The GameFi Revolution on Arbitrum: From Play to Earn, to Risk to Earn the story of TridentDAO
TridentDAO just raised $3m to build its free-to-play game on Arbitrum.
Trident is a “2D MMO, procedurally generated infinite universe video game” that will be free to play.
The game is currently under development by Geyser Forge Studios, their Alpha release is expected in Q1 2023.
The interesting aspect of TridentDAO is their “Risk to Earn” model as a way to improve GameFi tokenomics/economics sustainability.
The Play to Earn model suffers from an everlasting supply problem, where users' gains from playing the game result from selling assets generated during the game to someone else.
There is also the system of breeding, where an NFT/asset can be “bred” to create more of them.
Both models result in an ever-increasing supply and selling pressure. Creating more supply decreases the value of each token by diluting supply, and “creates a terrible problem most often of Pay To Win, as well as forming the above structure”.
Furthermore, for users engaging in a P2E economy, their playtime does not contribute to the value they extract from the platform. Rather, the user pays up from the initial cost of assets to join the game, resulting in a Pay To Win situation where skills become less of a factor in the winner of an in-game competition.
Risk to Earn
The premise of Risk to Earn is that it is a zero-sum game.
When one person loses a match, another person wins a match, and following suit, when one person wins, they receive the “risked” bounty from…
