Summary

We are creating a platform for rewilding projects around the world to adopt Web3 technology to educate and receive donations. The educational experience starts by engaging the user by giving them the option to sponsor a digital version of an animal at a sanctuary (through NFTs), which will become his learning partner to the world of rewilding.

Visit wildfriends.xyz for more information.

Wild Friends

Adopt a virtual animal and rewild the world - in collaboration with Senda Verde Bolivia wildfriends.xyz

Intro

A game to support rewilding projects and wildlife sanctuaries through digital collectibles (NFTs) that represent the different species required to regenerate an ecosystem. These digital collectibles will be used to unlock different pollinators, plants, trees and animals inside the game, with which you will earn daily rewards and get boosted for funding and learning about the right combinations of species to rewild ecosystems. Your companion throughout the game will be a digital collectible of an animal at a wildlife sanctuary, whose environment you’ll be a able to customise through the rewards earned with your rewilding and regeneration efforts. The pilot for this project is Senda Verde, an exotic animal shelter in Bolivia.

Vision

Guided by the fact that conservation and pure reforestation/carbon capture is not enough to restore the ecosystem, our vision is to change people’s minds about climate efforts to a regenerative focus with the goal of recreating a world richer in nature where wildlife thrives. We have seen a tremendous opportunity to expand the rewilding model with web3, thanks to recent advances in regenerative finance and support for public goods.

Among the opportunities that web3 brings, we have identified 3 relevant uses for Wild Friends that can be expanded to other rewilding projects and wildlife sanctuaries:

• Open source allows this model to be replicable to more rewilding projects and to create a network of mutually supporting projects and sanctuaries.
• NFTs and SBTs (Soulbound tokens) to raise funds, educate and reward volunteers, artists and donors who support these projects, starting with Senda Verde.
• A video game to connect with rewilding projects and wildlife sanctuaries without the need to physically visit them.

How it works

Volunteers, artists and the Senda Verde team stand out for their ability to create art inspired by the experience of visiting the sanctuary and sharing with the animals, listening to their stories and transmitting them to the world.

These works of art (painting, photography, video, drawing or even music) thanks to web3 have a lot of potential to generate an income that will help to give sustainability to Senda Verde. So we will use them to create digital collectibles (in the form of NFTs) that not only crowdfund for these projects, but also create social awareness, entertainment, engagement and a sense of community to educate people about the importance of regeneration of the environment to effectively recover from the climate crisis.

We are creating an engaging and interactive way to motivate the purchase and use of these digital collectibles. The form is a video game where collectors can interact with digital versions of the animals, and create the right combinations of pollinators and plants, while collecting artwork and visit the environments of their friends. The “book of collectibles” will function as a "Green Passport" to show your friends the different rewilding projects you supported, the art of the animals and even get access to cameras in those wildlife sanctuaries.

Our MVP

For our MVP we developed a simple game in Unity where you can move, feed and give water to an animal. We also have a basic environment customization system which aims to educate about how rewilding works. As of now we have 4 playable animals: jaguar, bear, caiman and deer, 1 pollinator and more than 20 plants to combine.

For the Web3 implementations, we used Bonfire to build our website and to token-gate the page with the game embed. Decent was used to mint the NFTs that give you access to the different animals.

As our project gains more traction, we will develop our own systems to tackle these problems and make them open-source and accessible so that more projects can plug-in to the game and benefit from these efforts.

Previous funding and future funding

We received a lot of support during the Devcon VI Bogota CLR QF Round, and we used those funds to develop our MVP. Now that we have a proof of concept and have received a lot of attention from big players in the ecosystem, we want to level up the game mechanics and focus those resources in hiring another game developer, while continuing with our marketing and partnership efforts. At the same time, we need to abstract away all the web3 touch points (connecting wallet, etc...), so that the user can experience the game without going through that steep learning curve.