For anyone not familiar, what is Walken?

Walken is a free-to-play win-to-earn game built on the Solana blockchain. It brings sports and NFT together while focusing on the natural human drive to walk and get moving. By walking in real life, players earn gems (in-game soft currency, not crypto token), with the help of which upgrade their in-game characters — CAThletes — and compete to win $WLKN tokens. In turn, the tokens can be used to upgrade a CAThlete’s level (and stats) or buy NFT-items on the Marketplace to get extra stats points and win more competitions. The Walken team is currently working to add more ways to utilize the tokens (like cross-breeding, tournaments, etc.) in order to enhance gaming experience and empower the players to earn more.

What does your token do?

First of all, Walken has a single token design which is a more sustainable way to run the economy. The only token there is $WLKN – an SPL-Token that is based on Solana Smart Contract. $WLKN is a key Walken token that drives the in-game economy ensuring its stability while allowing players to monetize their activity and play to earn.

In the game, $WLKN is first of all a reward token and governance token. $WLKN token can be earned in Walken as a reward for winning competitions. Defeating others in races ensures a player a certain amount of tokens. The higher the League a player participates in, the larger is the prize pool and the more tokens they can win. Another way to earn $WLKN is used for buying and selling items and CAThletes on the in-game NFT Marketplace. Next, each level-up costs a certain amount of $WLKN tokens (besides gems in a progress bar), so $WLKN is required for CAThlete’s level-up.

We are working to bring more features that will expand the list of token use cases: soon players will be able to spend $WLKN on breeding and feeding CAThletes (coming soon). Moreover, in the long-run, we will introduce staking to enable players to get income by committing their tokens to support the blockchain network.

How are you using NFTs?

NFTs in Walken fall into 2 categories: CAThletes and Items.  

Our CAThletes are truly unique as they are generated from lots of different parts / genes. So not only their stats but also appearance are unique. And by the way, each CAThlete is given a unique Pokemon-styled name! You won’t find two CAThletes with the same names, stats, or appearance. The values of the stats significantly affect the chance to win in a particular running discipline. Every time a CAThlete’s level increases, its characteristics — strength, speed and stamina — also grow. 

Moreover, players can get some items and clothes for their CAThletes on the in-game Marketplace. These NFT items (various hats, T-shirts, sneakers, shorts, accessories, and artifacts) give extra stats points and boost the chances to win competitions when they are on a CAThlete. 

Thus, the primary role of CAThletes is to compete in running disciplines and earn their owners $WLKN tokens for victories. As for the Items, they not only look nice but actually boost CAThletes’ stats helping win more competitions.

In addition, here is a bunch of ways for players to get an NFT in Walken: 

• upgrade a free CAThlete by walking and participating in competitions and take it to level 6 when it becomes an NFT; 
• buy a loot box on the Marketplace that will be available during the Official NFT Sale;
• purchase clothes or a CAThlete from other users on our Marketplace; 
• breed (this  feature will be live pretty soon).

How much does it cost to play?

We’ve been driven by the goals to make a product that is really free to play, democratizing DeFi and bringing more people to Web3 as we strongly believe that Web3 is the future. In line with these goals, Walken focuses on enabling everyone to join in and start walking & earning right from the start with zero investment. Players need a phone and stable Internet connection, the rest is on us: each new player gets a crypto wallet and an in-game character called CAThlete for free upon sign up, with the whole onboarding process lasting less than a minute. The CAThlete does not require anything else to set it ready to compete and win tokens. Thus, Walken focuses on easily and instantly onboarding millions of non-crypto people and giving them an opportunity to experience what Web3 and DeFi has to offer. 

How much can users earn?

To begin with, we’d like to point out that we do not actually pay players for just walking. Walking is just a component of the game, it helps get Gems that are used for CAThletes’ level-ups. Also, the steps play a role in competitions, impacting the winning rate in competitions up to 10% only. Far more important is upgrading your Cathlete and winning competitions, this is how you get paid with $WLKN tokens. 

When there is not much stress with getting your investment back, people can relax and have fun, making money on the side. As if you don’t get your investment back, it’s a lot of stress and the game is now so much fun. So Walken is about fun, sustainability and making money in a more relaxed way. And it’s about being paid for patience as there will not be any fast money making, rather wise investment both in health and in game!

The IEO of the $WLKN token is scheduled for June 21. So far any earnings predictions would be just hypotheses. Starting out, players could only compete in League 1, where the rewards are not high. Bigger returns start from the moment your CAThlete becomes NFT (level 6). Takes 2-3 months to get there. And there’s always room for re-investment in the game, and the best strategy for players to succeed is to play, earn and reinvest $WLKN tokens in the game (through purchasing CAThletes and equipment on the Marketplace and continuously leveling-up CAThletes) to be able to maximize their income.

Moreover, we expect that a competitive gameplay system makes a continuous upgrade of CAThletes and acquiring more CAThletes the only option to keep earning in a highly-competitive market setting, given that a large number of competitors are constantly reinvesting into the game to score higher and earn more.

With so many move-to-earn applications out there, what is your plan to attract users?

We take great care of both adoption and retention. The cornerstone of the project is our dream to create a very simple game which can be played by a wide audience without any knowledge of crypto. The goal is not just allow people to make some money, but also have a fun game play, while educating players about crypto, Web3, and DeFi as well. Walken makes it easy for everyone to understand how crypto works, so the game has every chance to become a gateway for people to become crypto enthusiasts. That’s why we call our mission “Robinhood of web3/defi”. 

We’d like to mention great support from our investors and partners that made an immense marketing coverage during launch and post-launch operations possible. We also have a very strong team in-house to operate all the marketing activities. Being on the brink of a new move2earn trend and having a strategy of bringing more people from web2 to web3, we are looking to launch performance marketing campaigns after the soft launch and stabilizing the application to make sure that lots of people in the world will know about Walken and start their web3 journey with the help of our project.

We also have brand negotiations in the background right now, so after showing first traction – we’ll start to discuss and announce our first brand collaborations.

What comes next for Walken?

Walken kicked off public beta on June 7, and the first release is just the first step of a 1000 steps ahead. Besides the short-terms focus on polishing the product and having a great token launch, we have a huge pipeline of different features around tournaments, branding opportunities, and celebrities collaborations. There will be many ways to earn in the game if you are an active player, so this is the objective to keep people engaged with the time. Also we are considering a number of ways to prolong the gameplay and the goal here is to avoid inflating the NFTs price.The balance of game economy is another focus, rewards vs how the CAThletes can be upgraded and developed in the most optimal way. So we could find a strong balance between gameplay interest and also economic sustainability. It’s all about providing people with a more smooth playing experience which will play a crucial role in attracting new users as well as retaining existing ones. 

In the long-run, the team is driven by the bigger vision to build the Walken protocol as a platform to onboard other developers and expand web3 eco-system with consumer-oriented products.