The Saga of DeFiKingdoms

The project was announced at the start of August, 2021 with an expected launch of the initial World Map near the end of August. The first AMA with the team was hosted on August 8th. A weekly tradition that has continued with very rare interruption to this day. For the first weeks of August the team was building their discord community by offering Jewel token airdrops to people joining the server. Then on August 22nd, the game site and DEX launched. Initial liquidity of the Jewel token was paired with ONE token on the Harmony blockchain, and people could buy jewel token by trading ONE for it. The next day, those new community members who had earned a Jewel airdrop received it.

With the initial launch, the Bank (single Jewel staking) and Jewel farming was also available. People who added liquidity to the pool in the DEX could lock it up for a time and farm rewards for it in the form of more Jewel token, most of which would be locked and untransferable for a long time. On the 24th more pools were added that could be farmed as well, pairing Jewel with other tokens which included BUSD, BNB, XYA, and ETH. That day the first community challenge was issued as well, offering Jewel rewards to community members who created content to help promote the project.

Before the end of the first week after launch, the total value in the DEX was over $2 million, and after the second week, it was over $3.3 million. At the beginning of September, it was announced how the launch of Hero NFTs would happen with some raffled to players holding Jewel balances locked in the bank and some sold for a gradually increasing price in Jewel as more were purchased. This put fuel on the fire of growth, with the TVL surpassing $6.2 million soon after. Pairs with UST, BTC, and USDC were also added to the Gardens.

In the following week, the project also started running contests with Jewel rewards on Twitter (now X) to promote and spread word of the project, and the TVL soon grew to $10 million. Governance votes based on Banked Jewel holdings also began taking place in September and everything was ramping up to the Hero NFT launch. During September the community also saw the introduction of live streams with the first in the long lines of DFK influencers, “The High Indian” and “Tosh”.

The first major community drama centered around adding new incentivized gardens. Initially, there was not a formal process for deciding what pairs to include and a couple pairs with small project tokens were added (KURO, and FOX). Despite the teams attempt to retroactively put in a review process and be very transparent, the community reactions were mixed and summarized well by the discord reactions

Snapshots were also taken in September for a secret airdrop, which would eventually distribute the first Gaia’s Tears to the community, and important commodity in the game. As the end of September approached, the Defi Kingdoms DEX TVL had grown to $30 million, becoming the largest on the Harmony blockchain. At the end of September, 2021, the airdrop and sale of the Generation Zero heroes that would go on to seed the game with all of it’s playable characters was conducted. The first week of October 2021 was a hectic week for the team as they tried to get hero summoning working, and at the end of it players could finally use their new Generation 0 heroes to create new heroes at the summoning portal.

By the second week of October, the team was ironing out kinks in the hero tavern so that heroes could be bought, sold, and rented for summoning. On top of that, the first raffle for Lands was announced! Considering that even now lands have no functionality, that may have been premature. Also, in late October, Bolon Soron joined the team, and has been a pillar of the community to this day. In the last week of October, the Hero Tavern finally made it to the beta site after giving the team much trouble. Thus began the era of the community having two sites to choose from. The main site, or the beta site where some features lived for a long time before being finalized and moved to the main site.

Also with the release of the tavern, we saw the first signs of what would become a recurring theme – the Harmony blockchain struggling to perform under the load of the highly on-chain ecosystem the DeFi Kingdoms team was building. For the first time, alternate RPC url configuration was suggested for players to alleviate the frustrations experienced.

In the first week of November, the “Wishing Well” was introduced. This was the precursor the hero profession questing system that would be developed later. In this version, heroes uses their stamina to quest at the wishing well and were rewarded with Gaia’s Tears only when completed. Around the middle of November, the “AnySwap” bridge was implemented, allowing new tokens to be bridged to Harmony and new incentivized gardens pools to be added including AVAX,FTM,LUNA,and MATIC. In addition to the Harmony RPC limitations continuing, the team also started to experience their own growing pains with the game API trying to keep up with all the activity.

In late November, major drama once again reared its head, one of the team contributors (SirSapient) sold their Generation Zero hero to Ansem (the first 19 Generation Zero heroes were specially minted for the team members and not meant to be sold). This was the first event of many to come that sent parts of the community into an uproar over the conflicts of team members participating in and potentially profiting from the game in a way that appears to be in competition with the players. It was decided to have a vote for locking these heroes from being sold for a year as intended.

November also saw the introduction of “TILTPROOF TUESDAYS”, a weekly giveaway where 5 random winners received some reward. In these early days, that reward was sometimes 100 JEWEL or so, which was quite a prize for doing nothing when Jewel token was around $5 each at the time. How many people do you think would enter a raffle to get $500 with no entry fee other than clicking a button? Attention was growing by leaps and bounds at this time, and these giveaways no doubt helped. Near the end of November, the first 2 profession questions for heroes fishing and foraging were released. Heroes could now get different types of rewards from questing other than Gaia’s Tears, but it would be a long while before those items would have any use yet.

December 2021 kicked off with the meditation circle being released and people were now able to level up heroes. The huge news that was brewing in December however was the first game expansion was being planned and the team had it’s sights set on expanding to a new subnet in the Avalanche ecosystem. The juggling of RPC providers for using the Harmony network continued and may have been a thorn contributing to the prodding to the greener pastures of another blockchain. The meditation circle was off to a rocky start in December and had to get some fixes done which lead to the creation of the fabled “Atonement Crystals” which were distributed to make up for a bug, but in the long run ended up being used to power up unrelated heroes. Speaking of power, the middle of December also saw the snapshots for airdrops of some mysterious “Amulets”. While players were very excited about these amulets, they were equipment which was far from being implemented, so they weren’t anything anyone would be getting for a while, but it did happen eventually.

Near the middle of December, DFK announced their first and as of yet only Grant/Bounty. The community was called to submit projects to create a “Transaction History Report Generator”, with the winner to receive 5000 Jewel. That was a $35,000 prize at the time of announcement. The tool was meant to solve the need of the team and community to help provide the data needed from DFK activity to report Crypto activity for Tax purposes.

After a development process fraught with bugs and challenges the team finally released the gardening profession quest late in December. Players could now use their heroes to boost their gardening rewards even more. Also in late December, the team decided to launch a donation campaign to help with Typhoon Odette relief efforts in the Philippines. Players could donate within the game interface and the team would match up to $250k of donations. At this point in time, the rising popularity of the game, snapshots, and macro economic events were colliding and pushing the price of Jewel up around $14. Making the reward for the weekly Tiltproof Tuesday giveaway worth $1400!

Near the end of December, 2021, the gold mining profession quest was released, but locked jewel mining was not quite ready yet. Rolling into January, new airdrop snapshots were announced with a variety of criteria that would be the rewards for people to get the new token CRYSTAL from the new Crystalvale expansion as well as the new classes of Generation Zero heroes for that expansion. This drove the already wild valuation of Jewel to new levels as staked Jewel was one of the primary ways to qualify for these. Within a couple days, it sent Jewel to its all time high price of $21.

At the end of the first week of December, the Jewel mining quest was finally released. Players could now start working on converting their balances of locked jewel into liquid jewel. Most did not know yet however that there was a small unforeseen loophole that people could exploit to mine Jewel faster by moving their locked balance to a different wallet. Another important development was released at the same time as well, potion crafting. Finally some of the materials being gathered from profession questing now had a purpose and could be crafted into stamina potions.

At this point we were also deep into the era of people selling locked jewel balances OTC. It was not in game yet to do, but possible to do on the contract. People lost their balances attempting to use this incorrectly at some times, and a handful of transfer escrow services cropped up over time. The middle of January saw a ramping up of more Harmony blockchain performance issues, frustrating attempted deployment of game updates, and in a bit of foreboding, a security incident with the multichain/anyswap bridge resulted in some approvals on tokens needing to be revoked on their contracts to remove exploits. Later on down the line this bridge would be fully exploited, and shut down.

In the middle of January, it was finally time to announce the results of the Bounty program. 270 people had signed up for the program and 30 of them submitted a project. The price of Jewel had begun it’s precipitous fall from it’s peak, but was still sitting around $15. That made the first place prize worth around $75,000. It would be much less by the time the prizes were paid out however. First place was awarded to “Lila’s Ledger” created by MellowGreenGiant, the only submission that actually met all the criteria for the bounty. Second place went to the makers of “DFK Tracker”, by the duo Josh and Joseph (2500 Jewels), and Third place went to 0xManic for “Jewel Ninja” (1000 Jewels).

After the winners of the bounty were announced, many people were surprised that the darling community tool for DFK that had already existed before the bounty program did not win. The makers of that tool also complained about not winning and even submitted a several page document detailing all the ways in which they took issue with how the program was ran and judged. But when it came down to it, they just did not seem to have read the instructions because their tool did not do what was requested. Over a month later, the prizes were paid out, with Jewel down to about $7 at the time, still a decent prize for all. The FED was pivoting to raise interest rates and all of crypto prices were collapsing as we transitioned out of the era of zero interest rate COVID mania. Because of this timing, those prizes were worth about what they were when the contest was originally announced.

Near the end of January, a new version of the API was being released to finally rid us of the ever un-purchasable hero on the tavern, “Doro”. Remember him? The map was also being expanded to show all of the lands that people were airdropped with hints at their future utility being announced. Other priorities would take hold however before anything more was developed with them other than a buy/sell market. The team was also getting more creative with ways to do airdrop rewards for people including for leveling up and summoning heroes. Leading to the eventual first person to get a hero to level 20, accomplished by the legendary community member, Okul.

A lot of things were happening around the end of January along with the market downturn, and various dramas ensued. People were questioning the way the team was compensating it’s members and sharing concerns about sustainability. There were also rumblings of the loophole in the locked jewel mining quest starting to surface. The additional jewel being released due to this loophole, or “exploit” as most called it was relatively minor, and as such the team did not put a high priority on closing it at the time. However it was perceived as many to be the primary factor in Jewels downturn, when in fact it was more just the general market and people getting out of their positions before the Crystalvale snapshot windows closed.

In February 2022, the release of Crystalvale was being prepared and details about it and the Perilous Journey were announced at Eth Denver that year with a handful of Crystalvale Generation Zero heroes being raffled out of a hat to people in attendance. Not much else happened in the game other than some gardens tweaking as all efforts were focused on Crystalvale launch in February, but a community tool called DFK Arena did get proposed for a grant, an app for allowing people to send their heroes to fight against each other in a way for a reward of DFK gold tokens.

At the start of March, registration for the perilous journey was opened and people decided which of their heroes they were going to send on the journey to possibly be burned forever and reap them great rewards either way. Also in early March, lots of drama was stirring around the newly announced grant program and its first applicant and swirl around how other projects could do smart contract integration with DFK culminating in an awkward community discussion with FriskyFox where he attempted to sort through half constructive concerns and half people being antagonistic to the grant concept and DFKArena team, followed by a cancellation of the grant program. DFK Arena went on to get funding elsewhere and release their product.

Not much longer into March, the Crystalvale trailer was revealed and more details about the Avalanche subnet were shared. The first “Chaos Cast” aired, DFK’s own podcast featuring a Perilous Journey discussion with Hubert Cumberdale. In mid-March, the perilous journey concluded and players could claim their boats of heroes and see who lived and who died. Late in March, the formation of Kingdom Studios was announced, creating a commercial entity to house the staff building the components of DFK and the team were front and center at the Avalanche Summit in Barcelona where many team members got bloater tattoos on their ankles.

At the end of March, 2022, Crystalvale was launched. There was a live Chaos Cast launch party, and brutally painful bridging issues for many hours due to some unaccounted for anti spam protections on the Avalanche side blocking much of the Synapse token bridge activity. This was frustrating for all because people were rushing to get tokens bridged so that they could get in the Crystalvale gardens and start farming. These delays led to the team delaying the start of garden emissions and developing an exhaustive retroactive locked crystal vesting airdrop to compensate people and make it right.

Along with the Crystalvale launch, a new feature called “Leaderboards” also launched back on Harmony. Though it may have seemed a footnote on the other things going on, it actually ended up being a huge thing for a lot of people who had fun trying to maximize what their heroes were doing on profession quests to try and win the huge daily, weekly, or monthly pots of Jewel, or even Gen Zero heroes.

At the beginning of April, the Crystal token launched and was added to the Crystalvale gardens. This involved also airdropping the vast array of crystal rewards for various snapshots that were done for different activities. It was also announced that a huge raffle would be taking placed for a giveaway of 1000 Crystalvale Generation 0 heroes based on xCrystal holdings in the Bank. Representing a huge shift by the team away from the Gen0 sale model to mostly giving away these heroes to the community.

Near the middle of April training quests were launched, and the first Giaia’s Song event took place during which egg drop rates were increased 10x in preparation for the upcoming pets release. With training quests come the drops of pages of the eternal story, and the trope of the Page 10 that would never come. Near the end of April, the new zones in Crystalvale were added to prepare for heroes in that realm, and would be activated in early May, however, around the same time, some drama was brewing.

The end of April 2022 was a major turning point for DFK. The price of Jewel had plummeted from its all time high of $21 and was now down to about $2. While many people who had discovered the project early made out pretty well. Many people who had bought in during the peak were “down bad”. They were looking for some reason. Why, why, why was Jewel price no longer going to the MOON?! But going down instead. Rather than looking at the macro environment, and the effects that introducing a new token, Crystal to the ecosystem were having, people looked internally to the team and the community. There must be someone rugging everyone right? Right?!

In April the word began to spread of the “Locked Jewel Mining Exploit”. Sometime after the jewel mining and locked Jewel transfer capabilities back in December, people had figured out that they could start a jewel mining quest, transfer their locked jewel to another wallet and immediately start another jewel mining quest, and so on for as many wallets as they had Jewel mining heroes to use. This let people unlock their locked jewel balances faster than was planned. While the amount of Jewel being inflated due to this was not actually that much in the grand scheme of things and was not even close to the primary cause of people being “down bad”. People were outraged and to this day remember it as an unholy sin upon the world that the team did not immediately fix it months earlier when they first learned of it.

True to form, Frisky Fox posted a detailed, transparent announcement about exactly why it was not immediately prioritized, but I assume most people pulled a TLDR on that. By the end of April, the loophole was closed with a creative fix, but the seeds of doubt were sown, and things were about to get worse. Someone noticed a discrepancy in the DFK docs with the address that provided the initial liquidity at the launch of the project not matching the address on chain. This opened a can of worms where people started looking into everything that the person who put up the initial investment to fund the start of this whole project had done in the game. Enter “LiquidLuck”.

LiquidLuck was the profile name of the address for the acquaintance of FriskyFox that had provided the $15,000 of ONE tokens to pair with Jewel to seed the DEX and launch the Jewel token. The agreement with this initial investor was that that liquidity would never be removed (and it never was) and that if the project succeeded they would be able to stake and reap whatever rewards from the staking of that liquidity they could. They did so, and many other things in the game, and due to the success of the project, earned and withdrew funds worth many times the initial investment they made. Many people thought this was horrible and it really caused an uproar. I did not understand the issue and still do not. Someone made a risky investment and it paid off. So what? What about the many other people who bought Jewel out of the pool on day one and got in the gardens early and did almost as well themselves, but with less risk?

While most people in the infamoust #price-discussion channel typically flail about and speculate wildly, community member Dunsparrow took the time to actually figure out some related numbers

This caused such an uproar that Frisky Fox posted a governance vote on whether he should be involved in the project anymore. He was that distraught by the vitriol spewing forth from the community over this at that point. Despite the reality of what the numbers were, things can take on a life of their own when a bunch of anons in Discord swirl on it for a while. On top of all this, people were also digging into Frisky Fox trying to find dirt on him and after finding out he had done some work on the Lootswap project, threw out speculations that he was the leader of that project who had rugged people. Despite all the drama, hate, and cynicism coming from some people, the discord reactions on Frisky Fox’s announcement about his dedication to the project and stating that he did not want to leave the project but wanted the community to have voice considering the feedback received, showed how most of the community truly felt.

Despite all that chaos, the first week of May, the team was releasing hero functionality in Crystalvale and airdropping Berserker and Seer Generation Zero heroes to people. One of the most exciting things to be a part of in DFK. The first week of May also saw the launch of the Kingdom Building Program. Created to support the wide array of community projects around DFK. Near mid-May the team released an updated Road Map, laying out the future priorities of the project. The crypto market continued to be brutal during this time, and the Terra/Luna collapse occurred. This collapse sucked over $40 billion from the crypto market wrecking many people when the algorithmic “stable” coin lost it’s peg and the whole system collapsed. I could never make sense of how it worked so never touched it, but there were some gardens in DFK with pairs of LUNA and UST, so it definitely affected the community.

Near the end of May, 2022, at last the release of Pets dropped. The pets would not have any functionality yet, but this was a huge deal as people could finally hatch those super rare pet eggs they were getting from quests. But just for 2 of the professions. Around the same time, DFK Duel was in development and starting to be talked about. A mini-game that would allow people to use their heroes in a new way to compete with other players.

By the start of June, 2022, Jewel token price was down to 50 cents, and it would go down to 10 cents before the end of the month. This month was harrowing for many reasons. The first staff reductions started to occur in the team, as the reduced treasury could not sustain all the staff in the depressed market. And by the end of June, the Harmony Horizon Bridge Hack occurred, where the Lazarus group extracted 100 million in assets from the bridge obliterating the value of now unbacked tokens held by the Defi Kingdoms treasury, team, and community. The Harmony team would never take responsibility or restore the funds that were lost. Some ridiculous amount of time after the incident, they implemented some token buyback program to help a little by inflating their own ONE token. A midst all the other chaos in June, DFK Duels did release though.

In July, 2022, functionality in Crystalvale expanded some more with profession quests starting to be added there, and the team also launched a merch store. There was a lot of incentivized gardening pool allocation changes with all of the de-pegs tokens on Harmony and some new kinds of tokens being bridgeable to DFKChain to shift there somewhat. The Harmony blockchain raised it’s base gas fee to 100 GWEI and continued to be unstable and difficult to use.

In August, the Leaderboard system was shut down as it had become another system for the bots to game for the most part. The item marketplace vendor was revamped and feature parity in Crystalvale continued to roll along with training quests being added. Rumblings were starting to stir about two huge topics as well, a new partnership with a gaming lab to work on PvP combat for Defi Kingdoms, and a potential new home for Serendale so we could move off the godforsaken Harmony blockchain. Most of the focus was on the latter however, and it was announced that Serendale would migrate to the Klaytn blockchain. By the end of the month, a tokenomics change was proposed for a vote that would deal with what to do about the tokens going forward with the Serendale migration.

The tokenomics change vote was passed by the community, from then on to be referred to as the "splittening". This change is another one of the major affronts that many people cite breaking with the project over. Their precious locked jewel tokens that they still thought of in their head as being worth $21 each were being converted into other useless tokens. The truth is, Jewel was down around 15 cents, and their precious stacks of locked Jewel would have been worth even less if it had all unlocked. With the new tokenomics, the total supply of Jewel would be greatly reduced, but a new power token was being added at the same time, further diluting the overall liquidity of those involved in the project among more tokens with lower values.

In September, the team added a place in game to feature third party games and tools like DFK Arena, DFK Fight Klub, the ADFK site, etc. Features in the old Harmony Serendale began to shut down, while features in Crystalvale were still being added, and by the middle of October this process was pretty much complete, as well as some refinements to quest management added. An interesting governance vote occurred as well, where the community voted to restore lost or hacked Jewel to owners who could prove it since the opportunity was there with locked jewel on Harmony being abandoned and converted to different tokens on Crystalvale. Finally, with the new realm of Serendale, new Generation Zero heroes were coming, and a summoning event was started to being the giveaway of these heroes to the community.

By this time, with heroes and summoning being much more affordable, most players had much more than a handful of heroes and needed something to help manage them. In October of 2022, a new hero auto questing tool called DFK Helper was released for wider use as a subscription service by a community developer. Since early in the year, players had been utilizing a handful of tools that automated the process of sending thier heroes on profession quests so they didn't have to do it manually. DFKEarn was the first, which was available early in the year and used a smart contract method. Difky was another tool that came out in May that was self managed. The Degen Waifu bot, DFK Quester, Pirate Quester all came later and eventually Adventures in DefiKindoms site even had a self managed tool available. DFK Helper tooks things to a different level though, going beyond automating questing, it's goal was to automate your entire DFK experience if you wanted, duels, summoning, levelling, token management, all of it. With handy community libraries available like ortis' DFKTools, it was fairly easy for someone with a little programming skill to create thier own automation tool as well, which many did.

November, 2022 was a huge month for Defi Kindoms. Not only did Dark Summoning and the vastly improved Jewel staking system launch early in the month, the new Serendale was getting ready to launch on Klaytn near the end of the month. Though it did not really affect DFK directly, I will note that this is around the time of the FTX exchange collapse which was another traumatic event for many people in blockchain projects in general, as many people were exposed to it in some way. Ramping up to the Klaytn launch, the team was encountering challenges getting profession questing to work on the slightly different parameters of their blockchain. It did not end up launching until early December, and profession questing on Klaytn would never be the same as on DFKChain, being subject to more limitations.

With the launch of Serendale 2.0 in early December, for the first time since the start of the game, a new elite level class mutation was available to discover. While I thought it would take several days to discover, thanks to the dark summoning portal and some hard core degens, the SpellBow class was discovered within a day of launch. Meanwhile, the team was working in the background closely with Wisdom Labs and the community was being introduced to 0xWorkhorse who would play a huge role in designing the combat system for Defi Kingdoms. They began working on a system much more ambitious than what the original team had in mind originally, and sneak peaks of what was brewing started to emerge.

As combat progressed in the background in January, 2023, the team also released a huge feature giving Jewel token more utility, Power Ups. These allowed people to allocate their banked Jewel that was earning them staking rewards to also enable extra in game bonuses.

In February, 2023 the focus seemed to be on getting rid of the glut of locked tokens looming over the ecosystem that could further inflate supply among dwindling holders of multiple ecosystem tokens. To that end, 2 features were released that most people may have forgotten about by now because they no longer exist. Players could use locked tokens to pay for in game activities like summoning or pet hatching and people could throw them into Glut the Furnace as an offering to potentially win things like enhancement stones or Gen Zero heroes. The team was hard at work to implement the next level of profession quests and pet utility, but it was one of the big endeavors tracked by a shared progress sheet, and would take quite a while.

March saw the focus back on combat with a new classes combat skills revealed, and more interviews with the Wisdom labs crew. On top of that, late in the month, the combat engine was ready for it’s first test spin by the public and the combat testing grounds were released. People could finally load their heroes in and see them in combat against a team of blubs. Also at the end of March, news came about the 2 charity donation campaigns that had been run. A total of $441,000 was raised by the community and Kingdom Studios for Typhoon Odette relief. Thankfully those funds had been delivered before the Harmony bridge hack incident, but the $81,385 that had been raised for UNICEF was on Harmony at the time of the hack and the un-pegged tokens it was held in became worth little. Despite no successful action from the Harmony team to restore this value, Kingdom Studios made the donation by using funds from their own project wallets instead. Watch and learn, Harmony. Or not, I guess since it’s you.

In April, players got to re-roll their heroes to reveal their crafting genes and any heroes that had tainted ability genes. Other than that though, lots of work was going into the pet utility release, and at the start of May, a huge release dropped including pet equipping and utility (DFK Duel only), and even green egg hatching. More stages of the release continued through the month to bring the new level of profession quests and pet utility for them.

Drama came back to the kingdom in May as well though with a new governance vote proposal. In addition to the huge token inflation being experienced, we also had incredible hero inflation, so it was proposed to have a vote to extend hero summoning cooldowns. Doing this was hotly debated, with people on one side that cared about reducing the inflation, and people on the other side against the increase that either wanted to protect their summoning fun or profit potential. The actual vote and change would not come until later, but the writing was on the wall that this was a possibility. If implemented, it would reduce the amount of heroes created, but also reduce the amount of power tokens burned for summoning.

In June, 2023 the entire art for the heroes had to be reworked to be compatible with displaying the heroes in the combat system. Change is hard though, and with much gnashing of teeth by people that don’t like devs messing with how their heroes look, an option was provided to show your heroes with the old art style in the UI. This theme continued on into July with more work going into the combat engine to refine how it works and expanding the heroes you could use in it getting released into the combat testing grounds. July also saw a focus on partnerships to help ease player onboarding with Halliday for smart wallets and Swipelux for funds onramp.

In early July 2023, the anySwap/MultiChain bridge was compromised, with over $100 million worth of tokens drained from the bridge. While it did not directly affect DFK realms, the bridge was used to bridge Jewel to Avalanche and Fantom networks and the bridge shutting down orphaned those Jewel tokens. In other news that month, one of the DFK copycats “Mind Games” shut down. A longer lived copycat project, “Defira” was also reaching the end of it’s relevant life at this time, though it did not have as well defined of an end.

The Bazaar feature launched at the end of July, providing an order book style market for tokens in the game, the first proof of concept implementation of the “MythicSwap” idea. A new Champion mode was added to duels later in the month as well, adding a new level of top end competition for the mini-game. As we approached the end of August the team started to get into “Void” mode with mysterious black circles for all of their discord profile pictures, and then a trailer for the Void Hunt: Mad Boar dropped. It seemed we would soon be using our heroes to fight in a boss battle! Alas, it would not release for over another MONTH later. Apparently some unforseen challenges were encountered, but it ended up being worth the wait. In the meantime through September, the community was entertained by various other things such as Dreamer being on a Crypto TV show, and lots of giveaway drawings from various events, including the long awaited raffle of “Amulets” that people had staked jewel for OVER A YEAR earlier. Now that the first form of equipment(pets) was implemented, and heroes would need other equipment for PvE, amulets could be implemented.

Also in September, the hosts of the Inner Grove podcast and DFK Community Members would launch their own web3 game called “Dragon’s Crossing”. It seems a little ironic in hindshight, because a large impetus for it happening was BloaterPunch’s constant frustration that DFK still had not made a “real game”. Yet in the very next month with release of Void Hunts, one could argue that DFK crossed the line into being a real game, if not a complete one.

In the middle of October, 2023, the Void Hunt: Mad Boar finally released. On this first release of PvE, equipment was functional but really only accessories and weapons players got from airdrops or loot because standard equipment was not released yet. Later in the month, we had a Halloween event where a limited time event let people summon heroes with plague touched or void touched skin color. This proved to be a very popular mechanic and would be revived with a new color every Halloween after. An equipment auction house was released soon too, so that people could create a market for all of the loot dropping.

In November, we got a new class added to combat, the Warrior, and the combat system continued to be balanced. In December, the Jewel token saw a strange price pump that seemed to come out of nowhere. People speculated on the cause, but I don’t know that it was ever clear. Might have had something to do with the project being called “shady” by ZachXBT on Twitter, or maybe it was just activity caused by preparation of market makers for what came soon after: the CEX listing. Whiners finally got what they wished for, but maybe not what they wanted as Jewel was listed in the Coinstore exchange. Jewel price did about a 5x in less than a week, then slowly lost most of the gains over the next month. In more important news though, December saw the release of the Visages feature, DFK’s version of skins for your heroes. Unfortunately we ended the year with a BANG however as we learned that the primary bridge provider on the Klaytn blockchain “Orbit” was hacked and all of it’s bridged tokens which were part of many of the Serendale 2.0 gardens became de-pegged. Deja-Vu anyone? Serendale seems to be cursed. I’m not sure any blockchain will want it to be there if they try to move it again.

The new year started off with further enhancements to the combat system and an announcement that a new Void Hunt was in the works. Another important milestone that happened in January, 2024 was the transition to the Gardens staking version two where rewards for gardens staking transitioned from emission of new tokens, to fee sharing from the ecosystem since the end of the supply inflation of the Crystal token was fast approaching.

February, 2024 was a huge month for DFK PvE, not only was the new Void Hunt: Bad Mutherclucker released, but we also got a new slew of potions that could be crafted and used in combat, further extending utility of materials gathered from profession quests. Also, at the end of February, at ETH Denver, Dreamer stepped off the plane after coming from fighting in the Karate Combat ring to announce a new partnership with the Metis Blockchain who would sponsoring the build of DefiKingdoms PvP. This news set off the last real fundamentals based Jewel price pump we have seen, almost doubling from 18 cents to 35 cents in a matter of 1 month.

In March 2024, the Serendale Gardens in Klaytn got the v2 treatment transitioning from token emission rewards to fee sharing rewards. The team was likely ramping on design of the Sundered Isles and working with Metis in the background and little updates happened, but an important change was made to the drop rate of pet eggs from quests, making them more appropriately rare and valuable.

In early April, 2024 the Hercules DEX launched on METIS which is where Jewel liquidity would be on that realm as there would not be a dedicated DFK dex on that chain. This new DEX was a clone of the Arbitrum “Camelot” DEX, and was launching with all kinds of incentives for providing liquidity including for Jewel. The team also released a priorities list, showing that their current development focus was on PvP and getting more classes fleshed out for combat, with a new feature called Expeditions on the horizon too. Before the month was out, the Seer was playable in combat.

The very next month, another class, the Berserker was released for combat too. At the same time, some refinements to the multi quest queue were being released for profession questing, these were a bit of foreshadowing and in preparation for the Expeditions feature down the road. At the end of the month, a new in-game voting system was released which brought a new level to governance over the simple token snapshot votes of the past. Players could now contribute their heroes and lands ownership to the power of their vote as well as token ownership in the for of cJewel/sJewel holdings.

In June, 2024 with the new governance voting system in place, the long awaited summoning cool down vote could occur, and occur it did. Despite the new governance system letting hero holders contribute their value to the vote, the Jewel whales won the vote, and summoning cool downs were greatly extended, pissing off a lot of people, and giving another group of people an excuse to say their goodbyes. At the same time, the DFK community was enjoying an unexpected windfall, as the Layer Zero foundation was launching their token, ZRO, and since the DFK ecosystem used the Layer Zero briding tech extensively, active players and Jewel stakers were eligible for their airdrop, which was very well executed.

There was little released in July other than some minor DFK Duels updates, and in late July a couple of influencers even held a fairly misguided live stream declaring that the project was dead. Despite this, the team kept delivering, and in early August 2024, the new Expeditions feature was released. Expeditions let players “set and forget” their heroes on profession quests for a small jewel fee. Depending on current gas fee levels, the jewel fee may or may not pay for itself in the form of more efficient gas usage through Expeditions. At the end of August, the team followed up with another pretty big update which allowed players to use their hero active and passive genetic traits in combat.

September 2024 was all about gearing up for the upcoming PvP Colosseum release, and a public PvP play testing weekend was held. A new DFK influencer, Spassvogel somehow managed to live stream 30 HOURS of content while he playtested over the weekend, and insane feat. The community got a chance to try out playing against each other in real time. Then in the beginning of October, the Colosseum was opened on Metis and at the same time, basic equipment was released as well so heroes would have to equip up appropriate items to be competitive. Along with the launch of private PvP matches also came the Influence system which allowed players to stake heroes on Metis to gain influence which could be used to gain rewards when spectating on sponsored PvP matches.

Over the next couple of months, refinements and improvements were made to the PvP match experience on Metis, and the Submersian shells system was also introduced where people could earn shells which could be used to enter raffles for game items like stones, crystals, and runes. Then in the beginning of 2025, it was time to bring low end PvE to the Sundered Isles, and the new feature “Patrols” was released. This was designed for heroes level 1-9 and featured lots of new enemies and loot. Along with Patrols also came a partnership with Yield Guild Games where their community flooded into the game to complete their incentivized guild related quests.

Near the end of February, 2025 the Tournaments system was launched in the Submersian Colosseum. An automated on-chain tournament bracket system where players could compete to earn rewards for placing in the tournament. The most coveted of those rewards were some new ornate treasure chests that could not yet be opened. Then, about halfway through March, a release dropped that enabled opening the chests, and fancy new PvP equipment came out. The PvP system was being tweaked during this time as well, with the most attention being on trying to nail down a good shot clock/sudden death mechanic that would encourage “normal” game play.

At the start of May, 2025, combat finally got another class, with the Wizard release, and not long after, the ability for anyone to host their own PvP tournament was released as well. This was the final feature delivery milestone under Kingdom Studios’ contract with Metis to deliver DFK PvP to the Metis Blockchain. Further tweaks and improvements to the tournament system would follow though, and there was much more big tournaments with cash prizes left in Season 1 of the core tournament circuit.

For a long time, many people have wished for features in DFK that would let them reset and re-level up their heroes. The ecosystem could also do with another outlet to burn heroes as hero inflation had gone even more crazy with cheap Jade token based summoning available in Serendale 2.0. Hitting both of these points, the Hero Transcendence system was released at the end of May 2025. With this system, heroes could be burned and produce some amount of “divine essence” and crystals. Divine Essence fulfills the dreams of many players allowing them to reroll level ups, reset heroes, and upgrade some items. This enabled the creation of supercharged elite heroes for PvP.

A couple of months went by without much updates to the game, then at the end of July 2025, the team released what would be pretty much the final state of the shot clock/sudden death system for tournaments that achieved a good balance. Soon after, in early August, the Pirate Class was added as a playable class for combat. The end of August 2025 brought the 4th birthday of DFK, as well as the “All-Star” PvP tournament. The culmination of the first Season of PvP with a $10,000 first prize, and it was taken home by xbla.

Things were quiet for a few months after the All-Star tournament with some off-season tournaments happening, but the team started hinting at a big release coming and it eventually dropped at the end of October 2025. Pet Combat bonuses were revealed along with Durability, and Enchanting features all together. And if that wasn’t enough, a Halloween Event was thrown into the mix with rewards for new stones that could summon heroes with new skin colors.

While everyone was having fun with those new features, cracks were forming in Serendale once again. The cursed realm which had been neglected by it’s chain partner and was burning funds to keep running and not providing much benefit was slated for shutdown. In early December, 2025 all of the game features on Kaia (formerly Klaytn) Serendale 2.0 were disabled and you can pretty much just trade and bridge tokens there now. Not only did this allow the the team to turn down some infrastructure to save on operating costs, but it also shutdown the ability for people to summon cheaply using Jade tokens there which in theory is another hit to hero inflation for that aspect of the economy.

For 2026, it was communicated that the team ( which consists of a handful of volunteers to spend whatever of their own time they are willing to donate to the project) were working on a new game mode called “Ragnarok”. This mode is designed to be a very low barrier to entry version of PvP gameplay where people don’t need to acquire heroes or equipment. While that is still in development, it was announced at the beginning of March 2026 that the last functional realm of DFK, Crystalvale would have all game features shut down as well. The future of DFK is in question at this point. The team and community have pinned their hopes on that a blockchain partner will sponsor a deal where all DFK realms and features are consolidated to their blockchain so the games operation can continue to be funded.

To be continued...

The Devs	The Influencers

This Saga was written entirely by a human, and while I have for the most part based it on objective sources of public information, it is colored by my personal bias and opinions in some places. I have no special information about DFK and this is all based my experience of following the project for 4 years, and research of publicly available sources. If you notice anything in my account that is factually wrong, or a major event that I overlooked, please send me a DM and let me know. I'll get it updated if it can be verified. If you don't like my opinions... go ahead and write your own story.

- Code Green (formerly known as MellowGreenGiant in DFK)