Alpaca City Marries Defi and Gaming with Auction of Presidential NFTs

Blockchain-powered game Alpaca City has announced the addition of two rare NFT tokens to its defi-based platform. Called Albiden and Trumpaca, the tokens will be sold in parallel auction in what essentially amounts to an in-game prediction market.

Prediction Market within a Game 

Alpaca City is a recently launched blockchain project that attempts to combine gaming and defi in one application. In its latest move, the platform has brought a real-world election outcome prediction market into its game universe.

Prediction markets are financial arrangements in which users can bet on the outcome of a clearly defined event by purchasing shares in one of the outcomes. Decentralizing prediction markets is a longstanding pursuit in the blockchain space. Ethereum-based protocols Augur and Gnosis pioneered it, and, more recently, cryptocurrency exchanges like Poloniex and FTX have joined the party by creating U.S. election outcome tokens such as TRUMPWIN and TRUMPLOSE. 

Alpaca City has taken this process a step further by adding non-fungible token (NFT) representations of Trump and Biden to its list of unique virtual alpacas. The Albiden and Trumpaca tokens are currently being auctioned on the Open Sea marketplace at the starting price of 0.1 ETH. However, the added twist is that the winner of the auction for the tokenized version of the U.S. election winner will be reimbursed their bid price minus the fees, and they will also receive the amount paid by the winner of the second auction. 

Achieving a Fairer Yield Farming with NFTs 

The playful introduction of prediction market tokens chimes well with the core idea behind the Alpaca City project. At a high level, it can be thought of as Crypto Kitties plus defi. Like their feline counterparts, digital alpacas have randomized genes that determine their traits. 

However, in addition to determining the game characters’ appearance, the traits in Alpaca City influence the profitability of farming the application’s native ALPA token through their so-called “energy”. Breeding alpacas enable users to produce offspring with higher energy levels, and thus, higher profitability. However, the ultimate earnings will depend not just on the amount of the ALPA token allocated to the users’ alpacas but also on their “breeding” skills. In addition to this, breeding requires payment of fees in ALPA, whose amounts increase with each successive generation of alpacas bred.

In this approach to yield farming, Alpaca City has likely been inspired by defi projects like MEME and Chad Finance that also turned to NFTs to streamline their incentive structures and make protocol staking less dominated by crypto whales and less subject to pump and dumps. 

The Alpaca City game launched only a month ago but has already seen a lot of user interest. More than 100 users have purchased alpacas on the Open Sea marketplace, with an average price of 0.2 ETH and a maximum at 4.3 ETH. The project’s foray into election prediction markets will further raise its profile, while gamifying the outcome of real-world events.