049 that half of the game’s players had never used a crypto app before. 

As such, whether it is Avalanche, Polygon, Solana or Ethereum, the user will just know they are playing an awesome game and earning crypto – rather than being defined by a specific chain loyalty. 

Tools for games will help with onboarding 

Part of this adoption acceleration will be the improvement of tools within these gaming metaverses. 

While not everyone is earning a living from their P2E gaming experience, just the fact that these tokens have real-world value and can be exported out of the game makes the stakes for these games higher. 

As such, proper tooling is crucial as players may start out winging it but will eventually want insights, assistance and cataloging of the items and efforts they are making from within the game. 

Already, crypto wallets provide this through being the one source for the tokens and NFTs to be stored and transacted with. 

Dashboards are also expanding the possibilities for players by providing a sweeping overview of their positions, items and ultimately data about their ‘financial’ position within the context of this game’s world. 

For example, users playing on Star Atlas can leverage the Step Finance dashboard to explore the best possibilities within the game. Users can use the dashboard to optimize their gameplay as they see the lay of the land. 

On Star Atlas, ships can be staked to earn yields for users. A dashboard like Step allows a user to see they have one kind of ship earning a poorer yield compared to another. This then highlights what their next move should be- acquiring the other ship. 

This opens up a whole new world of gameplay, not only because it reveals more about the game but also because the stakes for players are higher. They aren’t just earning in-game rewards  – they are earning money in the form of crypto tokens.  

Wallets with simple transaction mechanisms, easy notifications on positions and gameplay, dashboards laying the state of play simply before the gamer all work together to make P2E more useful, enticing and effective as a crypto onboarder. 

This corner of crypto is not going anywhere 

P2E has proven it has legs and will continue to grow across blockchains. What is starting off as an experimental way to build metaverses will morph into an effective way to make interacting with crypto an unstoppable onboarding force. 

While Web2 gaming companies are seeing the potential these games have, it will be the Web3 games pioneering, building and understanding the landscape and gamers that will prove most competitive.