Why is it important?

The Metaverse, DeFi and NFT Art form unconnected building blocks, but lack “killer apps” for mass adoption.

What does success look like?

DID solutions emerge that can be used by a larger demographic - unifying personal

finance, goods and services, gaming and collecting.

Key Metrics to measure

• Number of successfully launched projects as a result of this challenge

• Number of successfully linked existing dApps/projects as a result of this challenge

• Proposal dApp/solution users issued with DID

• Total $/ada value transacted in Cardano metaverse(s), games, platforms

• Growth in total number of Cardano wallets above baseline

  Challenge brief

Defi + DID = RealFi

Let us together expand use cases for DID and the Metaverse to reach end users, giving them better user experience and increased financial inclusion.

Permanently rising crypto prices that “subsidize” exorbitant DeFi yields, pointless play-to-earn concepts and over-priced digital art collections are a thing of the past. We need to find real marketing dollars, real savings and real entertainment to power the crypto economy. We need to achieve this while maintaining the visions of choice over our data and identity, free from centralized control and greedy agency. This is not an easy task, and current solutions are either too dull or too technical for mass adoption over a short time horizon. By connecting Cardano DID and wallets to exisiting real world infrastructure like payment systems, eCommerce, game engines, public services and NGOs, gradual development could be leapfrogged.

Our goal is to attract additional outside investment by creating “RealFi” use cases. With increased monetization and better user experience comes higher credibility and faster adoption of blockchain technology.

We do not want the Challenge to be too narrowly defined, but it is important to support some integration of identity and immersive experience. Possible directions are Atala PRISM for gaming, CNFTs and DeFi, mobile wallet DApp browser integration, integration of game engines - let your imagination run, be creative and think big!

IOHK blog post on RealFi:

<https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/11/25/welcome-to-the-age-of-realfi/>

Cardano can play an outsized role in bringing Web3 and Metaverse innovation to a

broader, more engaged audience:

<https://coinquora.com/cardano-wins-poll-for-protocols-with-best-nft-community/>

The Metaverse means different things to different people. We simply mean a more digital, more inclusive and more immersive version of our current online lives.

<https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse>

The reason we request ADA 3000000 for this challenge is that we believe that RealFi is a future goal for Cardano and the budget should allow ample funding to nurture proposals in this area. It would be good to see some ambitious project requestng around 10% of this funding, to be able to create meaningful MVPs with good user experience.