The problem Etherverse solves

The crypto native apps have evolved all these years and improved the UX to some extent however the average user time spent on crypto native apps is very low because the apps are boring. Users mostly visit the app, do their work and close the app. This might seem productive for pro users, however for new users there isn’t much to do, so they end up only talking about crypto stuff and not actually playing around/experiment with crypto native apps. Average user time spent can also co-relate with the crypto economy, hence the current to-the-point dapp design do not necessarily help improve crypto adoption.

A Gamifaction approach might increase the user intreset towards crypto and let their imagination fly with endless possibilites.

What if user gets to have some fun while using crypto native apps? But how? Metaverse!

Project basic details:

• 2D metaverse space where user can move around (inspired from gather.town).
• Each blockchain network is a city in this 2D space. The cities are connected with each other through bridges. Bridges allow users to walk to different city as well as use services to move funds to other chains.
• Each city has mall which contains number of shops which are basically dapps like Uniswap which users can interact with.

Overall benefits of such design to the crypto ecosystem:

• Enables to onboard new users who fear about crypto to join and become comfortable without actually spending money initially. Once they become comfortable, they can potentially move some of their fiat into crypto. This adds a bull effect to overall crypto industry’s market cap.
• Allowing pro crypto native people to have their control over the distractions within the metaverse, to enable the top tier professionals stay productive.

Challenges we ran into

Some incidents:

• We ran into frequent bugs while having the character walk around and the camera position not changing.
• While working on testnet, the test ERC20 tokens used in various protocols were different, hence we decided to build over production networks.
• Getting bridging progress was tricky, in order to move the truck. So we proceeded with LiFi’s API since it enabled generating estimates for every step in cross-chain transactions.
• We ran into hiccups with PUSH protocol’s RestApi SDK in browser. So we went through the sdk codebase and implemented logic in our frontend to display notifications.
• While creating a Valist release, we were not able to upload files in multiple directories. Hence, we explored their suite of tools and used their cli to deploy successfully.

In this hackathon project due to limited time, we have added support for only Ethereum and Polygon. However, we’d like to mention furture scope:

• The project can be scaled to include more EVM chains and dapps.
• Show nearby people using the app.
• Onchain bids for shop spaces in malls and native ad spaces for generating revenue.
• Improve support for more web browsers and integrate more wallets.