Default Game

PART 1 of 2: Why Artizen—and crypto at large—should be less like Wall Street and more like Rainbow Road.

In crypto, every app is a finance app. But what if this is wrong?

Today, crypto apps are Default Finance. By default, tokens are treated as money and stock. Builders focus on token price, supply dynamics, and financial engineering. And users expect to make money.

This works for actual finance like lending, perpetuals, and payments. DeFi can be DeFi. But for consumer categories like social, learning, fitness, creator tools, or entertainment, we should default to building apps more like games.

The gamer spirit burns in crypto’s millennial and gen-z user base. We’ve grown up farming gold, collecting items, and min-maxing economies. But through the Default Finance lens, this energy has been channeled into degenerate speculation.

Creating apps through a game design lens, aka Default Game, is how we’ll build useful, enduring apps that take consumer crypto mainstream.

This is how we are building Artizen. Instead of creating yet another speculative trading app, we want to create something fun, fair, and rewarding for all our users.

The cult of Default Finance

How did we get Default Finance?

First there was Bitcoin. Then Ethereum. Then ERC-20s, programmable money, stablecoins, and DeFi. And tech aside, speculation was everywhere. It was natural to assume all crypto apps should be built around finance.

Beyond finance, builders copied the ethos of the founding projects. Bitcoin needed decentralization, but then, all crypto apps were dApps, all crypto finance was DeFi, and all crypto organizations were DAOs, whether decentralization was necessary or not. Features followed suit: staking, originally a blockchain security mechanism, became universal, often meaning ponzi yield. And we copied design assumptions. Layer 1 tokens naturally merge utility with investment. But then every crypto app token tried to graft utility to investment despite having completely different dynamics.

DeFi may indeed be the Future of Finance–but applying a finance ux across all consumer crypto apps is just another copying act. Default Game is not just a superficial reskin from finance to games, but a clean break from cargo-cult design to first-principles.

Game design > finance

Why is Default Finance a failed paradigm and how can Default Game fix it?

Default Finance

Default Finance means building consumer apps through a finance lens. It has numerous failure modes:

• Developer greed
  The possibility of a hot token launch and quick millions can pervert the incentives of otherwise noble devs. It also attracts outright scammers.

• Mercenary Users

  Default Finance brings users who only want money. “Wen token??” This mercenary user base is counterproductive to finding true product market fit.

• Sharks and minnows

  Consumers aren’t finance savvy. PvP finance apps turn retail users into shark bait. Every single time.

• Limited UX

  If an app is Default Finance the UX boils down to “number go up.” This crowds out more interesting possibilities.

Default Game

Default Game means building consumer apps of all kinds (not just video games) through a game design lens. Done right, it has the potential to fix Default Finance’s shortcomings:

• Easy to understand

  Games abstract complexity through intuitive mechanics. Points, items, and levels are easier to understand than perpetuals, impermanent loss, and liquid restaking.

• Unlimited UX

  Games can be anything: fun, scary, challenging, adventurous, puzzling, or competitive. And everyone can have a good outcome because entertainment is positive-sum.

• Better design levers

  Game design is more versatile than finance tokenomics design. Progression, quests, soft currencies, faucets, sinks, gameplay loops, and more all let game devs craft the perfect experience.

Beyond ux, it’s clear crypto’s user base lives and breathes games.

We’re all gamers now. 77% of Millennials and 81% of Gen Z play video games. Globally, 3.3 billion gamers spend 1.5 trillion hours gaming per year. Even the richest and busiest man in the world speed runs Diablo 4 in his spare time.

Gaming concepts are already widespread in crypto. We use terms like Meta and PvP, and PvE, to talk about trading. Many apps like Artizen have seasons. Communities do raids to shill their tokens. NFTs can be soulbound.

I’m not the first to say gaming will be mainstream. OGs like EllioTrades have been rightly saying this for years–but only half right. Because it’s not that crypto video games will be mainstream, but that all consumer crypto will become gamified. Gamify, not GameFi.

We’ve only just begun to adopt this design philosophy at Artizen. Much of our effort to date has gone into building core infrastructure, things like payments, wallets, and match funding math.

But if you squint, you can start to see the game taking shape:

• Our voting points are like a soft game currency, freely earned on signup and for doing beneficial things like attending live streams. Votes give everyone, regardless of their wealth, the ability to participate.

• Artifacts are primarily like collectible skins or items, not speculative assets. (Although they do have potential financial upside as well!)

• And like games, we have seasons. Going forward, seasons will progress more frequently, constantly presenting new gameplay mechanics from Artizen and new content from creators.

The goal is to use fun to keep everyone engaged, attract new users, and create a game that is rewarding for everyone.

In Part 2, we’ll explore how to reimagine tokens and NFTs, like our Voting Points and Artifacts, to create a rich, positive-sum game experience.

Love,
Nate Van Cleve
Head of Product at Artizen