DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Growth Pillar Team) — April 18, 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.
Here is a link to the recording of the AMA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP4kJKV3B4w
This week, the AMA was from members of the Growth Pillar 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 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
Dreamer Partnerships and Business Development Update
A quick update across our Growth Pillar. Then we’ll open it up for questions.
Two weeks ago I was in Miami for BTC Miami. We had a very small presence there. We’ll try to have a presence at as many events as possible, at least Business Development and Marketing. We had some billboards and people came in saying they saw the billboard coming to and from the airport and it was cool to see the reactions.
What came from the conference? Some of you may have seen a video on Twitter of me talking to Mr. Kevin O’Leary. Got to meet with his team Wonderfi with Fox the next day. They are very interested in DFK and have big games already on mobile and want to look into what opportunities there are to collaborate.
Another one was interacting with a team called Aurox. They want to have something like bloomberg terminal, but for DeFi. Trying to build that high level relationship. Would be cool if we had a presence from DFK chain on Aurox and then also having analytics available that you don’t have to go to Dexscreener or some other Dex aggregator for.
Met a bunch of people from Binance as well. They were proactively interested in learning more. As we have historically been very careful about any CEX listings and being traded on them for a number of reasons. One concern is that the community wants the volume to live in the game. I agree with that, but at the same time we want people to know what JEWEL and CRYSTAL are and trying to find the right balance. One thing I asked is that, when you list through Binance, you can specifically request no perpetual contracts and no synthetic shorts. Nothing we are rushing into on that front, but just giving you a little update.
For the DeFi protocols we announced, Benqi — things are progressing. Dopex, we spoke with them last week. They are looking to provide option vaults on both Harmony and DFK Chain if they can. Looking on what it would take to build those out. All partners trying to build on DFK Chain will require oracle price feeds and Mr. Faun is working on that.
Couple of game partnerships been worked on in how we can use DFK tokens and NFTs. That’s progressing to a slower extent.
That’s the primary update on partnerships.
Sunbear — Charity Update
Hey great to be here with you. Going to give update on Charity work going on. You may have seen some info tweeted out. After 1 week for UNICEF drive, we had over $153k in donations. 3763 actual unique donations in that process. We are sneaking up on two weeks now. Encourage you if you haven’t to go in game to the Jewel and donate if you can. Really excited about that and excited to match all donations up to $250K at the end of the month of April. You may have also seen the posting in Discord about what are our next efforts and focuses for Charities. I put a question out there on who would you like us to focus on and why and then I will compile all of that information and then we can put a vote on that and help guide our focuses. That’s my update for today.
Bolon — Community Update
Wee are always looking for new ways to interact, engage, have fun, new contests, etc. with our community. My door is always open for help/support, but also if you have ideas on how to make the community better or things you’d like to see. Let me know. We are always looking for new ways to talk to y’all and interact with y’all. If you have thoughts/ideas tell us and tell me. There’s no better way to maximize interaction with community other than the ways that our community wants.
Spicy — Marketing Update
Its been a really important task to get our accounts verified on social media. It’s an application and you have to submit things. This is part of our overall brand authority. We were hitting that really hard over this past week. Also security/safety, we want to make sure we get ahead of any scam sites. We’re also working hard on SEO just to make sure we are really establishing our brand and that we are the first site that you see when you search for DeFi Kingdoms. Hopefully on the next AMA we can announce that our verifications are done.
We’ve been hitting SEO very hard this last week. We can announce we’ve taken down over 300 scam sites. It will continue to happen but we will continue to work on it. Always make sure that you are clicking on the official DFK website. Don’t click on links!
Another initiative — we are looking for an overhaul of our tutorials. Looking to create some really in-depth tutorials and how we can put it on multiple formats. Reading, something more interactive in game, YouTube tutorials. We’ve been hitting that really hard. There have even been talks with Avalanche and maybe creating something really quality there.
We’ve been planning some fun campaigns with Rissen. We are still working out details, but we are looking at out of home advertising (like a billboard). We are working on gathering data to make better decisions on growth and betterment of the project. We’re balancing all of the tasks in from of us. Hope to see you at the next events, really excited about those.
Bolon — Security Note
Don’t click on links! Bookmark websites that you frequent often. Check out the security basics channel in Discord. If you have questions or think something is suspicious, come ask questions. This is crypto, if it's gone its gone. Be careful, be smart. If you have any doubts, ask questions and verify.
Pieface — Creative Update
Our department works very closely with everybody in terms of marketing materials and graphics. I’d like to focus on merch for a bit. I know its high demand. I’d like to give you an update in what we’ve selected for our first drop for the Merch store. What will be in there is what we’ve handed out at events, such as Serendale Shirt, Crystalvale Shirt, Bloater beanies, Bloater pins, Jewel Hat, Crystal Hat, stickers. We also have new items. One sneak peak is a new hat, that is a “Bullish” hat. I shared this in chat the other day. Also a Bloater fanny pack, will it be Bloater shaped fanny pack or a fanny pack with a bloater on it, we will see!
One last thing on the merch store, we are working on making Jewel as a method of payment. That will be a really interesting thing to do. We’ve seen BAYC use their APE coin for their store.
Rissen — Events Update
I know you guys have all been curious about when is the next time we are going to leave our dungeons and show our face in public. Looks like the next thing on our radar is a little thing happening in Austin Texas. Dcentral and Consensus. These are on our radar and we are trying to figure out scope, how many people are going and what we are going to do. Safe to assume that if you make your way to Texas you’ll see us there. More to come on future events this year, and it won’t be an update the day before the event.
Dcentral is June 7th and 8th. Consensus is the 9th-12th.
AMA Live Questions
(Mettez) I have two topics from the perspective that the team has. When we started to follow you along at the beginning of DFK, you were small, some people joined and the group exploded and you even have your own chain. What is your perspective on how the original Serendale now fits into you being your own dev studio, having your own chain, etc. I was a bit surprised about when you launched CV you were focused on what CV would be and the new players weren’t pushed towards Serendale. How does this all fit together and how do you see the ecosystem move forward? Will it be focused on Serendale or built around DFK Chain?
Dreamer — I heard a few questions in there. The first was whether we are focused on Serendale. The answer is yes. The features are significantly more abundant in Serendale and we’ll continue to release things there, maybe even first or in Tandem (for example Dopex and option vaults, Harmony already has price oracles). We are also working to bring things to Harmony. A lot of focus there with features coming up will live in Serendale, given that CV doesn’t even have many of the base core zones out yet. It is multichain gaming. One is a new realm, one is developed. They both have large roadmaps ahead. Over time the gaps between two will close and they’ll develop together.
Why upon launch did we not push people to Harmony immediately? It was more of a strategy. We wanted to celebrate CV and its beauty. Many were coming in from new chains. It overwhelms people to be directed to so many places right off the bat. However, with Gen0’s on the horizon and being able to come and have the new classes integrated into the existing pool that’s going to be really exciting and be the first reason for people to have a reason to have a cross chain experience. When pairing liquidity pools for the Dex, there’s not much cross-chain action to be taken, sure there’s some arbitrage. However, once we have summoning and a tavern, that’s where some real strategy comes in. Let’s say you are in CV and have a Shiny new Gen0, but you can’t do much with it yet, however, you have quests available over in Serendale. So you’ll see more effort marketing others to say “hey you’ve got heroes and want to quest? Head over to Serendale”. Quests will come to CV but will not be immediately available. Up until now the focus was on the stability of CV and the launch, in the middle of a pretty bumpy global macro economic environment. We’re going to continue building out the cross chain environment.
(Mettez) So I think the CV launch is 2 stage — now that the AVAX side and DFK chain side is launched with DEX, we can push players to Serendale for Cross Chain functionality with Heroes right?
Dreamer — We’ll open the bridges and opportunity for people, but funneling people back and forth, there will be a place there and an option to do so and people will have to make the decision best for their own bag, but we aren’t trying to herd or force people.
(Mettez) I know you won’t be able to answer this fully, but my last question has to do with the upcoming lock system for Jewel. It’s not mechanics related. Everything w/r/t how it will unlock is clear. I’m more talking about from a growth side, what is your perspective on how you see that moment happening and if you have any specific general tactics to deal with that or if you have strategies on how to deal with it. Not asking for concrete strategies, just want to hear what you perspective is and how you are thinking about how to answer that.
Dreamer — Let’s make a baseline first for what this means. The unlocking should happen, due to slower block times, in late august [Samichpunch Note — Early September]. They look at total supply and total supply in circulation. The price is really dependent upon Market Cap and Jewel in circulation. As we have emissions, ignoring the unlock for a minute, a higher percentage is unlocked over time from the gardens then that adds to circulation. Then we come to the unlock, and some people think its a clear and that everything will unlock at once. It unlocks linearly over 1 year. If you look at everything that needs to unlock and how much will unlock per year, and you compare that to previous epochs of how much Jewel is being minted, the inflationary impact isn’t too dissimilar to what we’ve been experiencing every week from unlocked Garden emissions. As we get closer to that unlock, emissions get lower. Unlocking will essentially replace the unlocked jewel increasing supply from higher emissions. So just wanted to clarify there won’t be some giant cliff. The whole plan is that there will be a constant flow of Jewel into circulation as a reward for LP staking. Then as emissions go down, we slowly start to unlock as people unlock.
So what is the plan? First plan is awareness and education. A lot of people think that on that day its all unlocked and is a big cliff. I think it would be great to have an analysis on comparing periods of time on how much the unlock rate will compare with the amount of emissions from prior periods. There are ideas with what we can do with locked jewel prior to unlock or even during. Whether its a discounted % of purchase. We are trying to be innovative and creative without disrupting that too much. There was a lot of discussions about Locked Jewel escrow services. The best thing we can do for an increase supply independent of unlocking or locking is to continue to grow our offering in the Metaverse. We’ve done this by marketing to new market participants, establishing our presence so that more people know about us, and then to integrate more games and protocols into the system. If we can bring new protocols in and front them in and fee share or as we integrate with other projects, we can build the user base and focus on supporting the ever increasing supply, the supply that’s been increasing the past 8 months and will continue to increase as the unlock starts to happen.
Hoping not to beat a dead horse here, but although people are focused on this, I think that the way a lot of people have approached this has been a bit more aggressive. I think we need data to see how its will be different than the amount of inflations just from claimed unlocked rewards.
There are some things we can do with Locked JEWEL in the background, but this isn’t a new thing. It’s a new source of inflation, but the inflation itself is not new.
(Mettez) Okay maybe just to recap and confirm if what I’ve heard is true. In very short terms, what you spoke about is that the main thing will be educating the people on what difference will be between inflation from Jewel unlocking vs the inflation we are and have been experiencing from Garden emissions. Then in a secondary way, trying to grow player base and active user base, which will cause people to use Jewel more and hopefully offset increasing supply with increased demand, but otherwise no specific mechanics you can disclose?
Dreamer — I would flip them. I think the primary focus is first to get closer to gameplay. Pets, new Gen0s, new unique high level quests, partnering with other protocols. That would be primary and secondary would be education. It’s become clear to me now that we need to lay out the facts and show people what the expected inflation is during that period compared to the prior year. That’s not our “primary” focus, that doesn’t fix anything, but its helpful to know. Primary focus is building the player base and inviting people to come and join.
It is important to note that we are subject to the overall global economy and monetary policy. A lot of things that nobody can control. Crypto has definitely been experiencing some downward trading, but so are riskier assets globally. These are things that DFK doesn’t have control over though. Primary focus is to build and continue producing content.
(Jcrypto) I have a two part question. First is with all these new partnership in the DeFi space, will we be able to borrow against our Jewel? For example, maybe borrowing stable coins against Jewel so we don’t have to sell Jewel if we believe in it long term and if so when could we expect to use that? If we could get that out before Jewel unlocks that might help alleviate sell pressure. The second part of the question is has the team considered paying the team in stable coins, for example, if borrowing is allowed, maybe the team could borrow against Jewel and pay in stables instead of Jewel?
Dreamer — re borrowing with Jewel, that’s directly part of our efforts to get other protocols to build with us, gamify it and integrate. We are most focused on our efforts with Benqi. In order to build on DFK chain and provide any sort of lending services we need price oracles so that risk management models can work consistently. We don’t have that same issue on Harmony so we are looking for people looking to support that in a similar way. For options, Dopex is looking to build on both Harmony and DFK chain, and those are fully paid for option vaults, but it would still be usage of your Jewel. If you wanted to write an option you could and deposit your Jewel into a vault and receive a premium. If you deposit in there with a strike of 10 and get a premium, with the mindset that if someone makes me execute with a strike of 10 I’ve double my money and I also get the premium.
Re timing and whether it would be in place before unlocking. I hope so. I would hope well before but there’s a lot of variables we cannot control. I think a two-month time frame is realistic, but a lot of these inputs are DFK devs building.
(Jcyrpto) Any thoughts on paying the team in stables vs Jewel?
Dreamer — Team is paid in Jewel, but I will play a bit of Devil’s advocate. If we pay in Jewel and they hold it (and most people hold more than they sell of what they are paid because most people want to hold it and we also have very clear guidelines (i.e. nobody on the team can sell for more than 0.1% price impact when price is up and when price is down its 0.05% price impact) so that we don’t move the market in any way). But let’s say if we have to pay people with Stables, somebody has to sell Jewel to get the stable. If we paid in stables 100% of the funds would have to be sold to get the stables, and right now, less than 100% of the Jewel paid is sold because a lot of people are trying to hold their tokens. Although long term I do think that it would be helpful to have a treasury of stables, where maybe a hybrid pay mechanic where a good portion of the pay was from stables. Then you could build out that buffer from a treasury perspective. I think doing a mass sale of Jewel in a bear market makes me uncomfortable, but if we are at the peak of a bull market, should we be incentivized to build out a corporate treasury to make up a majority of pay, I think that’s a great option. We’ve definitely thought about that. Is this market and time the best time to do that? I don’t think so, but we will discuss more.
(Nightcookie) Hi — just a couple quick questions. The first being, what is the summoning cost on CV will it be 1:1? Or since there’s less total supply will it be a 4:1 or 3:1 ratio? Also any ability to give an update on the pets launch and new quests coming out?
Dreamer — the utility of Jewel and Crystal is the same. That means if there are no other inputs of price, one would expect price to be very similar. However there are other inputs, popularity of chain, fee sharing of protocols on that chain, Jewel is used for Gas whereas Crystal isn’t. But because the supply is less there are things that will impact how Jewel and Crystal might be traded and used, but utility is not one of them. If we said you need 1/4th the amount of Crystal to summon, that would cause a lot of chaos between the tokens and understand how they fit in. Right now, we would expect that if one is much higher priced between the two, and the only utility was summoning, you’d have a lot of cross chain movement of people selling the higher cost token for the lower cost token and moving to the other chain to use the utility there. Am I predicting that they will always be the same? No. People are people and they will move to specific chains that they like more. Right now we have Gen0 xCrystal raffles that aren’t ongoing in Serendale, so that’s another input. We don’t control price, the community and users set that. The lower supply just means that the volatility, all things equal, if they experienced the same amount of movement in capital, the volatility would be higher. That’s one characteristic one could define with some confidence. So more volatility would be one thing to look at, but with summon volatility the same.
(Bolon) Did you want to comment about Chikn game on Avalanche?
Dreamer — I think that we are in talks with many different games and protocols. The reality is that we’ve talked to each every week or two. I think we are due for a Chikn catch up. I think one of the big tings we are looking for is allowing PFP’s to be supported and how our tokens can be used in their games. No clear report there, but if people are asking for it, I will make sure to talk with them about that this week. No material update for the Chikn requests unfortunately.
(Bolon) One last thing since its been asked a bunch?
Bolon — We don’t have a date for the training quests, advanced profession quests and pets. All three are heavily in progress, but this AMA isn’t for those items. They are nearing. We will have a new roadmap coming out soon. There will be information coming, just not live on this AMA.
Closing Remarks
Dreamer — Everyone we had on stage represents their own department sorry it feels like I spoke so much. We are trying to build this out in a way that is long lasting, sustainable. Taking baby steps and now bigger steps and leaps. We started out saying we will show up at one big event, now we are trying to show up at the medium events. We’re moving from not just telling people to avoid bad websites, but also taking them down. Moving from not just flimsy throw away merch to high quality stuff built by professionals and connecting that to a store and using Jewel to actually pay for that. We’ve seen what the community has done with UNICEF and asking the community who else we should be considering for charity down the road.
The team is so large now. What we are doing is that a good chunk is focused on main content, then a small group focused on minigames and sub content. Then you have this group here, which is focused on growing the business and marketing. The efforts are real. There’s some overlap with development, but they are separate. A lot of time is being spent on partnerships and new content.
We’re really just getting started. If you look 6–12 months from now and our merch, our charity, or presence at events and all the information available on our websites it will be different. We are building. We are doing our best to represent the DFK community throughout the world both in person and digitally.
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!
