Itchiro — a DeFi Ecosystem for Blockchain Games
This article outlines Itchiro’s mission and will provide a high-level overview of the project’s technology ecosystem, economics and roadmap. Additional articles will be released on a weekly and per event basis. Stay tuned gamers 🕹️.
🌟 Motivation
As the crypto space fusses over DeFi, another type of digital asset has quietly begun to gain traction.
Over the past months, exciting use cases for NFTs have emerged in harmony with decentralized finance. When it comes to finance itself — the Yearn team announced yinsure.finance, a NFT wrapper for Nexus Mutual insurance covers that can be traded in secondary markets[big alpha]. More recently, we saw the emergence of projects like ENOKI and DOKI which utilize NFTs for a myriad of purposes from art to behavioural economics. One way or another, NFTs are making a comeback, this time in DeFi.
NFTs aren’t old but they haven’t seen much action since 2017. They were first pioneered by CryptoPunks, then standardized and popularized by CryptoKitties in late 2017. Crypto collectibles started much like trading cards, but they were always thought to have much more potential than those Pokemon cards you traded as a teen.
Itchiro at its core is a team of old school game developers that happened to be DeFi hobbyists too. As a team, we saw many interesting DeFi mechanisms from AMMs to investment mutuals and snapshots — that have massive potential for creating value in the gaming industry.
As game developers, we also realized that software tooling on Ethereum is poor for game developers who simply want to call a function() on an SDK and create a wallet, mint a token, transfer an asset or simply read live price feeds from main net. We’re going to build the infrastructure & marketplace for indie studios like ours, to issue & sell blockchain-based items. But before we get there, we have to start small — by building tools and app for end users to adopt crypto assets. We’ll get to that in a second.
Itchiro in Japanese means “first-born son” (イチロー) many of us originate from Japan, and for most of us, this is our first DeFi project. This is also the reason why we look to stay anonymous as we build out Itchiro’s arms and legs. To connect the dots and close some of the points discussed above, here’s our mission:
Mission
Our mission is to build infrastructure on Ethereum that helps gamers and game studios manage the lifecycle of in-game assets.
🎮 Ecosystem
Overview
- NFT Marketplace: a DEX where users can buy, sell, swap in-game assets from our marketplace contract (directory of game items and collectibles).
- NFT Mobile Wallet: mobile application for iOS and Android where users can receive, send and manage their NFTs.
- Itchiro DAO: Aragon DAO where $JEM 💎 token holders can vote on the operational and treasury decisions of the project.
- Future Projects (explained below).
NFT Marketplace
A decentralized exchange (DEX) that serves as a marketplace for NFTs. Users are able to buy, sell and swap NFTs and ERC-20s by interacting with our marketplace contract and interface. At first, we plan to offer existing NFT assets from blockchain and non-blockchain games already deployed on Ethereum. We seek to build partnerships and build games of our own and use the marketplace for the commercialization of these in-game assets.
Fees and Profit Sharing
The marketplace contract applies a 0.3% fee to every swap or trade that happens on the platform. Fees generated by the marketplace are distributed in the following fashion:
- 90% $JEM 💎 token holders pro rata
- 10% DEV fund
NFT Mobile Wallet
We’re happy to announce that we’re already working on developing a mobile wallet specifically designed for NFTs. The app will be released for both iOS and Android. We’re optimizing the build of the app for the following features: seamless authentication, smart actions (time-savers), import/export PGP keys in and out of games.
Fees and Profit Sharing
The mobile app applies a 0.3% fee to every transfer that leaves the wallet. Fees generated by the mobile wallet will be distributed in the following fashion:
- 90% $JEM 💎 token holders pro rata
- 10% DEV fund
Future Projects
The marketplace and mobile wallets will keep us busy for the next 90–120 days. In the meantime here’s a list of other stuff we’re looking to build afterwards:
- Minter dApp: Contracts and UI to mint NFT tokens.
- Game Protocols: Open-source smart contracts that use NFTs and classic “casino-style” logic to create probability games.
- Game Development: We’re currently building a new game for iOS and Android that will have NFTs from your favourite DeFi and crypto projects.
📈 Economics
Basics
Token: $JEM 💎
Token Contract Address: 0x21cf09BC065082478Dcc9ccB5fd215A978Dc8d86
Total Supply: 30,000 $JEM 💎
Type: ERC-20
Token Structure
30% — Released through Itchiro and 3rd-party games (controlled by DAO)
35% — Liquidity Mining Program I, II, III
15% — Pre-sale
10% — Community/Ecosystem Incentives (controlled by DAO)
10% — DEV Fund
Notes:
- Tokens originating from the 10% DEV Fund will be vested monthly over two years. The exact vesting and multisig contract addresses will be made public once deployed.
- 50% of the proceeds of the pre-sale will be deposited into the $JEM / ETH UniSwap liquidity pool.
Token Model Part I: Product Cashflow
The value of the $JEM 💎 token is directly correlated to the cashflow generated by the NFT marketplace and wallet contracts. Proceeds from these product’s fees are distributed pro rata, meaning that if you hold 10% of the token supply, you will effectively receive 10% of all fee revenue allocated to $JEM 💎 token holders. Fee distributions happen continuously as pro rata payouts are programmed into the NFT marketplace and wallet contracts.
Distribution Summary:
- NFT Marketplace: 90% of the 0.3% swap fee is distributed to $JEM 💎 token holders pro rata. 10% for DEV fund.
- NFT Mobile Wallet: 90% of the 0.3% swap fee is distributed to $JEM 💎 token holders pro rata. 10% for DEV fund.
Token Model Part II: Protocol Cashflow
The Itchiro team will also build a series of smart contracts on Ethereum that serve as a gaming protocol. In this gaming protocol, there are 2 economic agents, the house and the player. The player is able to gamble an asset, depending on the game logic, the player can win, or the house can win and the player looses.
The key here is that $JEM 💎 token holders are actually the house. Whenever the “house” wins, the proceeds from the game are distributed to $JEM 💎 token holders pro rata. Our team has thought about interesting ways we can incentives other operations such as liquidity farming on UniSwap with this approach, where the proceeds of the “house” from these games are given to liquidity providers on UniSwap. However, for the meantime here’s the distribution for any proceeds coming from the protocol fees:
Distribution Summary:
- Protocol Fees: 75% of proceeds to $JEM 💎 token holders pro rata. 25% for DEV fund.
** Note the DEV fund distributions from the protocol are 25%, which is significantly higher than the 10% in the NFT marketplace and wallet. This was deigned to incentivize our team and collaborators to deliver games built on top of our protocol. None of these metrics are set in stone and may always be discussed in our Discord server + DAO, but this is our initial thinking.
Pre-sale + Liquidity
We are announcing our pre-sale and yield farming details in separate posts! Keep an ear out on: t.me/itchiro
📅 Roadmap
This is our roadmap for the next 100 days:
✳️ Token Deployment [link]
✳️ Pre-sale [last week of October]
✳️ Yield Farming [last week of October]
✳️ NFT Marketplace [mid-November]
✳️ NFT Mobile Wallet [early-December]
✳️ Itchiro DAO [mid-December]
✳️ Infrastructure: Minters, Game Protocols (solidity contracts)
✳️ Adoption: Game Development, Partnership Announcements
💬 Important Links
If you’re a game dev, marketer/influencer, or designer who share similar interests in building infrastructure for gaming in DeFi, please email us at info[at]itchiro.com. Below are some important links to keep you updated with everything we announce:
- Website: itchiro.com
- Discord: discord.com/invite/M2UySpe
- Twitter: twitter.com/itchirogames
- Memes (Telegram): t.me/itchiro
