Sleep-to-Earn Project Gosleep Intro: Great UI/UX

Author: @0xMavWisdom

Disclaimer: The author has no interest relationship with the projects involved in the article.

Recently, Gosleep has gained attention due to its listing on Bitget Launchpad. It is a Sleep to Earn application based on the Arbitrum blockchain and has previously secured $2 million in financing from Foresight Ventures. Thanks to the effects of the Arbitrum airdrop craze and the incentives from the public beta testing rewards, Gosleep has become a hot topic in the community.

Gosleep combines GameFi, the metaverse, and SocialFi, aiming to improve urban lifestyles through Sleep to Earn while also allowing users to gain income after sleeping. When users first enter the game, they receive a free room NFT, which is essential for obtaining economic benefits in the game. Rooms are customizable while users can personalize their room style and increase their economic returns through NFT decorations such as beds, pillows, and carpets. NFTs can be classified into five rarity levels: free, common, rare, epic, and legendary. The rarity of the NFT determines the maximum rewards users can obtain in Sleep to Earn.

In addition to rarity, Gosleep NFT also have durability, levels, and other attributes. Each time rewards are collected, the NFT’s durability is deducted. When durability drops to 0, the NFT cannot be used or claim rewards, and free NFT cannot have their durability restored. Furthermore, Gosleep introduces level attributes for NFT. The level of the NFT affects three dimensions: (1) Efficiency: the base number of in-game output tokens that can be generated; (2) Comfort: the number of governance tokens that can be generated, but this only applies to rare NFT; (3) Luck: determines the probability of NFT upgrades, and staking governance tokens can increase the success rate. The level is positively correlated with the impact on these three dimensions. To facilitate user trading of these NFTs, Gosleep provides a built-in marketplace, and using the built-in marketplace for transactions requires a 5% fee.

Gosleep adopts a dual-token mechanism, consisting of the in-game output token NGT and the governance token ZZZ. NGT has an unlimited supply and is mainly used for repairing, minting, and purchasing new NFT. ZZZ is the governance token with a total supply of 600 million, used for upgrading NFT, purchasing high-level NFT, staking for profit, and more. Recently, 2 million ZZZ tokens were listed on Bitget Launchpad, with an initial price of 1 ZZZ = $0.025.

Gosleep retrieves user sleep data by connecting to Apple Health or Google Sleep API on the user’s mobile device. It detects users’ sleep quality based on their mobile device usage during sleep, ambient lighting, noise, device sensors, and other factors. Subsequently, it further scores users’ sleep based on their sleep latency, the number of awakenings, total awake time, sleep efficiency, time spent in each sleep stage, and sleep posture. These scores will affect the number of rewards received after a night’s sleep. Additionally, since wearable devices provide more accurate sleep records, Gosleep offers more rewards to users who use wearables such as the Apple Watch.

Through economic incentives, Gosleep encourages users to consciously ensure they get enough sleep. Additionally, by analyzing users’ sleep data, Gosleep can help users develop personalized sleep improvement plans, such as better sleep schedules and relevant pre-sleep psychological suggestions.

Overall, Gosleep’s UI/UX design is considered good, but it has not made further innovations in its economic model and gameplay, essentially remaining similar to previously popular Stepn, Axie, and other x-to-earn games. To some extent, x-to-earn is seen as a false proposition for sustainable operation in blockchain games, overly relying on the marketing capabilities of the team and needing more new users to maintain the project’s operation. The lack of strong use cases for in-game output tokens often leads to continuous selling pressure during gameplay. Moreover, in a bear market and amid the prevalence of reskinned blockchain games, the community is highly cautious about non-free-to-play x-to-earn economic models, often weighing the break-even period and profit expectations when participating in such projects.

Currently, the floor price for a common-level room NFT is 0.08 ETH, while the legendary-level room NFT reaches 0.8 ETH, which is not a low cost. However, the non-restorable durability setting of Gosleep’s free NFTs can help users experience the game and calculate the break-even and profit periods, thereby deciding whether to pay for deeper gameplay.

Additionally, a major challenge for P2E games is cheating. Gosleep also faces the possibility of cheating, and the leaderboard mechanism (higher rankings result in more rewards) could potentially encourage cheating motives. The biggest difficulty in Sleep-to-Earn is the inability to guarantee the authenticity of the relationship between the connected device and the user’s behavior, as sleep measurement is limited to the user’s connected device. When Gosleep records users’ sleep, they can continue using non-connected devices or engage in non-electronic device activities instead of actually sleeping. Even when users use more accurate wearable devices for tracking, individuals participating in Sleep-to-Earn can give the connected device to other members under the same roof rather than the device-bound participant.

However, when compared to activities like running, the difference in normal sleep does not have a distinction between professional and non-professional levels like sports do. Therefore, the returns from cheating through sleep are relatively limited, and the overall damage to the Gosleep project from cheating might be relatively minor.

Currently, besides Gosleep, there are some competitors in the Sleep-to-Earn field, such as Sleepagotchi and Snooze. Encouraging users to consciously improve their sleep quality (such as sleep onset time and duration) through economic rewards may be a good narrative, but keeping users focused on sleep rather than post-sleep rewards is a challenge. The positive externalities of the Sleep-to-Earn model may still need to be grounded in solutions derived from analyzing users’ sleep data, such as professional paid sleep consultations, room environment and item layout, and even the development of pillows and health products to alleviate sleep disorders.

Sleep is essential to the brain while analysis and suggestions for sleep are fundamentally inseparable from it. This requires a high level of professional expertise and a long research cycle. For most projects that pursue short-term economic effects, it is not possible to consider from such a long-term perspective.