Zentry: A World Where All Real-Life Interactions Become Games
Nexus Realizes Zentry's Vision of Play Economy
This report was written by Tiger Research, analyzing how Zentry's metagame vision is implemented through the Nexus platform.
TL;DR
Digital economy treats attention as a scarce and valuable resource. Attention alone cannot create sustainable value. Attention must convert to participation to produce real effects.
Zentry's Nexus converts attention into participation effectively. It offers class systems where everyone can participate. It uses gamification elements to encourage active engagement. Attention serves as currency in the digital economy. Nexus manages this value efficiently like a financial system.
The Nexus model could create a new paradigm for the attention economy. It must prove sustainable participation and reward mechanisms. The metagame vision's realization also remains a challenge.
1. Is Attention All We Need?
Attention is the most valuable resource in today’s digital economy, with companies competing fiercely for this limited asset. However, attracting attention alone does not create sustainable value. Investing resources solely to gain attention is like fueling an idling car—the fuel burns, but the car goes nowhere.
Attention gains true value only when it drives real engagement. Passive attention is fleeting and unsustainable, while active user interaction strengthens ecosystems and amplifies network effects. Yet, converting attention into participation remains a huge challenge.
As digital attention costs continue to rise, companies must move beyond capturing it and develop strategies to transform attention into meaningful engagement. This requires effective incentives and diverse participation opportunities. In this context, Zentry’s gamified attention economy platform, Nexus, offers a compelling solution for converting attention into participation.
2. Nexus: Zentry’s Gamified Attention Economy
Zentry develops a Play Economy Web3 platform that turns everyday activities into games, blurring the lines between reality and gameplay to add meaning and value to interactions.
Nexus is the first step in bringing Zentry’s vision to life. It gamifies social media communication, transforming passive attention into active participation. This participation attracts more attention, which, in turn, drives further engagement, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem.
Nexus integrates SocialFi and InfoFi concepts into a distinctive model that quantifies social media activity and rewards participation to generate economic value. Beyond financial incentives, it establishes a market-driven system where users directly evaluate the quality and influence of information.
2.1. Class System: Storyteller and Watcher
Existing digital platforms limit participation and rewards to creators. However, Nexus introduced a class system, a so-called 'job' mechanism, where all users can participate and be active. Currently, it features two classes: Storyteller and Watcher.
Storytellers create and share content to drive user attention and participation as key contributors. Anyone can acquire this class without requirements. Users' social media content is automatically aggregated in Nexus, where Watchers and Nexus’s AI system evaluate these activities to determine rewards.
Watchers play a critical role in Nexus’s growth, extending beyond passive observation. Users who meet specific criteria—such as token holding, staking, or project selection—can acquire this class. Watchers evaluate content quality generated by Storytellers and help distribute attention and rewards throughout the ecosystem. On traditional digital platforms, most users remain passive observers. Nexus assigns roles and incentives to these users, encouraging active engagement.
Nexus’s class system extends beyond Storytellers and Watchers. While it currently focuses on social media, it will expand through integrations with Zentry’s services and external platforms, introducing new classes and building a comprehensive ecosystem. This ecosystem will support diverse participation and reward structures, including on-chain activities. For example, the Chainwalker class could be introduced for Web3 users who engage with platforms like DeFi. Users can develop and level up multiple classes simultaneously, forming a unique identity within the ecosystem.
2.2. Gamification: Nexus Missions and Story Cards
Nexus provides gamification features based on its class system, including Vault (point) rewards and leaderboard competitions. In addition to these basic elements, Nexus introduces 1) Nexus Missions and 2) Story Cards, enhancing engagement through structured challenges and interactive rewards.
Nexus Missions serve as a quest system that presents users with various challenges, encouraging active participation—similar to mobile game pre-registration events. For example, a mission could be about inviting new users to bootstrap the early growth of a project’s community. Upon reaching achievement milestones, the platform conducts buybacks, rewarding the entire ecosystem.
Users collaborate on these missions, experiencing shared accomplishments, much like raid missions in games. Nexus Missions are an effective strategy for short-term platform activation and provide projects with a fast and efficient way to achieve their goals. At the same time, users receive a balanced mix of economic rewards (points, tokens) and non-economic rewards (Story Cards, achievements). This multi-layered reward structure will play a key role in increasing participation rates.
Story Cards emerge from user interactions rather than preset challenges, making them distinct from Steam achievements or PlayStation trophies. They naturally accumulate based on activities, reflecting individual experiences and contributions and resulting in a unique journey for each user. This organic system is expected to strengthen long-term retention.
For example, Nexus awards special cards to users who have played Axie Infinity or invested in specific memecoins. These cards serve as growth hacking tools by encouraging users to showcase them on social media. In the future, they may offer exclusive benefits such as special privileges or whitelists.
2.3. zAI: Accelerating the Ecosystem with AI Technology
Nexus integrates AI technology to drive user engagement and enhance platform activity. Zentry’s zAI framework enables real-time interaction between AI agents and users, delivering personalized experiences that foster active participation. zAI operates through two core agent: Persona Agents and Operator Agents, each playing a distinct role in optimizing user experience and maintaining seamless ecosystem operations.
Persona Agents function as "living NPCs" with distinct personalities and roles beyond simple chatbots. They interact with users in real-time as autonomous entities within the platform. For example, "Alicia," an AI agent operated by Zentry, acts as a Watcher, verifying content and rewarding outstanding posts. She also encourages engagement through real-time interactions. Currently, Alicia is the only active Persona Agent, but Nexus plans to expand zAI-powered Persona Agents for partner projects like Ronin and Injective.
Operator Agents optimize backend platform operations, enhancing ecosystem reliability and efficiency. They handle on-chain data verification, data oracle integration, content quality management, reward distribution, and rule enforcement. Additionally, they extend Nexus’s functionality by integrating with external AI agents, creating a more flexible and scalable ecosystem.
Nexus positions AI agents as core elements of its ecosystem, not just operational tools. These agents actively communicate with users and operate autonomously. Both Zentry’s AI agents and external AI models can participate as Watchers or Storytellers, collaborating and competing with users and other AI agents. This creates a virtuous cycle where high-quality content is generated, real-time interactions increase engagement, and rich experiences continue to evolve. Through this structure, Nexus builds an immersive ecosystem where AI and humans don’t just create content together—they play, collaborate, and compete as equal participants in a new digital society.
3. Nexus Momentum, The New Opportunities They Bring
3.1. Removing Market Friction in the Attention Economy
Traditional digital marketing incurs high costs for simple exposure, yet its ability to drive real user participation remains uncertain. In the Web3 industry, marketing reliant on large influencers (KOLs) faces several challenges. Unclear standards create market friction, as the industry lacks reliable methods to evaluate influencer impact, determine compensation, and measure performance objectively.
Nexus addresses these issues by applying market economy principles. Users directly assess and verify content value, enabling transparent measurement of influencer impact and content worth. This shifts influence from a few large players to a broader network of participant leaders, fostering a more sophisticated value assessment system within the attention economy.
This structure reduces market friction and boosts engagement through a dual flywheel model. The Attention Flywheel encourages users to share experiences, generating organic content and expanding network effects, which in turn attracts new users. The Contribution Flywheel provides a foundation for various ecosystem participants, including token holders, who contribute to sustained activity.
These two flywheels interlock, forming a virtuous cycle: attention converts into contribution, and contribution amplifies attention. This model may mitigate market friction in the attention economy.
3.2. Connecting Identity Between the Real and Digital
Zentry's Play Economy concept extends to Metagame. Legendary game designer Richard Garfield proposed the Metagame concept. It refers to the broader context around games. Poker provides a clear example. Poker played in a casino differs completely from poker played with friends for small stakes. The rules remain identical, but they create entirely different experiences. From Garfield's perspective, games extend beyond simple rules. All surrounding elements become part of the game.
Zentry actively utilizes this metagame concept. Specifically, it aims to: 1) make reality game-like by adding game elements to daily activities, 2) give real-world value to games through tangible and intangible rewards, and 3) create a larger "game of games" encompassing everything. Nexus serves as the central hub of this metagame. It connects and accumulates all experiences. Nexus will integrate with Zentry's other products. These include Radiant, a gaming platform for Web2 and Web3 games. Azul acts as a playable AI companion. Zigma represents an NFT collection. Vault functions as a staking platform.
Nexus extends to everyday activities. All environments interact like games and connect organically. Life itself becomes an MMORPG-like experience. For instance, when a user plays "Dota 2," Radiant saves their record; when they write a game review on X, Nexus verifies it through Radiant's records and provides rewards. Game elements even apply to daily activities like cafe visits or shopping, where users might earn rewards for actions such as drinking coffee seven straight days.
User interactions accumulate in Nexus. It functions as a digital identity spanning reality and digital realms. Previously fragmented data connects into one integrated form. Users gain enhanced experiences and rewards through this integration. These rewards generate more attention to the platform. This attention transforms into active contributions. These contributions accumulate as meaningful data. This creates a virtuous cycle where value continuously flows and grows throughout the ecosystem.
5. Closing Thoughts
Zentry’s Nexus transforms "attention," the scarcest digital resource, into "participation." While attracting attention is important, true value emerges when it converts into active engagement and contribution. Nexus facilitates this transformation through growth hacking strategies and diverse incentives.
In the digital economy, attention functions as currency—an increasingly scarce yet valuable asset. Nexus acts as a financial system for this currency, managing its liquidity, accumulating its value, and ensuring its efficient distribution. Its class system, gamification elements, and AI technology enhance attention efficiency, making engagement more sustainable. In the future, attention will become an even more important resource. Systems like Nexus that efficiently utilize this attention will present a new paradigm for the digital economy.
Zentry’s Nexus has already recorded 150,000 users, 81 million impressions, and over 1.3 million engagements. Yet, these numbers mark only the beginning of its broader vision. How Zentry will seamlessly implement its metagame—blurring the boundaries between reality and games—remains to be seen. Their potential to reshape the digital economy is just beginning to unfold.
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This report was partially funded by Zentry. It was independently produced by our researchers using credible sources. The findings, recommendations, and opinions are based on information available at publication time and may change without notice. We disclaim liability for any losses from using this report or its contents and do not warrant its accuracy or completeness. The information may differ from others' views. This report is for informational purposes only and is not legal, business, investment, or tax advice. References to securities or digital assets are for illustration only, not investment advice or offers. This material is not intended for investors.
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