A project that our research team has recently discovered and quickly gained interest in is Knights & Peasants (“K&P”) which lives on the Polygon blockchain.

Investment Highlights

Before going into more detail, let’s highlight the main points of interest about K&P:

• The initial investment includes a Badge (10 $MATIC) and one or more Knights. The Knight NFT floor price has been increasing over the past few months, and sits around 18 $MATIC.
• A reward system that provides $MATIC, based on total transaction fees, as the primary reward token to avoid inflation, and allow for a more sustainable earning experience.
• Polygon ensures low transaction cost and speed while enabling gas-free transactions on Opensea, Ethereum’s primary NFT marketplace.
• K&P has its own marketplace in-game, where you can P2P trade Knights, Peasants, and Items
• 20% of the $MATIC players spend will be given back through quests, while another 20% will be passively rewarded to Knight NFT holders.

Introduction

Knights & Peasants is an NFT-based questing and building simulation game. You are in charge of managing your Knights and Peasants, completing quests, and upgrading your army. The lore is a strong attribute of the game, luring players deeper into the Knights and Peasants journey.

During your quests, you can acquire goods and resources found around the Kingdom of Rensmira and return them to your kingdom for selling and crafting. A Peasant army will support your Knights in questing while crafting useful items and earning $KNP tokens passively, an in-game and off-chain currency. You can spend $KNP to upgrade your badge, unlock rewards, and many more future usages. Knights, Peasants, and Items are NFTs, which means they can all be sold on the built-in marketplace, creating a unique player-driven economy.

Tech / Infrastructure

The game initially launched on the Harmony Network, but recently launched on Polygon as well, following the North Korean hack on Harmony, to maintain the player’s trust and loyalty. The game is available to play on the official website through PC and mobile, by connecting a browser wallet such as Metamask.

History

Knights & Peasants is a project that “DarthKnight”, the Project Lead, started developing in February 2022. At the time, DarthKnight worked as a CM for Cosmic Universe. There, he met Shantastic, the second core member of K&P, who also worked as a CM. Shortly thereafter, the game launched its initial Knight NFT collection on March 26th, 2022, on the Harmony Network. Not long after the devs released its utility token, $KNIGHT. On the 4th of November 2022, the game migrated to Polygon, releasing 5,000 Knights, while holding weekly Peasant mints. The migration to Polygon started shortly after the Harmony Bridge hack, where the K&P team lost around 80% of their funds’ value.

Management Team

The K&P management team consists of 3 core members. DarthKnight, Shantastic, and Hopi, with two artists working closely, one is designing the UI and maps, while the second artist handles the NFT designs.

DarthKnight

He is the Project Lead. He is a former Community Manager of Cosmic Universe and a seasoned trader with more than 5 years of experience.

Shantastic

Shantastic is the Community Manager of K&P. She met DarthKnight when both were working for Cosmic Universe as CMs, where they began building the project. Additionally, she worked at EB Games for ten years. Together with DarthKnight, they were moderators for Atlantys, a Harmony Network project.

Hopi

Hopi is a Game Designer and the engine of K&P. He was recruited by DarthKnight and Shantastic to help them with K&P’s development and coding. Prior to this, he worked as a Developer for Freyala and has experience with web2 game development.

Investors

K&P is a self-sustainable project, with no initial investment funds. Resources for the game’s development are derived from NFT mints and player transaction fees.

User / Social Stats

The game is divided between the Harmony and Polygon Networks, with slightly more than 1,000 unique wallets interacting with the game, based on the team’s information. In the Discord channel, you will find about 4,350 users, with the channel showing high activity and support to new players.

Market Stats / Tokenomics

The game utilizes a dual token economy, with $MATIC and $KNP fueling the ecosystem. $KNP is an on-chain token with unlimited supply and various burning mechanisms, but is only used for in-game activities and can’t be exchanged for other currencies.

The $MATIC circulating supply is currently 8,734,317,475, with a total supply of 10B coins.

$MATIC

You’ll need $MATIC for paying transaction gas fees and upgrading your Knights. However, each Knight earns a portion of $MATIC passively (20% of the total $MATIC spent in the ecosystem is shared between all Knights). Additionally, you can earn $MATIC by selling items in the Marketplace, or by opening “Royal Bags” earned by questing.

The price of Matic has been increasing over the past month, from $0.76 to $1.09.

$KNP

$KNP is the in-game token. You can’t buy $KNP, only earn it through:

• Quests
• Badge (passive)
• Knight (passive)
• Peasant (passive)

It’s used for in-game activities, such as upgrading your Badge. In the future, it will have additional utilities, such as buying items from Vendors and upgrading your army.

Game Mechanics

Badge

You will need a Badge to unlock quests, which costs 10 $MATIC. Buying a Badge will also give you some items and provide 5 $KNP per day passively.

A badge contains rewards that will be unlocked and earned by the Badge owner. Completing Quests allows you to gain Badge XP. You will be able to upgrade your Badge and receive your rewards once you have leveled up your Badge.

Some of the most valuable rewards earned through the Badge upgrades include equipment, consumables, Knight’s Blessings (which increase your Knight’s stats), $KNP, and additional item slots.

Quests

Questing is the game’s main feature. To start questing you will first need a wallet connected to Polygon, such as Metamask, and some $MATIC in it, depending on the amount of Knights you wish to buy.

After you have bought your Knights and a Badge, you are ready to start questing. You can choose between Easy, Medium, and Hard Quests. Each quest provides some rewards based on its difficulty. To start a Quest you will need to assign a Knight to it, and, optionally, some Peasants and Items to increase the chances of completing the quest.

Each Quest has different stat requirements (Health, Attack, Defense, Speed, Charisma) that will determine if the Knight is strong enough to complete it. Based on the number of stat requirements met, you will be rewarded with some items. You’ll want to cover at least 3 of 5 stats to earn rewards. 

Every day there will be four quests of each difficulty available. Quests refresh every day. If you complete all four quests before the day ends, you have the option to refresh the quests, allowing for four additional quests, for a fee of 0.1 $MATIC. However, you can complete all four quests with no time restriction, and refresh when you have completed them all.

Knights

Knights can be upgraded to gain more stat points. More specifically, you can upgrade your Knight four times for a total of six stat points for 1/2/3/4 MATIC each time. A fully upgraded Knight also grants you 1 $KNP per day. 

There are some items earned through quests and Badge rewards that you can use to further increase your Knight’s stats. Knight’s Blessing provides one stat point of your choice to one of your Knights, while a Greater Knight’s Blessing grants between two and five attribute points.

Peasants

Peasants are NFTs without a max supply, who play an important supporting role in the universe of Knights & Peasants, such as accompanying a Knight on a quest. You can add up to three Peasants for each quest. They will benefit your Knight depending on the type of Peasant, its rarity, and how much you’ve upgraded the Peasant, improving the likelihood of completing the Quest. There are 5 types of Peasants:

• Hunter
• Chef
• Blacksmith
• Alchemist
• Farmer
• Priest
• Miner

Other attributes of Peasants are Rarity (Wood, Iron, Bronze, Gold, Platinum) and Skill (Novice, Amateur, Advanced, Competent, Expert, Grand Master). Each Peasant also has a Labor and Talent stat. Labor affects the amount of $KNP earned daily, and Talent influences the Peasant’s ability in Crafting.

You can purchase Peasants on the native marketplace or during the Peasant Mint which occurs weekly, with a price of 2 $MATIC per Peasant. An Enrollment Scroll (Item) gets you a free Peaseant of your choosing.

Items

You can earn Items through Quests and Item Vendors, as well as through Crafting. You may also trade with other players on our P2P marketplace. Items are classified into three types: equipment, consumables, and materials.

Items are essential to complete a Quest with a Knight that does not cover the stat requirements. By strategically using Items based on the stat that needs to be improved, you will complete quests without any issues.

Vendors

Vendors are in-game merchants where you can buy and sell Items for $KNP.

Forge

You can use the Forge to upgrade your equipment, merging two identical Items for a chance to receive a higher level Item. You can improve your chances using Peasants of higher stats and by burning $MATIC.

To use the Forge you have to assign a Peasant to complete the task, with a Peasant cooldown of two hours.

Crafting

Crafting is an in-game feature where you can create important Items to use in Quests, using lower rarity Items. For example, you can cook a Vegetable Soup using a Carrot, a Tomato, a Turnip, and an Orange Mushroom, or create a Lesser Health Potion with a Medicinal Herb and Red Wine.

ROI Scenarios

Let’s take for example that you hold three Knight NFTs. This passively earns around 0.02 $MATIC per day. Additionally, you can sell items on the marketplace, in this example accounting for 0.5 $MATIC on average per day.

With an initial investment cost of 74 $MATIC:

• 3 Knights of 18 $MATIC each
• 5 Peasants for 2 $MATIC each
• 10 $MATIC for the Badge

This accounts for an ROI of 132 days, or an annual ROI of ~176%.

Roadmap

Knights and Peasants still have many features in the makings, which will be implemented in the Polygon version, such as:

• City Building
• Squire Summoning
• Wage Farming

These features are expected to be added during 2023.

Key Takeaways

• Overall, the user numbers of Knights and Peasants may not be impressive, but there is a healthy dose of positivity in its vibrant community and supportive and hard-working devs.
• The game started its journey in a rough environment, developed right when the bear market of 2022 started. Right after, the Harmony hack greatly impacted K&P, which led to the Polygon migration. These are signs that the devs are willing to work through hard times and won’t abandon the project as soon as unfavorable conditions appear.
• Knights and Peasants offers unique gameplay mechanics. It requires strong strategic decisions, while the gameplay complexity, low entry cost, and transparent $MATIC rewards are scarce in the Web3 Gaming scene right now.

Key Risks

• The earning mechanism is strongly dependent on the amount of player activity, such as marketplace sales. A reduction in total sale volume will strongly affect your earning rewards.
• The team consists of a small number of developers and builders.
• No initial funding. 
• Knights and Peasants has yet to see friendly market conditions. Entering the scene in early 2022, it is important to see if the project’s resilience can withstand a longstanding bear market.