Sofi, defi, gamefi, there are so many fis popping up lately. The new world of finance is coming up with a lot of nascent areas with a lot of opportunities for new investors and users of cryptocurrency. It can seem like a lot of information at first but once you get a handle of using dapps and defi the rest of it will come easy. All you are doing is combining a thing you did before like game or be social online and adding a financial element to it.
But first let's start with defintions.
What Is Fi?
Fi is short for finance. This can be a broad term but when it comes to crypto it usually means things like staking and pools. Defi is decentralised finance, which is a financial system set up on a decentralised block chain network. Gamefi is gaming mixed with a financial element such as owning in-game land which pays dividends or staking your nfts. And sofi is social finance which is blogging and earning rewards like you do on leo.
The Many Elements Of Gamefi
When it comes to gamefi you can have a game that is built around a full crypto economy with all aspects working together and dependent on said economy or it can just be a couple of add-ons like skins which can be traded but the rest of the game runs like any other game off a blockchain. Axie is an example of a game eco-system that is almost 100% gamefi. You own your assets, you earn an income for playing, there is a markeplace for trading Axies, there is land coming that players own and the value of SLP makes a difference on how many people are playing the game. Other titles might just take one or two aspects like land or nfts you can stake and leave the rest of the game and economy alone.
The Future Of Gaming
This will almost certainly be the future of gaming. Once people get used to owning their assets and being able to earn while playing there is no going back. I don't know if we will see a future where blockchain development is becomes easy enough that all games are built on a chain or if some games will be blockchain games and others will just make things like skins NFTs and that's it. It will be a mix of the two for years and years to come. Some will build with a full ecosystem and metaverse while others will add some gamefi elements that fit into their overall plan.
Still A Long Way To Go
It is a trend right now with a lot of money being thrown at it but the gamefi space really has not even started yet. Axies is a full game but it's still only like 15% done according to the dev team. There are a lot of titles like crypto blade where you click for auto battles. But when it comes to full AAA titles they have not even been released yet. They are coming. There a lot of them in development with more and more coming everyday but game development takes time and it will be at least a year before we get some solid titles. Maybe in the future we will get consoles that run on a blockchain and come with their own wallet. But for now we just watch trailers and wait for the cool things to come.
Gamefi is just getting started and with real dapps coming out it will be a push for crypto into the mainstream as people love to game. I wonder if games will come out before a bear market hits or if we are going to lose the trend and have it come back in a year or two when a big title get released.
I will be keeping an eye on the space and looking to get into new projects as they come. The problem is a lot of them are expensive to start so it's hard to give them a fair try with such a heavy entry level. When games come out there are free to play or seem like have potential to earn I'll let you know.
Speaking of which I just found out Blankos is 100% free to play and you can earn by getting NFTs from a season pass which doesn't cost anything at the moment so I might write about that soon.