A Fully Decentralised RPG and Collection Game Built On The Immutable X L2 Network
Whitepaper V3.4
Introduction#
Welcome to the world of Illuvium. A shattered land of beauty and wonder. Travel the vast and varied landscape hunting dangerous beasts, then capture them to battle in the Arenas or trade via the exchange.
Prior to launch of the game, $ILV holders may choose to stake $ILV to access the liquidity mining program (a type of ‘yield farming’ that has become popular with DeFi protocols where the founding teams seek to decentralise the governance of the protocol).
The purpose of the liquidity mining program is to distribute $ILV from the Illuvium Treasury to early Illuvium community members to: 1) achieve a distributed holding of $ILV tokens across more of the Illuvium community, 2) incentivise new people to participate in the Illuvium community, and 3) to enable a more liquid and transparent market for the trading of $ILV. The greater the size of the Illuvium community, the greater the prospects of decentralised governance as well as a self-regulating community that discourages bad actors and manipulation of governance and the game. Once the game is launched, users can stake $ILV as a signal of belief and support in the game and its governance model and receive access to governance and distributions from in-game fees.
A fully decentralized protocol, Illuvium represents a new age in gaming. It has been engineered from the ground-up to support the long-term sustainability of the Illuvium game and governance and provide players with a AAA-rated blockchain gaming experience. What makes Illuvium unique is that stakers receive regular distributions and can vote on everything from tokenomics related issues to the features in the game itself. With Illuvium, the power to define the project into the future is purposefully left to those who stake in the protocol.
Why DeFi?#
The primary goal of the project is to create a fully decentralised game that can run autonomously. Over the last 18 months, and particularly in the last six, DeFi apps have seen impressive growth and rapid development. There are hundreds of DeFi projects gaining traction today—from trading, lending, and wallet interfaces, to assets and communities representing over 15B $USD in value. DeFi allows us to leverage this exciting growth to bootstrap a solvent platform that can hit the ground running for the increasing market interest in DeFi projects.
We are already starting to see a shift away from “novelty projects” that don’t add tangible value because ultimately they are unsustainable. We strongly believe a decentralised gaming economy provides the best fusion between crypto/blockchain/DAO enthusiasts and gamers looking for open access devoid of corporate interference.
There are currently no AAA gaming titles with cinematic quality 3D special effects in an immersive open-world RPG built in DeFi, and Illuvium merges gaming and cryptocurrency in a unique synergy that holds allure for crypto enthusiasts, dedicated gamers, and the curious tech-savvy public. By having gorgeous, functional, and rare NFTs, as well as a high replay value, Illuvium will keep players interested in the $ILV protocol longer, ensuring the stability of the underlying NFT assets and the token pool.
(There are risks associated with DeFi, particularly staking and smart contract risk, and contract configurations are being developed continuously and subject to change and sentiment expressed by the Illuvium community).
Layer 2 Ethereum Scaling Solution - Immutable X#
Ownership is vital to collection games. If you don’t own your collection, the entire value proposition falls apart. This is why digital media has struggled in this space and why games with tangible assets, such as card games, have stood the test of time. But with the advent of NFTs and the investigation of their implications, the conventions about ownership, value, and utility of digital property all change.
So what is an NFT?
An NFT, or non-fungible token, is a crypto token representing a verifiably unique entity that is mutually interchangeable. The first NFT-like token was launched back in 2012 and was built on the Bitcoin blockchain. However, the most common NFT, ERC-721, is built on the Ethereum network.
NFTs became popular with the launch of CryptoKitties back in November 2017. Being a blockchain based game built on Ethereum, CryptoKitties was prone to multiple scalability issues. However, the rarity of owning an NFT captured everyone’s attention. Since then, add-ons and NFTs have found their way into many games, art and collectables.
Why did Illuvium choose Immutable X?
One of the primary issues NFT projects and users are currently facing is the cost of performing transactions on the Ethereum network. With limitations on the number of transactions Ethereum can handle, users on the network have bid up gas prices to ensure their transactions quickly settle. With the average cost of transferring an NFT averaging $15 at the time of writing, trading volume for NFTs has plummeted.
Immutable X changes this, allowing users to trade their NFTs without paying gas fees using what is known as a Zero-Knowledge (ZK) Rollup. Aside from just the savings in gas fees, this provides you with a variety of benefits, including:
You maintain self-custody of your NFTs with the same level of security as mainchain Ethereum, something not seen in alternative scaling solutions like Matic and xDai.
Transactions are instant, and moving back to mainchain Ethereum is trustless and verifiable.
Unlike other solutions, there is no need for you to own a unique L2 token to buy, sell, send, or receive NFTs.
You get more interesting and attractive game mechanics and design from Illuvium thanks to off-chain minting (more on that later).
Immutable X will provide turing-complete general computation in the near future thanks to Cairo, technology developed by their partners over at StarkWare.
Immutable engine supports over 9000 transactions per second
Immutable X also focuses on improving NFT liquidity to ensure as a buyer you find what you’re looking for, and as a seller you can find someone who wants your NFT. This is done in a couple of ways:
They’ve created what is known as a “metadata order”, or the ability for buyers to quickly and easily purchase assets (single, or in bulk) based on an NFTs underlying properties (or “metadata”). This is a major advancement over today’s high-friction trading, where users are often forced to sort through thousands of NFTs that differ ever so slightly to find what they’re looking for at the best available price.
Immutable X offers pooled liquidity, allowing assets to be listed instantly on every exchange that supports Immutable X.
If you’re not familiar with ZK Rollups, why they’re considered the best solution for scaling on Ethereum, and want to learn more, we’d recommend Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin’s recent guide on Rollups.
Illuvium’s Core Mechanics: Minting, Burning, and Exchange
From the very beginning, the standard paradigm of most NFT games had become uninteresting, and lacking in utility. Buy a digital asset, own it, and hope it appreciates in value. Some games allow you to buy NFTs and then play with them in a game. While certainly an improvement, we still felt there was more to the experience. There had to be a way to establish an emotional connection between the players and their collections. We aren’t the only ones to see the gap, and the subsequent opportunity in this, but we wanted to provide the most distinctive and original solution: an emotive experience that was consistently intriguing and rewarding throughout the entire process, from discovery all the way to exchange.
Inside Illuvium, you will encounter wild, mysterious, and combative creatures called Illuvials. On your journey through the many regions of this broken planet, you hunt, defeat, and capture them. To do this, you need a Shard; a specially-constructed sliver of crystal that traps the quantum signature of the beast inside. The quality of your Shard determines the chance of capture. A successful capture results in a new NFT token representing the Illuvial being minted and stored in your wallet. When you manage to capture a few of the same type, you Fuse them together, which burns the existing tokens and mints a more powerful creature.
Immutable X makes this vital process much easier, by taking away distraction and letting players simply explore and enjoy the world. Players are not bombarded by constant GAS fees for every little change to their collection. And transactions happen much faster, so players can stay focused on what they came here to do: Explore, Collect, Battle, and Earn.