For a long time, DeFi has predominantly been a playground for whales, with outcomes that often seem secure and predictable for these dominant players. Even the seasoned and experienced DeFi users frequently find themselves effectively serving as exit liquidity, due to the disproportionate difference in initial capital. This disparity often leaves these users at a disadvantage, unable to fully participate or benefit from the opportunities within the DeFi landscape.

Our mission is to transform DeFi into a playground where every player matters, irrespective of their financial might. We believe in the collective strength of communities and aspire to unlock their true power through our initiative.

But how will we achieve this? The answer lies in our innovative approach towards gamifying DeFi.

Gamifying Defi

Matchbox has been a long-standing participant in the on-chain gaming ecosystem. As pioneers, builders, and communities within the space, we’ve cultivated rich experiences and developed initial primitives. Our aim is to leverage the composability of DeFi to create a new kind of web3 experience — a gaming layer fully integrated into DeFi protocols. In other words, we’re gamifying DeFi.

We are firmly convinced that the technical maturity and experiences that have been cultivated in DeFi, in tandem with the innovation that fully on-chain games bring, will form the next growth engine of web3.

Our approach to gamifying DeFi is guided by three foundational values:

1. Community: We believe in the collective strength of a supportive community. By pooling resources and leveraging the power of the masses, we aim to establish an empowering ecosystem that can compete with the strongest entities in DeFi.
2. Fairness: We are deeply committed to fostering an environment of fairness. Our goal is to build an ecosystem where rewards are linked to meaningful contributions and active participation, rather than merely the size of one’s liquidity pool.
3. Engagement: We strongly believe in the transformative power of engagement. By creating captivating, game-like experiences within DeFi, we aim to enhance the user experience and make DeFi accessible to everyone, not just financial experts. We envision a DeFi environment that is both enjoyable and rewarding, stimulating a greater level of involvement from all participants.

In practice, we envision a system that generates its own internal liquidity while also uniting fragmented liquidity from existing DeFi protocols and users into a single coherent force. Moreover, this system will provide a fair and sustainable source of income that is predicated on skill and performance, ensuring an equitable and balanced ecosystem for all participants

FiIrst Step- 2000 Members Strong

Putting community first is the cornerstone of our philosophy. Our Guardian membership, strictly limited to an exclusive 2,000, ensures a tight-knit community fostering meaningful interactions and substantive contributions. Guardians are accorded the privilege of premier access to our revolutionary DeFi gamification platform, placing them at the heart of a transformative financial landscape.

Criteria for Eligibility

The Matchbox Guardian stands as a tribute to our most devoted community members, starting from 0xTitans. To qualify for Matchbox Guardian, community members must hold the 0xTitans Season Pass, actively participate in the game, and contribute value to the community. The specifics of the eligibility criteria will be revealed in due course

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Welcome back to our second article on the relaunch of 0xTitans!

Like we promised, this article will be an in depth follow up to our last one by covering the premise of the speculating system, how it will operate inde, and some sneak peeks on the sleek UI we’ve designed!

We highly recommend reading the first article, but TLDR: we are initiating a relaunch of 0xTitans + next phase of our plan by combining it with a new speculating meta game built around it. The contents of this relaunch is the first phase of many in our vision to grow MatchBox as a center of fully-onchain defi gaming ecosystem.

Don’t Jump the Gun, Become a Skillers First

If you like interacting with 0xTitans content, believe in Matchbox’s vision, or just want to enjoy some speculating fun, do so by buying our 0xTitans season pass and becoming a Skiller. By doing so you unlock eligibility to participate in the next season’s speculating meta game, future token and NFT airdrops, and other exciting future games.

The purpose of having a “Season” Pass and not just a generalized pass is for us separate the different seasons more effectively and act as a PoaP as to who actually participated in a certain season.

0xTitans Live prediction

The goal the game is rather simple: use your wit, skills, and luck to determine the winning team in each phase of 0xTitans. The live prediction game utilizes live data and numbers that takes place in tandem with the live 0xTitans tournament. As the tournament progresses through various phases, Skillers have limited windows of time to analyze the latest data and make their predictions.

Phases, Rounds, and Elimination

Each event will be separated into different phases, which are itself further separated into 2 distinct parts: Play-time and Reveal session.

Players will need to vote on the team(s) during the play time, which will be locked in as the Play round commences. More teams will be eliminated per phase as the tournament continues in an elimination bracket style.

In this process, you will go through several phases. Each phase allows you to choose between 3 to 5 teams that you favor most.

Before a phase ends, you need to vote for your favorite teams. This voting happens before the last session of a phase, an event we call the “reveal session”.

The highest-scoring teams from each phase, move on to the next phase. The rest are eliminated. (we start with 70 then 15 then 9 and grand final of 3)

At the beginning of a new phase, all the remaining teams’ scores return to zero; no scores are carried over from the previous phase. It’s like a fresh game each phase.

However, a running total of all the scores earned by the teams across all phases is kept and can be seen on the leaderboard page. This helps you see how each team has performed over the course of the whole event, not just the current session or phase.

For example:

Phase 1 have 3 sessions, session 1, 2 are play time and session 3 will reveal the top teams for the phase. during the phase you will have 40 minutes to analyze the results of sessions 1 and 2 and to vote before the start of the last session(session 3)

Don’t worry on the site you’’ll be able to see how much time left for you to vote, also follow our live Twitch stream!

Point system

TLDR: points rewards is inversely correlated with popularity as we want to reward risk taker who votes on underdog teams

Players are rewarded points for choosing the correct teams each round. To calculate the points, each winning team will be awarded with a certain amount of points (that will be dynamically adjusted based on a multitude of factor like number of teams left in a certain phase) and each vote for this team will be awarded a P/N points, where P is the total system allocated points and N is the total amount of votes.

For example, if 100 people voted for the Uniswap team, and Uniswap moved on to the next stage, people who bet correctly will get 1 point each as 100 people/100 total points. If only 50 people voted for Uniswap team because they don’t think Uniswap has a chance, people who voted correctly will be awarded 2 points instead (100/50).

The purpose of this system is to reward Skillers who have taken the time and used their skills to analyze data and identify an underdog team they believe will perform well in the next round.

Alright I’m sold, bought a 0xTitans Pass Now What?

Congrats Skiller- welcome to 0xTitans Season 2 and Matchbox’s vision. Lets see if your god like analytical skills and lady luck can help you identify the next big winner!

First, navigate to the website

You’ll need to then sign in with your web wallet to enter the home page.

From here, you can look at your, team analytics (which we shall cover more in depth in our next article!), and team voting dashboard.

On the current round you’’l be able to check the latest session and all the previous ones keep track of your fav teams, check their recent races and dashboards

From here, select the teams you believe will win and proceed into the next phase. Use your god tier analytical skills to find that rewarding but risky underdog pick; or if you’re unsure feel free to be a sheep and vote with the masses for a safer but much lower payout pick. Whatever you do, choose wisely as you will not have a lot of time to choose before voting is locked up.

And that’s its Skiller! For now this is the core loop that will make up the prediction game. Make sure to stay up to date with the latest news and developments in order to find that edge that no one else has.

In the next and final article of this series, we will cover in-depth the analytical dashboards and systems that all spectators will have access to help them better understand 0xTitans, and to help Skillers find that perfect pick they seek.

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“I live my life a quarter-mile at a time. Nothing else.. For those ten seconds or less, I’m free.” — Dominic Toretto

We at MatchboxDAO live by that statement, which is why have turbocharged our efforts to officially launch the next phase of our game 0xTitans. We are happy and proud to announce that 0xTitans is back in full throttle with higher stakes, more teams, improved mechanics, brand-new systems, and bigger prizes. On Your Mark, Get Set, Code!

But first, what is 0xTitans?

For those who are new, 0xTitans is a fully-on-chain smart contract-enabled PVP tournament-based game with built-in esports components. It’s essentially a beautiful love child between competitive smart contract coding plus Mario Kart, with some inspiration from F1’s hype and atmosphere sprinkled in. 0xTitans is based on Paradigm’s previous game, 0xMonaco.

In our current format a certain number of pre-approved teams will flex their coding skills and PVP ingenuity each season by building a byte-code car to compete on our on-chain racetrack. Teams are encouraged to be creative by using the new tools and insights developed in the ever-changing web3 landscape to adopt new strategies to gain an edge.

For a more in-depth explanation, check out this previous article.

But What’s The Actual Gameplay?

Teams compete by building the most “code-efficient” car to race against other players based on our given parameters. Before each race, every team is given an equal amount of gold to spend. The purpose of gold is to create economic constraints by allowing players to either buy acceleration and propel the car forward, or to buy buffs and utility that will interfere with their opponent’s car. Utility purchases include the likes of:

• Shells, which are thrown forward to stop enemy cars from moving momentarily
• Bananas, which are the backward version of Shells to impede other cars
• Shields, to protect a car from a singular attack once

Teams will need to design code that is strategic about how they spend their gold, while simultaneously allow their car to react to what their opponents could possibly do. We’ve already seen some truly interesting and clever coding tricks from teams in previous races to outsmart their opponents.

Over time it will be interesting to see teams learn each other’s style and habits, and exploit those factors which adds an interesting human-behavior meta-game.

Titans of 0xTitans

Part of the appeal in (e)sports is relishing in the engaging and competitive narratives created between different prominent players within it, and it shall be no different in 0xTitans.

In several of our last tournaments we invited players from top web3 companies like Uniswap, Ottersec, Polygon, Zellic, Bybit and more to form teams and compete in 0xTitans. Teams with their byte-code cars were pitted against each other in a elimination-style format until it came down to Uniswap vs Polygon vs Ottersec in the grand finals.

Ultimately, Uniswap’s crushing victory cemented Uniswap as the current undisputed champions of 0xTitans. Of course, 0xTitans wouldn’t be proper game without someone trying to cheat, like when Zellic exploited a bug for unlimited shields and glitchy bananas, which ultimately got them disqualified when discovered.

So, in the coming season will Uniswap remain the unquestioned top dog, or perhaps will another hungry like Polygon can finally dethrone them? And perhaps Zellic have learnt their lesson or will they find some other devious way to win?

Or, maybe perhaps you think you can do better and dominate the scene yourself?

Yeah I Sure Do, So How Do I Get Behind the Wheel?

Every season we select new teams to compete, so if you think you/your team have what it takes feel free to submit this form. However, for the foreseeable future, we will maintain the closed-tournament format and limit the number of teams to maintain our high standards to keep the races super-competitive.

For those who aren’t smart contract wizards, you can participate by buying our Season Pass and becoming a Skillerz to participate in a speculating meta-game we built around 0xTitans!

The 0xTitans Season Pass

The Titans Pass will serve as a club membership, offering holders the opportunity to become part of Matchbox’s vision and future events. The main perk of the pass holders is the ability to participate in a PVP speculating meta-game based on real-time data and performance from 0xTitans. Skillerz can bet on teams they believe will perform well, with prize payout inversely correlated with popularity and bets placed. With our current closed-loop tournament system, each season will last only a couple weeks as we want to narrow down the best performers quickly and keep the pace of the game fast.

Find the Underdog To Beat All Others!

Conclusion

In Part 2 we will cover more in-depth the speculating meta-game and the other perks that come with the Season Pass so stay tuned and check our twitter for future announcement.

Want to learn more about on-chain games and MatchBox vision? check out our previous blogpost

GM!

We at MatchboxDAO have been busy building for the last several months, and we thought its finally time to share what we have been up to.

Our trial runs with 0xMonaco and 0xTitans (which is a more complex version of 0xMonaco) competitions ended in great success, which further motivated us to execute our grand strategy to create a more accessible on-chain gaming experience. However, we quickly discovered that building a single game wasn’t enough to realize the vision we had.

Thus our thesis became more than just building a game like 0xTitans; we wanted to create a purpose-built ecosystem to make viable on-chain games more enjoyable and accessible.

To that end, we are building multi-layered solutions centered around esports that can address the multitude of problems on-chain gaming. We separate our building process into different phases. Phase 1 will encompass the core components of our envisioned ecosystem, while Phase 2 is the scaling and hyper-growth period.

Phase 1

In phase 1, we will be working on building out the core infrastructure that will become the main gameplay loops and attraction for our ecosystem, which will include elements like:

• Esports — Building out further gameplay components in 0xTitans
• Speculation — Building a card-based prediction system based on said esports for meta-gameplay
• Analytics — Building simple yet comprehensive dashboards to display esports analytics
• ZKP Development — Building a cutting-edge ZK privacy layer for on-chain games

Doubling Down On Esports Through 0xTitans

0xTitans was the first closed-off competitive web3 on-chain tournament and it proved esports could be a viable model to advance on-chain gaming. Moving forward we will continue to improve the game and run scheduled closed tournaments to showcase high-level smart-contract coding gameplay. Teams will also be more structured and formalized for a better viewing experience. The purpose is for all of this is to build narratives in 0xTitans, as narrative elements like team rivalries and dynasties are what drive viewership and engagement beyond just high-level gameplay in esports.

Prediction As A Meta-game

While 0xTitans is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in smart contract development and on-chain-gaming, we realize it is definitely not the most accessible game to understand, much less participate in.

Therefore, we want to use a prediction meta-game (similar to League of Legends Pick’Ems) that will allow anyone, with a technical background or not, to participate in 0xTitans beyond either as a competitor or a simple stream watcher. The prediction system will both be a way to increase engagement from existing stream viewers and a way to attract new viewers into 0xTitans by generating emotional attachment through financial and social incentives.

To start off the first official season of 0xTitans, we will launch a Season Pass that will be an entry ticket for the prediction game. Individuals who mint our season pass and play the prediction game, otherwise known as Skillerz in our ecosystem, will accumulate points by correctly predicting the top-performing teams. Points will then be redeemable for special prizes and rewards. Holders of the pass will also be eligible for future airdrops of NFTs, collections, and tokens.

Moving forward we plan to launch a season pass for each season where viewers can mint and become a Skiller to participate in the prediction game for only that specific season.

Ultimately, we want to open the competitive on-chain scene to not just highly technical developers, as competitions only thrive when there is an audience to watch it. This prediction game offers a meta-game to build a sticky audience for 0xTitans.

Analytics on In-House Dashboards

To facilitate a better experience for all nondirect competitors in 0xTitan, we will create dashboards to contain all sorts of analytics about the game which will serve as a perfect complementary dish to the prediction system. Adding this layer will allow anyone to easily digest what’s going on in 0xTitan with little background info. It will also act as a conversion gateway to convert more interested viewers into Skillers as it will offer them insight to make better predictions.

The dashboard would contain information such as a team’s win rate, play style, tournaments participated in, and much more, which will be presented in a gamified manner for easier comprehension. Armed with more information, Skillerz will have the confidence and knowledge to make bets if they so choose.

Our ultimate goal is to make the analytics dashboard easy to use but hard to master. We want it so that is flexible enough to cater to anyone from the most casual stream viewers to the most degen Skiller scraping any information for their next big prediction and anyone in-between.

Developing a ZK layer Solution

The most crucial component to make MatchBoxDAO become an open on-chain gaming ecosystem powerhouse is the development of our ZK solution. We are building an Infra-as-a-service ZK plug-n-play solution for any game studio wanting to take advantage of ZKP benefits such as enchanted security, informational asymmetry capabilities, and generally low gas fees. We will be developing this infra solution as a joint venture with the leading ZKP research companies in the web3 space. Over time we want to decentralize the ownership of this infra solution through tokens, as we believe this is the best way to develop industry standardization in the on-chain gaming space.

Phase 2

Once we are able to roll out those core features in Phase 1 and garnered community feedback on how to build better, we will move on to Phase 2.

0xTitans Continuous Improvement + 24/7 Game

We will continue to improve on 0xTitans to provide a better experience for competitors and spectators alike. However, to what extent these improvements will be, only one thing is certain:

0xTitans will eventually become a 24/7 game rather than a tournament-based game. This means games can function autonomously and/or not be hosted only by us, which unlocks much more scalability and interactability.

Moving forward we are working on unlocking many cool partnerships both in and out of web3. These partnerships will shape how 0xTitans continue to grow, so stay tuned for what we have planned for the future.

No-code Meta Card Game

In the future, we want to create a standalone card game that will be based on 0xTitans. Each card will be an NFT inscribed with different properties based on certain data points from 0xTitans. Players can then assemble a deck and assemble dream teams and compete with other players, similar to Fantasy Sports.

We will provide more details on the mechanics of this card game as we build out more content in 0xTitans with the partnerships we have planned, so stay tuned!

Expanding Games We Are Hosting

Last but certainly, not least, we will want to begin attracting builders and game studios that want to utilize our ZK layer solution to build their games. 0xTitans will act as our halo product to attract users, and by building with our ZK infrastructure product we will also indirectly offer these games exposure to our community. Over time, we want to turn MatchBoxDAO into a discovery platform for all things related to on-chain gaming. Even further into the future, we are looking forward to creating new on-chain games ourselves to diversify our gaming offerings.

Conclusion

In future articles, we plan to break down our entire vision into multiple better-elaborated and in-depth but digestible articles. Don’t worry if you felt this piece was a little vague, as we will be sure to update you on our process every step of the way. Do be on the lookout for the articles here or when we post threads about them Follow us on Twitter | Discord | Twitch