Clam Island Essential Visitor’s Guide

Ahoy there Clam Island visitors!

In preparation for the impending Clam Island launch, we are publishing this Essential Visitor’s Guide, which is intended to help our newer visitors gain an understanding of what is that we do here at Clam Island.

Unlike our introductory medium article, which assumes familiarity with the DeFi / yield farming scene, this guide is designed to be friendly to our novice visitors, with the aim of being as easy to understand as possible.

Ready? Let’s go!

What is Clam Island?

Clam Island is an immersive 3D island where you can invest using the power of blockchain and yield farming by interacting with in-game characters. You can also buy Clams and use them to produce Pearls, both of which are NFTs that you can use to generate yield, boost your investment returns, keep because they’re cool, or sell to another collector.

In short, we want to make investing easy and fun. Perhaps you have heard of Play-to-Earn. At Clam Island, we see ourselves as the first Play-to-Invest solution on the market.

If you don’t know what yield farming and NFTs are, don’t worry, we’ll give you a short explanation later — but we do recommend that you also research the topics yourself to stay informed.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so rather than waste more time explaining, this is Clam Island:

Nice place, isn’t it? You can visit it by going to https://clamisland.fi. But what to do once you’re there?

Well, as you can see, we are not yet open, but once we are open, you can go into any one of the five buildings to do various things.

Visitor’s Info Center

This is the lighthouse building you see at the back. All types of information about Clam Island and its ecosystem, including this guide, can be found in there.

Clam Island Bank

This is the building you see in the centre of the island. Once inside, you will be greeted by Tanja, our resident Clam Island banker:

Inside the bank, you can do a number of things:

1. Exchange between cryptocurrencies (in the future, you will be able to directly use currencies such as dollars, euros and others to buy a cryptocurrency of choice).
2. Choose an investment pool to deposit your funds. There will be a range of different cryptocurrencies, with each pool yielding a variable rate of return. Some pools are safer than others in terms of price volatility — we have given them a risk rating as a guide. Riskier pools tend to have higher yields, but you would be more exposed to a drop in the value of your principal.
3. Collect your yields in the Clam Island native currency, $GEM. These tokens can be easily converted to other cryptocurrencies, be invested into the native $GEM token pools for higher yields, or be used to buy Clams / produce Pearls! Keep reading to find out what Clams and Pearls are all about.
4. Boost the yields in particular investment pools using your Clams or Pearls. The amount of $GEM boost will depend on the traits of your Clam or Pearl.

Clam Shop

This is the building on the far left. From the resident shopkeeper, Diego, you can:

1. Purchase Clams with $GEM tokens, which you can buy from the Bank or earn from your investment pools. 80% of the $GEM used is burned (meaning destroyed forever) to combat token inflation and to create a sustainable ecosystem, while 20% of the $GEM is transferred to Clam Island treasury to fund ongoing Clam Island development. We have a much bigger vision for Clam Island and many planned features and expansions — stay tuned!
2. Harvest your Clams for $SHELL tokens, which is the governance token of the island. The harvesting process will destroy your Clam and is irreversible! The more Pearls your Clam has produced, the more $SHELL tokens it can be harvested for (unless the Clam is dead — pay attention to the Lifespan trait! More on this under the Farm heading). These tokens will allow you to participate in future democratic governance decisions relating to the development and management of Clam Island, and they can also be invested in the Bank to earn yields in $GEM. The supply of $SHELL is limited and can only be increased from harvesting Clams.

All Clams are fully rendered in 3D and interactive. No gifs or videos here!

Every Clam that you buy has randomised traits. There are over 6 billion different possible combinations, including a variety of shapes, colours and tongues, so your Clam is almost certainly going to be unique! Here’s an example of a few Clams:

That said, some Clam traits are rarer than others, so to help you identify just how rare your Clam is, we have included a rarity tier system which ranges from Common to Legendary. More information on the drop rates and rarity tiers can be found here.

We hear that Diego also has plans to expand his shop to sell more than just Clams — stay tuned!

Clam Farm

This is the building on the far right, run by your humble resident farmer, Al. Here you can:

1. Deposit Clams in order to produce Pearls. It costs 10 $GEM and takes between 1–5 days to produce one Pearl, and each Clam has a fixed lifespan trait (randomised between 5–15) that dictates how many Pearls it can produce before it dies. A dead Clam can still be traded or held as a collector’s item, but it will no longer be able to be harvested for $SHELL tokens in the Shop, and it can no longer produce Pearls.
2. Collect produced Pearls and withdraw deposited Clams (for example, if you want to sell them).

Here’s an example of some types of Pearls that you can produce:

All Pearls are also fully rendered in 3D, and if we may say so ourselves, they look B-E-A-utiful. That said, there are also billions of different possible trait combinations for Pearls, so by design some Pearls are rarer and (dare we say) more beautiful than others.

The traits of our Pearls are inspired by real-world Pearl traits, such as body colour, overtone, surface and lustre. There’s a rumour on Clam Island that in the future you may even be able to redeem some Pearls from Clam Island for pearls in the real world!

Saferoom

This is the building that looks like a vault in front of the Bank and the Farm, and it’s where all your purchased Clams / collected Pearls go. From here you can:

1. View all of your Clams, except those that you deposited in the Farm (which you can view from the Farm);
2. View all of your Pearls, except those that have been produced but have yet to be collected from the Farm.

This is also where you see all the detailed stats for your Clams and Pearls, such as rarity tiers and traits.

Markets

Wait, another building? Ok, so this one hasn’t been built yet, and won’t be ready until some time after we open Clam Island. This will be where you can trade your Clams and Pearls directly on the Island. Until then, you are able to trade Clams and Pearls on third party NFT marketplaces, or you could still use them to produce Pearls / boost Bank returns or harvest for $SHELL tokens in the case of Clams.

A few technicalities…

There are a few technical terms used in this guide, so in case you are not familiar with them, we give a (very) short explanation here:

1. Blockchain — this is the technology that makes Clam Island possible. It is a decentralised immutable system of verifying transactions without requiring a central authority, like a government or a bank. All transactions are also (generally) publicly available and therefore verifiable by anyone. Today there are many different blockchains, and the chain that Clam Island is built on is Binance Smart Chain (BSC). It is also possible for a project to go cross-chain to increase reach and exposure. Clam Island has plans to do this in the near future after launch.
2. Yield Farming — a cornerstone of the Decentralised Finance (DeFi) movement enabled by blockchains with smart contract capabilities such as Ethereum and BSC. Yield farming is a way for investors to earn returns by depositing funds into a “farm” consisting of various pools that are purely governed by a smart contract. Users can “farm” the returns by “harvesting” the rewards (like $GEM) as you would a crop, and then choosing to sell them, keep them or reinvest them. Funds deposited in a legitimate yield farm are governed only by the rules publicly verifiable in the smart contract code; no one else has arbitrary control of the funds, unlike in a traditional banking or investing scenario.
3. NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens, is a type of tokens on the blockchain designed to represent a particular asset (instead of a currency where every unit of a particular token is interchangeable with any other unit of the same token). Leveraging the decentralised, immutable and public nature of blockchain, NFTs are pioneering new ways to digitally represent physical assets, and to create novel types of digital-only assets. Benefits of NFTs include that they are secure, traceable, ownable and publicly tradeable on decentralised marketplaces. By making our Clams and Pearls NFTs, we make sure that every buyer of a Clam or producer of a Pearl truly owns that Clam or Pearl and can do whatever they want with it (including selling it to anyone and in any way that they want), and that the Clam / Pearl traits and rarity cannot be forged.

More information

If you want to deep dive into the nitty gritty of the numbers and how Clam Island works, here’s a few useful articles for further reading:

Introducing Clam Island

Clam NFT Deep Dive

The Voyage to Clam Island

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