Interview with NFT Brands: Q&A with DeFi Land

We started as a team of 3 back in Summer of 2021. Now we are a team of 27! We are trying to scale with quality. We do everything in-house, like we are building everything on the blockchain in-house, 3D, engineering, all in-house. Basically we have the people who are wearing several hats in DeFi Land. Personally, I am the team-lead of DeFi Land, also the founder, I also lead operations, product, and marketing. But everyone is just doing a lot of things, it feels like we are 50, but right now we are 27!

 I’ve been involved in crypto since 2017, I was just trading Shit-Coins. I got caught in the 2018 bear market, and lost pretty much the entire portfolio since I was investing in just really bad coins. But I did not quit! A lot of family and friends quit at that time, just thinking that crypto is a scam.

But I just started to have some really great thoughts of what crypto could become one day, and I stuck to it and was always just looking at new features and projects and everything. And got really involved in Defi and NFTs in 2020.

Since then I have gotten into many different layer 1s, layer 2s, and all that stuff. In late 2020/early 2021, I got heavily involved in Solana and saw it was really cool and interesting. I doubled down on Solana and after several months started to develop DefiLand.

Me and my friends got into NFTs pretty heavily, and with Defi it got super hard and annoying to explain it to people. Like “why would anyone just give retail users 1000s + APY or why would anyone just buy monkey JPGs for $10k” so it was super hard to explain, and you were just giving the whitepapers, medium articles, YouTube videos and so on.

It was not really effective, so we came up with the idea that it could be potentially gamified. Have an educational learning process. We know that gamification is the best thing to do to drive retail adoption, as well as just keeping users happy, loyal, and active. So we thought let’s provide some gamification on yield farming. So whenever you were just farming in our game you were actually yield farming in the back-end.

We went to the Solana Hackathon in May 2021 and won with our MVP! After that we came up with a lot of ideas such as how to implement NFTs, how to go forward with portfolio management, and after that we started fundraising!

 The main idea and driver was always to educate people and create the best place to onboard the retail users and people who really want to learn different aspects of the space. A lot of people know about DeFi, but want to learn about NFTs or P2E and vise versa. So we want to be the place to help get new DeFi 2.0, 3.0, or new NFT trends and so on and everything in the same place. So I believe with these kinds of products, it is not really possible to reach mass adoption.

We see more complex projects created every day with new mechanics on top of already complex stuff. It is super super hard for retail to understand! For that we are trying to simplify and gamify all of those experiences. We are not really competing with anyone, we are helping existing users to learn and get more knowledge about the industry. I believe if more products like DeFi Land exist, more users will come to crypto, DeFi, and NFTs. It will be really amazing for the industry. I think education should be #1 priority for every single project out there.

That is a very tricky and good question .I believe if I would have been asked that in 2017, I would have said I expect everything in 2021-2022 would be running on blockchain and crypto. But I believe we are progressing slowly and that is good!

There are a lot of scams and cash grabs, and that is actually a really good indicator that the industry is going the right way because if you don’t have that stuff at first then it means it’s not really getting any attention at all. So after several years I believe we will have less and less cash grabs and scams as people learn how to evaluate projects and how to invest.

I think the winner will be gamification, I think NFT games will be the biggest part in the crypto industry. But I also think DeFi, the indices and funds, will be really big as well. I believe later we will see entertainment, streaming, AR/VR catching up hopefully. But I believe in 3-5 years we will be in a slightly better situation, not like a huge mass adoption in 3 years, but like slowly and steadily and at some point, maybe 2025, when technology is ready and everything can be handled really well, then we will see that mass adoption. Because right now there are no layer 1s and layer 2s that could provide good user experiences right now. Without that there is no way my dad or my grandmother will not be jumping on web3 just for fun right? So yeah hopefully we start to see that adoption in 3-5 years. 

The tooling is a big thing. If you are a builder there are not many tools you can use to build stuff. So everyone has to somewhat create their own solutions for everything.

In DeFi Land’s case, we had to build our own staking, NFT drop, etc. We had to code everything for ourselves because there are not good alternatives out there. We don’t really see much B2B projects, everyone is just trying to target the retail and the customers and trying to get the max value from that they can because whenever you see that there are more B2B projects providing great tools and services for other projects that can be helpful for them, that tells you the industry is maturing.

In the beginning everyone is just rushing to the customer and trying to get their attention and get their money. More tooling, more services for the businesses is going to be an indicator that we are getting ready. Also I do really believe gaming is a big opportunity. It is super hard to get NFTs into gaming. I’ve been gaming since 2005, and have actually been in eSports, and every gamer I know is just so against NFTs. The best example of this is there is this game, great game, great story that all of my friends liked. Then FTX bought it and they wanted to implement NFTs in the economy and ecosystem into it. Which I think was a great idea!

I mean if you have a great game with a fanbase that everybody loves and try to implement NFTs step by step. But even though a lot of gamers didn’t know anything about NFTs and crypto, they just knew FTX bought the company and there was instant backlash and negativity.

Everywhere was just kind of saying that NFT ruined the game, and I think that they lost like half of their users in several days. Everyone knows that 95% of NFT projects are cash grabs, and that’s just reality, but that 5% that are great projects are struggling due to that. So gamers are seeing that NFTs are ruining great games and are really against it. We need to somehow talk to the gamers, but a lot of projects are talking to them just giving them the tactic description like why NFT tech is good, but gamers don’t care about that, they just want to play a good game and no one is talking to them that way. No one is saying you can still play this game the same way, it’s a great game, and by the way you will be earning and the skins and whatnot will actually be on your account to trade and do what you want with, not on some centralized server. True gamers don’t care about the NFT value, true gamers just care that it’s a great game with a great plot. Once we change the marketing approach to the gamers, we will see great gaming adoption. Let’s say we get NFTs into League of Legends and the gamers love that. Then it’s just a matter of days when other games implement NFTs and see the mass adoption into gaming. And gamers are like 50% of the population of the earth i believe.

So penetrating the gaming market is a no brainer and will be the single point of mass adoption that drives the super cycle of this industry. I believe that should be the #1 priority and hopefully the other big companies behind us like FTX and Coinbase that have a lot of the retail users will start working on this topic as well.

It’s really tricky. I’ve been a newbie before. Even though I’ve been involved in crypto since 2017. I didn’t really have much knowledge about the technology and stuff before 2020. Even though I am a tech guy and I code and everything, still, this tech was tough to understand. I have spent several weeks straight just to understand it, so it would be really hard if you are not a tech or a match person. Even in NFTs, how should you evaluate projects is tough as well.

We are actually building our own educational mode. It’s like a practice mode where you can try NFT trading, DeFi trading, yield farming, everything for free without spending money. You can try different strategies and optimizations for yourself. It will be the same experience as buying NFTs for yourself, and every other function of the game will be exactly the same, but with fake money and no risk.

Before you try that, there are some great influencers that always try to give the alpha and breakdown and everything. But I think paper trades are really underrated. Just pretend you have 100 SOL and invest 5 in this, 10 in this, etc… Write them down, there are some good tools besides excel to use that you can try for 1-2 months to see what optimizations can be done in your strategy. After you do that you will be so much better, in the 3rd month you can go in with real money like someone who is an expert. If you started with real money instead of paper trading, you will probably use money, get angry, blame crypto, and lose interest. Basically your negative emotions will get the best of you and you won’t learn.

With paper trading, you will be able to absorb the knowledge and lessons from your trades without any loss. I like the projects that give you the tools to do that. Try to practice! Secondly, everyone on social media who is saying they have made millions of dollars today flipping this NFT, many are lying! Many are lying to get more followers and exposure. Don’t get stressed because of crypto twitters success or personas, they all lie! Just focus on you and your paper trading and get better!

I believe one of the best communities is Solana Monkey Business and Monkey DAO. I believe they are doing a really great job! I believe the Portals team is doing well, the metaverse lens and rooms and everything. Really hard working team and delivering really well! There are a lot of other projects I would like to name, but for now just those three!

If you’re interested in DeFi Land, check out our discord, we already have 40k+ members there, a lot of them are very active and if you come in we will help you with onboarding, tutorials, how to do stuff, and really just explain everything. If you want to learn more about crypto, P2E, love farm games, or are just curious about anything; jump in DeFi Land discord and say hi.  The founders and team are there so just hang out and we will give you everything to get started!

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