Wildchain

Wildchain is a non-profit mobile game that lets you digitally adopt endangered animals and support real-world conservation efforts via a transparent wildlife conservation DAO.

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Inspiration

67% of all Earth’s wildlife has been lost in the past 4 decades, causing the most devastating loss of biodiversity since the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. Today 37,500 species are threatened with extinction. In the next decade, 95% of biodiversity could be lost and up to 1 million species could be threatened with extinction. This is the result of climate change, habitat destruction, pollution, and poaching. The lack of transparency from donations, low public awareness, and engagement make it more challenging for conservationists to tackle those threats. The global mass animal extinction, the loss of biodiversity, and the degradation of natural zones demand fundamental changes in the way nonprofits and charities raise funding as conservation funding needs to be scaled 20 to 30 times to reach our planet’s needs. Wildchain strives to support this by building novel fundraising structures that can mobilize funds at scale and appeal to the masses.

What it does

Wildchain is a non-profit climate action tool that lets you adopt wildlife and plant trees to cut your carbon footprint and support real-world conservation efforts - all within a mobile game. In the game, you become a Digital Conservationist and your mission is to preserve all wildlife on Earth. Actions in the game trigger real-world impact and 100% of our profits go toward wildlife conservation initiatives. Simply by playing our non-profit mobile game you can:

  • Plant trees & offset your carbon footprint
  • Help protect the natural habitat of wildlife species
  • Help create employment for underprivileged people
  • Back a wildlife ranger

Each animal in the game is a unique, digital counterpart of an animal living in the wild. We use cutting-edge technologies to blend the real and virtual world.

  • Solana-based tokens to create provably scarce digital assets
  • Real-world Animal population data from the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™
  • Real-world Environmental data from OECD & UN Environment By turning 100% of our game profits into funding for projects selected by players that perform actions in the game, our incentive systems align the interests of the project with up to potential 2.2 billion mobile gamers and channel funds from entertainment into environmental impact.

How we built it

Frond end: Unity; Back end: Node.js; Database: MongoDB; Infrastructure: AWS; API: Stardust

We use Unity as our game engine for everything related to UI and game logic. Our database is on MongoDB. We use multiple AWS services such as code pipeline, code commit, EC2 for data storing, & instance. At Solana Ignition we implemented Stardust’s zero-fee API for an incredibly smooth UX for our players. We are using Stardust to mint NFTs, more specifically allow the API through the frontend part to login to Stardust through the creation of a player that is associated with the player in the database so that it uses the same token. This way it is easy to access all the information regarding the player in Stardust’s Dashboard. At the moment when the player creates the NFT, the API checks if the animal species NFT you want to mint already exists as a template in Stardust. If it doesn’t, the template is created from the API with its mutable and immutable fields. Finally, it mints the NFT with the same information of the animal you own in the game. A future implementation may be to use the Stardust marketplace to adopt/trade animals. Beyond the Stardust implementation, we’ve also added the sanctuary feature of our game. Now players can scroll through the sanctuary via a parallax scrolling effect. As of now, your animals won’t appear there yet, but this is a feature we’re working on at the moment. We’ve also introduced the Eco-Score feature. Eco-Score needs to be maintained and kept high. The higher this score the more beautiful the habitat will be. We’ve also added the first Eco-Action - the “Make it Rain” action. In the future, there will be more Eco-Actions that will help to increase the Eco-Score. More features we implemented include the introduction of Gold leaves, an in-game currency that allows you to get more magic eggs. Gold leaves will also serve as a booster to decrease the hatching time of the eggs. We’ve also added different sounds for the User Interface.

What’s next for Wildchain

Our goal is that fund utilization can be viewed and verified in a transparent manner and projects must share exactly how their contributions are used and tie donations directly to the impact of their project. To achieve that, we’re building a conservation grant DAO. This aims to give grassroots conservation projects more exposure and access to a stable stream of funds from a global community, empowering conservation and research like never before. The donation experience itself will be gamified with unlockables, challenges, leaderboards, awards, and competitions to empower and mobilize our community of digital conservationists.

Feedback

Please try out our early-stage alpha version. We would love to hear your feedback! Feel free to join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/UZ9Uf6Y

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