DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Development Team) — December 20, 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.
Here is the link to the recording of the AMA: https://youtu.be/QR9ODboO12o
This week, the AMA was from members of the 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:
First half of the AMA will be addressing written questions and 2nd half will be live questions from people who may have questions about the transaction history bounty that DFK has going on.
Team Updates and Opening Statements
Frisky Fox Update: AMA’s are my favorite time of the week. Being able to share all the updates — there are so many each week. Every week feels like a month and every month feels like a year. This week we had a lot going on, particularly from the bus dev team. Exciting news last night about Harmony approving our grant. They have a really cool program where they incentivize builders to come and build awesome things on the Harmony chain. Our team launched in August without trying to do any of those specific things just because we saw how great Harmony was. After the fact we started to collaborate with them and its been great. There are a few of the team members that are located close to some of our team members. We would always get asked by the community when we are going to get a grant because obviously our project is a shoe in for the grant because we are bringing all these new users to the ecosystem. It was quoted once (and Frisky said don’t quote him on this) that 90% of transactions on the blockchain are related to our project.
Harmony is looking forward to working with us, its been a good working relationship and is about to get better. A lot of the things that Harmony does well (bounties, charity outreach, events, etc) align well with the ethos of the DFK project, and we have modeled a lot of our programs after them. We plan to initiate a community grant program to incentivize builders to create cool projects that the team can use. I think to date the largest grants out of Harmony have been $50-$100k and ours received $1M. Our plan with that is to match it with $2M USD worth of Jewel and earmark all of it for improving the community (events, bug bounties, grant programs, education). This has been one of the dreams I’ve had — to give back to the community and so I’m super excited to give back to this.
We had a cool article about us on Yahoo finance, where a few members were involved in that so thank you for that.
We are hard at work on gardening quest and on track to launch on Wednesday. It is a very complex quest because we have so many pools and the math involved with that is complex. We have really good unit tests and have been hammering it hard so that its really solid. There’s been a lot of concerns out there about other blockchain games and Dex’s that get hacked, so we have to be extremely careful to be vigilant. And that’s another reason why we are excited to have a bug bounty program, to incentivize people to find bugs and get rewarded for that. We’ve already had people reach out who have been recipients of that. Having an official program in place will help with that even more. I’ll speak more about audits here in a bit because there are some questions about that.
We’ve been growing in terms of community members and we also had some new contracts get tracked on Dappradar — because previously it was only tracking our DEX and not things like hero sales and the game, which brought our volume up to where it actually should be. So as of a few days thats tracking properly and we are well above Axie volume. It’s been great to seeing the market reacting favorably to our project despite choppy markets.
Written AMA Questions
Solidity finance doing our audit and what do we plan to do about Grim Finance getting hacked in the past:
Frisk Fox: We’ve spoken with a bunch of different auditing firms. Many of them are busy and booked far out so we are trying to figure out how to lure them over to us to Audit us. The audit we had for our Dex was really good and they didn’t find anything because our Dex is pretty much a fork of Sushi with some Viper elements, but the core aspects is tried and true code that has been running on Uniswap for over a year and a half now without any hacks or exploits. As we release more and more features, I want to make an ongoing relationship with at least 2 other auditing firms so that they can be auditing all of our contracts every 2 weeks or so. I’d like to add that into the timeline so that audits happen before anything is released. Having that ongoing relationship with at least 2 other firms will be important to incorporate that. We’ve also added some really talented solidity Devs, so they will all have an extra eye on everything. We take security very seriously. Obviously our project has been growing a lot and has a lot of liquidity in it. We’ve taken steps so that even if one set of keys is hacked our multi sig wallets will be safe. We are also flying our entire solidity team out to a security event to receive more training on best practices in the security industry. We need to stay vigilant and have regular audits so this is all at the top of my list.
When trying to level up my hero I keep getting “Execution Reverted, ERC20…. exceeds allowance.”
Frisky Fox: Every time you level up it spends 0.1 Jewel, only thing I can think of is that when you approved it the first time, that you changed how much you agreed the transaction could spend and made it lower and if you lowered it enough there’s no way to go back and re-edit the limit. We will look into this, but add more info in the support channel and request help.
I don’t feel like the warning of a hero crystal needing to be summoned immediately is a clear enough warning. Are you planning on making any changes or doing anything about this?
Raspberry: we are actually going to remove this feature. It’s not needed anymore. It was to try and keep people from re-rolling the randomness, but we have features in place so we won’t need this anymore.
Frisky Fox: We didn’t want to do this but it was necessary to make sure RNG wasn’t gamed, but we’ve got upgrades in place so this won’t be needed anymore and will be phased out soon. As a part of this we also plan to run a report about everyone who has paid that fee and see if we can get them refunded, because it is a lot of money in Jewel at its current price. When we first started out with this fee Jewel was only $1.50, but now at current prices that's a lot, so we’ll try and get you guys refunded who have had to pay this.
Are there any plans to add a bidding system to tavern or other in-game markets rather than just setting sell prices?
Frisky Fox: We are in process of updating auctions on tavern to support setting a start and end price. Ex. you could say I want to sell this hero for 100J but over next 7 days lower it to a bottom of 50J, this will allow you to have a dynamic range that changes automatically if people aren’t buying. You can also set it lower and have it raise over time if that is your thing. This would require everyone to unlist their hero and then relist with the newer settings. Having that roll out would be a bit more of a process. We will get to that soon but can’t promise any times.
Are there any plans to add filters to the heroes that can give a range of summons remaining?
Pinecone: It is on the list. Going to add features like summons remaining so you can query it directly in the Tavern.
Will there be an option to re-roll stats in the future?
Hubert: No we don’t have plans to reroll. I understand the game is evolving as we are playing and you are trying to make decisions on current info (i.e. professions) and those would change as we roll out more features, but we have to work in the system that we ahve and one big element of this game is randomness and luck. So if we allowed you to reroll your stats you could get more than what you got the first time and I don’t think its fair or should be allowed. No plans to allow this. I hope we are giving you enough information to make good decisions. For combat, the stats that grow the best for heroes for a given class will be the most important to that class so you should factor that into account when leveling up. But you may decide to level up based on profession stats, which won’t always align with combat stats. We’ll all have to do the best we can and we’ll try to give you the best information we can so you can make informed decisions. Things may change in the future though. We don’t want to limit ourselves to saying “we already said this so we can’t change it because people made decisions to be the best forager”. There are a lot of different angles to approach things and that’s the intent.
Professor Tango: One of the intentions of ahving ability to summon new heros is so you can progress new paths for heroes. We are hoping people find more ability to get new heroes with new stats as the game grows. As hubert said, we won’t make your really good fisher absolute, but he may not be the best at combat.
Can the quest rewards screen display the names of the heros including their picture?
Raspberry: Yes this is somethign we’ve done, on desktop you can hover over their name and see it. We’ll consider a tooltip for it on mobile. We are also planning to add new borders around heros to see rarity, because that may play into battle quests once we get there.
Why does it take longer for multiple heroes taking longer to quest together?
Hubert: This was intentional. For those here when we had wishing well in first iteration, it was a lot of work to get all your heroes lined up doing the quest and involved a lot of transactions. Going through and trying to make the user experience better, we considered the impacts of letting multiple heroes quest together. One concern was that more resources are being put out than intended, so the additional time is a convenience cost. You lose a little efficiency but get more done in one set of transactions. Also from a lore perspective, if you have 1 person fishing it would be faster to catch one fish than 6 people fishing it at the same time. Same with resources, with more people out there it may be harder to find resources. We hope to have some animations to go along with this so that the additional time you can enjoy watching your heroes do stuff. Don’t quote me on this, won’t promise anything but its something we’d like to see.
What about snapshots with land and secret snapshots?
Frisky Fox: There were the secret snapshots back in September for several things. For those we are hard at work on that. We had to create a new aidrop smart contract (because current one only supports Jewels). Essentially we want to make it really easy to see all the items you’ve been airdropped. That contract is in final stages and will be ready soon. For other snapshots we alluded to snapshots leading up to Crystalvale and we have all kinds of plans for those.
We want to get questing out first for Gardening and mining. We are in snapshot now for the amulets. We will be doing snapshots for things like Crystal soon and have a lot of ideas in the works so stay tuned.
Professor Tango: We are taking a lot of snapshots on a regular basis. Some are advertised on purpose and we are also trying to find people who meet certain criteria, maybe its people who have the most of something, etc (its not always going to be xJewel), but we are waiting on this airdrop contract to be finished.
Place in game to show where Jewel transaction costs go, such as a fireplace that shows distribution percentages showing how much is burned and where its going.
Professor tango: There are a lot of fun stats, most of which is available outside the game, so we are looking at adding things, even like Patch notes, in the game itself. Looking for ways to get reliable information in the game that can be supplemental (not required). One example is if you go to the tavern there is a log book and we hope to have some transactional information that can be accessible there. Anything that can help you we want to have in the interface.
Frisk Fox: I actually think this is a cool idea — how many Jewels have been burned.
Tango: Things that aren’t critical tot he game we will consider implementing as supplemental info. With the RPC issues we want to make sure we aren’t taking away resources that bog down the critical information we do need, so we will assess.
Frisky Fox: We’d love to have dynamic reactionary experiences So something like anytime a hero is summoned, if someone is in the zone they’d get an animation showing a hero walk through the portal.
Will there be PVE quests that require more than 1 hero to complete and if so will you be able to team up with a friend if you don’t have enough heroes?
Hubert: As far as teaming up with a friend we have to think about how that would work with contracts. That would be challenging. What we have said though is that we want to have hero renting for questing (not just summoning) so your friends could rent to each other for basically 0 and that would be a lot easier to achieve than tandem questing. Not going to rule it out, but in terms of how we are setting things up it will likely be a rental system.
Fox: Would be interesting if you are in a guild if you could allow people access to your heroes.
Tango: Yes like a pre-rental with ability to share rewards. It’s something we’ve discussed.
There have been reports about RPC issues as far as hero transactions going on, do you guys have any comments?
Frisky Fox: RPC Issues are an ongoing painpoint. We are on a blockchain trying to do something that has never been done on a blockchain. A lot of the things that we’ve build (i.e. node for the graph) were built for Ethereum, and Eth does like 15 transactions per second, and of those the transactions are typically very simple. Ours is hundreds per second and are actually very complex (i.e. calculated quest rewards for 6 heroes questing 5x). It can be hard for some of the blockchains to keep up with that. Harmony has kept up with it really well. This is part of why we are redoing our API from scratch and trying to use something used for these slower older blockchains we have to create thing entirely new and inhouse to manage that. That is why we brought on pine cone. He is hard at work on that. In the meantime we are staying afloat for the RPC issues. We do have a bunch of fallback methods in the event the API isn’t indexing everything. That can be tricky as well because it has to loop through heroes and query on the chain which can be slow. This is a good problem to have because it means we have a lot of active players but its something we take very seriously. For now, hang in there, we are constantly trying to approve it and are actively working with a cool solution we think will resolve this.
PineCone: If you have RPC issues switch between the two. The other day POKT employed an improvement. Switch between the two to see if it helps.
Frisky Fox: Sometimes network will just be more congested than at other times. We try to be aware of those and if network is having issues its sometimes something we just have to deal with and is often outside of our control. We are in close talks with Harmony.
AMA Questions re Transaction History Report Generator:
Does it matter what layer of application — web based, graphical, etc?
Frisky Fox: I think some of these may have been answered in the document — but that may not have been shared. We had a lot of feedback and questions about the transaction tracker bounty that we put out. I’m excited about this because its a very needed thing because everyone is trying to figure out how much they have to pay. Any format is fine, but if you want to win this bounty, ease of use is going to be important. If you have regular users playing and they have to install Yarn and run it from the command line, then you probably won’t get very many votes. In the end we will have a community vote to help choose the winners. Still produce whatever you can and submit it though. As you improve these skills there will be other bounties that you’ll be able to participate in.
Xeno: Bolon confirmed the above mentioned document was shared.
I’ve been working on this new bounty. People may want to use this for tax purposes, but I also figure that there will be a lot of people other than the U.S. that will want to use this for tracking their portfolio or their success (or even transactions generally). What is the criteria going to be? Mostly about tax calculations or just what most of the users like at the end of the day?
Frisky Fox: We are a worldwide game and every country will have different preferences. I think a general tool that allows you to see all your transactions with profit and loss without targeting US tax purposes specifically. I.e. you get runes from quest that were worth $10 at the time then sold them later when worth $30, seeing that is really helpful. Another example, you summon a hero that cost $600 worth of Jewel then sold it for $300 Jewel then you have a loss.
Professor Tango: We are looking at this for tax purposes, but the information is something that everyone would be interested in seeing. At the end of the day we need to be able to extract all of our information out. So things that everyone will want to see. We aren’t trying to find something that is specific to US taxes. We want something you can extract for your own purposes or for tax purposes.
Frisky Fox: There could be people out there that will try to cater to a very specific tool on top of a tool like this. SO maybe we have a US tax specific application on top of whatever this bounty produces.
[Skipped question about how to purchase Jewel on MM]
Been trying to understand entering the liquidity pool. When you enter into LP in DFK, is there actually an exchange of your two tokens for an LP or is it being tracked separately? Because it may trigger a taxable event if exchanged for another token?
Frisky Fox: You send your two tokens into the uniswap pair smart contract, which then creates LP tokens which determine your ownership. Kind of akin to buying stocks, it tells you your shares in the pool, is it a taxable even in the USA — I believe so. As far as the actual impact it essentially says here are some LP tokens worth exactly the amount that you put in.
Hubert: When you break the tokens up the value will be different so you do need to know the value of it when you put it in and when you take it out.
Frisky Fox: If you stake in the gardens you transfer your LP gardens to the master gardener contract. If you want to withdraw then it transfers the LP tokens back to you.
Do you have a channel you’ve set up for these bounties? Maybe for joining up with others?
Frisky Fox: Yes there is a channel for this bounty in particular and you could definitely reach out in that channel and try to team up with others.
Xeno: Under community tab there is a channel called transaction track channel — sign up with a form and Bolon can add you. You have to register first to be added to that channel.
Would Locked Jewel be a taxable event when you claim it from gardens or when you unlock it?
Frisky Fox: Technically they aren’t owned by you, they are owned by the contract. They are earmarked for you, but you don’t own them until you unlock them.
In the bounty — are you planning on including the claiming of Jewel so that as time goes on we have all of our initial mints of when we claimed the Jewel?
Frisky Fox — yes the intent is to show all the smart contracts involved with this project and have a holistic view of anytime a token entered into your wallet.
We need prices of the tokens at the time that we received them for tax purposes, is this possible to address in the bounty?
Frisky Fox: Agreed that having the exact amount at the time is important. I’m pretty sure the Dex graph node has the ability to put in a block number and get the ratios at that block number. This will need to be beefed up if everyone is going to hit it with these apps. Lots to consider here.
Closing Remarks
Xeno: If you have more questions about this transaction tracker bounty, reach out to Bolon or Aila and you can request access to the specific channel for this.
Frisky Fox: Really excited about this bounty. I want to have an extensive program in place to incentivize and rewards creating apps on DFK. This was a bit of a test of this bounty program to see what does and doesn’t work. There will be other projects that maybe creates a game that uses our Hero NFTs. We are excited for the future of this program. Thanks to everyone throwing in their gauntlets on this. Hopefully we can all learn and grow and earn something out of this.
