Parea Profiles: Polynize

9 min readMay 18, 2022

Welcome to Parea Profiles!

This is a series where we create profiles for each of our public investments in the cryptocurrency/blockchain space. Stay tuned! If you don’t know who we are, check out this article to get acquainted with us, Parea Capital, the best community-based crypto investment club in the Algorand ecosystem! Follow us, Parea Capital, here on Medium, on Twitter, or on Instagram to keep up to date with what we’re doing.

This week we are covering Polynize, the first #innovate-to-earn economy. They are bringing people, communities, and organisations together to solve problems using their gamified innovation economy — all built on Algorand.

Polynize Origins

Polynize’s mission began with an idea — how could innovation be encouraged and the creative process optimised? Co-founders Shourov Bhattacharya and Marrs Coiro, with their backgrounds as successful entrepreneurs creating value for brands across multiple industries (Sony Music, Ubisoft, Bollywood etc), embarked on this journey in 2018. Inspired by the creativity and innovation from the collaborative approach to creating music, they wanted to promote more successful innovation by translating that process to other problems. By connecting the need for innovation by organisations and communities with the creative potential of individuals, innovation can be pushed to its fullest extent.

Polynize 1.0

Developed initially as a tabletop game, Polynize was able to create a process that resulted in consistent quality innovation. Through multiple iterations of the game, their idea was further refined and evidence was gathered as proof of the viability of their model. The final Polynize 1.0 game was therefore optimised and created value for everyone involved — it became apparent that the process of innovation could be improved upon. The next step was clear with the emergence of Play-To-Earn and the gamified crypto structure to extend this model to a global scale.

Polynize, Innovate-To-Earn, and the PolyVerse

Welcome to the PolyVerse!

Polynize is using Algorand’s blockchain technology to move towards the future. “Players” are the creative individuals across the world looking to earn from their creativity. “Backers” are the brands, organisations, and communities looking for innovation to help them solve their biggest problems. Polynize is the bridge between them.

With impressive visual and interactive story-telling, which is designed to maximise engagement and enjoyment, Polynize is enabling anyone to earn from their creativity using their easy-to-use and accessible platform. Players can innovate to earn by taking on “Missions” that are minted by Backers to create Prize Pools. They then innovate and use their creativity to come up with solutions to these Missions, earning from Prize Pools based on performance. Polynize has not only incentivised innovation but also created a new payment stream for the creative individuals who take the lead.

Team

Principles

Polynize’s principles are that innovation is:

Directed: Bringing communities together based on a shared purpose
Quantified: Generating data about the innovation process to constantly improve
Tokenised: Minting the outputs of innovation into assets

Behind Polynize are some key ideas:

Powers: Everyone in this world has a unique talent or skill such that they can uniquely and creatively contribute to the process of innovation
Missions: Innovation thrives and so does creativity when they are brought together for a shared purpose of solving a problem
Collaboration: Innovation requires teamwork, communication, and creativity thrives when people are collaborating.

How does Polynize work?

Polynize’s sequence allows for creativity and innovation to excel — in any industry, for any problem, or in any organisation. The structure of solving Missions in collaboration with other Players, and being rewarded by the Prize Pools that are added to by the Backers with problems to solve, creates a cycle that allows continual innovation. Polynize has not only, therefore, created a platform for monetising your unique skills but it has optimised the process of innovation leading to benefits for all involved.

Missions

Missions are simply the problems that organisations and communities want to solve. By incentivising collaboration to solve these problems, Polynize has created a process by which both the innovators can earn from their creativity, and the problems get solved in an efficient way. These Missions are set up by Polynize in a way such that Players can collaborate easily to find solutions in a fun and purposeful way. Investors and organisations must buy a Mission PFT (“Poly Function Token”), using $PLNZ, to become Backers and have their problems solved by the Players taking on their Mission.

Powers

As mentioned earlier, Polynize considers everyone to have “Powers” — skills and talents that everyone has. With those Powers, they can uniquely contribute to the innovative process of solving problems. By collaborating with other Players with similar Powers, Guilds can form and essentially become “Superpowers” in solving the particular problems that they are best suited to.

Power is the key in-game resource for Players to earn from their performance. The higher your Power, the greater the rewards you can earn. These rewards are paid out in $PLNZ and scaled according to how successful your solution was. Powers are quantified by the 6 parameters; Creativity, Courage, Communication, Commitment, Collaboration, and Competition. The aim for Players is to have the highest Power in the game, incentivised by these higher rewards for successful “Polys” (more on Polys in the next section). Power Factor, which is normalised across the network, is scaled from 0.0 to 5.0 and calculated by a calculation of dividing your Power by the number of Polys you have created. Those who are more capable of creating optimal solutions (Polys) are proportionally rewarded.

Play Hard, Poly Hard

Players earn “Power” and rewards by creating solutions (“Polys”) to Missions. Each Poly is minted as a unique solution to a problem and is valuable to the Backers since they are possible solutions to the problem they want to be solved. The best solutions to a mission, i.e the Polys that are chosen, are called Gold Polys and the Players who created them earn the highest rewards. The less supported Polys, which are called Green Polys, are rewarded for their efforts as well, albeit less than the Gold Polys.

The collaborative process is underwritten by the process of the “Spark”, in which a Poly created by one Player sparks creativity in another that they can continue to build upon to facilitate efficient and optimised solutions. Sparks are allocated to signal to other Players that they want to build upon an existing Poly. As these Sparks and Polys multiply, the Mission can be solved in the most efficient and innovative way possible. Polys also can spawn other Missions in a process called “Evolution”, which opens further collaborative capabilities to take the solution from a proposal to actual implementation.

$PLNZ and PFTs

The $PLNZ token is used to facilitate the Polyverse. It is used to access, participate, and trade — Backers need it to fund Prize Pools for Missions, Players need it to join those Missions, and Traders need it to trade PFTs. It is also required to “train” innovation Powers, to play Polynize, and join Guilds too.

PFTs are “Poly Function Tokens” and, using Algorand’s NFT capabilities, they represent a variety of different tradable assets: Mission PFTs, Poly PFTs, Avatar PFTs, Join Mission PFTs, and Power-Up PFTs. The first PFTs will be traded on existing NFT marketplaces soon. However, in the future, these PFTs can be traded on Polynize’s in-game Innovation Marketplace, with multiple royalties and other perks as well!

PFTs are needed to represent each unique Poly, and they have value as tradable assets since each isn’t solely applicable to one organisation, individual, or community — you can earn from trading your innovations. Other PFTs have utility: Avatar PFTs are essentially PFP NFTs and give access to certain functions, purchasing Join Mission PFTs allows Players to join Missions and Power-Up PFTs boost Power to enable higher rewards.

Platform and Governance

Polynize is unique with its approach to governance in the cryptocurrency landscape, choosing to use its own platform to enable it. By minting Governance Missions, any $PLNZ holder can participate in creating a Poly and the Gold Poly is put to a vote to the community using $PLNZ. Users therefore can participate the entire way from helping to solve the Mission to approving the best solution.

The first version of the platform is planned to go live on Mainnet in June 2022. The Game Arena, which is based on Polynize’s 1.0 tabletop game, is where Players undertake their missions — optimised for mobile-first. The Polynize Academy is a custom Discord where Players can gather to train, meet one another, and prepare for Missions. Players can also join Guilds and choose Missions from Mission Control. Polynize’s own innovation will not stop there though! They are planning on creating a Governance API to port to other DAOs and organisations in the future so others can use their unique governance approach. With its own AI capabilities, Polynize will mine the data layers of innovation to predict Missions and build Guilds/Teams autonomously as well.

Views From the Parea

“During my years working in corporate environments, I have been involved in many meetings to think upon and improve designs and other different kinds of brainstorm sessions. They were typically awkward, tedious, and chaotic. Polynize offers an exciting new age alternative by leveraging blockchain through gamification of design thinking and problem-solving! I see a huge promise in Polynize — there is great demand among enterprises for more inspiring ways to engage teams and workgroups.”

“Polynize is not just another blockchain project, it is a “humanity” project; a “great minds” project; a “we are better together than apart” project; a “worldwide brainstorming session” project! I am fascinated by what they are working on and bringing to the market. The chance to think deeply about serious issues and problem-solve a solution that anyone can benefit from is so cool!”

“Polynize is one of the rare blockchain projects where their story does not begin at the blockchain but long before. It’s gamified innovation; gamified progress! The founders are highly recognised entrepreneurs and renaissance men. They are taking an already successful project and granting access to its benefits to the whole world! They’re also genuinely responsive, kind and friendly people.”

Next Time on Parea Profiles

Thanks for reading and have a great week! Please make sure to follow Polynize on Twitter, as well as check out their website to learn more. WAGMI!

Check back in a couple of weeks for our next article on Algoracle, the first natively-built decentralised oracle on Algorand. Don’t miss out on the next exciting instalment of our series, Parea Profiles — you won’t want to miss this one! Follow us, Parea Capital, here on Medium, on Twitter, or on Instagram to keep up to date with what we’re doing.