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DeFi City

Project details

Programme
Cluster RC12
Award
  • B-Pro Urban Design Gold Medal

What would a financial district in the Metaverse look like? DeFi City critiques the skyscraper as a symbol of capital and the unregulated systems of cryptocurrency through a business district entirely defined by highly volatile decentralised finance markets.


The game conceptualises a future where Metaverse urban form is fundamentally connected to crypto trading. As players engage with the city through cryptocurrency trades, they generate a city shaped by the expansion of different competing blockchain technologies and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations. Skyscraper typologies are generated by individual coin technologies, demonstrating the blurred relationship between symbolic value, economic utility and social media memes within the crypto ecosystem. As the game progresses, city morphologies can emerge as clusters of useful digital assets or devolve into unhinged dystopias where cartoon animals proliferate. DeFi City examines how the Metaverse may take symbolic forms from real cities and subject them to the erratic forces of decentralised finance, using the game to critique the idea of a virtual urbanism perpetually reshaped by the volatility of its own power dynamics.

01

Crypto Urbanism

DeFi City: Game Trailer

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DeFi City: Game Trailer

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A Financial District for Decentralised Finance

An expansive player-generated city. Each island constitutes a separate blockchain, with skyscrapers representing individual cryptocurrencies. The urban form of DeFi City represents investment decisions and chain growths in the crypto sector.

DeFi City Skyline

A view across DeFi City, showing the varying height of island agglomerations, a skyline driven by the relative power of competing blockchains. The city takes the symbolic form of a financial district and subverts it by subjecting it to market forces.

City Growth

City Growth

As players invest in blockchains, the city grows both vertically and horizontally, with new coins emerging on the chain, and the chain moving in relation to others. The player's investment strategies design the city's morphology in real time.

'Iceberg' City Type

An example of a conservative city where one blockchain has dominated the player's investment strategy. This produces a city on a large island mass demonstrating an urbanism growing from stability and confidence in the chain technology.

Blockchain Islands

Blockchain Islands

While skyscrapers represent individual cryptocurrencies, blockchains take the form of islands, growing as new coins and functions are added. As new chains emerge, new territories grow in the city, expanding but also potentially conflicting.

'Bubble Mountains' City Type

If players pursue a volatile investment pattern, chasing quick profits through 'pump-and-dump' and Meme Coins, the city will take a 'Bubble Mountain' form. Here tall structures occur at the expanding fringes of the city with depressed areas within.

'Rainforest' City Type

By investing in 'greener' blockchain technologies and coins, players can challenge the environmental costs of cryptocurrencies, moving the city form towards more sustainable technologies. The coloured island substructures communicate this change.

'Hot Explosion' City Type

When chasing meme coins and cryptocurrencies without utility is taken to its worst extents, the city might collapse in on itself, producing vast swathes of worthless areas defined by the failure to sustain value, a city lost to the Doges.

Eco Shift

Eco Shift

As well as growing vertically, players can see the relative ecological impact of the chain and coin technologies they choose to prioritise communicated through the game.

City Metrics

As players generate their unique city morphology through play, they can track the metrics that are shaping its urban form, and how these might correspond to certain organisational archetypes.

02

Life Within a DeFi City

DeFi City Streetscapes

DeFi City Streetscapes

Screenshot drawings showing views from within DeFi City, where the symbolism of the different cryptocurrency technologies combines with the typology of the skyscraper to produce a perpetually growing and shifting financial district.

In The City

In The City

In-game footage showing an aerial view of a mid-game DeFi City.

03

Mechanics of DeFi City

Architectural Investment

Architectural Investment

Players can invest in coins through interacting with their representative tower. While DeFi City starts with real cryptocurrencies, it also extends by procedurally generating new currencies, allowing for the game to project into market futures.

Engagement Strategies

Engagement Strategies

Different towers, and different coin types, require different types of investment strategy. How the player engages with these will change the overall morphology of the city.

Tower Typologies

The design of each tower is both symbolic, relating to the visual identity of the crypto coin, as well as computational. The growth patterns of towers are defined by the logics of the coin technologies that underpin them.

DAO Decision-Making

DAO Decision-Making

Players also participate in DAO votes to decide future zoning laws and design principles that guide the future of the city.

Scripting the City

Examples of the visual scripts that underpin DeFi City, as seen from the Unreal engine.

Weather System

Weather System

The city simulation includes a procedural weather system, where different patterns indicate market forecasts and can provide favourable conditions for investment.

Interface Studies

Study drawing demonstrating the User Interface of DeFi city. Within the game, players can bring up analysis to guide their investments, watch social media feeds unfold and understand the metrics of the city they are producing.

Social Prompting

As with the mainly unregulated crypto markets, social media is a key tool for driving the form of DeFi City. A constant feed of generated tweets and prompts offer informal direction to the player as to how the city's future form may develop.

Prototyping the City

Prototypes for the creation of the Unreal game including procedural distribution systems, game interfaces, material and shader experiments for skyscrapers and simulations of cryptocurrency markets in the generation of architectural form.

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The Bartlett
B-Pro Show 2022
27 September – 7 October
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