The gaming industry is a multi-billion dollar business with millions of players from all over the world. For the real fanatic, it is therefore a true dream to earn money with gaming.
Until recently, this was reserved for only a few players. With the advent of blockchain technology, a new trend has emerged: play-to-earn.
By gaming, you can now earn, in the form of crypto. In addition to exponential price increases of game-related crypto projects, we also see the number of players increasing.
And thanks to the combination of Metaverse, NFTs, and gaming, ICE poker is created. The poker platform in Decentraland is where players can play poker without being exposed to possible risks. How? Discover it all in this blog about ICE poker!
What is Play To Earn?
It is sometimes said that if a scenario sounds too good to be true, it probably is. For many gamers, however, this new play-to-earn model is a reality. Thanks to the latest trends, there are more and more developments based on gaming on the blockchain, and this play-to-earn model is certainly important here.
Play to earn is, as it suggests, the principle whereby players can earn money by playing games on the blockchain. This remuneration is of course in the form of crypto coins, which contribute to the success of the gaming platform. Think of the popularity of DeFi Kingdoms (JEWEL) and Axie Infinity (AXA), but the virtual casinos of Decentral Games (DC) are also an important development here.
In the video below you will get more insights about ICE poker and how it has already completely changed several lives in low-wage countries, such as the Philippines.
What is ICE Poker?
The gaming industry is a multi-billion dollar business, with people trying their luck at various casinos worldwide. If we look at places like Macau or Las Vegas, we see that there alone, there is a tremendous flow of money in gambling and casinos. With the increasing adoption, there are also more and more opportunities to place your bets in these virtual and decentralized casinos.
Although gambling is central to casinos and you should be very aware of the potential losses here, your risks at ICE Poker are rather limited. You should not make a deposit amount available in advance that you could potentially lose completely. The principle is that you can only win by playing poker. Too good to be true? Let’s see how ICE Poker is built.
Decentral Games (DC)
The parent company of Facebook and Instagram announced in 2021 that it would change its name to Meta, which is a direct reference to the Metaverse. Within a considerable period of time, we will live completely digitally and we will create an entirely new universe, with an associated economy that we can completely determine ourselves. An important platform in this development is Decentraland (MANA).
Decentraland is one of the various virtual worlds where you can buy and sell a piece of land and then start a new digital life. Just like in real life, you can also walk around and visit other people and/or places. The development of Decentral Games (DC) is an important point here.
In the virtual world of Decentraland, you will find the digital environment of Decentral Games. This is an area with different casinos where every player can participate in different games, such as Blackjack, Backgammon, and Slots. And recently also ICE Poker.
How does ICE Poker work?
One of the advantages of crypto is that this new financial market should be accessible to everyone. However, with this play-to-earn principle, we have often seen in the past that you have to own certain NFTs or the like before you can participate in the game. These are often expensive, which means that large groups of people do not have access.
Think of countries such as the Philippines where the salaries are low, but where net games are many times more popular than anywhere else. It is therefore not for nothing that critics have often said that it is a pay-to-play-to-earn principle.
ICE Poker, therefore, makes it possible to play poker completely for free, without any investment, and even earn money! As a player you receive chips daily, which you can use for gaming. are you losing? Then you have lost these chips and you have to wait until the next day until you receive free chips in the form of ICE tokens again.
Decentral Games NFT Marketplace
Decentral Games has its own NFT marketplace. The only requirement to participate in the game is to have an NFT Wearable. This is, as it were, your cloakroom entrance ticket. This can be a jacket, shoes or a simple hat. In this way, Decentral Games connects several important aspects in the world of crypto, namely the popular gaming industry and the world of NFTs.
NFT Wearables
These NFT Wearables are the core of ICE Poker. So all your fellow players have a unique outfit that gives them access to the game. In addition to being a cloakroom admission ticket, this is also a sign of status.
You can also upgrade your NFT to make it even more unique. Fellow players can see at a glance that you are a formidable opponent and that you take the game more than seriously. Not only status is important here, but with this upgrade you also earn even more tokens. You get a higher multiplier and therefore earn faster than your opponent.
These upgrades are placed in 5 different ranks. Each rank gives you a percentage bonus:
- Standard: 1-7%
- Rare: 8-15%
- Epic: 16-24%
- Legendary: 25-34%
- Diamond hands: 35 – 45%
But you have to do something to get such an NFT Wearable. Via OpenSea you get an overview of the entire collection. At the time of writing, your cheapest investment would cost you 0.6 Ethereum.
For this, you get neutral smoking shoes. And this is just the cheapest NFT. I hear you think: but not everyone can just make this substantial investment, right? That’s right, and that’s why ICE Poker comes up with the principle of ‘Delegate Wearables’.
Delegate Wearables
An investment of a few thousand euros is not for many people, let’s be honest about that. But Decentral Games wants to make ICE Poker accessible to everyone. Also for those who cannot buy an NFT themselves. That is why they have the principle of delegate wearables, which is a win-win situation for everyone.
Owners of an NFT can of course participate in poker tournaments themselves, where they can earn chips, in the form of tokens. But what they can also do, for example, is make their own NFT available to those who do not own a wearable.
They can lend them out for a predetermined period. Suppose you no longer have time to play poker yourself, then you can lend your NFT and earn a passive income yourself.
How? When you lend your NFT to a player, this player gets 70% of the rewards. This is a significant amount for someone who has not had to make an upfront investment. This allows him/her to enjoy the benefits of play-to-earn and poker tournaments and thus also win tokens.
The other 30% of these profits go to the owner of the NFT, without this person having to do anything for it. You can of course imagine that many players are eagerly waiting for an assignment. This is done via the official Discord where members can indicate whether they are looking for a wearable, or just make their own NFT available.
Earning such passive income, while someone else is playing for you, is of course quite nice, but what you can also do is trade with your NFTs. These are now scarce and quite expensive. Who knows, you might even sell your NFT wearable for a record amount!
Challenges
Of course, we all want to know how exactly you can win ICE tokens and thus free crypto with poker. Players with their own wearables, or with a delegate wearable, will receive free chips every day via airdrop. The more NFTs you have, the more chips you receive that you can use to play. The maximum number of NFTs is currently set at 5, which is quite an investment considering current prices.
Every day you will receive a daily challenge. Completing it will give you ICE tokens again. And the more wearables you have, the faster you can complete these challenges. For example: if you have 1 wearable, your challenge includes winning 5 hands to win 750 ICE tokens. A player with 3 wearables needs to win only 3 to win the same amount of tokens.
Scoreboard
Each player also receives experience points (XP). These are all added together and kept on a scoreboard. This ranking also affects the number of tokens you earn. The higher you are in this daily ranking, the bigger your multiplier is. If you are in the top 5, you will get a whopping 1.5x multiplier and thus earn 50% more ICE tokens that day.
Earning model
Earn crypto and tokens without investing in it? For that, you want to know what their revenue model is exactly. It is important to know that ICE Poker does not stand alone, but is part of Decentral Games which operates several virtual casinos.
The Treasury is important here. This is the central treasury and therefore also the largest fund of Decentral Games. In addition, they naturally want to keep as many games as possible active on the platform, which they make possible through the use of NFTs.
Every time you want to upgrade your NFT, you have to burn a part of your ICE token yourself. In addition, you also pay a one-time fee in DG token, the native token of Decentral Games. This goes straight to Decentral Games’ Treasury. This is a treasury controlled and managed by anyone with DG tokens.
You can also use these ICE tokens in the other games of Decentral Games, such as Blackjack or Backgammon. Therefore, Treasury needs sufficient liquidity to pay out players.
Tokenomics
$ICE is a deflationary ERC20token. This means that the initial stock does not increase, but decreases. Upgrading NFTs burns ICE tokens, thus decreasing the supply.
- In total, 250 million ICE tokens will be mined at the launch of ICE Poker.
- In addition, 50 million will be mined that will go directly to the DC Treasury of Decentral Games.
- 100 million tokens are minted to provide sufficient liquidity
Are there more than 50 million in the Treasury? Then they will be automatically incinerated and removed from circulation via smart contracts.
Conclusion
The principle of play-to-earn is not entirely new. The year 2021 saw a significant increase in the development of blockchain gaming and its possibilities. Still, we saw that even with popular games like Axie Infinity, there were drawbacks.
For example, not everyone had access to the game due to limited financial resources and you first had to make a certain investment before you could participate.
ICE Poker has completely removed this barrier and offers everyone the chance to earn these ICE tokens through poker. You can earn money in a playful way without the necessary risks. Especially the latter is just as important and many (new) gamers will find their way to ICE poker.
A side note that we can make here is that the search for these delegate wearables is a real challenge. Everyone is of course eager to be assigned an NFTs completely free (and temporarily) in order to claim no less than 70% of all rewards. But since there are far fewer NFTs, there are already long waiting lists to get hold of a delegated wearable. But if you get one, it’s a fun way and the play-to-earn principle comes into its own here!
