There comes a time where those once in glory fall victim to a plateau, where their sense of reality resides in the perception of Hubris’ eye, whilst the grounding of civilization lives much farther beneath them.

As hard times breed great men, and great men breed peaceful times, so do peaceful times breed unmotivated men, thus spawning hard times once more.

We believe in solving problems. Whether they be problems hard to admit, or problems hard to solve, we seek to solve them regardless. We have identified during our time, two major issues in GameFi, and in the “DeFi 2.0” model.

Just as society splits when different opinions arise, so do teams when philosophies do not synchronize. Our vision formed in focus on these two issues, and comes to fruition at the convergence of their respective two solutions. The idea of these two solutions is rendered in the idea of “Atlantis”, a city where the critical problems of these two sectors are mitigated, and, ideally, resolved.

Games should be designed with the player at the forefront, and be enjoyable with and without crypto involved. The game should be designed with crypto as an enhancement for the player and in-game economy, and not to be designed around in a nature of greed.

OccupyGameFi represents the campaign to change the way that “GameFi” is designed. The better product naturally trends towards more success. Thus is the case with GameFi. We believe the bar is low for “crypto games”. There is a critical issue in GameFi, an issue that not only hurts the players, the public opinion of crypto, but the future trajectory of both of these. To nip this issue in the bud, is to save the future of GameFi, and “crypto-gaming” as a whole, or, at the very least, do our share.

This manifesto will read leaning on the side of verbosity as to provide as clear of a message as possible. In addition, throughout the duration of this writing, three terms will be used frequently, and may or may not be considered the “cultural & commonly accepted” definition of the terms. By providing the contextual-definition, semantic debates over this manifesto are extracted from the equation.

From here on out, the use of the term “GameFi” will be used to represent any game that involves a cryptocurrency. This is not the common use of the phrase. Generally, GameFi refers to the merge of DeFi, and gaming. However, for a game to involve crypto, it does not have to also technically utilize DeFi. Again, for the sole purposes of this manifesto, GameFi represents any game that utilizes crypto in its mechanics in any way, shape, or form.

P2E will represent Play-To-Earn.

POL will be used to represent the idea of “DeFi 2.0”, or, the concept of “Protocol Owned Liquidity”, POL for short.

A debate over semantics generally is an arbitrary and overall net negative when having a conversation, however, it has its place as a preventive measure when the common conscience has a specific understanding of a word not well defined. And this is meant to spark a conversation. A conversation of issues in GameFi, and protocols utilizing the POL model.

The fundamental issue present in the current state of GameFi, is, none other than the “Play to Earn” model at its core, and, in addition, the way games are designed in GameFi. Take a shot every time you read “GameFi”.

Before diving(kek) into the problem, let’s explore a principle of economics, the system of “Play-To-Earn”, and how that piece of fundamental economics works, or, does not work, in context of the current “Play-To-Earn”-dominated GameFi landscape.

We in Atlantis are not the most prestigious economists, however, it does not require an expert-level knowledge to know the phrase “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”, or, in its abbreviated form, “TAANSTAFL”. The idea of TAANSTAFL is quite simple. In an economy, there are relative incentives for providing something, paid out in goods, services, or currency. To acquire a good, service, or currency, a trade is always made. There is no free ride, and to acquire one of these things, is to give up another. If one desires to acquire currency, they provide a service or good. A business will buy your time, effort, and service-providing skill-set, in exchange by selling you currency. Both participants are ideally satisfied, as they receive the thing they want, in exchange for the thing the other party wants. No participant in the economy is willing to give away one of their things in exchange for nothing, thus, giving birth to the heuristic phrase, “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch”.

It does not take long when peering into the current state GameFi to realize, there is seldom any other model present than the P2E (Play to Earn) model. P2E represents the following concept.

Within the context of a game existing in the GameFi sphere, one must not win in order to receive a currency. This means, that whether a player wins, ties with another player, or loses, they are given a currency in return for simply showing up to play. In the case of a game that rewards this currency only on a win for the player, this issue is still present, since the losing player does not lose the currency, therefore, tokens are still given by the game for nothing in return other than playtime. Let us briefly return to the concept of TAANSTAFL to further illustrate the connection between P2E and the economic principle itself.

TAANSTAFL says there is nothing given for free within an economy. All decisions incur an inherent cost, whether the cost is considered to be free or not, is arbitrary, because at the basis of all things given for free, they are given for free with time spent to do so, time being a cost in itself. In this article, the definition of TAANSTAFL will not be revisited, but referred to in abstraction as it fits for the purpose of this manifesto.

When a player participates in P2E, they are given a token, which they are often able to sell for currency that can be used to purchase goods and services or other currencies. The game itself, or, those who decide the in-game currency’s flow and output, must be making an economic decision. They are providing a token, or, currency, in exchange for, well, something, right? Generally, in software products that are provided as a “free” service, such as, Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat, there still is an exchange taking place between the user and the one providing this “free” service. In the case of social media software, the exchange is in user data.

In the case of P2E, there is no exchange of user-data. So, one must only ask, where does the value in a P2E token come from? One must ponder this question thoughtfully to arrive at the truthful conclusion. Generally, when there is something existing in an economy, it may have an intrinsic value, and an extrinsic value. Without exploring the entirety of these two concepts, which is still a largely unsolved mystery of human psychology and economics, the terse definition for purpose of this manifesto will be that intrinsic value represents the utility and scarcity of an economic good/service/currency. Extrinsic value will represent the perceived value of that good/service and/or currency by “the market” as a whole, which is, for lack of a better definition, the non-mathematically represented value sum of all its individual participants.

If there is no exchange of user data, or other economic value exchanged in trade between the player spending their time playing the P2E game, and the token received for doing so, nor is any value given for the team’s efforts in upkeeping or innovating on the game, then where does the token’s intrinsic value come from?

Generally, a good or service, if a currency does not exist in the economy, can be roughly quantified by the cost it incurs, or, the exchange rate of the thing itself and a different good or service.

For example, if a carpenter builds tables, and a farmer farms corn, and they wish to trade, and a trade is struck for 100 corn ears in exchange of 1 table, then the value of 1 table can be thought of at market price, or “the going rate”, to be 100 corn ears.

Let us now return to the P2E model. If a player that spends their time playing a P2E game is giving up that time in exchange for a token, and they are not selling their user-data to the organization maintaining the game, then what is the intrinsic value, or, exchanged value, of that token given to the player for their time? How do the creators of the game benefit from receiving that player’s time? What we do know, is that the player benefits by selling the token they receive at market price, for a currency they can use to buy other goods and services, such as a loaf of bread.

The market price will be whatever is paid for it, in other words, the perceived value of that token by the market. If you subtract the intrinsic value from the market price, this is what gives us the extrinsic value. If the intrinsic value is 0, does that mean the market price of the token is purely based on extrinsic value, or, the perception of value by the market participants? Would anyone like to purchase some tulips for a premium?

To quickly visit laws of supply and demand, when the supply of a good increases, the demand reacts in “reflexivity”, and generally, when supply increases, and demand does not increase equally, the price of the good/service must fall to meet the demand. There is the Economic Theory of Equilibrium, and the Economic Theory of Reflexivity explored by the Open Society Foundations. A stance on one or both of these theories is not necessary to admit that when the supply of a good increases, the price of that good tends to fall. This can be tied to the idea of intrinsic value, which is derived generally from two things: Scarcity, and utility. Scarcity is the one to be explored in context of a token being minted and given to the player within a P2E game. If playing the game mints the player a portion of the new supply of a token, which is the case with a P2E game, as, tokens are minted to the player, and not of a finite supply, then it is inherently implied that the supply of the token only increases. This is the case unless tokens are bought back from the supply and removed, although, this would require an entity to purchase the tokens back, incurring a cost in itself.

If supply only increases, whilst demand does not, then what does this imply for the price of the token?

Simply put, a grim destiny.

“What if the player receives more of the token, but the price falls?”

The player benefits from selling the token on the market, to other market participants, for market price, represented as its extrinsic value plus its intrinsic value(generally 0).

For a token to have intrinsic value, it must be backed by something, generally scarcity or utility. If a token in the P2E model is not backed by the player’s time, nor user-data, then what is it backed by?

In the P2E model, tokens emitted by the game for simply showing up to play, are backed by nothing, unless an exchange is made to acquire the token besides the time of playing itself, because the creators of the game cannot exchange your time on the market for anything, thus rendering the player’s time at a market price of 0. So this means, the player must sell this token for its market price, which is generally composed of its extrinsic value, since it has no intrinsic value, if they want to receive any benefit past simply enjoying the game without the crypto involved. This implies, to collect any profit, that the token must be sold to a different market participant for higher than what it cost the seller to acquire. If it costs nothing to acquire the token from the original position of its minting, since, no user data is exchanged, only play-time, which has a market price of 0, then selling it for anything higher than 0 would imply the Greater Fool Theory and the presence of Tulipmania, both concepts of which, outline the idea of an overvalued asset pushed to wild prices beyond its intrinsic value, simply on the fumes of the next market participants perception.

Now that we know the problem, that the token is backed intrinsically by nothing, how can we solve it?

Admittance is the first step.

Within the POL model, which is further outlined in the TridentDAO Gitbook documentation, the concept of intrinsic value is manifested in the use of a treasury. Assets of market value, generally stablecoins such as DAI or FRAX, are taken by the treasury, and, in exchange a token is given to the participant. In the case of TridentDAO in the Atlantis ecosystem, PSI is given to the participant in exchange for FRAX. Without delving going further on this topic, since it is well outlined in the Gitbook documentation, this means, that we know one PSI has an intrinsic value of the amount of stable assets used to create it, and those stable assets are stored in an open-source smart contract, aptly called the treasury.

In the beginning of this manifesto, two issues are mentioned to be outlined and addressed.

The first issue, is the issue of GameFi being dominated by the P2E model, an economically unstable system.

The second issue, living in the protocols utilizing the POL model, is what will be identified next, and thus, a solution will be proposed to both issues simultaneously by this manifesto and the Atlantians working to bring it to fruition.

The concept of the POL model, pioneered and created by Olympus, is one of prestige. In short, it capitalizes on the DeFi protocol’s ability to own its liquidity, and then leverage it to earn a yield in some way, shape or form. In any forward innovation, a new branch of issues presents itself. The one spawned by the POL model, is that, at some point, growth of the protocol ceases. This is an issue in any organization and exists in many facets of life, but can be mitigated through vertical and horizontal integration. Olympus has since launched Olympus Pro, a remedy to this issue, albeit still within the confines of DeFi itself and does not integrate from outside crypto.

At some point, things grow too large for the box constructed for itself, and must metamorphosis to expand its wingspan to elsewhere.

Generally, on a basic level, by providing liquidity to an exchange, one incurs a profit back in return for their liquidity provision. This is the case in DeFi, and by integrating the POL model to a protocol, a large treasury can be built through bonds, and thus the liquidity is used to gain a yield and redistribute that yield back to its stakers who earn profits in the form of rebases, where new supply is minted and distributed to those stakers and then compounded. In the case of the TridentDAO treasury, this is also true, as is with most if not all POL protocols.

There comes a time when the influx of liquidity to the treasury does not continue to grow as much as what was maybe expected, and a plateau is reached. The folks in Atlantis believe that, at some point, a POL protocol must seek to horizontally and vertically integrate to expand its reach to broader markets. If it does not do this, the valuation of the treasury becomes locked to only its yield from the DeFi market, which is encapsulated in a portion of the crypto market. Locking a treasury to one market is a finite game to play, and presents the hurdle of bringing revenue from outside of crypto. The vector of scale does not have the ideal maximum that could be attained when locked to one market, and so a protocol seeking to reach its tentacles into other markets would provide more promising potential should it succeed in its plan to integrate, both horizontally and vertically. More simply put, a protocol seeking to grow its market shares in not just the crypto market, but other markets, would have a much higher cap on its future profits than one locking itself to one area of the open market, in this case, DeFi liquidity yields.

The difficulty in solving this problem, the problem of not harvesting revenue from outside crypto, is that, at least here in Atlantis we believe, there is not many places for crypto to be integrated with other sectors where the bridge is able to be built and thus crossed. Without getting into the issue of real world use cases, there has not been much movement to integrate other sectors with crypto yet. This poses the hurdle of securing integrations outside of DeFi a quite difficult one. At the same time, the tokens in the POL model are generally never burned, causing them to be locked as an inflationary currency, where supply is only created and never removed from the market, which exerts supply side pressure and forces demand to shift in reflexivity. Generally this leads to the price of the token to decline, although the holders who choose to stake will receive this new supply in the form of rebases. The yield has a much more finite pathway than if a protocol were to expand its borders outside, as a country exhausts its internal natural resources, and seeks to conquer foreign lands in its pursuit of growth as an empire.

So what is the proposed solution by Atlantis and the Trident protocol, and how does it solve both of these critical issues simultaneously?

Let us briskly cover the two issues once more, to outline how they are merged, and bring an attempt at a strong solution.

We believe Play-To-Earn can only exist if an exchange of economic value is taking place, which is not the case in the most prominent iterations of P2E, since tokens are minted based on playtime of the users, without collecting user-data, and playtime is not something that can be directly sold, thus, proving the current-standing Play-To-Earn model as a complete and utter facade.

This is the current state of GameFi, with an economically broken and unsound system acting as the spearhead of GameFi.

Players often collect a token with no intrinsic value, and at most, use it to breed two (insert game character here) together, spawning a third. However, they generally do this in hopes to sell the (insert game character here), to then acquire more of the valueless game token emitted through the P2E model, to then sell this token on the market.

This causes the facets of Pay-To-Win to come into play, since players acquire in-game utility through purchasing the (insert game character here) with tokens from outside the P2E game’s economic system, and then using that acquired power, represented as the game character. These game characters generally have quantifiable stats, and thus are directly comparable to other game characters, meaning one will, within the confines of the game’s economy of course, inherently have higher value than another game character. Pay-To-Win has never increased the enjoyment of the game in an equitable way based on player skill, nor has it ever made a game more enjoyable. More addicting? Sure. Better? Absolutely not. Players know this, and so does the market, hence why the most played and enjoyed games are generally “Triple A” titles in the gaming industry, which, have microtransactions, but generally never overstep the boundary of letting players with more capital have the upper hand as a direct result of them spending more in-game.

This model would not be acceptable in the traditional gaming industry, or, at least, not at this level. The model of P2E renders itself not only by minting a token with no intrinsic value, but also by having in-game utility locked behind a large paywall, that tends to increase as the wealth gap does so and those with more capital acquire more of the in-game assets and increase their price since supply is removed from the market. A few examples come to mind where this issue is present, and again, regardless of the broken economics of the GameFi spearheads, remain the pinnacle of GameFi.

To revisit the POL protocol problem swiftly, these protocols are strongly advised to seek revenue from outside the self-contained system that is crypto and DeFi.

How can the gap be bridged, if there is not many lands to explore through the use of crypto?

A combination of the two. Crypto serves large use cases in both the financial industry, and gaming.

By utilizing the POL model, to amass a treasury, and utilize that treasury to build and maintain a game with sound economics that are sustainable, and line incentives in a manner that makes sense, as is never the case in P2E (since a player’s time cannot be sold but a token must be returned in exchange), Atlantis hits two birds with one stone.

Fresh revenue is captured by conquering the GameFi sphere, and gaming industry itself, which remedies the critical issue of traditional POL DeFi protocols.

The GameFi issue of P2E is solved by doing away altogether with a fundamentally unsound system, and completely replacing it with a new one.

In the Risk-To-Earn model, we solve both the issue of GameFi’s cancerous P2E economical farce, and at the same time, are able to transfer the POL token emissions to a deflationary policy at the point of a plateau in growth.

The Risk-To-Earn model ensures a better future for GameFi, where players earn based on a meritocracy, and not based on their wallet. Any player may earn their way from the ground up, as is the case in the open market when one opens a trading account on a CEX, or throws some change into a decentralized wallet and hops on a DEX.

At the same time, this allows the game to have growth outside of crypto. With the Risk-To-Earn model, and the new era we are working to bring to life in GameFi, games are enhanced by crypto, not designed around them. We begin with the game design in mind, and if the token fits, then so be it.

The Risk-To-Earn model is a term coined by the team in Atlantis, and is designed around the following concept:

A new game is created. Agnostic, or, neutral, to using crypto. This game begins solely as a PvP game. Players face off against one another. They, of course, are defeated, or are victorious in this game. Ties are counted as neutral and do not affect either player in any way, and thus can be labeled as “negated” and removed from all scenarios when discussing outcomes.

It may assist to tie the rest of this Risk-To-Earn model with an analogy. One may from here on out, attempt to bridge connections with the Risk-To-Earn model, to the way a trader operates in the financial market. They risk capital, in a zero-sum game, to earn back profits, while a market maker like the exchange they trade through, takes a small fee for this, that the trader is willing to pay in order to attempt at capturing potential upside from a “victory”.

In Risk-To-Earn, it is similar. Players provide a chunk of their own capital, in a wager format, and the winner takes all of the wager placed on the match.

This is not limited to the two players involved in the PvP competition, but also may involve the spectators able to watch, and therefore, bet on the match as well.

This creates a zero-sum game, which is sustainable as is evident by the world economy, in which no currency is created from nothing and given to a player, rather, it is earned by improving their skill and receiving it from a player willing to risk it on a match between the two.

This not only provides for an economically sustainable game, but one that is a meritocracy, which removes the Pay-To-Win mechanics entirely from the actual gameplay itself, which, in the current state of the GameFi sphere, calling it “gameplay” is a horrendous disgrace to the word itself.

POL protocols tend to run dry of new places to capture market share, and thus, yield for their holders, because they lock their market to the DeFi space only. In addition, their tokens often remain inflationary. Supply increases while intrinsic value growth flattens out. With Bitcoin or Ethereum(as of recently with its major shift to having a burn mechanic), which are often considered good examples of improvement on a store of value, the supply of tokens is either finite or deflationary. The only way for a supply to become deflationary, is for the supply to be burned or removed from the market in some way. There are currently no incentives in place for a market participant to burn their own tokens, which is also the case for POL. Generally, tokens are removed from supply in DeFi through lockups, which, affects the circulating supply but not the Fully Diluted Value (FDV).

In the Risk-To-Earn model, players earn by defeating other players in a zero-sum game, whilst paying a small fee to the person facilitating the deal. Sound like the analogy to trading on the financial market?

This allows the POL-style protocol to, if it chooses to or not, based on economic conditions, not only incur fresh revenue from players, at the same time giving the players potential to earn massive profits, but also, to burn the incurred fee in the form of in-game tokens, which happen to also be the same tokens used for the POL protocol, reducing the supply, and providing a dynamic and reflexive supply control variable.

When the game has less economic activity, likely arising from reduced player activity, supply is minted on a faster basis than is burned.

When the inverse is true, and players are playing the game actively, wagering their tokens in competition, more supply is burned than minted.

In this way, the game is not designed around crypto, but rather enhanced by it, and the tokens in game are given intrinsic value through the POL DeFi model, because they can earn a yield on these tokens whilst also using the bonding and staking mechanics to benefit economically.

The Risk-To-Earn model has yet to prove itself, but if the zero-sum-game of the financial market, and the way fiat currency and bonds are utilized have taught us anything, its theory is a promising model.

A model that, when implemented, can shift the course of GameFi in a better direction, one that benefits the investors, by mitigating Tulipmania and the Greater Fool Theory, and one that is designed with the players first, by creating a game that is enjoyable with and without crypto.

If a player has no money, and would like to play, they are able to.

If a player is better than another, they are rewarded based on that, and not how much is in their wallet.

This is the vision and manifesto of Atlantis.

This is the definition of what it means to OccupyGameFi.