PlayerMint Play-to-Earn Marketplace

[IMPACT]

PlayerMint is a play-to-earn blockchain layer that integrates with existing video games. This rewards players based off of their in-game performance with a fungible token called PMX. PMX is earned in 5 day periods, or epochs, just like Cardano's staking rewards. PMX can be spent inside of a marketplace to buy and sell NFTs.

PlayerMint will first integrate with Fortnite, a game with over 350 million registered players. This will give everyone of them a way to earn a Cardano native asset by connecting their wallet to playermint.com and then authenticating their Epic Games account. Then they just need to pick up their controller or mouse and keyboard and play as usual. PlayerMint will conduct API requests each epoch through Overwolf to determine each users gameplay performance. At the end of each epoch the users are ranked based off of performance and a fixed supply of PMX is attributed to them based off of placement.

PlayerMint is free-to-play and doesn't require the user to pay anything in order to earn PMX. The closest things to a fee is the ~1.7 ADA that the user sends to claim the PMX they have earned each epoch. ~0.2 ADA is spent on transaction fees and the other ~1.5 ADA is sent back to the user with their earned PMX.

Onboarding

The user arrives at playermint.com and connects their wallet. We will be utilizing the Cardano Transaction Library that is CIP-30 compliant (wallet connection standard). The user can then decide if they want to authenticate their Epic Games account to start earning PMX or not.

Profile

The users profile that allows them to interact with the NFTs that are in their connected wallet. This allows them to list, unlist, and change the price of their listed NFTs on the marketplace. The profile also allows users to change their username, set a bio, provide a custom URL, change their profile picture, and authenticate an Epic Games account if they haven't already.

Leaderboard

The hub of all things PMX. This is where users can see the current epochs PMX supply, how much they are expected to earn, their current rank and equivalent skill metrics, and of course a leaderboard that displays all players in the ecosystem. The leaderboard is also where players will be able claim the PMX that they have earned.

Marketplace

This is the NFT marketplace that allows users to buy and sell NFTs on the Cardano blockchain with PMX. This is where our idea of a play-to-earn marketplace comes into mind. This marketplace will support CIP-27 which is an NFT royalty standard. This is to ensure project creators are getting fairly compensated in the secondary market. Royalties will be paid out in PMX.

Mint

This is a feature that allows any user to mint NFTs onto the Cardano blockchain. These NFTs can be put up for sale on the marketplace or used however the minter would like.

Support

Because we plan to on-chain a lot of new gamers to the Cardano blockchain we are putting a strong emphasis on a support model. Through tools such as FAQ pages, chat bots, Discord servers, Social Media updates/responses, and email ticketing we will create easy ways for users to get educated and have their issues resolved. For user issues we will focus on a self-service to live-service model. This is where the user is directed towards resources they can use to resolve the issue on their own, think FAQ pages. If they are not able to do so they have live contact support where needed (Discord and email).

Standard User Experience

1. Go to playermint.com
2. Connect wallet
3. Authenticate Epic Games account
4. Play Fortnite (earn PMX)
5. Claim PMX
6. Spend PMX on NFT marketplace
7. If needed use support to resolve any issues

The entire user experience with product mockups can be viewed in this Youtube video. Additionally you can learn about our tokenomics, read our litepaper, understand our current timeline and more in our Fund8 Proposal Package (Google folder of additional documentation).

The Gamers On-Chained challenge focuses on creating applications to support the adoption of the Cardano blockchain by the 2.5 billion gamers of the world. PlayerMint's main focus is to provide a blockchain layer that brings crypto to the gamer, making the experiences they are already enjoying more rewarding.

This blockchain layer reduces the overall friction into crypto by provide a direct incentive to turn the users gameplay performance into tokens. All the end user needs to do is create a wallet and they are ready to start interacting with Cardano.

If PlayerMint is adopted by just 0.1% of Fortnite's reported 350 million users we would be enabling 350 thousand people to earn and trade Cardano native assets.

We will measure our impact based off these provided challenge KPIs:

• Amount of value made by gamers in play-to-earn applications
• Number of CNFTs made specifically for gaming
• Number of fungible tokens made specifically for gaming
• Number of gaming based content creators that have come to Cardano

In order to on-chain these gamers to Cardano we have begun working with a Fortnite esports org, called Xen, with a total audience reach of over 4 million (calculated based off of individual team members collective followings).

We have 1 big risk that we will have to face in order for PlayerMint to be successful. Luckily we have already created a quality plan for how to deal with it.

Game Studio Rejection

It is possible that a game studio that we integrate with doesn't like the PlayerMint service and decides to reject our integration with their game. Luckily we have 2 distinct ways of dealing with this:

1. Crypto Friendly Studios and Platforms

We work to only integrate PlayerMint with games that are being hosted on crypto friendly platforms and are developed by crypto friendly studios. Epic Games has made it very public that they are big supporters of the metaverse and are open to blockchain games being hosted on their Epic Games launcher.

2. Usage of Overwolf

Overwolf is a tech company that creates APIs for some of the worlds most popular games such as Fortnite. Overwolf then takes these APIs to different game studios to get them approved for usage and licensing. This means that Epic Games gave Overwolf permission to license out the API to parties such as PlayerMint.

We feel extremely confident in Fortnite being the first game integrated into PlayerMint as we already see other gameplay monetization platforms such as Buff integrate with them. For context Buff is a way to earn points you can redeem for gift cards based off of gameplay performance that also uses Overwolf.

[FEASIBILITY]

PlayerMint was founded back in 2018. Since then the product has gone from a side project to a main focus, grown to a team size of 6, minted 7k CNFTs, been successful in Fund4 and Fund6 of Catalyst, and deployed 6 smart contracts to an on-chain environment.

Our intention is to launch the PlayerMint product in Q1 of 2022. We are actively working towards this goal but have been impacted by the current events in Ukraine as one of our core developers is based out of Kyiv. The timeline provided is what we have confirmed with MLabs (our dev group) to be feasible with the developers situation in mind. This timeline is set to be intentionally longer than expected in case any internal or external issues arise.

Timeline and Deliverables for 2022

Playtesting

This is the process of testing out the PMX distribution model by running live data through it. This is to ensure the model accurately distributes PMX based off of gameplay performance, but will not be run on-chain. Rather the PlayerMint community will supply their Epic Games usernames, play Fortnite, and after 5 days we will run an API request to determine each players performance. The data from this will determine how much PMX each person would have earned in a live product. This data will be formatted and shared in a spreadsheet so a discussion can occur around our distribution model, so that it can be optimize before launch.

Testnet

This is the launch of the full PlayerMint codebase to the Cardano testnet. It will be live for a brief period of time before the Founder Launch to ensure that all code functions as intended in an on-chain environment. It will allow users to carry out the feature functions described in the "Impact" section. This means users will be earning testnet PMX and can be trading testnet NFTs.

Founder Launch

This is a beta launch of the PlayerMint codebase to the Cardano mainnet. Only holders of the PlayerMint Founder NFT will be able to earn PMX during this 4-6 epoch long beta. This provides PlayerMint a way to reward its early contributors while they test out the overall mainnet experience and provide feedback as they do (think of the incentivized testnet before the Shelly era). Non-Founder NFT holders will be able to participate in the NFT marketplace at this time. This will give us a good sense of how to properly scale the backend and customer support before opening the full product to all users.

Main Launch

This is the full launch of the PlayerMint codebase to the Cardano mainnet. The codebase will have some updates to it based off of input provided during the "Testnet" and "Founder Launch". At this point the product will be open and accessible to anyone that wants to use it!

Upgrades and Maintenance

This will be an update to the PlayerMint codebase that works to upgrade the overall experience and add further richness of features (we already have a backlog in mind). It will also include some maintenance in case any bugs/issues are discovered.

The team expects the first deliverable to be completed by the end of March at the latest and the last deliverable to be completed by the end of July 2022. Due to the developer situation it is difficult to state exact deployment dates at this time. We have cross checked this time range with MLabs and they have given us the green light that this is extremely achievable. We have included a timeline doc in our "Fund8 Proposal Package" so we can update it with the latest information even after proposal editing has closed. It is possible at the time of reading this that we have listed more specific dates in this doc.

The funds obtained through this proposal would go directly into the budget for the "Main Launch" and "Upgrades and Maintenance" deliverables mentioned in the above timeline section. Here is the breakdown on how the budget would be spent:

Main Launch - $25k

• $22k spent on MLabs to further develop out the frontend, backend, and server side of PlayerMint
• $3k spent to market the PlayerMint Main Launch
• This will be primarily through the Xen Fortnite esport org to their +4 million audience (already have a deal in place)

Upgrades and Maintenance - $25k

• $22k spent on MLabs to further develop out the frontend, backend, and server side of PlayerMint
• $3k spent to market the PlayerMint Main Launch
• This will be primarily through the Xen Fortnite esport org to their +4 million audience (already have a deal in place)

We have an awesome team of 6 internal team members along with the support of MLabs.

Internal Team

Grant Scholl - Chief Executive Officer

Has 2 years of experience in gaming and 4 years in blockchain. He works to build out the ultimate vision of PlayerMint and how it will evolve overtime.

Aidan Rankin-Williams - Chief Experience Officer

Has 2 years of experience in gaming and 4 years in blockchain. He works to form the user experience from first contact marketing to engagement across the product and customer support.

Josh Shull - VP of Marketing Services

Has 6 months of experience in gaming and blockchain. He works to rally and strength a community of gamers, crypto enthusiasts, and NFT collectors so PlayerMint has a strong userbase.

Jack Rousseau - VP of NFT Business Development and Sponsorship

Has 6 months of experience in gaming and blockchain. He works to develop strong relationships with esports orgs, gaming content creators, and projects needing help in the world of NFTs, while driving them to the PlayerMint platform.

Courtney Guthrie - Intern

Has 3 months of experience in gaming and blockchain. She works to assist Josh, Jack, and Aidan across marketing, NFT development, and user experience design.

Greg Fox - Strategic Advisor

Has 7 years of experience in gaming and 2 years in blockchain. He works to provide advice and guidance as to how the project should progress and establish quality lines of revenue.

[AUDITABILITY]

We will measure the projects progress across the following KPIs:

• Total number of users (unique wallets connected)
• Monthly active users (unique wallets connected each month)
• Total PMX earned via gameplay performance (amount of PMX claimed by users)
• Amount of USD value earned via gameplay performance (USD valuation of total PMX claimed by users)
• Amount of social media mentions
• Number of gamers on-chained to Cardano (number of new wallets created to earn PMX. Metric would be tracked through number of clicks on a how to create a new wallet guide provided in onboarding process)
• Total volume of NFT sales
• Amount of PMX paid out in royalties

As the product is deployed and used we will reference these KPIs to determine our success.

Our definition of success for the "PlayerMint Play-to-Earn Marketplace" is the completion of every deliverable listed in the feasibility timeline by the July 2022 due date. If we are able to accomplish this along with an effective marketing plan to encourage a userbase around PlayerMint we will have on-chained gamers to Cardano!

Yes! PlayerMint has seen success in Fund4 and Fund6.

Our Fund4 proposal, "PlayerMint: Token System for Gamers", was focused around the product described in this proposal, but more geared towards obtaining the initial capitol necessary to start its development. The Fund4 proposal was in the "Dapps and Integrations" challenge and ranked number 4 in terms of reviews.

Our Fund6 proposal, "PlayerMint: Community Access NFTs", was focused around developing relations with gaming content creators to utilize PlayerMint to mint NFTs. These NFTs would have unique community access utility and would be purchased by their community with PMX. The Fund6 proposal was in the "NFT Business Models" challenge and ranked number 1 in terms of reviews.

SDG Rating

The main Sustainable Development Goal that PlayerMint has impact on is "Decent Work and Economic Growth" due to our capacity to provide alternative revenue paths for the gamers of the world.