About

BreederDAO is positioned to improve the supply of in-game assets to meet the growing demand of play-to-earn game economies through highly tuned, programmatic asset-generation systems. Whether it is play-and-earn, play-to-earn, play-to-win, play-for-fun, pay-to-earn or pay-to-win, NFT assets are the core requirement of any blockchain-based game. BreederDAO has already established itself as a leading provider in this space.

BreederDAO specializes in both breeding, the process of crossing two in-game assets to produce a third asset that contains traits of the two initial subjects, and crafting, which is focused on the generation of assets by combining skills, materials or other assets into a new asset. Breeding and crafting are in-game mechanisms used by blockchain games that enable participants to produce new assets or NFTs in their game.

Assets can be produced at scale for guilds as BreederDAO’s proprietary technology cuts down the time taken to generate new assets by a minimum of 50%. This efficiency allows BreederDAO to maximize production with asset production increasing at a rate of 10% to 20% month-on-month, depending on the demand requirement. As both games and guilds define their success through user adoption, lack of access to viable assets for players is a major limiting factor. BreederDAO removes this barrier.

For highly competitive gaming teams and guilds that focus on strategic gameplay, BreederDAO is able to selectively breed for highly desirable traits. Through the process of engineering assets to maximize traits, BreederDAO enables teams to execute their strategies more effectively, leading to much higher in-game yields. The BreederDAO data and analytics team is able to respond to changing game mechanics to determine the most effective structure of traits and update asset generating programs accordingly.

While many guilds may consider developing their own in-house asset generating program, their core business is the productive use of assets. BreederDAO removes the scaling constraint for guilds while allowing them to keep their NFT assets in the hands of scholars to maximize yield. This, in turn, allows gaming guilds to more adequately fulfill their role as demand-side player liquidity providers for new games.

The financial impact of play-to-earn should not be left to chance; instead, guilds and players should be able to optimize the value and effectiveness of their NFT assets through selective breeding. BreederDAO generated assets increase the opportunity and efficiency to generate yield through skill and commitment to the games.

With play-to-earn users growing at an average rate of 15.85% month-on-month [⇗] from Q4 2021 to Q1 2022, demand for play-to-earn gaming NFTs is rapidly increasing. By remaining game- and guild-agnostic, BreederDAO is able to provide ubiquitous asset liquidity for the entire market such that supply can maintain demand. It is this symbiotic relationship between the demand-side player liquidity provided by gaming guilds and the supply-side asset liquidity provided by BreederDAO that underpins the “hockey stick” exponential growth that play-to-earn games have promised VCs and investors and that today’s gamers are demanding.

Vision

It is the BreederDAO vision to be the go-to asset manufacturer by providing a solution to the supply-side constraint in the play-to-earn economy. BreederDAO aims to outfit 5,000 guilds and over 10 million players with in-game assets optimized to maximize value within the next few years.

Gaming Industry

While many in the crypto industry are already very bullish on blockchain gaming as the “trojan horse” for crypto adoption [⇗], it is still in its early stages compared to the traditional gaming industry.

The evolution of gaming began with pay-per-play arcade games in the early 1970s before moving into the home with console gaming, launching with Atari in 1977, which required the purchase of the device and the physical game cartridge. Console gaming went mobile with Nintendo’s Game Boy in 1989, and mobile gaming went mainstream as the iPhone and subsequent smartphones eclipsed the mobile phone market in 2005 — putting sufficient computational power into people’s pockets to enable true gaming experiences.

There are now over 2.8 billion people in the world who actively play video games, with experts forecasting the count to breach the 3 billion mark as early as 2023. In 2020, global video game revenue surpassed ~US$160 billion, making it larger than the global music and movie industries combined at US$96 billion. Some experts have even estimated that the global video game market is twice the size at US$337 billion, making it larger than than all other media categories combined [⇗].

Free-to-play games account for 80% of total gaming revenue per year[⇗]. While typically there is no fee to start, they eventually “force” players to purchase additional items to accelerate progress within the game. However, these game assets only exist within the tightly held publisher ecosystem — function, valuation and availability are all at the whim of the publisher.

NFT Gaming

With the growth of cryptocurrencies since 2015 and NFTs gaining traction in 2019, the gaming industry model is seeing another shift, where blockchain game publishers develop games and marketplaces, and their gaming community own and trade the assets that are used to mint game-specific tokens. This model brings the gamer into the center of the economy alongside the publisher to create a flywheel of game adoption through grassroots, gamer-led user acquisition.

Players receive platform-specific cryptocurrencies for in-game actions such as completing quests or defeating their opponents. Commonly, the higher the level, the higher the in-game reward is. In-game rewards stay inside the game until they are transferred to the blockchain, at which point they can be used or sold. The process of moving the reward tokens from the game into the blockchain is called “minting.” The primary function of these game-specific tokens is to enable the creation of new NFT characters or assets.

This primary function has led to a very lucrative market where gamers can sell tokens to speculators, traders and those looking to breed without having to spend their time in-game. In Q4 of 2021, the hottest six game tokens that gamers sold to breeders were $SLP, $AXS, $VIS, $PGX, $TUS & $CRA. The total volume traded was US$81 billion[⇗].

The game developers typically seed a limited number of NFT assets to launch their game. The proliferation of these game items becomes the job of the community. As owners of the assets, they have the ability to breed or craft additional assets to use or to sell. As part of a finely balanced economy, one or more of the game-specific tokens are consumed (or “burned”) in order to breed and craft in-game items.

NFT assets are required to play these blockchain games. When a player wins, new game-specific cryptocurrencies are created or “minted.” Better NFTs result in more chances of winning more tokens more often. These tokens are required to create new NFT assets so that there is a strong market for gamers to sell these tokens to other players who may then produce more in-game assets. This replication process consumes or “burns” the tokens. The mint-and-burn process of breeding is designed to avoid inflation and ensure the long-term stability of the gaming ecosystem.