DeFi Kingdoms Special AMA with Frisky Fox — Grant Program and Building on DFK — March 3, 2022
This AMA was announced in connection with an announcement from Frisky Fox in Discord on March 2, 2022. The AMA was held on March 3, 2022 at 3pm EST.
Hey @everyone, I’ve been getting lots of questions lately about the future plans for allowing other projects to integrate with DFK via a smart contract interface.
This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time (since the inception of DFK) because I see blockchain as the first logical step towards a “Ready Player One” type of future, where assets from many different projects can interact with each other in a sort of metaverse.
We’ve been very open from the beginning with public APIs, which encourage builders to come and create awesome things in the ecosystem. I believe there are many opportunities to push this envelope further via creating smart contract API gateways that would allow approved projects to interact with our ecosystem in well-defined and controlled ways.
These types of interactions would add utility to existing DFK assets and give players more choices about what they would like to do with them. Due to the controlled nature of the integrations, they would never be able to impact things beyond the limits that we set, enabling us to ensure things remain balanced and regulated.
As a rule, these extra options would not supplant in-game options in terms of most efficient ways to grow the value of your assets, but would rather serve as extra things you could do instead of them if you so desire.
Additionally, a system like this would be governed by community votes to decide which projects are approved for which integrations, as well as to define the strict limits they would operate under.
I’m a firm believer in creating open platforms and incentivizing builders to come and create awesome new integrations. The internet started this movement, and the blockchain has taken it to the next level. People coming together to build amazing projects on top of existing platforms, to create new value.
I would like to answer any questions anyone has about this idea tomorrow at a special AMA at 3pm EST. Please join me and come with any questions you may have. Thank you!
Source
Intro
Frisky: This is a different format than most AMA’s we do. This is more of a community brainstorm session rather than just hey here are some things I want to announce. We will be bringing people up to hear their thoughts, question and concerns though. This is more of a working session. I have ideas and I want to hear your thoughts, concerns and questions and we can figure out what the best thing will be to do.
I will be taking notes on this document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_ZtRZZXNhIrjwvtmXYyS8WefJkh_AFa46ZXv1Ek9X2I/edit?usp=sharing
This game is different than other games that have been built before. Players can have a very significant difference in how the game is developed. We have the voting portal where people who hold xJewel and heroes can vote. The team is creating new features on the roadmap, but we are servants for you and the community to build what is best for the community and this is one of the first steps on that road.
From the very start we wanted to build a system that is open. The blockchain itself is a decentralized and open system where anyone can come and build things on top of this platform and you don’t necessarily have to trust because its trustless and decentralized. You do have to have a group who agree at the beginning on where the game will be developed. So a game development has to start of in a centralized format, but we have the opportunity to build on that and expand on that so that the community has more of a say in things.
We had very public and open APIs where you could get really rich and broad data about the activity going on in the game. The intent of that was to encourage people to come and people things on our ecosystem and add richness to the project and the ecosystem. That is one thing that I love about things I’ve seen in the past. Even regular games that aren’t decentralized you see community tools being built around it. The blockchain creates a cool opportunity to allow us to push that even further. One of those things is the metaverse idea where you have in game assets that are NFTs that you control and have ownership of and the game itself shouldn’t be able to say I’m going to change something unilaterally and change how your assets function and their value. It’s a concept we are trying to build towards.
So one of our ideas was how do we encourage people to build around this? One of these was open APIs. Another idea was a grant system in place like you see protocols like Harmony and Avalanche doing to incentivize people to build on their network. I see DFK like that, as its own platform that we want to encourage people to build upon. So the grant system is us putting our money where our mouth is and encourage people who might not have funding to come and submit an application, have it approved by the community and then if it's approved its approved, if it's not then it's not. But this should encourage some smart people to come and build on our ecosystem.
As more features get added to the game and our ecosytem. Our Heroes and other assets will gain more utility and have higher value. This is one of the theses that we will be working off of. As there are more things to do with your NFTs then they should have more value.
The idea is that our assets could have value across many projects and chains.
There is a point here about Metcalfes law, which is brought up a lot w/r/t Crypto, where the Bitcoin network says every person who becomes a new node increases the value of the network. How do you peg a value to a network? As we get more and more users and more and more options for our heroes to have value, the value of our network will increase.
How can we best incentivize builders to come and build on the DFK ecosystem?
Giving them the tools they need. Trying to figure out what tools to give them is a big part of this.
Grant Proposal System
One of the ideas I had was to have a smart contract interface that would allow other audited smart contracts that have been approved to be able to interact with our contracts in terms of spending HP/MP, Stamina, reading values of the stats, earning XP or even earning items. There’s this idea that we could let other people create cool things that give our players more choices of things to do with their heroes. If you set rules in place on what you can gain and spend and they are consistent with what is set internally, we can control the narrative and make sure that its always in balance. So that is the proposal and that is what I said at DFK day at ETH Denver. We haven’t put out a hard and fast of “here’s the interface” because we don’t exactly know what should look like. We know it's possible, it’s just a matter of figuring out how we want it to look like.
I want to hear your thoughts. Are there issues with these theses on how we can help the system. So I’ll invite some of you up, but first here are a few things I thought of:
What kinds of controls will be put in place to govern?
- How much XP can be gained for a given amount of stamina spent.
- interface.spendStaminaForXP(heroId, stamina)
How can we secure things?
- By creating smart contracts that give very limited and defined access to certain functions in exchange for spending other resources, such as stamina.
How does a project get approved?
- Team must vet the project
- Audits
- Community Vote
What ongoing control do we have?
- We have the ability to revoke access at any time.
So let’s invite some people up.
OgreAbroad — I love the fact that you are focusing on each game that ties in meeting some sort of costs to earning ratio. That was one of my biggest concerns when you talk about growing the economy and how that's going to impact the economy. Will it be a drain or an asset. Also how does this impact heroes, we don’t want a way for bots to drain funds from the ecosystem. I love the way that you guys are going with this.
Frisky — I’m also adding notes on your comments to this document. Vulnerability — this is big. We don’t want to add any extra attack vectors. So it would be a whole new smart contract that would have access to very specific things, and of course it would be audited. For earnings ratio, it would be hard coded so that its something that can’t be changed, like here’s the upper limit of what’s possible and that upper limit would be less than what they could get elsewhere as part of the core game. We don’t want our players to ever feel like they HAVE to go to these other things to get full value of their assets. We want these to be seen as extra things they can do and not something they HAVE to do to keep up with other people.
OgreAbroad — Not sure if someone has done the math to get from Lvl 1 to Lvl100 would take years. So building the ecosystem and creating new ways to get XP would only add more versatility to the ecosystem. We are in good hands in my mind.
Mettez — First of all, I want to thank you to take the time to do this. This is an incredible thing that you are doing and being transparent and opening the discussion. It’s crazy. A few things I want to talk about. Two main topics that I’d like to at least ask your opinion on. The first is maybe about implementation of the projects, because I agree with your vision, but I am worried about the practical implications. However maybe before we touch on that we need to discuss WHEN a project gets approved for a public vote. Why do I ask this? Maybe because I think that the current project proposed seems a bit rushed and many of the things you’d need to vote seem to be missing. Its even small things. I don’t see any models or estimations on how they might achieve they estimated overhead. I’m not talking about the size of the overhead. I just don’t see anywhere in their proposal on how they plan to achieve that with the percentage that they will take. Another thing, and perhaps this is missing, is how they will plan to use the DFK mechanics. I’m not here to critique it, I know you’ve already looked at it. It’s just more of a general question and wanting to have a clear guidelines on the where a proposal needs to be at a minimum before it can be brought to a vote.
Frisky — Excellent points. There should be a minimum requirement before proposals can be brought to the community. We’ve been approaching it this way and Sunbear and others have been reaching out to them and working with them before its submitted. So we have actually been working with them to refine their proposals. At the same time, this is our first one and the world of what is possible is unknown and this is why we are holding this meeting. We need to figure out what we want to allow these projects to do and what is okay and what isn’t okay. Backup for why they are asking for certain things are great things to ask for.
Mettez — for me the point isn’t about what a project can propose, the issue is more of at what stage can a proposal be sent to a community vote. In other words at what level do you allow a project to get your support. You guys have been exploded a multi million business venture at this point. So any proposal that gets your suggestion already has your support in the public eye. So I think there needs to be a clear and strict set of rules. I’m not proposing you have to share those rules, but I think they need to be stringent in such a way that there is NO DOUBT in your heads that this will be a good project, not just that it could potentially be a good project.
Frisky — yes very true. Any proposal we’ve worked with and helped adjust and we’ve helped them know what we would be okay with and what we wouldn’t be okay with and refined to a point where we’d like to open it up to the community. We want the community to be involved and for this to be more decentralized. These grants should be seen as a way to get the ball rolling. This isn’t intended to be angel investing or us having ownership and oversight over it. It’s more of we think this has merit and could provide value to the communities assets and so we could provide a grant of x amount. But allowing it to go to vote isn’t us putting our stamp of approval on it. It’s not our team building it. We think it has merit, but it’s not going to be part of the core DFK experience.
Mettez — I’m happy to hear you say that. Perhaps if you really want to make it decentralized, you could make very clear statements about what your endorsement means and what it should mean to the community. Perhaps you could have community votes at separate levels and be VERY clear about what the community is voting on and what does it mean if the community votes yes or not, would it go to another internal round of review and then submitted once again for another community vote. We need it to be extremely clear.
Frisky — I agree, some of these may have multiple votes that they’ll have to go through. Would we want them to have access to certain Intergrations? Yes or no. Figuring out where the votes would need to happen will be important. We’ll work through the process and need to improve it on each project. It will be an iterative process.
Mettez — I’m really glad to hear you say that on the open stage like this. One more item on external systems impacting internal systems, such as experience. I’ve been trying to reverse engineer what you’ve done and its amazing how balanced you have made it. What I’m worried about is balancing something like XP in one simple formulate. In the current game players have a lot of ways to gain XP. And the Xp gained per stamina spent is not the same. For example, heroes with higher profession skill have higher chance for more XP per stamina level spent. We’ll have more quests launching soon like PVE and PVP which may have different XP rates per stamina spent. Different profession levels which may have different XP per stamina spent. How can external systems, like DFK Arena, ever hope to achieve the same distinction between heroes and not be open to abuse. For example, a lower level hero getting more or less XP in DFK arena than the core game. I think its difficult to balance it out in a general method where you say well you’ll get this much XP per stamina spent.
Frisky — If I’m hearing the concern correctly its that we have a very fine balance that we’ve struck internally (which is true) and is introducing external things going to throw that balance off. Could they earn more XP externally than they could internally all other things equal? For me it could be answered very simply in that all of these integrations all of these returns will be a very low return by definition. You’ll have lots of options to do things with your heroes. We’d like there to be more that you can do, but it will always be less (maybe even half as much) than what you could get using the same amount of stamina in the game. I’m fine with that because its like giving a nod to these other projects. E.g. if you want to have a rock paper scissor game and people can go and send their heroes to spend stamina there. Having people earn XP there would be icing on top, but not the meat of it. There will always be a buffer and you wouldn’t be able to earn as much doing that than you could in the current game.
Mettez — This is what I was expecting to hear and why I don’t know if it makes sense to do as a project. Any third part project can work with in game mechanics but can never be the as good as the original in-game mechanics am I understanding that correct?
Frisky — Yes. That is the current concept.
Mettez — My concern is that someone will have to choose to do something less optimal, which devalues their time spent on their assets and so not as much value for the project. Also that essentially devalues the grant that we give them. E.g. if you gain less results in DFK Arena than you could in the original game then you wouldn’t be incentivized to go to DFK Arena which would mess with their financial models. If this is true, then why is it needed for them to modify the heroes at all. Wouldn’t it be better to just not let them spend stamina at all and instead just let them interact with the NFTs in different ways with attributes or systems built into the 3rd party systems that are completely separate for the original game.
Frisky — I think to your point where it wouldn’t make sense to do it. I think the one you are referring to they updated the proposal to remove that even. But there are some projects where they might have something in their system where they are providing extra value from inside of their ecosystem. Lets say someone else makes a game and they want to onboard a lot of players like hey if you have DFK player you can come here and spend stamina and earn things in our game. Then they might want to have that be set so that you have to spend stamina so that you can’t do a lot of it all at once. I’m just saying there could be projects where that makes sense.
Mettez — yes but I’m saying that if you allow someone to spend stamina outside they have to choose between the two and you place value on the external system. By definition the external rewards should be equal in value to the value of the stamina spent in game. I think its very dangerous to allow people to take the spendable materials from DFK and allow them to be connectable in any way. Arbitrage works across chains. Things will always be balanced out.
Frisky — So could it result in unexpected and unforeseen things. We can’t see the future of what can be built and what could come about. As long as we set the rules in place so that you can always get more XP in game than you could out of game, I don’t see how that could be abused and then its up to the players to choose if they want to do something suboptimal maybe just because its fun to them. From our standpoint, we want to see what people build and give our players more choices with what they can do.
Mettez — I completely agree but want to nuance one point that you made. It’s the fact that you said if we ensure people in our original game will always gain more with their stamina than they would outside of the game. I think that you are absolutely right that there is no abuse possible. But if I could nuance that a bit more, its not that its devaluing their assets its that it doesn’t incentivize people to out and use those third party systems. The external parties because they can’t give as much, will be less optimal to start playing, or they’ll have to give out additional rewards in addition to support their in game economy. I’m not a developer and could be wrong. I’m just extremely bullish on this and excited to see where this goes in the future.
Tertius — Hey I’m here thanks for having me up. I’ll try and get to the point. The two things that haven’t been brought up were that (1) if you have a chance to speak to the positives of the DFK arena team since you had more access to them that might help some of us appreciate what they bring that we haven’t seen from them and help us to vote on the upcoming vote. (2) I’d make a quick note to some involved in the grant team, I had an impression early in the thread, partially because you had more access and more understanding that some of you were taking a defensive stance in support of DFK Arena and it didn’t seem as neutral as I would have hoped, which led to some of the more heated discussion at the beginning. So something to just be aware of. This was dropped in the AMA, you guys were excited and a number of people not knowing what it was had a lot of concerns. Having some of the knights be defensive of the proposal itself and maybe having more knowledge of than other community members created a perception of a tilt.
Frisky — you hit the nail on the head. Communication is key. This is our first time. Our team has seen some things built by this third party. It’s been a couple of months now that we’ve seen them trying to work with us. We have a good idea of what their ideas are and providing feedback. From our standpoint we’ve seen that they’ve been willing to work with us and open to feedback and changing their proposal. To be something that would provide the most value is what they are after. I can’t speak too much to that. I haven’t spent a lot of time personally with them but I know they’ve been working with others. As far as tone. We are seeing what works and what doesn’t work. Having better communication from the start is a step in that direction. I think excellent feedback there and we’ll be improving this as we go.
Nous — I guess what I hear is a tension between what is a planned economy and a carefully modeled economy (a lot of what makes DFK work) and a sort of wiki creative commons spirit that doesn’t work as well here where the core of the value is the IP. There’s this sense of the tragedy of the commons where if you don’t clearly define, people will overuse the resource that is DFK IP. Right now they may not think that they are going to do that, but as Mettez said, they have an incentive to draw people to their site. If they can’t do it through token modification they’ll do it through some other incentive and they don't have the same interest in the DFK economy. Having a flourishing ecosystem is nice in theory, but there’s a ton of empirical work that that’s now how it works in reality. When you look at fan fiction, the stakes of fan fiction can never impact the main story. If we are paying them, why do they also need to make money off of it. They are just creating a diversion.
Frisky — Okay- a lot of points there. Concerns over would third parties impact the controlled economy. They are good points and we need to think more about those. I do kind of see DFK as creating a new ecosystem and being a platform rather than a fully controlled economy. You look at Harmony approving grants to projects where they are building things and have their own tokenomic and still earning money on their own. I don’t think it has to be a system where they have to choose one or the other.
Nous — if there is one team that can hybridize a controlled economy model with a creative commons model its this team, but I think its much more complicated than you think.
Frisky — Yes it is. These are things we are going to have to iterate on and build upon. Measure twice and cut once. In terms of who owns the IP for this project. This is something internally we’ve had a lot of meetings about because we have a lot of artists creating things. At the end of the day, DFK is more like a DAO and if you own Jewel you in a sense have ownership of these assets. This is all very new and we are trying to fill it out.
Nous — as an IP attorney this is very interesting. At the same time I don’t think there’s any reason to rush into a project that can change and interact with our heroes. We can start with something much smaller.
Frisky — Excellent points. Maybe we can reach out to you and maybe have some consultations on this. I have another meeting I need to go in, but let's have a couple more.
Kamus — Going to cut this to just one Q. Just a general observation of the process for this first grant. Seems like there was a lack of framework for the proposal review. I feel like the approach was too simplified for a community of our size. Maybe there should be general metrics proposed to the community up front (along with what was reviewed by the DFK team up front and how you evaluated them) then you show that to the community and maybe a standardized process like scores for each of these metrics that the community can view. Metrics like team background, ability to create new innovative systems, and then we could review those metrics and that would give us more to discuss and help us understand how these were selected. Maybe a more structure process could help.
Frisky — I think you are right. At the start of the process we have a 2 pager on why we felt their project was a good candidate. This is something we can iterate on make better. Having a scoring system sounds cool and I’ll see if we can implement something like this.
Tommy — First of all, I’m a huge fan. Y’all will be in Barcelona right? Looking forward to meeting you. You’ve said we’ve had over 50 proposals? I think the primary consideration if the spirit is to guage what the community wants I think it would be cool to make those proposals public. Maybe the community wants something that the devs aren’t too excited about, or maybe there is a project the devs might want to pursue or take inspiration from. I acknowledge that its dangerous where there is a mob rule where we put a lot of pressure on you, but gauging community sentiment on all of the projects could work.
Frisky — I agree. The program was loosely modeled on how Harmony does it where the community is a lot more involved from the start. I would like to push for that. That was the original plan that I had where it would be very open and transparent from the very start. We are trying to be very decentralized. If everyone wants something and our team has serious concerns we can discuss. If everyone wants something though, there’s probably a good reason for that. Transparency is a good thing to have.
Tommy — So you think there’s a path to have the proposals public in the future?
Frisky — I think it would be great to pursue. I can’t promise anything, but we want this to be something that provides the most benefit to the community. Anything we can do to increase trust and participation is something that we want to do.
Tommy — will there be a DFK day in Barcelona?
Frisky — We will have a picnic sponsored by DFK with Avalanche. Have some food and come and sit down and talk about all things DFK. I’m not directly in charge of that. That’s Rissen.
Rissen — it will be on the 24. We will be outside the main auditorium. You can all stop by. We’ll be around town the whole time. It won’t be hard to find us. That is the main event where we are going to be doing things.
Tommy — Do you have the times for that?
Rissen — Should be around 1pm to 5pm.
Frisky — I’m excited about it. We should have 21 people there, which is the largest presence at any event, plus a lot of knights and lot of people from the community. Come over and say hi.
Frisky — To wrap this up, I think this was really helpful. I’d like to do this more, sit down with the community and talk more. We have ideas and let's talk about what to do and how to do it. Let’s figure out a good proposal on how these should look and then have the community provide feedback and maybe even a vote on it as well. We’ll be figuring things out and coming back.
