DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Development and Biz Dev) — June 22, 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 (mostly a transcript tbh). You can find the transcripts/summaries of the prior AMA’s in my index of DeFi Kingdom’s Articles.
Link to the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmRnakVdcaw
This week, the AMA was from members of both the Development and 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 questions-bus-contacts-suggestions channel in the DeFi Kingdoms Discord server to submit questions!
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.
DeFi Kingdoms Website
DeFi Kingdoms Official Medium
DeFi Kingdoms Discord
Team Members Present:
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Team Updates and Opening Statements
Frisky Fox State of the Project Update
Frisky — feels like a whirlwind since the last AMA. We launched Duels. I was able to be involved in the coding on that. That’s been a lot of fun to work on and its the first time I’ve seen something like this done on chain, with a fully competitive match making system on chain. It was a first foray into this new play style that we are looking at. Obviously we have PVP on the roadmap and this is a bit of having our toes get wet in terms of matchmaking and how that can work on chain. A lot of people are playing it, a lot of people are loving it. A lot of gold and Jewel is being burned. A lot of people are earning raffle tickets. We’ve shown some screenshots teasing this, and raffle tickets have been my life as I’ve been building this. We have some really good prizes. Raffles will be 100% on chain as well and they will be self sustaining.
They will be able to be closed and drawn by the players themselves. It will be protected by the randomness built into the chain. We’ll have more of those going on than we had planned so there will be more variety. There will be a limit on how many tickets you can put into a raffle based on how much time is left on the raffle so that you can’t wait until the end and just snipe it. There will also be an ongoing gold raffle and we will close it periodically, likely every day. This will give you a portion of the pot for a guarantee of gold. Beetle dude has been working on the UI and I’ve been working on the back end. Winston is doing some testing there. He’s found a few things that we need to work on before launch. We are currently working on a Friday launch assuming no major bugs. There’s also a few things we are going to work on after speaking with Hubert. We are testing that right now. The environment for testing is tough because Harmony testnet is having some issues, so we are testing on mainnet, but we will burn anything resulting from the testing on mainnet. Some of the gold being used for this will just be thrown into the gold pot.
We have some other things that are less happy to talk about. One of them that really hit me was Warr King. I heard the news about him from Bolon. Bolon is there anything you’d like to share about that? Maybe we could have a moment of silence for him?
Bolon — Obviously also hit home hard. Just wanted to say that I really appreciate the communities support and response. Really appreciate the response to the go fund me that his family started as well. It’s hard to lose somebody and we can all only do what we can, but showing support for his family and myself and a few others are planning to attend his service and represent the community and will let his family know that we are there for them and care for them.
Frisky — We’ve talked about ways we can remember him in the game, whether its an NPC or working him into the lore. I’m excited to see what we can do there.
Back to state of the project and Duels. I saw in chat some heroes still stuck. We’ve had reports of that and its on my list of things to look into. Just trying to get the smart contract for Raffles passed off to the testers, but I’ll start looking into this and see if I can get those unstuck in the next 24 hours with some luck.
We’ll also be doing a few changes with Duels and how that works, since we are in pre-season we are looking at how its going, is it doing what we want it to do and so we’ll make adjustments before doing season 1. Be aware that anytime we do make changes we will announce those changes but we’ll be having a look at that to see where we are at.
Speaking of raffles, they are also a way for us to do other things in the future. We create the raffles with the raffle master contract so that they can be used by other mini games and also have integration with other programs like the build program so that we can have other integrations and tap into that and allow others to tap into that and charge Jewel or Gold to generate raffle tickets at maybe more of a wholesale type price. There will be future mini games other than Duels that use it. There might be other mini games that will use it that are building into our metaverse.
That leads into the build program a bit and the community voice stuff that has been worked on.
Community Voice
Bolon — Just a heads up what we are doing today is that we are going to pull questions from the AMA questions channel. If you have anything you want to ask, ask them there and we’ll pull them from there.
On that note, yes we have ended up not using user voice but have ended up using Rapir R. RapidR site is set up and we will post it after this so that everyone has access to it.
We have different boards, you can go there and submit a question or idea/thought into the different boards depending on where it goes (for example we have a board for AMA questions, that we can pull questions from there in future AMAs and making sure that we are pulling questions that are important to the community). I’ll send that link out in an announcement in an AMA after this. This gives us a good way not only to hear from you all but for the community as a whole to weigh in on each other’s thoughts and suggestions, which helps us gauge the popularity of an idea for lack of a better phrase. Definitely excited for this and will be a great touch point for us to stay on top of what you guys want to see and what you want to know.
Frisky — This is what will set apart projects that survive and those that don’t, having communication with the community. We want to be on the same page and want to know what you are most concerned about. There are a lot of people as well in the community that want to help build and we want to help support that.
Harmony announced they aren’t doing any more grants and that impacts us in a big way. We want to do everything that we can to support our build program and we’ve been doing that out of our matched funds and we’ve been waiting to receive things from Harmony until we could get our entity set up and things with our lawyer and once we did reach out we always got sort of a red tape response and then we just learned that we won’t be getting any of that. It is hard but we want to make sure we can to whatever we can to support the build program. We will just have to be more judicial with the funds and make sure we are getting good ROI. We are excited about this still though and we want to support the community. There are other things we can do like integration into the Map, zones, NPCs for certain project. All of that I’m really excited about because its a step towards the metaverse idea I’ve had for a while and its also instant access for these other projects to have access to our use base. Last time I checked, DFK makes up high 90% of projects on Harmony as far as userbase goes. Almost all harmony users are on our project whether its the game or just trading, and being able to have access to that is access to an instant player base. We’re also looking into co-marketing but I’ll let Sunbear get into that.
Sunbear — So yes, definite disappointment around the Harmony Grant information but we aren’t letting that stop us, we are just shifting how we do everything we can to support our builders. First thing was release of the DFK builders website to give them the tools they need. We had to reprioritize a few things but are now back to focusing on third party builder being able to build on our site and to get links to our site and using our assets or being endorsed by us. I know a lot of you are waiting on answers. We haven’t forgotten you and are working hard. We are even looking at other ways to support builders, maybe like paying with locked jewel. I’m also really excited about the RapidR piece. It’s a way our community will really be able to express their ideas, suggestions, feedback, and can focus our building around that. This will just give more traction to our build program as well to make sure we are giving our community what they want.
Frisky — Another thing we’ve been talking about a lot are ideas for what we can do to integrate locked jewel into our game more to provide ways for them to be used ahead o ft he unlocking to reduce pressure there but also to provide good incentives for users to use them in game for things that have real value and are desirable. Basically the more locked jewel we can get people to use in game for things, the healthier that is for the project. We are looking into options there and have some really good ideas. Mr. Faun has started a contract that will allow for a unified way for our other contracts to be able to spend locked jewel. Say you wanted to do the upgraded pet hatching you could use locked jewel maybe at a multiplier of locked jewel. Also Duels and having those be spent at a multiplier. Its all very possible with the direction we are going. We are also trying to make it so that most of the areas that spend jewel in game will support this interface. Up until locking the multiplier will be higher and during the unlock it will be higher but go down until its at parity.
We also have some more ideas that are outside of the box and we’ll be looking to get feedback from the community to see what they’d like to see done and probably have some governance votes. It is my hope that the RapidR site will be a good sourcing ground for ideas that will become votes. I want the community to have a way to propose ideas there, get enough consensus and then after something gets enough attention and support it would be a candidate for having an xJewel vote. There’s also been ideas like being able to purchase things in game like lands or something and using locked Jewel at a multiplier. We’ve also talked about allowing players to further lock their Jewel to participate in certain things, which might create other tracts of locked Jewel, where they wouldn’t start to unlock for another year in the future, and maybe even using unlocked jewel and locking them up to get access to certain things in game. There are some ideas there that we will probably involve the community on.
We’ve also talked about a hero burn, there are now over 200,000 heroes out there. And it seems like a lot when you look at it. But if you look at something like Axie and their Axie count, we have a lot of room to grow and if you think about where we want people to participate in pvp and will need 3 heroes and even some things where you’ll need 9 heroes like War or things like potential guild wars where you will need more heroes. But we also want to prevent options for players that have a lot of heroes and want to get more of them. We’ve talked about a dark summoning. We are pursuing that and have been for a while and are trying to flesh it out and we’ll be releasing a few more details there. It’s a bit dark and heroes will be lost in the process, but its essentially returning essence to the inner grove. Kind of like with pets where you can turn into two pets to get an egg, its similar, but not exact since heroes work differently than pets, but essentially using 2 heroes to produce 1 hero that is either stronger or maybe has a higher chance to produce the results you want to use. Having it as an option. We also want to make sure that its not inflationary and balanced and maintains value for assets. That is something that we are working on just so you know.
The last thing is feature parity
We’ve been asked a lot about DFK Chain and we want to give our players a compelling reason to come to all of our realms. It’s an experiment, this whole cross chain thing that other projects aren’t really doing it. Part of that is making sure that they have things to do in all of our realms. If they’d prefer to stay on DFK chain but have to come to other chains to do things its good but not the best user experience. We try to make things as seamless as possible with our in game bridges but we are trying to bring profession quests, pets, crafting to DFK chain.
We are very close to launching profession quests on DFK chain. That will be our first step towards that. You can already summon heroes over there, but we are slowly adding those features. We want all of our chains to have all the basic features but then have certain things that you can only do on certain chains, but it will be a cohesive experience.
DFK Chain is a really great chain. Mr. Faun was heavily involved in that. It’s build to scale and can easily handle our transaction load. It’s using Jewel for gas, which is actually a significant burn on Jewel. There’s a compelling reason on why we want to get more and more of our features over there. You’ll see in the future that some features may release on all chains at the same time or maybe start on a different chain and then come to the other one.
Bolon — One thing is the dev weekly update, we missed it last week but we the plan is to keep doing it, we just have a lot to get done and only so much time in the day so that is what happened with the dev update last week.
Questions from the Discord Chat
Any insight on the order book system?
Beetledude— sure can tell you what I know. Solidity team has been working hard on that. Faun has been working on a proof of concept for client side interactions. Its in process and we’ll keep you all up to date when we know more about when that is coming. I think originally he was thinking of having it live on a separate page but we may be looking into gamifying that into fitting into our current site. Contracts are on a good spot, and we’ll work with API team to get that going.
Bolon — awesome and that we with regards to buying and selling quest rewards.
Vote to extend or delay Jewel unlocking?
Bolon— that would be a Fox question, but Beetle chime in if you’d like.
Beetledude — I don’t think we’ve talked about that as an option specifically, but I know we have the tokenomics committee.
Fox — I think something like this would require allowing locked Jewel to vote, because I want to see what people who hold locked Jewel think on this. We are all trying to build something that has staying power, so whatever you can come up with ideas we want to potentially have a vote on, so use the Rapid R site for that.
(Stronghold) Do we have any other mini games currently planned other than duels?
Frisky— we’ve had some ideas but they aren’t nearly as far along like Duels. We don’t have a plan for anything specifically now because we are trying to build the framework right now and we are focused on things like what do we do with Locked Jewels, land, parity of features, etc. Intent is to have a program in place where the builders and community can work with it. It will be kind of like Axie’s where they recently released a bunch of mini games, most of which games from builders in the community. I’m sure we will add more mini games ourselves in the future and there’s a lot of opportunity for things that are fun with our hero assets and pets. You’ll see more in the future, but probably not in the next few weeks or even couple of months I’d say.
How is the pitch deck going?
Frisky— I know that Boo and Spicy and Dreamer and Pie Face have been very much involved in that. They’ve been hounding me to get my bio written for that. It’s looking really good. I know that Dreamer has been referencing that too when he’s meeting with people. He’s actually out right now at NFT NYC and he’s meeting with a lot of really cool projects and people and he’s referencing that in his meetings, our milestones, our roadmap, etc. and its a really good tool.
Bolon — Pie mentioned it in chat, but he’s been meeting with several people while he’s there and they’ll definitely have updates for y’all when they are ready.
Plans for next chain?
Frisky — in the current environment with the markets, some chains are buttoning up their programs and their funding. We’ve seen that even here at home, then other chains that are more forward looking are in a better position to do so are accelerating those and viewing this as the right opportunity to build and are trying to bring on projects with the same ethos to build build build, especially in these markets that are down. A lot of those projects and chains are out there trying to look for projects like ours. It’s a good opportunity like projects like ours to continue to expand the game, build our player base, and even pass some of those on to community builders. WE continue to look at who those best chains are and who those partners are. We aren’t sleeping on these opportunities. Dreamer is very much involved in these conversations.
Speaking of grants, I forgot to mention that our team has a lot of locked Jewel in our own treasuries. There have been discussion about using those locked jewel to reward builders. So that those builders could use those locked jewels to be incentivized to build on our chain and integrate with our projects in conjunction with co-marketing, integrations and support from our team. So one of those incentives could be paying with locked jewel to those projects.
With plans to be able to spend locked Jewel, what happens to it, does it get burned?
Frisky — obviously there will be some kind of a multiplier, we don’t want to arbitrarily say what we think it is worth compared to an unlocked Jewel. We want to use math, and come up with an algorithm in our game w/r/t the spending of locked Jewels. Then for what happens with those needs to be determined. Right now unlocked Jewel gets distributed to various allocations. So what would we do with the locked ones? Consensus right now, and we are trying to hammer it out, but lets look at the initial cost and have those get distributed at the rate if you had used unlocked and then have the rest either burned or put into a special project fund. Another option has been to have all of it stay locked. We are trying to make it configurable, and maybe this is something we have a governance vote on. We are open to feedback. We want to do it in a way that is sustainable.
We don’t want to do anything radical, but would be willing for 100% of it to stay locked if that’s what the community wants.
Any update on incentives from AVAX?
Frisky — Dreamer has been speaking with Luigi at Ava labs. There are others that we are working with on the daily. We are still receiving really good support from them. Last I heard it's all still on. We are trying to set that up with our entity and our lawyers. We haven’t received them yet. Part of that is we want to increase the feature parity of DFK chain. That grant is for us to continue building our DFK chain, and that is why adding features on DFK chain, maybe even on Avalanche first will be important because that shows them that we are serious about building DFK chain and that its something we want to partner with them on and need funding for.
Closing Remarks
Bolon —Make sure you post your suggestions on the Rapid R site once its announced.
Sunbear— thanks everyone. Thanks for believing in us and in the project. We’ve come closer as a team over the past several weeks and I appreciate the support and heart felt response for Warr King. Thank you, please take care of each other. Reach out to others if you are struggling. Let’s keep moving forward together.
Beetle Dude — We have an incredible team. Times are rough, but everyone is staying supporting. We have some good features coming up and we’ll continue pushing them out. Appreciate the awesome community.
Frisky—I hope you guys have seen the amount of effort and love we’ve put into some of the recent releases. The markets have been trending down pretty much this entire year and it's been hard having to build through that. We’ve had people step away from the project, which is fine, everyone is in their own situations. It’s hard to go that hard for so long, people get burned out. It’s also hard to build in a bear market, but that’s what we ‘ve been doing. We’ve also been doing some restructuring and who can help us get where we need and investing in those people. It’s important to be very strategic with our funds and looking at things that have ROI for us. We are looking at merchandise releasing soon. There are some really good ideas from Pie Face, mother brain and Boo. Our team has consolidated, restructured, and set ourselves up to execute on the vision and the dream that we see for this project. It’s been almost a year since we planted these seeds and started to build this team. We’ve come so far over the last year and it’s incredible to see the amount of progress we’ve made. It’s an amazing and ambitious thing that we are building. A lot of people are still building very hard and its hard to work hard in a market like this. Our team is still pulling long hours. We don’t want to burn out the people that we have and we don’t want to lose people. The past month we’ve had a release almost every week, and we said we were going to do every other week. We’ll try to stick more closely to that. We have raffles potentially this friday if all goes well with testing, but just so that its out there. Maybe on the off-week AMA’s where we don’t be releasing new features the AMA’s may not have much to talk about that week. This is a marathon and not a sprint and a lot of us have been sprinting for a long time. I for one can surely say that everyone is working hard and its hard to do so. I’m proud of our team and they’ve really stepped up and everyone is working hard. By that same token the community is amazing. I truly believe we have the best community in this space. I think that our community just really pulls together, is kind, mature and understands how these things go.
Just really excited, really happy and really blessed to be building with you guys as a project and community. Bullish!
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!
