Jan 6, 2022
DECENTRALIZED FINANCE | GAMING
Dogira Poised to Become a DeFi Gaming Powerhouse
Three reasons why they might actually pull it off
By Hogefather, aka Jesse J Rogers | Sponsored by Dogira Finance
Not financial advice. For transparency, the author personally owns 50,000 Dogira tokens (roughly $500 value at the time of writing).
What is DeFi Gaming?
Over the summer of 2021, the jaw-dropping success of a play-to-earn Pokémon clone called Axie Infinity redefined multiple industries.
In only 30 days it brought in $84 million revenue, more than all other protocols in decentralized finance (DeFi) combined. Suddenly, GameFi was on the tip of every tongue.
That staggering amount of revenue sent shockwaves outside of crypto as well. Gaming giants such as Ubisoft took notice and pivoted towards blockchain and NFTs, even though technology for technology’s sake isn’t necessarily what their players wanted.
It remains to be seen if traditional game studios will be able to both satisfy shareholders and also give up enough control to win over their players. Particularly with Steam refusing to carry blockchain games, I expect an uphill battle for established studios to transition to blockchain while keeping their existing distribution channels.
DeFi natives like myself tend to believe that the best opportunities and greatest success stories will instead be found in small, independent grassroots projects that follow in Axie’s footsteps by building from the ground up.
One such GameFi project that strikes me as having this potential is Dogira Finance. Here are my reasons why.
#1 Lean Startup of Industry Professionals
Probably the first thing you’ll notice about Dogira is the crisp, vibrant artwork by Mary Mabiruna, one of the five doxed team members. As you can see from her gallery on ArtStation, she’s a talented freelance professional with a background both in gaming and crypto as well as an unmistakable style. The Dogira-chan character she created has become the iconic mascot of the entire brand.
Eoghan Hayes, the project lead, also has a background in both worlds. He was one of the original Dogecoin developers who worked alongside the Digibyte team in 2013/14 to upgrade the memecoin into what it is today. Additionally, he’s been both a successful enterprise-level project manager as well as indy game developer.
I actually had the chance to sit down and interview one of the team members — communications manager Elijah MacDougall. For a deep dive into the project, you’ll learn a great deal from his first-person, behind-the-scenes perspective.
The remaining members, Daniel Gooding and Skyler Ramsey are both military veterans with strong leadership and operations backgrounds. They each have sales and marketing experience as well, equipping these guys with the versatility needed for community building and establishing business partnerships.
A team doesn’t have to be large to be effective. It just needs specialized experts with industry experience. Dogira has that. There’s also transparency, as the team has done around a dozen AMAs as well as educational videos.
As is the case with Hoge Finance, this group is not the original team, and their cause is not just a memecoin. This is a group from within the community that stepped up after the founders were considering abandoning the project. The contract was signed over to them and from this point the new Dogira team was formed. They genuinely believed in the viability of the brand and concept. That kind of resilience and determination is the same quality that pulled me to Hoge in March.
This new team kept the idea and community alive, but unlike Hoge (so far) they ultimately discarded their old token. They’ve successfully upgraded to a v2 Dogira token on the Polygon network. That brings us to the next topic.
#2 Polygon in Pole Position
Polygon (Matic) started in 2017 as a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, and by the beginning of 2021, it still had very little usage. Now, it has gained so much adoption that it sometimes has more transactions than even Ethereum itself!
The key is the fast, cheap transactions. Because Polygon uses a next-gen Proof of Stake protocol, a transaction that could cost $100 or more on Ethereum gets executed on Polygon for less than a penny.
As you might imagine, for blockchain gaming, that’s critical. It’s a complete deal breaker if players have to pay hundreds of dollars for routine gameplay actions.
Returning for a moment to study Axie Infinity’s success, as merely an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum mainnet, Axie got virtually no traction. But as soon as they moved to their own Ronin side chain — an L2 solution similar to Polygon — that’s when transaction costs fell to almost nothing and the popularity of the game skyrocketed.
Cheap transactions are the key, and out of the three most popular chains (Ethereum, Polygon, BSC), Polygon is by far the one with the lowest transaction costs. Even Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin believes that users will have to migrate away from L1 and onto L2 solutions.
In order to grow to its full potential, a tree has to be planted in fertile soil and in the right season. Similarly, tech projects have to grow in the right environment, at the right time. I believe Polygon is the chain that will play host to a large segment of the GameFi industry. I also believe that 2022 is the year that the mainstream realizes that blockchain gaming is crypto’s most powerful use case to date.
Dogira has put themselves at the right place, at the right time to implement on an incredible vision. So let’s get into the details of exactly what that vision is, and why I love it so much.
#3 Vision for a Gaming Ecosystem
Launching a fun, original game is hard.
Integrating it onto a blockchain is even harder. That’s what I’ve been discovering as I teach myself Solidity. Smart contracts are unforgiving. If there’s any flaws whatsoever, they can be exploited and users can lose value.
In order for aspiring indie game developers like myself to confidently launch our blockchain games, we really need some guidance and assistance from experts who know what they’re doing. This kind of technical support, coaching, and consultation is exactly what Dogira provides to its partner projects. There’s enormous opportunity for mutual gain in this model. People who have great ideas often won’t be able to implement without the kind of network and solutions that Dogira is offering.
There are already several collaborations underway.
- 3rd party developer Hanzo Inu is building a cool, animal-themed, play-to-earn samurai NFT game with Dogira’s consultation.
- Dogira is also advising another 3rd party, PolyDoge, on how to integrate blockchain into their ambitious play to earn VR game.
- A pair of Unity developers called Jupiter Lighthouse Games, which have years of AAA studio experience between them, are creating a game directly for Dogira.
As for the DeFi side of things, the liquidity of Dogira’s token is secured not through taxation or tokenomics, but through high-yield farms and partnerships with the decentralized exchanges Apeswap, PolyCrystal, and PolyCat.
For a utility token in this highly competitive GameFi space, it makes sense that they avoid taxation because taxes unfortunately add friction and discourage transactions for users and liquidity providers, not just speculators.
The main use case for the Dogira token is as a staking instrument that allows players to earn tokens or unique NFTs for partnered games. There’s already $2.9M of locked value in dogira.finance. As their ecosystem of games grows larger and more valuable, it isn’t hard to imagine that number going way up. I myself am currently staking about half of my matic and dogira in a pool to earn more dogira at a 130% annual rate.
I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to me that this ecosystem will be built in Polygon. After three years of development in obscurity, in 2021 Axie Infinity logged a total of $1.1 billion in sales after moving off of L1 Ethereum and onto an L2. It’s exciting to wonder — what might Dogira’s ecosystem look like after 3 years of development, especially when it is so early to Polygon’s party?
Want to Get Involved?
The Dogira Team is actively recruiting medium writers. If you want to be compensated for creating Dogira-related content like this, reach out to marketing@dogira.net.
Quick Links
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