Below are initial thoughts on a GTM strategy for driving on-chain liquidity to Illuvium.
**Step 1 **- inflows heading to IMX from eth L1 bc of us or other games. If we are the best game, it's just awareness and technical hurdles. I don't have a ton to add here atm.
Step 2 - dominating inflows from EVM compatible chains (L2s and Solana with neon now live). We could use an evm landing page to help facilitate this conversion. The basic idea is to take funds in exchange for an nft from EVM chains and release fuel/nfts on IMX.
We could list a series of starter packages (NFTs), starting with just a few fuel packages, but potentially add in skins and Illuvitars.
I laid out some options and not committed to just these, just getting a conversation started.
Option 1: The DAO uses its supply and adds fuel to the dapp on IMX. The DAO offers nfts on the landing page of the evm chain. The fuel is issued into the player's wallet from the dapp when the nft is purchased. This keeps the experience easy for landowners and players as the team manages the whole process until it can be fully automated.
Option 2: Any land owner or the dao can add fuel to the dapp on IMX - adds some dev work to build a ui plus contract to handle funds from/to landowners, and each nft created by a landowner would need to have metadata attaching it to them, so they can claim the eth after it's sold. The team would still have to manage bridging on the backend as we want to keep liquidity in the ILV ecosystem.
Pricing would ideally use an oracle from our imx dex and based on if someone was going to market buy that much fuel at current prices.
Long-term option: A fully customizable gaming bridge represented as an nft marketplace. Anyone can configure packages with pre-determined item types included. So Guild A or land owner D can create a package with a certain amount of fuel, an illuvial, and a skin. There could be a flow where a user pics among a few options.
We could gamify this, allowing landowners and people to select the chain where their funds are deployed so we could incentivize people to spread the word on those chains and drive traffic to where their NFTs' are located. Again all pricing is based on the dex on imx.
All options above can have options for bulk sending eth to IMX, with nfts in incremental values of eth, so we don't have to build a separate solution for just sending eth. Again the main focus here is L2s and Solana, where gas is cheap (Neon).
**Step 3 ** - Web2 players and non-evm chains. That is not the focus here.
WHY
-
Liquidity is king. Once the game's core mechanics are in place, it will be a game to drive liquidity to our ecosystem. Being able to drive flows seamlessly from evm chains will be highly valuable as the evm proliferates with the OP stack, Neon, and other advancements. The evm currently has the most liquidity and will likely remain true for a long time.
-
The bridging process is primarily for experienced users, with many hurdles and risks.
People need to find a bridge that even bridges to IMX (can't bridge to IMX from Base rn), figure out if they trust it, swap to a token where there is liquidity, bridge then figure out what fuel to buy.
Vs.
Arrive on an Illuvium page, watch the trailer, see a breakdown of our packages and what they might get in-game, add a package to a 'cart' (see chart of live pricing), sign the transaction, and get pushed to the game/imx flow with fuel ready to go. -
Security. We don't have to worry about directing users to a bridge that might get hacked, as we won't be using resting pools in a contract. There is the risk of people exploiting this to release a ton of fuel on IMX, so the team would need to mitigate that.
I don't see a world where our growth and success is not dependent on effectively capturing players and liquidity from EVM chains directly. Whether this idea or another, we should build a white glove service supporting EVM market capture.
