The rising popularity of “Banana”, an “tap-to-earn” game built on the TON blockchain, demonstrates how it has emerged as a showcase for the integration of tokenization within games.
Banana, which first launched as a traditional game on Steam, made its debut on Telegram earlier this year as a mini app, and aims to infuse the basic fun gameplay of the original game with novel earnings opportunities for players.
The gameplay itself is simplistic, with players being given a banana at regular intervals which they can immediately harvest for rewards. Banana invites players to enter a world in which they’re tasked with collecting a wide variety of bananas, with each one being totally unique, with its own attributes and rarity level. Players can collect their bananas, utilize them to earn daily rewards, and trade them to earn points and even money in the shape of USDT cryptocurrency.
Tokenization at its core
With Banana, tokenization is a fundamental, core aspect of the game, as digital assets are the most critical elements in its basic gameplay.
The uniqueness of each banana stems from the fact that each one is actually a non-fungible token or NFT, which is a unique, one-of-a-kind digital asset stored on the underlying TON blockchain, where its ownership is verified. No single banana can be replicated or stolen from its owner, but the owners of these NFT-based assets can choose to trade them at any time, selling them for USDT or PEEL.
The gameplay involves players tapping on their bananas repeatedly each day in order to earn points, known as PEEL, which can also be exchanged for USDT. PEEL is actually the game’s native cryptocurrency token, and it serves as the game’s currency too, helping to facilitate the trade in bananas within the game itself.
Players are encouraged to collect bananas to grow their daily rewards, with each banana providing a different amount of rewards based on its rarity. The rarer the banana, the more PEEL it generates each day by tapping on it, and the more rewards it gives users at the time of harvest. The rarest banana in the game is the highly-sought after Banana Matrixnana, which commands a price tag of a cool 500 USDT on NFT marketplaces.
Powered by CARV Protocol, a modular data layer for gaming and artificial intelligence, Banana is at its heart a kind of NFT rewards app, designed to showcase the incredible potential of NFTs and tokenization. The game makes use of regular airdrops, delivering digital tokens to players at regular intervals based on how many tokens they hold, while new bananas are generated every 18 hours.
Players can earn even more rewards by completing “tasks”, such as creating a CARV ID and binding it to their account, following CARV on X and reposting one of its tweets to earn additional bananas to feed their urge to continue tapping for rewards.
An introduction to Web3 assets
The developers of Banana have cleverly used tokenization to drive gameplay in a number of ways. The main elements of the game are digital assets, yet the underlying complexity of interacting with these assets has been abstracted away, simply becoming a part of the gameplay process.
The core aspect of Banana involves tapping to earn rewards, and this requires players to collect NFTs, which have tangible real-world value due to their rewards potential. Each time the player taps their banana, they’ll earn PEELS, a cryptocurrency that also boasts a growing value due to the immense popularity of the game. PEELS are in demand as players can trade them for rarer bananas and boost their earnings potential, and ultimately cash out for USDT.
The game has already made a huge splash in the TON and Telegram ecosystems, with more than one million new users signed up within just 72 hours of its launch. With the support and activation of some of the biggest players in TON’s ecosystem, BANANA has continued its meteoric rise, notching 5 million users in just three weeks. The game is catalyzing Web3 adoption by onboarding new users into the world of digital assets.
As of mid-August, BANANA has reported over 1 million daily active users, 1.4 million connected social media accounts, and a staggering 45 million in-game tasks completed.
A recipe for Web3 onboarding success
Banana’s model can serve as an inspiration to other developers looking to explore the benefits of Web3 while catering to the demands of casual gamers. It provides everything those audiences are looking for, with simple, pick-up-and-play gameplay that’s perfect for those idle moments, such as when someone is sitting at a restaurant waiting for their friends to arrive, or hopping on the bus to go to work. And it unknowingly guides its players into the Web3 ecosystem, enabling them to own and enjoy the benefits of blockchain-based digital assets without even realizing it.
Banana has a simple vision in that it’s aiming to make NFTs available and accessible to everyone, and it does it in a way that doesn’t require any research or effort. Players simply download the mini app from Telegram and they can get started clicking within just a few seconds. Low and behold, those players obtain their first NFT and crypto assets, and quickly discover how valuable they can be.
It’s an extremely promising model, and its impressive growth numbers suggest that it’s one that works well. As such, we can see many other developers of casual games following in the footsteps of Banana, encouraging gamers to interact with digital assets and explore their benefits as a part of an enjoyable gaming experience.
In this way, Banana is more than just an addictive game – it’s a successful proof-of-concept that demonstrates the viability of using fun mobile games to onboard the next billion users to blockchain and the world of Web3.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice
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