DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Bus. Dev Team) — December 27, 2021
For those unfamiliar with the project, the DeFi Kingdoms leadership team holds weekly AMA’s with the community on the discord server.
Not everyone has time to listen to the recording or wants something they can just read instead so I’ve been writing these written summaries. You can find summaries of the prior AMA’s in my index of DeFi Kingdom’s Articles.
I will post the link to the audio recording of the AMA here once its available.
This week, the AMA was from members of the business development team. AMA’s have different teams present to address different topics. Join the discord to follow future responses to questions they couldn’t address on the call! Go to the Community Updates / suggestions channel to submit questions! https://discord.gg/bDwN2WYqy7
If this is your first exposure to DFK and you are looking to learn how to start participating in the game/economy, you can check out my unofficial beginner’s guide here and the official DFK tutorials here.
Team Members Present:
Team Updates and Opening Statements
Dreamer — we haven’t done a bizdev tokenomics defi AMA and may start doing that going forward. We will recap expansion and then upcoming events. Will focus on various events on discord, twitter, etc. Also will give update on the typhoon charitable relief as well as the harmony grant recently approved.
Expansion: Not going to spend a ton of time recapping everything that’s previously been given. Looking to expand to Avalanche in Q1, we don’t have a hard date. We want to make sure we are focused on quests and Serendale before that. Single staking Jewel for Crystal is something that everyone should understand. When Serendale launched there was a large pre-mint of Jewel to set up the pools. What we will likely do is a single stake seed phase to start and then after a certain amount of emissions start to open up Crystal-Other token pairings for LP. The new Gen0 will ONLY be new classes and they’ll have specific gene sets for Crystalvale. Already have a bridge for Jewel and Avalanche, but before we do any hero NFT bridging we are working on getting the bridge working for those as well.
Bus Dev: We are trying to have a presence at various events. Sometimes the focus is for us to have a booth to talk to community and hand stuff out. Other times its for us to make partnership and keep up with the overall fast evolving environment. This upcoming Jan, we have Web3 in San Fran. This will be very innovative and technical and we’d like to see how we can participate. Bitcoin Miami — less of a DFK go and present but more of a “all the big dogs show up” and we want o show up and rub shoulders and bring back updates to the community. There is an event in Denver as well coming up.
Listing: We’ve been reaching out to exchanges. You can see my (Dreamer’s) twitter page for some discussions. There’s been some very strong feelings in both directions on whether we should push for a CEX listing. We know this is inevitable at some point but it’s not necessarily something we’re rushing into because of the obvious concerns and volatility that comes with CEXs and perpetual contracts. We just don’t want to rush into any big decisions. Will be be listed on a CEX any time soon? Probably not. Are we educating ourselves and future planning for this in the future? Absolutely. [Thanks Sarah for completing the notes on this part!]
Perpetual contracts are often associated with centralized exchanges. One mindset is that people will be able to short Jewel and Crystal once we get put on centralized exchanges. Hotbit and MexC we are already listed on and we had no part in that. Pangolin has listed Jewel on Avalanche. On Fantom there is interest in our project. We’d like to see Jewel available on one of their exchanges (currently working with Spirit Swap). Any intentional listing on an exchange with perpetuals will be reviewed VERY carefully and we’ll eventually have to get to that stage, but that’s probably a long way out. We want decisions we make to pull people into the game that are players rather than just trading volume.
Leverage: In my 10 years at Goldman Sachs, I learned that leverage is one of the key pieces for things to go wrong. Leverage is always a key piece when mixed with liquidity and high volatility for things to go wrong. We don’t really have liquidity issues but we are in a highly volatile industry. There could be regulations and another Omicron variant and we could be hit hard. It’s not that we don’t like leverage, we just want to be thoughtful about our growth and we don’t feel the need to add the complexity of leverage. It’s something we’ll continue to look at.
Incentivized Pools: We added 4 new pools about a month ago and using anyswap bridge. It’s been successful with Luna, Matic, AVAX, Fantom. We’d like to standardize the process whereby we hold a vote and consider adding new incentivized pools. We want to be thoughtful about exposure and how it can help the community and the project. We may also hold votes on retiring pools, with something like a 2/3 vote to retire a pool.
Pool Updates: We announced updated to the pools with the intro of the 4 main pools. What we’d like to see overall is a high weighting towards ONE and then next to that AVAX, which is our second real partner and first expansion partner, and then blue chip tokens and stable tokens. Maybe we will see more with the voting mechanisms, but we will have some VERY clear guidelines (min market cap, days traded on harmony, etc) on what can be voted on.
Focus Items: We are focused on building the bus. You can build vertically by adding new features (such as roadmap features). You can also expand horizontally, which is what we are doing with AVAX and scaling, including adding value to existing participants. Then there’s a bit of a third aspect too. As we build this metaverse, there are other games or applications that are related. Such as anything that comes into harmony through other interfaces (Anyswap Docks in game) to do a fee sharing mechanism that will benefit and Jewel holders.
Partnerships with Chains: We are constantly reaching out to all the other chains. This is not just for the reason of expanding. We don’t want to expand to quickly, each expansion will be disruptive both positively and negatively. Discussing with Fantom, Terra (can’t build here easily yet but still in discussions) and Polygon (they are also very interested in gaming and we want to try and control the narrative here). We want to be in a position to suggest the best and next solutions for DFK.
Venture Capital: A lot of VC firms reach out to us. A lot of projects whiteliest, they get pre-capital and then try to follow through. DFK was very different. First we focused on quality and community and then having the rest follow and we’ve stayed true to that. Any acceptance of a VC firm that would get in the way of that is not something that we are entertaining. We are however listening to them as there is opportunity to advisory benefits. We typically direct them to the game and it turns into a very interesting educational opportunity for them and if they jump in its on their own and not through an incentivized investment.
Harmony Grant Approval: DFK is matching the 1M grant with another $2M. Not ONE PENNY IS GOING TO THE DEV TEAM. It’s all going back to the community through grants, hackathons, learning about things like scholarship programs, the community and Charity.
Bounty Program: We wanted to hit the ground running and we’ve created a bounty for a transaction history report generator. We know the community wants this to help them with their own taxes/finances. We’ve had over 170 participants jump into this. They are engaging with each other, learning with each other and learning from our team. We are about to see some of these product submissions. As a team we will choose the ones that meet the needs and standards and then the community will vote. Real exciting, big response on that, and a lot more to come with the Harmony grant.
Charity — Odette Typhoon: We had members of our community that were a part of the people impacted by this. Community was asking what we can do and we created a few possibilities on how we could contribute and left it to a vote for the team. The community wanted DFK to act quickly and chose to just have DFK match up to $250K USD in donations. So far the community has put forward 192K worth of coin. DFK will be matching that to a total of 384k. DFk will continue to match up to the 500K total.
Another exciting piece of the donation is that we are tracking those who donate and will give varying levels of achievements in game. There have been ideas also on things like, repurpose the wishing well into a donation pool. We are impacting the Defi space, we are impacting our communities and this is one way to give back.
More on CEX Listing: Dreamer isn’t saying we won’t list on a CEX, its just something we need to analyze. Dreamer noted that we are in holding position and trying to learn more about this. With a CEX and perpetual contract we are also going to ask if every listing HAS to have perps, what is the timing, how much control would we have over it, etc. We don’t want to make an uninformed position. Should peopel think we aren’t analyzing this closely, reviewing the risks and determining if it will allow us to grow and protect ourselves? No, we are definitely doing those things. We are in information gathering mode.
More on Leverage — this isn’t something we jump into lightly, we are focused on safety of assets. We are trying to go ahead and protect people as much as we can from an institutional point.
Live AMA Questions
What happened on 12/16 and the transparent volume? Trying to wrap my head around it and can’t make sense of it. The volume essentially disappeared.
Dreamer: Probably a data quality issue. We’ll look into it but we probably won’t have time to look at it live.
If I purchased a bunch of heroes for questing base and we move on to the expansion will I be able to bridge my heroes over to Avalanche?
Dreamer: Yes that is the exciting party of the expansion. It will really depend the tokenomics and utility of our NFTs. If we consider the founder/seed phase of single staking and then rolling out the same roadmap of Gen0, summoning, tavern, etc. There will be two taverns and there will be opportunities to bridge over and rent/sell heroes over there which may have better pricing than here on Serendale. There may be unique resources and additional quests that will be unique to the realm.
The price and speculation of heroes is set by the players, so we can’t say the price will go one direction or another, but the ability to rent/summon/sell on the expanded chain will have an impact.
Any chance we could get an incentivized pool for Jewel and Gold? Even sometimes selling 2 Jewel gets a 6% price impact on Gold.
Dreamer: Once we see a much larger supply of gold with mining we may see things change and we’ll consider it. For right now we don’t have enough gold in supply to really have an effective Jewel/GOLD pool.
Prior to launch of Crystalvale will we have a time auction element to combat botting arbitrage opportunities between the two realms?
Dreamer: Auction functionality is in the works and being considered. Can’t say when it fits into the priority, but we have quite a bit of time before we’d be at the tavern phase of the expansion.
When I try to invite friends, they see the price tag of a hero and they say no. I heard rumors about some things you are doing to make the barrier to entry easier. Can you speak to that for how we can get greater adoption?
Dreamer: When we see the price of Jewel going up everyone is happy and then you go to summon and people are thinking oh wow that's expensive. We want there to be a place for everyone. We are in holding formation but we are learning more about Axie’s scholarship program where people who can’t afford the assets can use them and share the profits with the owner. We don’t want to just copy it because there are issues with Axie’s approach, so we are trying to develop something that will be much better. We also don’t want to recklessly jump into this and break or betray the value that people have perceived in these assets. There is a lower barriers to entry section in our Harmony grant on building out a scholarship in a different form on helping people get into the game that isn’t as scalable as as scholarship type program but we are thoughtful about it. Please share your views in any way that is appropriate and healthy.
Providing Feedback, I see some support channels on the Discord but no real “Feedback” channel. Is there a way that you want to be collecting feedback from us. Is there an organized way that we can be providing feedback?
Dreamer: A dedicated channel would be interesting.
Flu: There is the suggestions channel.
Dreamer: Not sure how much its being used so maybe we can market that better. We also have great mods that are passing on pretty much every risk concern that comes through. We try to stay very well connected with our mods, but maybe there are better ways to centralize the feedback gathering process and we can look into that.
Ogre: Not sure the suggestion channel is public. Also consider incentivizing the channel and giving the best feedback once a month a prize or something.
We have a lot of information on Jewel rates for Gardening but no information on item drop rates.
Dreamer: We aren’t owners of those mechanics but can pass this along.
Closing Remarks
Dreamer: We don’t want to just blindly grow and assume our actions don’t have consequences (i.e. expanding too quickly, lowering barrier by adjusting prices, listing on CEX). We are really trying to think of this as a flat organization without one supreme leader and trying to stay very tight to the community, our mods, our bards and our seers. We hope you trust us enough to bring suggestions to us in a healthy manner. This space can be so full of negativity. I feel that in our community we have a different culture we are building and cultivating. We want to welcome new joiners. Separately we are all limited, the only way we can grow and preserve everyone’s assets and investments in the game is to stick together and make sure everyone is heard. We appreciate the questions, so that we can all understand better and sharing the correct information with everyone.
Sunbear: One thing I’ve really appreciated about this community from the beginning is the thoughtfulness and generosity such as talking about reducing barrier to entry. But even just helping each other out, there’s been a lot of private rentals, reaching out and explaining things and inviting people to guilds. I want to thank everyone for their generosity, its gone a long way. Watch out for each other.
Flu: Only thing I would say is that my DM’s are always open. If you have suggestions or if you have ideas for people for me to meet, I travel quite a bit. I like to travel to all the different DeFi events. If you have leads please forward them. I get some every single day. I appreciate all of that. This goes back to our earliest influence, which was a suggestion of the community. Without the community there is nothing to develop. Wanted to say thank you to everyone and remind you all that you are all amazing.
Dreamer: Just to hedge on this, we all get a lot of DMs. We keep them open for you guys so we don’t miss out on those leads. It also means its hard to get to everyone quickly and make everyone feel important. If you haven’t heard from us, just bug us again and we’ll get back to you.
