DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Crystalvale Expansion AMA) — March 28, 2022
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.
Link to the recording of the AMA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVqBadJ2GME
This week, the AMA was from members of the Development Team, specifically geared towards the Crystalvale Expansion. 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 index of many other DFK articles here.
Team Members Present:
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Team Updates and Opening Statements
Frisky Intro
This is going to be a bit of a different format. Usually Bolon is here to moderate this. He’s on an airplane right now and not able to make it so you guys are stuck with me. I’ll try to moderate this and also do a fair amount of talking as well.
Today we had slated a Dev AMA. It’s a big week for Dev. We have a lot of things launching. It’s a big week for all of us though because we are launching CV and DFK Chain, both of which are huge undertakings and we are launching both the same day this week.
In light of that we wanted to rebrand this AMA to a more Expansion Chain AMA to talk about all things CV and DFK Chain. A lot of people have a lot of questions about that I’m sure. It will just be us three.
There is a lot to talk about, this is a very exciting milestone in our project. I think back to August when we launched this and there were 8–9 of us and we were huddled and hit the button and held our breath and the rest is history. This launch is way more complex in terms of content we are launching, new features and then also our own chain. Really exciting I think we are in a much better place now than we were then in terms of skillset and professional experience and I’m personally sleeping a lot better for this launch than I did the original.
Wanted to report on the Avalanche Summit and maybe Dreamer can report on some of that.
Dreamer — Avalanche Summit Update
It was a wild success. First off we flew a fair amount of people out there from the team and a lot of Knights were there as well as community members. It was great to be in person with so many and to be at an event withs o much significance and energy. It was great to see the welcome that DFK received from the AVAX family. Every project there knows about us and our success. They are very much bought into the multichain gaming approach and are very excited about the subnet. We didn’t run into people that didn’t know who we were or who weren’t excited about the launch. We were kind of the hottest thing at the summit. If you were there and wearing a DFK shirt, I saw and heard people talking about us constantly.
To help put a lot of that narrative we attended a lot of networking events. The first one that I went to, there were a lot of big names attending and I was nervous like the first day of school, but every time I shook hands they knew us and were excited to meet us and excited to collaborate with us.
Many of you probably watched the key note. We gave it our best to rep DFK and our community and the project. It felt like it was a good success. If you were there you would have seen a completely packed room with people standing to fill it. At many of the other presentations there were not that same amount of people and sometimes a fraction of that amount. It was exciting to see the amount of support. Fox and Faun did awesome on the two panels they attended and they did a great job carrying the energy and excitement. Pieface did a workshop and many people commented on the content shared there, and on everything, the UI, the UX, the business model, the music and overall delivery of the product.
Thank you for everyone being patient with some of those who weren’t as readily as available as in the past because they were attending. Huge success. There was a chaos cast there for those who didn’t catch that yet.
State of the Project and Expansion Related Updates Prior to AMA Questions
Project — General reception and philosophy of the team
Frisky — It was amazing to show up at our first international event ever and basically have a stronger presence there than all of the other projects that are already there on avalanche. We had so many people there from our team and were able to fill all of our sessions. We brought energy, were clear, concise and basically hit a home run. I spoke with a VC firm there. In the past lots of people have asked how to we get Jewel how to we get started. We don’t take funds from VC and just instruct them on how they can buy just like everyone else int he community. I had some of them ask me and they asked how we have 80 something people on our payroll and how we can afford that. I let them know we are entirely self funded and the economics of the game are set up to sustain that. They were blown away to see we didn’t receive any funding and that we are already profitable. They asked how much we preminted. We said 5M for dev fund, 2M Jewel for marketing and if you look at those funds today, we haven’t touched a single Jewel from those original funds, and we have more in there than we did at the start because of the way the protocol works. They were blown away by our tokenomics and its unheard of in our space and I’m so proud of that. That’s the mentality that we have with all of our new things that we’ve been doing like land and CV and all of these other Gen0’s over there. We aren’t doing a Gen0 sale on CV, we are trying to give them all away and let people win and earn them. Same with Crystal, we aren’t doing a Crystal ICO, we are giving the mas majority of them away and letting them be earned rather than trying to fill our own funds. For Serendale launch we did premint a lot of funds and put them into these funds, we don’t have to do that here though, so instead of preminting Crystal and putting them into our funds, we are giving them to our own community.
Crystal Airdrops (as xCrystal potentially) — When and how much will be airdropped Day 1.
Frisky — We still have a bunch of questions about how we are going to allocate those and when we will airdrop them, but its a lot different than Serendale. In Serendale we had 2M jewel set up for initial liquidity. For Crystal, we want it set up so that there aren’t too many initially and also not too little. WE want enough liquidity so that people don’t have unfavorable slippage but also don’t want crazy volatility. We also want our airdrop recipients to receive the max amount of rewards they can receive from that. For Serendale we basically launched with 1/5 of the preminted Jewel to liquidity. For CV it’s going to be 1/4 of that, so we are trying to figure out what amount makes sense. Because if we only have 1/5 of a quarter launch there might not be enough, but there also might be too many if we have all airdropped at once. If we want to maximize the rewards that our recipients receive, why not airdrop xCrystal rather than Crystal so they can be fully invested in the Jeweler and already be receiving those rewards from the Jeweler. If you are familiar with how it works, anytime someone claims from the garden a portion of that goes tot he Jewel or anytime someone swaps on a DEX, a portion goes to the Jeweler and that's why the xJewel to Jewel ratio is as high as it is now. We’d like to give our airdrop recipients the chance to get in on the ground floor and give that coveted 1:1 ratio on the Crystal to xCrystal ratio. So that’s our thought process there.
Dreamer — I don’t think in terms of detail I have much to add there but in terms of excitement I want to reiterate the participation of the community. The fact that everyone will be on equal footing and it won’t be a “how quick can I get in and stake my crystal with the jeweler” it won’t matter if you are sleeping if you are working, you’ll already be in xCrystal and getting the advantage of that ratio. We want to maximize the rewards as well as the overall stability of the ecosystem.
Frisky — I’ve had a lot of people ask how they can get in. We want to make it as simple as possible. Our team isn’t getting a single amount of Crystal. It’s going to the community and we want to do that with all of our expansions. We also want to make sure that we don’t flood the market with Crystal, so we are exploring what options we have and when and how we will airdrop all of the crystal. If we follow the pattern that we did for Serendale and we take 1/5 of the preminted power token, we could do something like that and then maybe just release only a portion of the airdropped crystal, and then have the rest vest over a week or two so that the launch day liquidity isn’t crazy so that people don’t have to deal with the unpleasantness that can come with high volatility. We were very careful on Serendale. We want to make sure to protect the community here and that the value is there and slowly grows. We are looking into that and will announce more specifics about that today along with the timeline.
Launch Day (March 30, 2022) Timeline
Speaking of timeline on Wednesday
- 12pm EDT chain opens for bridging and you can start pairing. This will include the outpost, the bridges, the chain, the map and the zones. There will be a Jeweler, Marketplace, Ice Gardens, Outpost and Docks from day 1.
- 8pm EDT emissions start in the Ice Gardens. So your Jewel/xJewel start to earn Crystal at this point (it’s all in the docs).
A lot of people have asked how they make sure they have enough time to get into these gardens. To that end we are going to try and give people 8 hours to bridge over, get paired and staked so they are ready for when emissions start.
Trying to pattern as much of this of the Serendale launch as we can. It’s one of the best launches I’ve ever seen. Want to make sure it’s fair for the community. We also don’t want to launch too many advanced features at once and that’s why CV will also be launched in phases as well. We’ll be doing heroes after that, probably sometime as Phase 2 of CV and that will include summoning and Tavern, just like Serendale. Although for CV we can launch the Tavern at the same time. During the time you are waiting for that, you can bridge heroes and summon and mix genes and also have your CV heroes start questing in Serendale.
Some Differences Between DFK Chain and Harmony
Frisky — Faun, you had something you wanted to say about Harmony and our chain right?
Faun — yes on the topic of Ice Gardens wanted to identify a few differences due to the protocol. We wanted to ensure that the emission schedule doesn’t foresee large amounts of time if block times don’t occur at a 2s block time. We took the time to convert the garden contract to be time based, rather than block based. Therefore we can ensure our community that it will be the accurate emission schedule. So there will be little differences like this. Every time we make a change it will be to make sure that it’s trying to benefit the community.
Frisky — I’m super excited about this because the expertise and skills we’ve cultivated here to launch our own chain is astounding. We are doing a whole new expansion, project and chain all at once. I’m not aware of any other project doing this. Huge hand to Mr. Faun who has been instrumental and I have so many people come up to me and ask how they can become a validator. Everyone and their dog wants to become a validator because we are the chain that people are going to want to come to for gaming.
Big Picture of DFK Chain
Dreamer — I could probably take the remainder of the AMA to talk about all the things you’ll be able to do on DFK chain. If you load in and zoom out and then close the map and think all things DEFI all things Gaming, and think about what people could put onto our chain and gamify and build on our chain. We aren’t just setting up a chain or Jewel to be used as Gas, the goal is to be THE GAMEFIED chain and anyone that has a web3 protocol that could be gamified or built into our front end is a candidate to partner with us. What was announced in the key note, in pretty short order and for a first for many of them, the partnerships announced (Ramp, Benqi, DPX, Synapse) I did say we aren’t here to take part we are here to take over, and its a sincere invitation to invite people to come and build on this dream with us. The next day after key note we had the picnic and I was worried that people would think we are coming in and trying to push everyone down. Not one project came in and saw it that way, they all asked how can we build together, how can we collaborate. I feel like we are bringing a refreshing mindset approach. If you look at the amount of assets in Web3 compared to traditional assets, we have a long way to go and we have a lot higher chance of survival and innovation if we all work together.
Faun — as I was involved with conversations at Summit and talking about lending resources or providing assistance in gamifying anything that is DeFi into our system is just really cool and I’m personally very excited about it.
Frisky — We are DeFi Kingdoms, we are not Dex kingdoms or Uniswap kingdoms. We want to be the ones top shop chain for people to come and do DeFi in a non cookie cutter way. We want people to come and integrate into one unified system. I get Ready Player One vibes where we can invite people to come and not just play but also live in a sense and manage their finances. With the added utility of us having our own chain and having Jewel as the gas token and having opportunities for players and guilds to be validators to secure the own chain that they are own. Facebook’s meta play is interesting, but the only way that can ever work is on the blockchain and through decentralization and that is what we are working towards.
Launch of the Ramp fiat “onramp”
Frisky — we did announce Ramp among many of our announcements. I think that many of our community was surprised to see that already released last week. We don’t have a huge release every week, but on the previous week we did the Perilous Journey and that was a big release in terms of new tokens and rewards and this week (which will be two weeks after PJ) we are doing CV and our own chain and an immense amount of new content, so those two huge releases two weeks apart but we still managed to squeeze one in between with this really cool feature with Ramp. For months, its been a very painful thing for regular people to get onboarded onto these side chains. People come up and ask how they can get involved and I have to give them the 20 step process and tell them it takes a week for everything to finish. So this is a huge new feature where players will be able to come, go to our website, hit play, it will walk them through installing MM, if they don’t have ONE or Avax they’ll be able to enter their card, acquire some and get into the game already. I’m incredibly proud of that. Huge shout out to Beetle Dude and all of the people involved on that.
Dreamer — part of Ramp that we are really excited about is that for the launch of CV, we are looking to have significantly reduced fees for a limited amount of time. So look out for that tweet once we are able to finalize those details. There will be a promo of reduced fees for a limited volume and/or time to stay on the lookout for that.
More thoughts on Reception at Avalanche Summit
Frisky — At the conference we realized that we aren’t the small fish in this ecosystem. Our community is probably bigger than any other gaming community on Avalanche right now. Ours has 90K in discord, over 100K players. We have an amazing community that has grown purely organically. It’s been players here in the community that come and they see this and are blown away and then they tell their community. We have hands down the best community in the entire space. We are hard at work trying to figure out how to give rewards back to our community. Someone sat next to me after the Key Note, he didn’t know who I was and we were watching Mr. Faun talking about DFK and this guy said DFK is just hopping around from chain to chain sucking up incentives and putting it into their pockets. I had to tell him that we received 1M from harmony, and 15M from Avax, but for Harmony, they paired the 1M and paired it with 2M of their own funds and gave all 3M back to the community. For Avax, DFK received 7.5 from Avalanche and used 7.5M of their own and its all going to the community, none of its going into their pockets. He then realized I was on the project and said we need to let other people know how we are doing this because nobody else is doing it like this. Most projects are selling land and putting the money back into their own pockets. We are really something else and going to that event was amazing to see really just how different we are from everyone. Dreamer anything you want to add before we take a few questions?
Dreamer — I want to compliment the people at the summit. it was an incredible summit. So many incredible projects and people with great ideas. So much class that was present. The organization, the different stages, the different people we talked to, it was great. It wasn’t that we are saying hey we are the best, there were so many great projects and it was nice to just see DFK recognized as a player among them. It wasn’t viewed as a threat, rather it was viewed as “I want to work with them.” That’s the world we want to be in. We want to be working with the best and we see that we are inspiring other projects in the space and we are wanting to help with grants and hackathons and its great to step into an ecosystem like Avalanche with so many developed projects and having them reach out and want to work with us. It was great hearing people say “Hey I’ve met your team, you guys are the real deal.” It was only excitement and only positivity and that’s coming from a very strong, very talented, very sophisticated community. So we should feel proud as a community and project as we embark on this multi-chain gaming endeavor.
Frisky — I spoke with some really great people at Chicken Game. We came out with something along the lines of we aren’t trying to beat everyone into the ground. it’s not us versus you, there’s room for all of us. A high tide raises all the boats. Let’s all work together. If one of us has success that lends legitimacy to the entire project. We are allocating a portion of our incentives to give to other players within the avalanche space, like players playing Crabada or just using Pangolin or Trader Joe. I think a lot of people will come and see what we are about and stay. It is all about working together. We are all here working for the same reason to revolutionize this space. Come and build with us and we will see what we are able to do together. Faun any last thoughts? I know there’s a lot going on with the new chain. Gotta make sure all of our T’s are crossed so how are things looking?
Some Frequently Asked Questions Faun has been getting about Validators and DFK Chain
Faun — Was going to pipe in here and sorry if this will go a long time because of this, but I’ve gotten a lot of the same questions, so maybe if I can preface the answer for those questions we can avoid those
How do I become a validator?
There is validators.dfkchain.com you can apply there, it’s a google form. To understand our play, the first month we are partnering with specific partners to support the chain early on and then as we will look to decentralize further with some form of community involvement and maybe offering some form of liquid staking. If you are interested, apply, but don’t expect to be a validator at launch.
How much Jewel used for gas?
We will publish our fee configuration for the subnet, but its important to know if you have a basic understanding for how this works, its not a static fee configuration so it will scale up and down based on the load, but to give you an alpha teaser, I’m on DFK Chain RPC right now wanting to send some Jewel to another wallet and the fee is currently .000032J for that and we’ll have the flexibility to adjust that in the future if needed.
Right now its just Dex, we don’t have quests and summoning which are big gas consumers.
The Chainlist RPC listings was made public. We are aware that its available. The reality is that everything isn’t launching until Wednesday so configuring early doesn’t really give you any benefit.
Minimum Specs for Validator:
Avalanche C Chain already recommends high specs, ours are probably double that. Had fun conversations with Ava labs while discussing this. Multiple times we configured the server and then decided to double it just to be safe. That doesn’t mean all of our validators will need that really heavy level of hardware requirements (32 CPUs and 70 gigs of ram), but we want to start out really strong and make sure this is smooth then give later recommendations for non-partner validators.
AMA Questions
Why are we doing xCrystal instead of Crystal:
Frisky — xCrystal is Crystal. You can just go to the Jewel and basically withdraw it right away. It’s just Crystal that has already been but into the Jeweler so you are getting the rewards from the very beginning. xCrystal is better than Crystal in every way. The reason why we’d do this is to make sure that people can get the most rewards they can get. The Jeweler will be THE PLACE to be because it increases the most in the first week than it does in any other time in the project.
Dreamer — Also if you are talking about the xToken, it’s an asset that only appreciates with respect to the underlying token. The ratio can only go up for xJewel and xCrystal. It can only go positive. From inception of the Dex, all of those xtokens are receiving rewards from fees and as people withdraw from gardens. It’s never going to have less value.
Jewel/xJewel pairing — How do I get xJewel?
xJewel and xCrystal exist in your wallet like any other token. We’ll be launching and making sure everyone is very familiar with the xJewel and xCrystal addresses on the chain.
(Stronghold) Thanks for repping the community so well in Spain. On CV, will there be any more specific timelines attached to the roadmap? Because everything in Serendale was “Thoon”, we’d obviously like everything to be tomorrow and we know that’s not possible, but is there any chance we can have more details on this?
Frisky — We need to do better than just saying Soon. As we grow our team and as we get a more developed product life cycle and sprints, it gets us a better idea of how long things are actually going to take. As we get better at that, we are going to be more specific with our timelines. We will probably avoid specific dates until we get maybe 2 weeks out, but we will get better about that and we are very concerned about whether we give you enough. With our latest one with DFK Chain, we’ve been working on that for months and months without saying anything. It was something we had to make sure we could do before we announce it. Then things in place with AVAX on co-marketing pushes so there were other reasons as well.
(Stronghold) All the heroes for CV will come out and they’ll have full access to Serendale. In terms of quests, the PJ heroes have their own unique quests, will those be in Crystalvale?
Frisky — there will be some questlines that will be cross chain, actually a lot of them probably will be. That specific one will be cross chain and that will unlock other quests later.
(Pumpskol) Will team be opening the initial liqudiity for Jewel/xJewel?
Frisky — we are planning to do a bit to make sure slippage isn’t too crazy, but vast majority of it will be from the player base. We want to make sure there’s enough time to get it in there. A lot of people o n AVAX are going to see it and probably want to ape in and buy jewel and xjewel. We want to make sure there’s enough in there.
What about how long it will be the only pool and how long it will be an incentivized pool? Is it 2 epochs or less? That will impact the fee withdrawals a lot.
Frisky — we haven’t released a lot of those details, but maybe Dreamer can give more detail. We have plans in place to protect the value of Jewel and Crystal from not having a lot of liquidity, but Dreamer could you speak more on this?
Dreamer — 100% Jewel/xJewel on day 1 obviously. W/r/t when it will not be the largest pool, it will probably be the largest pool for quite a while. You are earning Crystal by holding Jewel. The xJewel component might see a lot of people moving their xJewel over to CV. The xJewel portion of the pairing is very intentional. Day 1 that’s the only pool. A few days later (and we will release the schedule, but we want to make sure we don’t over promise), Crystal Avax, Crystal Jewel. Then subsequent weeks we’ll see crystal pairings with the following:
- Bitcoin and Eth
- ust, usdc, matic.
As you go from 100% Jewel/xJewel then maybe we see 10% to Crystal Jewel and Crystal Avax, so that its 80%, then as more and more come out it will siphon away from that. It will be the largest pool for at least that first month, with pretty high confidence.
(Pumpskol) For those crystal pairs, we will have to rely on the airdrop recipients to provide those first crystal pools right? Will it be communicated to us how much we’ll be getting?
Frisky — In game you’ll be able to see how much you get. Tentatively we are thinking 1/2 of it on the day of launch and then 1/2 over a week or two to make sure its not too volatile at the beginning. Then you’ll have all the crystal being emitted from the Jewel/xJewel emissions. The amount of Crystal emitted during that first epoch will be in the 400–500k Crystal as well. But yes all of the Crystal in those first pools will be from the community either from the emissions or the airdrops. The Crystal-Avax pool will have additional incentives from the 7.5M of Avax that will go into a perpetual incentive fund to reward the stakers in that pool. So not only can you earn Crystal in that pool but you can earn Crystal and AVAX as well.
Dreamer — Part of the AVAX incentives will go to that pool, but it may not be day 1 of that pool.
(Malience) As far as airdrops from like the summoning airdrop and hero leveling and hero holding — will the Jewel also be dropped on CV or will it be dropped on Serendale separately?
Frisky — the plan right now is to have the Jewel dropped on Serendale. We could also do it on CV, we just already have the infrastructure on Serendale so that makes most sense. I’d like ot have those airdropped the same time as the CV airdrops.
Will that be first week of launch of will we wait for that as well?
Frisky — Targeting 1st week of launch for airdrops to begin. Some will be all at once, some will be ongoing. For Jewel there’s plenty of liquidity so there’s no concern about that all being airdropped at once so that will probably all happen at once.
Closing Remarks
Faun — Excited that everyone is here in this community as we explore the subnet technology. Humbling and mixed emotions of pride and humility to be the first subnet truly launching outside of Ava labs themselves. We have a lot of learning to do over the next month. Excited to see how the benefit rolls out over the next month.
Dreamer—I want to circle back to how well we were received at the summit and grateful for Ava labs. I want to extend an invitation to all of us. We are going to see a lot of people pop into our discord. People from Avalanche and maybe people from other chains, maybe people new to Web3. Please welcome these people and people from other chains. We have a good community and as it gets bigger we want to continue this growth mindset culture where good questions can be raised in a healthy manner and looking and for those that are lost and frustrated or not having a good time. Let’s use this step forward to DFK Chain and working with Harmony and ramping them up together to invite all people to come work and build with us and also to invite members to feel a part of the community and the family. Looking forward to the upcoming week, hoping for a minimum of hiccups, as we have them though we’ll stay close to discord and the community and stay as transparent as we can. Let’s expand on this new journey and see some incredible success and innovation.
Frisky — Echo that and huge shout out to Ava labs. Luigi is like the godfather of DFK Chain. He has helped us in so many ways. Same with Daniel and so many others over there. Where we are, this is a group effort. We’re doing something that’s never been done before. We are so stoked to be the people making that first step. Excited to be here along with you guys in the community. Going to see some really cool things in the next weeks and months in terms of DFK chain and also on Serendale (pets, combat, travel). Let’s have a good week. Bullish! Thanks for coming, see you guys later.
Check out my Index of Samichpunch DeFi Kingdoms Articles For a list of all of my other articles. You should definitely bookmark this index. Follow my medium account to get updates when they go live!
