No, the idea is like this - and the same idea also applies to those massive APY offers to provide liquidity pairing so they can grow a massive treasury because they think that size matters (and it may well do).
So these Heroes (like trading cards) are non-fungible tokens. 2,000 of them are originals or “Generation Zero”. For a cost (in Jewels), an owner of one Gen0 can hire another Gen0 from another member (for a cost in Jewels), and mint a new “child Hero”. The Gen0 can create ad infinitum (for a cost for each new Hero), but Gen 1, Gen 2, etc are limited to the number of offspring they can produce, and at an ever higher cost as the x in GenX increases. Gen 0 heroes are for sale in the Tavern, but the cheapest cost about US$50,000! Imagine getting in early and being the fortunate owner of one of them?
At some point, it becomes unprofitable to mint new Heroes. Since their release in August 2021, the original 2,000 have spawned over 70,000 (inflationary). But also since then, the game has introduced “quests” that the Heroes can perform every so often (like 3 times per day) and earn rewards (Jewel tokens and other items that are for use in the game - eg. to raise the Experience level of a Hero).
Let’s say that a Hero can earn 10% per month of its bought price. And that you paid 100 Jewel for it (about $1,400). If the game designers got their calculations wrong, the Hero would reduce in value by 10% in that month (to less than 90 Jewel), so although the owner of the Hero would have gained 10% in Jewel tokens, the real value of the Hero would have reduced more, so you would be in a loss. If the game designers got their calculations right, the Hero would actually increase in value, and if it did so by 10%, the overall gain in the month would be +10% from income (the widgets you won on the quests) AND 10% from the capital gain (the increase in value of the Heroes). The actual game is not as clearcut or simple as that. For example, you can park your Jewel in the bank at an interest rate of around 40% per year. You can pair your Jewel with the Harmony (ONE) token and commit the Liquidity Pair (LP) by sowing seeds in the garden. That earns about 500% interest per year. Again, if the game developers get it right, the market adoption of the game will far outweigh the potential depreciation of the Jewel (and to a lesser extent the ONE token).
An announcement was made two weeks ago that the Harmony game will now be “expanded” to the Avalanche network - this DeFi Kingdoms on ONE is sub-named Serenvale, whilst the expanded game on the AVAX network will be named Crystalvale, whose coin will be Crystals. Now in order to procure Crystals, it will require ownership of Jewel, which can be bought either within the game or with ONE tokens. At the game level (DeFi Kingdoms) the expansion to Avalanche is intended to massively grow the members. One way or another the “expanded” game will favour those long term holders of Jewel, and there is expected to be airdrops which favour Jewel holders.
So I have two reward / risk scenarios - extreme bad, and extreme good. The worst case scenario is that everyone stops playing the game, and you end up with a load of ONE tokens at less than you paid for them, and the Heroes are worthless. If that were to be a total loss, the Harmony ecosystem would also need to disappear and I have not included that scenario. A 90% loss is far, far more likely than a total loss of ONE token value. Harmony is a network, as is ETH, SOL, ADA, DOT etc. I do not think it will disappear soon. So let’s say I may lose 90% of my overall stake in DeFi Kingdoms.
The upside? ONE token does a X10. Jewel token does an X10. So the Jewel/ONE pair does a X100.
BTW there is a parameter that drives mass adoption of these investments. It is called Total Value Locked (TVL). TVL has grown from $10M to $40 bn (yes, 4,000 times) in the last 12 months across the entire space. Of all the NFT types out there, those attached to gaming where they can earn “stuff” that can be exchanged for stable coins, and therefore for fiat, are the only ones that make sense to me.
I deem the reward / risk ratio to be at least 10X and at the extreme potentially a 1,000X. And for that reason, I have opted to go big and go fast.
)
I’ve been interested in De-Fi recently because of you and I’m reading more about it. 
I guess at this point, my only concern is that the team behind this is completely anonymous. 
