Walken

Introduction

The Walken platform embodies an opportunity to onboard thousands of new users into DeFi. Walken is a play & exercise to earn mobile app built by a team with over 50 million app store downloads and $10 million in annual revenue. Users are rewarded with WLKN tokens for exercise and in-app game play and their characters in the game are NFTs which means that users not only can earn tokens, but they are also creating NFTs that can be bought and sold in NFT marketplaces.

The real power of the Walken platform is in offering a direct integration with DeFi platforms to encourage new crypto holders to start earning more from the tokens they receive from living a healthier lifestyle. The app will have a built in and simplified interface to blue chip level DeFi strategies.

The Walken mission is to create a powerful app platform and ecosystem to bring millions of new users into the world of crypto through apps of all kinds developed by the Walken team and 3rd party studios. It should be easy for users to experience the power of crypto to make their lives better while also providing improved stability for the WLKN token by encouraging investing and holding over selling.

Their unique advantage is our ability to rapidly acquire new users for the app because of our years of experience building an in-house marketing team and technology platform. Having already done user acquisition for the first Walken app, we are confident that our mobile app marketing expertise will allow us to grow the Walken ecosystem and the market for the project.

How The Walken App Works

While inspired by Tamagotchi and Pokemon Go, the Walken app's user interface and experience has been engineered to appeal to young and old alike. Walken's easy to understand interface guides users to easily grasp the basic concepts, so that as they advance in earning and play, users can expose more advanced functionality when they are comfortbale. Walken's early testing revealed, that it was important for the development team to layer the exposure to functionality little by little rather than all at once.

Walken uses the movement detection capabilities of standard smartphones and wearable devices to capture the step counts of users. It also utilizes sophisticated algorithms and tools provided by to prevent cheating.

Walken continues the approach of successful motivation apps like Strava and Apple Activity by providing users with incentives to live a healthier lifestyle. The app converts user steps into GEMs (the app’s soft currency) by synchronising data from Apple Healthkit and Android Health to determine the number of steps taken. Gems can be used to upgrade a character's (the development team calls them CAThletes!) speed, strength and stamina so that they can participate in battles in order to win and gain WLKN tokens.

Research has shown, that getting a user to invest in the game experience means a user is more likely to return to an app. Not only are Cathletes all unique and distinctive, but users can customize their attirbutes by earning Gems in the game.

The success of Peloton and other exercise and gaming apps has made clear, that a social element can significantly improve the retention of users in exercise programs and app use. Walken will be implementing a social sharing feature that not only allows users to share their accomplishments on social media, but will also let them join with their friends or random anonymous users and create a leaderboard and share their progress. The system will use prompts to encourage the desire to share socially and create a group mentality around use, getting healthier, and earning.

Battles

Inspired by the most successful MMORPG the battle algorithm will match players in random, but in an organised way where your ability to win will grow with an increase in the capabilites of a user's CAThlete and level in the game. In addition, the amount of tokens a user can will will be based on the level that CAThlete has.

Users will be provided with a Free-to-Use, unique CAThlete when they first launch the app. It will have a limited number of lives per day. Each battle - costs one life. In order to participate in more battles, users can buy Cathletes found within Walken's NFT Marketplace or they can choose to crossbreed two CAThletes using some amount of WLKN token and mint a totally new and unique NFT character.

The WLKN token

WLKN is a fungible governance and staking token used to enhance a user’s adventures in the Walken app and provide income and a token to use in simplified DeFi applications within the app. WLKN token holders will be able to vote on the future of the project as well as stake it to earn rewards.

Users can earn the token only by participating in battles. The battle algorithm calculates the amount of play-to-earn tokens that can be earned based on the number of players and available play-to-earn tokens.

In order to win more battles and earn more WLKN tokens, users need to keep upgrading their NFT characters and move to the next level. This will provide an incentive to use the token in the game and will reduce sell pressure on the tokens.

The Bigger Vision - The Walken Protocol

While the Walken app is an important phase of our mission to bring more users into DeFi by earning WLKN tokens, it is only the first step. The Walken protocol will enable a network of developers to create apps that operate on an earn model. By utilizing the platform, app teams will be able to earn ongoing revenue from the activities and earnings of users of their apps.

As Walken's development team advances the platform and enable more capabilities, developers will be able to easily leverage the wallet and DeFI components that the Walken team will make part of the Walken API. This allows studios with app marketing and development experience and an existing base of users to add earning and DeFi functionality directly to their existing apps or create new apps using the WLKN token.

As the network of apps grows, the ability to cross market to an eager user base will incentivize developers to expose users to additional games and a referral share of the revenue those apps generate along with WLKN.