Title
MetaCartel Achievements via Infinity Keys 
Description
Hello MetaCartelians! 
We are Infinity Keys. We propose a 4-part gamified challenge that players can work through and gain more exposure to MetaCartel-supported projects.
This is a “pack” or set of challenges that Infinity Keys would build for Metacartel. It has a loose narrative theme, art, and a number of steps laid out for players to engage with various projects supported and built by Metacartel.
We propose to include MGD 
, Llama 
, Metagame 
, and/or MetaFactory 
in this challenge.
Objectives:
- Expose players to Metacartel projects
- Guide players through Metacartel onboarding
- Guide players to active participation in Metacartel projects
- Provide fun community-building experience for active community members
- Provide incentive and community-building for less-active community members
- Recycle existing marketing content via webpage, staking, etc to give it more run
Manifesto/Vision
Infinity Keys is a gamified achievements platform with composable pieces that helps projects & communities build engaging virtual challenges.
We want to give creators the tools to own their own gamified marketing pipeline. The vision is not just to free marketing from the shackles of middlemen by giving creators their own pipeline, that’s the core go-to-market angle, but there’s a larger vision that grows from this functionality.
Imagine people building their own games to incentivize anything. That’s the vision. A world 
of interconnected achievements and games. Use it for DAOs, use it for fandoms, use it for getting your kids to do their chores, use it to fix democracy, use it to lose 15 lbs, use it to promote Metacartel to more people.
Incentives fuel human activity, so let’s democratize, decentralize, and provide the connection for gamified incentives to work together. Anyone should be able to link into relevant hunts and challenges for anything they wish to create: Gaming achievements, sports achievements, grades and work objectives, health goals and marking special events with trophies and achievements.
We already see these incentives work in gaming on isolated ecosystems like XBOX, Playstation, or Steam Achievements. But with crypto we have the tools to expand far beyond gaming and connect all of those achievements together. We do that by giving people the tools and community to create, test, launch, and play these games together.
The result will be a massive set of side quests for people to explore and earn real treasure, whether financial or emotional. This is a different model of incentivized participation that has incredible potential to be paired with traditional incentives for a wide-ranging composable world of achievements and quests.
To us, this is the metaverse. Not a world of 3D pixels that can plug into a VR headset, but a world where one can create and pursue accomplishments across communities and worlds to give meaning to the connections and actions we’re all already taking.
Ok. Yes, that is the grand vision, but what are the steps to achieve this? For now we work directly with projects to do gamification design and implementation for challenges.
That brings us back down to earth. For this proposal, we would like to create a series of challenges for Metacartel to give new participants exposure to Metacartelian projects and incentivize them with fun activities and treasure.
Problem
Projects want gamification for their communities, but developing custom games is a long, uncertain process, while using existing platforms is just a one-time airdrop campaign that dilutes token supply and generates low-impact social media activity. In other words, current solutions are either expensive or shitty. 
Solution
Infinity Keys and total domination by (well-intentioned) tentacled space monsters
With IK, give your community stuff to do that feels like it actually matters. Community loyalty isn’t only about hodling. It’s about piquing curiosity, forming relationships, and having something memeingful 
to share with others.
Also, projects need recyclable processes that actually work and don’t break the bank. Projects are already investing in content, reuse that content and gamify it! Content is a loyalty factory if you incentivize it.
Plus, using composable assets as gamified experiences is a proven way to connect with new users through community cross-pollination. They’re more than collectibles, they’re composables. 
Product
For a demo and sample hunt, please see the live Infinity Keys packs - the Starter Pack is a simple place to begin to see how basic hunting works. The Metacartel challenge would fit in here among these and other upcoming project packs: Infinity Keys Packs
The steps in a Metacartel challenge would be something like:
- Complete a basic passcode challenge on the Infinity Keys site to claim an access key (NFT).
- Go into a Cryptovoxels plot to find a free mintable wearable from MetaFactory or related to a Metafactory irl wearable.
- Solve a riddle to figure out a Llama Mirror post that the player must collect.
- Collect a Meta Gamma Delta Lens post NFT.
- Check to see whether the player has joined the Metacartel Discord.
- Once the player has completed all of these steps and claimed a key (NFT) for each, they can claim the overarching achievement trophy (NFT), which Infinity Keys will use to conduct drawings for treasure, and which the user can display as a badge of honor.
The idea behind this type of challenge is to create minigames that are not too hard, but still make the player feel like they have accomplished something.
Themes: Part of the game design that Infinity Keys provides is a themed “story” for the player to engage with. A very light story would be implemented for this challenge TBD.
Validation
Infinity Keys milestones thus far:
-16,000+ mints across Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism & Avalanche
-Users paying gas.
-Tx fees & collection fees on Lens > 2500 paid mints
-Unique Wallets: 2,000+
-Average page time > 3min
We’ve worked with a number of projects including Lens, Cometh (signed and scheduled for launch Feb), Saga, Probably0, RehashDAO and more to create various gamified challenges, and we’re embarking on a series with several gaming partners to create challenges and eventually build overarching achievements that require players complete challenges across each game. It’s our way of expanding the metaverse.
Progress
We’re live and onboarding more communities all the time. We are currently converting to Redwood for our backend system to better handle the volume and structure of requests and also to create an organized and methodical method for challenge creation. This will allow us to launch many many more features and integrations and eventually launch a self-service portal and self-soveregin challenges.
Once funded, we can deliver a Metacartel challenge pack within 2 weeks minimum. We’d like to aim for February before ethDenver so we both have something fun to point to, but that’s just a matter of determining a good time to promote a few Metacartel projects.
Note: We are very much still actively developing and growing. We will be seeking Seed round funding and will certainly be soliciting metacartelventures and other values-aligned funding sources. This current grant would be like a client fee and we would classify it as revenue, but future opportunities do exist for Metacartelians to invest, and we are actively seeking synergies for technical build and business partnerships on this front as well.
Differentiation
We’re different from other task-reward projects in that we are building toward self-sovereign ownership of your own marketing pipeline, and our focus on gameplay experience. Challenges should not be just a retweet or follow spam campaign like Galaxy or Premint. Game mechanics are key, and as we move into a community-built gaming DAO, the branding and mission of the games themselves will take on a community life of its own.
Existing projects like Premint, quest.xyz, etc don’t give the creator any help. They say “Build a treasure hunt!” and those games are either just bribery campaigns to get retweets, or they end up being multiple choice quizzes. Come on, we can make better games than that! Making games is a major differentiator for IK.
The other differentiator is our goal of self-sovereign challenges. Creators will own the contracts to run their own games. This is a marketing pipeline that creators now have full control of, including its ties into other project hunts and challenges. To be clear, this is not live currently. However, the composability and immutability of on-chain assets means that as more challenges are created, more overlapping hunts can require the quests and hunts from today. There is no shelf life for on-chain records, so the future hunts can reference whatever we put out in the MVP versions of Infinity Keys.
Team
The full time team consists of Andy Boyan (PhD in digital games, formerly @ Chainlink Labs/Status/others) as CEO & Founder, Technical Lead Tawnee Allport, Technical PM Chair, Solidity Dev Pegacarter, experienced supporting advisors (including senior AAA and seasoned mobile game design talent), and a number of incredible part-time contributors.
We want to go far.
Grant Request $
7500 DAI Total
6000 DAI for challenge creation and launch.
1500 DAI for treasure rewards - will use funds to buy relevant NFTs and award as treasure.
Additional Resources
Infinity Keys Example Hunts - some are Sponsored Partner Hunts, some are just for fun and community.
IK on Lens
Discord