Huge performance improvements and earning opportunities await in DeRace V2
DeRace is a play-to-earn virtual NFT horse racing metaverse where players can become virtual racehorse owners or breeders. Players can earn $DERC, the DeRace token, by entering their horses into races, as well as earning NFT items used within the game ecosystem.
Rewards currently include:
- Race prize money: earn $DERC tokens
- Spin-the-wheel mini-game: earn $DERC or Liquid Love NFTs
- Horse breeding: earn $DERC and NFT horses
- $DERC liquidity staking: earn Opie Avatars, NFT horses $DERC & Liquid Love NFTs
- Single-sided $DERC staking: earn Liquid Love NFTs
The game is in early Beta but the roadmap promises exciting new features and ways to earn. Due to launch very soon:
- Player-owned hippodromes: owners can earn a percentage of race entry fees
- Horse level system: levels indirectly increase earning potential
- Achievements and missions: NFT item rewards
- Chests & keys: containing horse equipment NFTs
- Rental of horses: for passive $DERC income
Most of these features will ship with DeRace V2, which is just around the corner and is the start of several months of incredible updates including brand new ways of earning and significant improvements to the user experience.
Now is the perfect time to start racing for the first time, or to get back on your horse if you’ve played before.
Exciting new ways to earn
Currently, players can earn $DERC by entering races and finishing in first, second or third position. If you’re not lucky enough to have one of the best-performing horses out there, you’ll be able to supplement your earnings through activity rewards as part of DeRace V2. This is all part of DeRace’s sustainable earning plan:
Horse levels
Horses will soon begin to earn experience points (XP) based on their activity. Horse levels will play an important role for wearable items (details below) because some items can only be equipped when certain levels are attained.
Chests, keys & shards
Chests and the keys required to open them are a new reward that can be earnt by completing missions and unlocking achievements. They come in various rarity tiers and contain horse equipment NFTs inside. Rarer chests are much more likely to contain a rarer piece of equipment.
Shards are a new form of in-game currency which are used to purchase chests and keys. Shards are earnt from completing missions and unlocking achievements, but also from playing the spin-the-wheel mini-game and even from burning NFTs. A new burning mechanism will allow you to burn unwanted items, horses or Liquid Love in exchange for shards.
Horse equipment
Obtained from opening chests, you will soon have 10 different types of NFT horse equipment items to kit out your horse. These include saddles, stirrups, blinkers etc and differ in condition (worn, fair and new) as well as rarity (common, uncommon, rare, epic and legendary).
Horse equipment is used to boost a horse’s performance. Items will clearly show which stats change when worn. It’s now up to you to equip your horse for the best possible performance, adding an element of skill to the game.
Missions & achievements
Players will soon be able to complete daily, weekly and monthly missions to earn rewards. You’ll earn smaller rewards for daily missions and larger ones for weekly and monthly. You can also earn bonus shards for completing them all. Daily missions will include tasks such as running 3 races or racing for a total of 30 furlongs in a day. The requirements for the weekly and monthly missions will require more player engagement.
Achievements can be earnt by players and horses. For example, horses may unlock an achievement for completing a certain number of races, whilst players might unlock an achievement for earning a certain amount of $DERC in total. Some rewards also include additional spin-the-wheel opportunities, on a recurring basis!
Renting horses for racing
Idle horses can now be put to work via renting for racing. Players can decide their rental fees and even benefit from any XP increases or horse achievements that are unlocked whilst their horse is being rented. Those who rent a horse from another player, will collect rewards from completing daily, weekly and monthly missions, as well as any prize money earnt.
Introducing DeRace V2
The development of V2 is nearly complete and ready for launch. It’s more than just a collection of new features, it’s the first iteration of a whole new game infrastructure built to be performant and scalable.
Performance & reliability improvements
In its current form, DeRace players must wait for blockchain transactions to complete when registering for a race or breeding. In the case of breeding, this involves many different transactions to approve the spending of multiple tokens.
By moving many of the game’s interactions off-chain, V2 replaces them with a lightning-fast experience that we’d expect to see in traditional games.
An example of the performance improvements to breeding functionality with DeRace V2:
“Implementation of these solutions is a very big scale upgrade that every player will notice personally. It allows us to create a flawless user experience flow where users don’t have to wait for transactions and face the frequent errors.”
New NFT utility & faster development
DeRace V2 bypasses the need for new smart contracts to be developed for each new feature and thus drastically reduces the time required to build new features. Moving interactions off-chain creates the possibility of new NFT horse utility which wasn’t previously feasible.
Most exciting of all is the suggestion of horse ancestry rewards. Imagine how quickly your earnings would multiply when you start collecting a percentage of your descendant’s winnings!
A cross-chain solution for GameFi
DeRace V2 might have been born out of necessity to improve the DeRace experience, but the team quickly realised its potential as a solution to be utilised by other game developers. V2 will be developed into a platform for gaming studios looking to break into the crypto-gaming space.
It will allow them to integrate blockchains and NFTs without the requirement for in-depth knowledge of the blockchain industry. Steps like these help to push blockchain technology closer towards mainstream adoption by reducing the barriers to getting started.
It's time to start racing
Despite the bleak outlook in the markets right now, there’s never been a better time to start playing DeRace.
The current market conditions provide the perfect entry point into the game. The floor price of a Gen1 NFT horse on Opensea is currently around 0.07 ETH or $150 at today’s Ethereum prices.
DeRace v2 is scheduled to launch within the coming days. It’s the update that players have been waiting for, as well as the catalyst for bringing in a whole host of new players. If you’ve not started racing yet, you can pick up a horse cheaply on Opensea and get a headstart on getting to know how they race. We recommend reading our racing page to learn the basics, and of course, you can find details of where to buy on our where to buy page.
For existing horse owners who perhaps weren’t staying profitable from racing, it’s important to remember that we’re still in the game beta and there’s still lots to be done to create earning opportunities. As the vision for DeRace’s sustainable earning model starts to unravel there will be many more opportunities to earn, and this starts with the launch of V2.
The new rewards which we’ve covered in this article will tip the balance and allow you to earn by engaging with the game, instead of just needing to win races.
Our tip
The best opportunities to earn from NFT horse equipment is within the first few day and weeks following the launch of V2. Horse equipment that you earn will give you an advantage over other racers until they’ve earnt some of their own. Any horse equipment that you choose to sell, will sell at a premium whilst the circulating supply is quite low. It will take some time for prices to settle to their “real” value, so in the meantime make sure you’re playing and making the most of the opportunity.
See you at the races!