Three months into its closed beta, the Walken team has announced the long-anticipated launch of the public beta on June 7 for players to try out the free-to-play win-to-earn game before the main launch. The enhanced and thoroughly polished Walken app will welcome everyone to take part in the public beta that will be available for download, both iOS, and Android, in the App Store and Google Play Market. From P2P competing and motivating players to lead a healthier lifestyle to the upcoming breeding of CAThletes and more, Walken promises to be a wholesome move-to-earn experience. The game’s first NFT public sale goes live in June, with the IEO to follow. Shima Capital and Infinity Ventures Crypto are among Web3 investors who backed Walken in a $4.7M funding round.
What is Walken?
Walken is a free-to-play win-to-earn game built on the Solana blockchain. It combines sports and crypto while focusing on the natural human drive to walk and get moving. By walking in real life, players earn gems, the in-game soft currency, with the help of which upgrade their in-game characters — CAThletes — and compete to win $WLKN tokens. In turn, the tokens can be used to upgrade a CAThlete’s level (and the three stats: speed, stamina, strength) or buy NFT items on the Marketplace that add extra stats points and help win more competitions. Each CAThlete is generated from a unique gene set that determines their appearance, stats, and rarity. The values of the stats significantly affect the chance to win in a particular running discipline.
The gameplay focuses on upgrading CAThletes and taking part in running competitions to win $WLKN tokens. Every time a CAThlete’s level increases, its characteristics also grow. CAThletes compete in 6 Leagues, with a higher reward on a stake in each subsequent League. From the start, any CAThlete can enter League 1 and compete in 3 running disciplines: sprint, marathon, and urban running. To enter the next League offering a higher reward per each competition won, a player would need to bring his CAThlete to the next level. Summing up, the more a player walks in real life, the higher the stats of a CAThlete get, and the more often it wins in competitions and can compete in higher-level Leagues, earning more $WLKN in the long run.
The Bigger Vision
Built-in the simplest move2play win2earn mindset, Walken has both the potential and capabilities to democratize blockchain gaming for those who need it the most by onboarding non-crypto people to the DeFi in less than 30 seconds. Each player is provided with a crypto Wallet and one in-game character for free upon registration so that they are set to walk and earn straight away. That means a player is set to generate yield with zero investment. Nevertheless, players also have the option to begin their journey with Walken by purchasing an NFT character and gear to accelerate their progress and start earning more tokens faster.
The team is also driven by the global vision to build the Walken protocol as a platform to onboard other developers and expand the web3 eco-system with consumer-oriented products.
Thus, our mission is to simplify the crypto experience for players, driving a flood of new users into Web3 and positively impacting their lives while providing stable environments for $WLKN token and encouraging players to make a positive change to their lifestyle and well-being.
Picking up Steam
Emerged as a daring idea that was drawing inspiration from Tamagotchi and Pokemon GO, Walken has come a long way from an early concept to a fully-fledged move-to-earn game operating on the blockchain.
The closed beta started in March 2022 has been a smashing success, having welcomed 10k beta testers from 120 countries. And now the total number of testers has exceeded 10k from more than 120 countries, and their CAThletes have taken part in over 1.25 million competitions in total. The Walken team has seen the concept and the application resonating with the community on a deep level: testers have hit a remarkable total of 830 million steps during the closed beta – this amount of steps is equal to walking around the world 13 times!
On the course of the closed beta, the Walken application has seen a significant number of prominent changes: reimagined competitions now focused on showing the stats and steps of the rivaling CAThlete rather than on visualizing them running; redesigned Wallet with transaction detalization and day-by-day sorting; SOL support and QR code sharing, as well as enabling players to send, receive and – all these features make the Walken in-game wallet a fully-fledged crypto wallet; support for wearables devices for iOS, and many more, with even more to come!
The Walken community has seen exponential growth and now amounts to more than 286k in total in all social networks, getting bigger and bigger every day. The team is extremely grateful for the engagement and feedback of the community – it is a driving force of the game development, helping refine the game day by day.
The Walken team is currently working to add more gameplay features that will let users create and try more strategies, as well as more ways to utilize the tokens (like cross-breeding, tournaments between users based on steps or competition wins, etc.). Time-limited events where users can monetize their activity in the app even better and NFT life cycle together with further utility improvement will enhance the gaming experience and empower the players to earn more. In addition to walk-to-earn and competitive content, Walken has set up a CAThlete breeding system. With this, players will soon be able to breed two CAThletes to create new CAThletes with different speed, stamina, and strength stats, possibly colors, and visual traits. Players might even just be able to breed the ultimate running champion, extremely skilled in one of the three stats!
Walken has onboarded Blockwiz, a premium web3 marketing solutions provider, to help with expansion in new markets.
Disclaimer: This is a paid post and should not be treated as news/advice.
