Gamification in DeFi: A Double-Edged Sword for User Retention

Gamification has become a powerful tool for DeFi platforms seeking to attract and retain users in an increasingly competitive market. Marcel Thiess, a crypto and DeFi executive with experience at Binance and Amber Group, notes that gamification is quite good at bringing people in, but you should not expect it to keep them. The part that has to come from economics that work on their own.

The most successful projects currently leverage a vote-escrowed model in order to align long-term holders' interests with the health of the protocol. This approach works because it transforms a passive investment into an active and strategic game of resource allocation, making users feel like they're playing a game they're already winning.

Audit Origins rejects vanity metrics, pointing out that most of what gets called gamification in DeFi is basically paid activity with a leaderboard on top. The reason for this is pretty simple: the reward is funded by token emissions and not by the revenue the activity itself generates, so there is nothing really holding it together once the emissions stop.