Aavegotchi: Game That Lets You Grow NFT Characters
Aavegotchi is a simple game with complex DeFi mechanics where users can grow NFT characters called Aavegotchis. The idea is simple - the more you love your Aavegotchi, the more valuable it becomes!
The game lives on Etherium and runs through Polygon. The graphics, NFTs and interface are pixelated and looks like from 90's:
Each NFT has unique attributes defined by a rarity score. The score is calculated by specific character traits, wearables attached to the avatar, a kinship score, which is based on how often the player interacts with the avatar, and the amount of tokens staked to the avatar.
Rare Aavegotchis not only have higher value, they also enable the Aavegotchi to perform better in farming of GHST tokens.
GHST is the primary utility token of the Aavegotchi ecosystem and is used to buy and sell goods within the Aavegotchi world, including Aavegotchis themselves. GHST can also be staked for additional rewards.
You can acquire an Aavegotchi in a Bazaar which is a marketplace within the ecosystem. Or you can acquire a portal which allows you to mint Aavegotchi but you also have to have some GHST for minting. Acquiring the NFT through the portal will cost $1700 give or take.
Cheapest Aavegothi listed for sale at the time of writing is 499 GHST or $1197 at the current GHST price.
How much can I earn you might want to ask?
As mentioned above the Defi ecosystem is complex and there are multiple ways a user can make income. You can make 40% APY even if you stake Aavegotchi and forget about it, you can also earn from the upcoming auctions or if you snipe Bazaar deals. But overall the income will depend on how much you put in terms of time and initial investment.
On Discord I found people who said they earn 15K GHST a month, another one claimed he accumulated 650K of GHST through the game, I would assume these numbers are more of an exception than a standard.
Tokenomics
The current market cap is just a little bit smaller than diluted cap - 166,9M and 170,8M. The volume is 33M.
In the whitepaper or a lite paper of the project, that are just very basic documents on a Google Doc, there are some details about the token GHST but nothing is said about the max supply. Since the GHST can be acquired through farming, it could be that the project has inflationary tokenomics and no fixed supply.
Etherscan shows 7000 holders and 14,9K transfers. The activity comes in waves but the last wave was a little smaller than the previous ones.
Number of unique wallet addresses interacting with dapp's smart contracts according to dappradar.com is 1,6K for the last 24 hours and 4,6K for the last 30 days.
Partnerships & investors
The seed round took place in 2020 but the details of funds raised aren’t disclosed. There’s not much to see among partners either, although recently they shared a partnership update about Ready Player DAO which invested 50 ETH in acquiring Aavegotchi’s assets. Ready Player DAO is a group of investors that pool their capital to make investments.
There’s also NFT Gaming Guild YGGSEA that acquired game assets recently. YGGSEA is the first subDAO of YGG.
Social sentiment
Official Twitter page has 90,8K followers and 19.1K new people joined in the last 30 days. Engagement is decent but not exceptional.
Discord has 20K members and 3K are currently online, general chat is pretty active and responsive.
Reddit has 2k frens as they call it, activity on Reddit is poor.
Medium articles are mainly updates on what the team is working on and what they have accomplished.
Roadmap
Currently the team is demo-testing the game that is about to be launched - The Gotchiverse which is an action role playing game.
In The Gotchiverse, players are able to farm completely new ERC20 tokens, craft exclusive NFTs, organize into guilds, explore the sprawling world and much more.
Players can also own a land in Gotchiverse, the land will generate a token but not a GHOST, another token called Alchemica.
Summary
The game keeps on evolving, it gets the interest of gaming guilds. In my view it signals that the project will stay here for a while.
I would expect to see more users though. The project is pretty famous, you can hear about it from different influencers on Youtube or Twitter, so the user count should be larger I think. Perhaps the high entry level prevents the Aavegotchi from growing faster.
The ecosystem is pretty complicated too, the Aavegotchi is very complex on its own and now they’re about to launch Gotchiverse with more tokens, NFTs, earning possibilities, so you have to really be involved in the ecosystem to wrap your head around what is happening. But if you do, it seems as if the project can provide an opportunity to generate decent income.