DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Growth Pillar Team) — May 16, 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.
Here is a link to the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNFJHWNjXgc
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 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:
Frisky Fox, Dreamer, Sunbear, Poppy, Rissen Bolon
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Team Updates and Opening Statements
State of the Project Update
Frisky Fox — It’s been a busy week and a very interesting week. It’s also crazy in Crypto and last week was extra crazy. We saw a lot of interesting things in the wider market space. Some of the top 10 coins had issues and that’s something that was hard to foresee and was very eye opening. From our standpoint we had a busy week. We launched the Gen0 reroll and had a lot of people take advantage of that. It’s a cool way of rebalancing the gene pool. We also did Stone Carver, a big thing we’ve been working on to add more utility to gold and some of our other items. We saw a lot of people using it and a lot of gold and items consumed for that. Really excited for that because its driving the type of tokenomics we want to push in terms of adding additional utility and demand for the items out there. That’s the pattern we’ll be taking for all of our upcoming features, what type of behavior does it drive, is it adding new demand and utility, etc.
Speaking of the market again, we’ve made a lot of strides in the entity that we are setting up. It’s all set up and we are starting to have people transitioning over there and part of that is moving from a more contractor basis to a traditional style relationship with an entity. As part of that we are adjusting how we do payroll and being very cognizant of the competitive nature of this environment and being able to pay above market rate to employees but also making sure that we have enough runway to make it through whatever the market throws at us so that we can stay here and build build build. We are very serious about making sure that we have the runway. I’ve said this all along, but its about the projects that can stick it out and build build build so that they can reap the rewards of the market when it comes back strong. The strongest projects out there are able to weather the storms. So we are trying to be very conservative with spending.
We have some things underway. We are full steam on DFK Duel, its pretty far along. It’s going to have matchmaking functionality built into it, which is tricky to do on the blockchain, but our approach to it is very cool. It will auto balance and try to match you with others of equal skill, then having rewards that will be really fun. I’m excited to start to Duel. Also pets is a really big one and we are getting really close to that. Our team is full steam ahead on those two initiatives and you’ll see those in the short term. That’s mostly it from the build side and this is for the growth side so I’ll turn it to them.
Dreamer — Just to add on a couple of comments there. I mentioned last week and maybe the week before, solvency analysis is something very important and we’ve been very focused don it. Last week was wild and if someone asked if it would be wild compared to prior weeks I would have said no it can’t be more crazy but it was. All we could do was look at how we can take care of our ecosystem, community and our tokens and a lot of that came down to being intentional about our budgets and people and what we are prioritizing. Proud of our team, for putting in the time and being willing to adjust because there’s a lot of things we can’t control. I’m excited to build and grow and thankful for the community for positive comments and good questions and understanding. We need to look at this environment and say if we can survive and build and position ourselves that may not be making the same decisions to promote longevity, think about how we will come out on the other side. It’s not just about how much we can do on our own in the bear market, but how much can we do relative to others. At one point we hit top 100 tokens. What if we can continue to build content while others slow down or fall off and deal with their own struggles. Maybe this is a silver lining and its all very exciting. Its important tot stay positive and supportive of each others.
Wanted to note that there was a garden rebalance with everything that happened. The policy talks about this, when there is heightened volatility or other drivers that we don’t have control over. What do we have control over? Reducing emissions from some pools for example.
Kingdom Builders has been an area that Sunbear will talk about, but something I’m excited about in a bear market is building with the community. This is all something that will be very beneficial in this overall time period and theme of building in the bear. we are looking at other projects progressing. DFK Chain we are still waiting for price oracles and looking at options there. Some AAA games have reached out to work with us in a consultant capacity or even considering building on DFK Chain as they consider Web3. That’s an interesting opportunity we will pursue as they come up. Data analysts that are looking to partner with us is another thing. Maybe you go to the marketplace and you see a version of their analytics product show up there. Just another thing we are looking at in terms of the DeFI and marketplace aspect.
pets will be really cool for partnerships. So many games have animals in their game and we’ve hinted to the ability to integrate NFTs as pets. As we get closer to that date, I’m excited for our own pets, but also excited for other projects where we might see some cross-platform integration.
We have community, marketing, events, creative and impact initiative on this call, so we will kick it off to them.
Business Development Team Member Updates
Pieface (Creative)— we’ve been busy supporting marketing with graphics. We’ve still been in the Merch realm and like I shared before, the lineup for the first drop we confirmed it. So expect some of what we’ve given out at events but also some exclusive items. Another update is working on getting some samples and some logistics, so to start things off with a bang, I’ll share in AMA voiceless chat a teaser of some tote bags. Pretty awesome inspiration that came through and Mother Brain helped design these.
We want to coordinate with the community and get feedback from the community on what they’d like to see. We want not only inspo but also want to see what you guys want. Fanny packs are in the works.
For Kingdom Studios, as we’ve shared, and as some of us have Doxed we will be updating the website. The update will have a more extensive about us section and more details about events. Team section will be able to allow you to get to know us better, but also some pages with policies.
We are also working on some albums so that you can jam to the beautiful music that Sam has created. We’ve been working on that with marketing and Sam.
Poppy (Marketing Update)— Pie was just talking about our soundtrack coming out with the amazing music from Sam. That you can look out for later this month on Spotify. They are making some beautiful album art for it. The marketing team has been working on getting all this great content from the other departments and making sure we get it out to you guys. Starting with music, then we are getting more content from Lore. Last week we had a twitter space with Synapse where Mr. Faun talked about NFT bridging. We are planning to have more of these digital events so that people that can’t make live events can still hear from the team. I know that Spicy also mentioned in a previous AMA that we are trying to get our Twitter verification and one of the things that we needed for that was more legit news articles about that, so if you didn’t see it, there was a Forbes article about DFK this weekend about the Gamefi community and our community as well.
We’ve created an official Kingdom Studios linkedinpage that we are setting up. We have a few tutorials coming up this week for those of you who don’t know how to play on mobile. Then we are also in conversation with Avalanche and Coinbase on creating some more educational tutorial videos.
Some of the marketing team will be in Austin for Decentral and Consensus coming up.
Rissen (Events) — we are headed to Permissionless this week. We are finishing up plans for Decentral and Consensus where we will be in Austin next month. There will be Chaos Cast coming out and announcing them in the next day or two. You might see some familiar faces like Sam, our Composer, maybe new features and first looks at a few things, or at worst you’ll see me and Bolon down at Permissionless.
Bolon (Community) — really excited for Permissionless as well as Decentral and Consensus. Come meet us and say hi. No matter what happens with the market and what's going on. In addition to building we are focused on the community and keeping this environment that we have. Now its more important than ever. There’s so many people that come into DFK and hear Sam’s music and see our Art and see our gameplay features and then they join the community and see how friendly and supportive they are. I just wanted to reemphasize that in these times its more important than every because as we build we are going to see people joining and its our community that will keep people staying with the project long term. Just wanted to highlight the importance of that. Lots of people say in the Discord that they’ve never seen a community like this in Crypto.
Sunbear (Impact Initiatives) — What do we do in a bear market? We look for light and the sun and we build. I’ll give a report on our new building program that launched 1.5 weeks ago. The format we used is Discourse, its working out quite well. We’ve hade just over 35k views in the last 1.5 weeks. 255 Likes on various posts. We have 7 active proposals that are posted and up and are under review and receiving feedback. You can see those progressing in the next couple weeks moving towards community vote. There are a couple of channels in there for collaboration for devs in the community that we wanting to maybe build a team or who are looking to contribute. Then there’s a brainstorming channel to get feedback from people on various ideas. Lots happening there. Looks like most people are going in an viewing at the very least. There’s also lots signing up and offering feedback and consulting as well.
So we have this channel where people can consult with myself and Piano man about the grant program, things like how to prepare a submission or maybe they are seeking feedback on a proposal they’ve already written. Meeting you all in these spaces (we’ve done just over 12–13 of them and have several more scheduled this week), almost everyone is on Camera and everyone’s been really excited about building even in this market. I’ve been really inspired by the amount of people wanting to build on DFK Blockchain.
On the Charity side, the community voted up the Wolf Dog Rescue and Project Beloved. We will put those up as our Charity areas of focus. We’ll do it a bit different this time. We’ll do a raffle, one in SD and one in CV, and it will be for a Gen0 in each one. In CV you’ll have a Gen0 from CV, and in Serendale you’ll have one of the original Gen0’s from Serendale. 1 raffle ticket will be like 1 Jewel in SD and 1 Crystal in CV. Buy as many as you want and we’ll raffle them off in the end of June. Side bonus we will add 5 pet eggs as a runner up to that. Maybe people are just really excited about pets and so maybe that’s why they voted up Wolf Dog Rescue.
AMA Live Questions
(Mettez) It’s been exciting to hear the steps you are taking and the new content you are working on and all of those things, got me thinking about the roadmap being portrayed. I understand that the roadmap was published before other opportunities arrived and before you as a company had to take certain steps, but are you considering reworking the roadmap or adding a lot more detail there for the new content you’ve been working on for the past few AMAs because that content isn’t available anywhere else other than the AMAs.
Dreamer— are you referring to roadmap of the native game or other things we are working on?
Mettez — the old roadmap was based on the fact that you were working on int game content like pets, buildings, etc. CV had the same idea. Right now you are working on so many more new things, such as the quest system got reworked, or DFK Duel, which is completely different from what PVP might be. All of these new steps are interesting and we get you don’t want to pin yourself to a date, but you are working on so much, it would be good to get it out there what you are working on.
Frisky Fox — The task force is working on a launcher that will be like other games that have recent events and things coming up that will be cool. The roadmap we are working on a revamped and reimagined roadmap that has a lot more details. We are doing a ton of stuff, especially with integrations with 3rd parties into our DFK chain, what we are trying to do more of is creating a metaverse place where others can come and build as well, so the supporting efforts for that will be on the roadmap as well.
(Mettez) While it shows a great deal of confidence that the team has their funds in Jewel, and all in game prices are tied to the power token and not an underlying value, the price action that you can’t control though, does that affect the capacity of the team? Would you reconsider your strategy or is this an inherent part of your vision long term?
Frisky Fox— like you said it has pros and cons using one mechanism over another. Up until now, we’ve done basically all of it in Jewel but we do have some funds in other currencies and we are trying to make that more of a priority to have those there so that we can respond and react in the best way in any kind of market. As we move to Kingdom Studios, it’s a studio that operates in the U.S. and has payroll, so we will still be using Jewel’s for a lot of things, but there will be some stuff that will be in traditional fiat and so having a treasury in all of the above is a smart move for us, also building out those treasuries so that we can react in the best way in any kind of market, as well as just being a lot more thoughtful with our spending and ensuring that everything we are spending has the best ROI.
(Mettez) I expect you can’t speak a lot to this, but with the New Gen0s launching and the new hero tree launching, can you speak somehow to the expected timeline (obviously no commitments), but the expected timeline for new expansions as it relates to being able to expand the new hero tree and giving more long term value to the new Gen0s?
Frisky Fox— It’s a fair question because the first 8 created the ability to make advanced, elite and transcendent. I can’t speak with a definitive voice on timeline, but we are trying to balance out fleshing out the game with lore and gameplay with expanding. It’s going to go back and forth as we progress. The next expansion will be a lot easier because the first one paved the way. I’d like to see all 8 newer classes out in a reasonable amount of time. We are still under a year old and already have an expansion. You’ll probably see one every half year or so is kind of the pace we are targeting. Don’t quote me on that. We are trying to prioritize whatever adds the most ROI at any given time and right now that’s gameplay features, and a lot of those will play into expansions as well.
(From Discord Chat) Is there any update on the thought process behind a standalone mobile app for DFK?
Frisky Fox — been thinking about that for a long time. There’s some really cool plugins for unity that integrate with the blockchain and we have some on our team that are really good with Unity. Obviously you can still play through Meta mask on your phone, but having a standalone app would be amazing and we want to do it its just a question of when we fit it into our timeline and the ROI, coming back to the whole point of focusing on what will provide the most ROI at any given time. This will allow us to be one of the largest players out there, which is our goal. I fully agree that its a great marketing and user acquisition approach too. Having an app in the app store you’ll get a lot of newer people into the game that otherwise didn’t try it.
(Linq) Next expansions. I really like the new characters that we got, but I was hoping you could focus more on heroes that would grasp the Asian markets, like maybe samurai heroes? Can you give any details in terms of further expansions?
Frisky Fox — can’t give specific details but we’ve thought along similar lines for having themes. Obviously this one was more of a northern, barbarian theme. Other expansions will have other themes. I’ve seen class lists that we have planned and there are for sure some of those traditional Asian style themed classes as well.
(Bless) In regards to building program, I think its given community a voice in the DFK future so thank you for allowing the opportunity to community to build alongside Kingdom Studios. How much of ap riority is the grant program in grand scheme and will a grant proposal compete with AAA games?
Frisky Fox— Build program has been one of my highest priorities since the very start, making sure we provide the tools to the community to be able to build 3rd party sites to analyze data but also to integrate with the game itself. This is one of the coolest things that will be made possible by the blockchain, like ready player one, where I can create a program and put it on the blockchain that has its rules and parameters, but can interact with the assets. All apps currently do that by interacting with things like Eth, ONE, etc, but NFTs is another thing and we haven’t seen much of that.
In terms of competition with the game itself, I see it as additive and not competitive. Anytime you see websites try to control the entire narrative and not open up to the community devs, they will never be as successful as someone trying to create a platform.
Dreamer — if you take all 3 business lines, we have our native building, which is very native core team intensive. Then we have the build program, where we have two people allocated to facilitate that, but its really driven by the community and we just facilitate that process. Kingdom Studios resources that that will take up is significantly less than our native features. If you think about other games, we are seeing people reach out and ask for consulting and we talk about things like maybe using DFK tokens in your game. Oh you have NFTs? Maybe they can be integrated? These consulting services we may provide to these other games are similar to the role we are playing with the consulting to people wanting to build under our Build program. So I don’t view that as competitive. There are some shared resources, but there are a lot of resources operate independently there. Nothing gets deprioritized to the point of there not being any progress. [See recording for exact transcript of this paragraph until it can be updated]
(Bless) I think its been working well. I have a submission on there. I’ve met with Sunbear and Pianoman and hope to see a lot more interaction on the build website. Thanks.
Sunbear — Just wanted to reiterate that this is a priority for us. I was just talking to Faun about a website we are building to help support developers going through this program. We are constantly figuring out how to do this well. Go to meet with Bless, super excited about what he’s putting out there, and also Coolio, who I got to meet with.
(Coolio) First question I had, Pie was talking about Marketing, and you guys were talking about AAA games and Spotify. As income picks up for Kingdom Studios, how, if at all does that impact the price of Jewel and also I would imagine that you would move that into a side fund for salary or different things like that for people that are working for the team? Is that your vision?
Dreamer— there’s a couple ways to look at it and we don’t control how everything goes, so there’s some adjust and learn mentality here. Merch for example, we make things people want to buy so that its profitable and self sustaining where does that go? Well that would be a new business line for KS outside of Jewel. There’s potential as we work with other projects or games and provide consulting services, maybe we do that so that they build on DFK chain, maybe we do that instead of fees for services to KS. That could potentially turn into its own self sustaining business line that synergizes with the business line of the DFK metaverse and game. I think anything in game, that’s not going to change. The whitepaper outlines how fees are distributed to certain wallets in terms of power token transactions and those wallets help pay salaries. I hear what you are saying and yes there will be different lines of revenue over time and we’ll have to adjust where the best ROI is for the time and money spent for each.
Frisky Fox — A lot of different lines, we want to put everything that we are doing towards continuing the best success of the project and there’s a lot we could be spending that on, whether its marketing, the chain, or salary. There’s lots of opportunities to use those funds.
Dreamer — for how it impacts Jewel, I don’t want to speculate, but no matter what focus of KS is, there will always be a focus on creating the economy and value of Jewel, NFTs and other tokens, so that when people come and want to work with us, they have an incentive to build with us. So just want to emphasize that there won’t be a direct impact on jewel, but there is a focus on all other business lines that come up to add to the gameplay, value and utility of our tokens.
(Coolio) Have you committed to the next chain and if so, can you disclose?
Frisky Fox— we have some that are in serious consideration, we can’t disclose yet, the time has to be right.
Dreamer — We’d mentioned in pervious AMAs the possible options. Right now we are on EVM compatible chains, there’s only a limited number out there that you could expect. There’s a few we would really like to work with at some point and we’ve previously commented on them, but with everything we saw last week, we aren’t overly eager to expand to quickly. Current priority is to really get third party building and native building going. Getting gameplay going, so that when we move on to 2nd and 3rd realms, there will be a huge platform to get there. If we had expanded when we only had a Dex on SD, it would have been harder. We want to make sure we don’t expand before its necessary or ideal. We will avoid giving any specific names, but there are some pretty obvious ones out there where you could probably guess their names.
(Malience) First question — if a grant project isn’t correlated with the tokens or NFTs, but want to build on the chain and maybe use some in game currencies like Gold, would that also qualify?
Sunbear— absolutely, anyone can bring forth an idea, the community will respond, we can consult. We will make sure it doesn’t disrupt the project or cause problems. But yes a completely independent project that wants to build on our chain are eligible.
Frisky Fox — If you think a bout DFK, a pretty significant part of transactions on ONE are from this. We want to build a chain that is optimized for that type of application and adds utility to Jewel and we want to attract people to come to our chain for that.
Dreamer — I try to throw ideas out there, but with pets coming out, the amount of third party application for Pet NFTs is unlimited. There are so many cool mini games that people are going to use that could use those. Someone could start their own protocol, Defi related or otherwise, and the grant proposal could implement that and DFK could be the front end of the game like BENQI and DPX. The goal is to add to overall experience and to the value and utility of the tokens. Even if its completely inconsistent with DFK, they can apply, and the community can make that vote. We are trying to be shepherds of the overall process. Also someone wanting to use our tokens like Gold, that’s a great candidate
(Malience) Second question —in terms of moving to paying the team members a salary rather than Jewel, I feel like a lot of us here know that our Devs and Mods are friends, do we expect backlash from them on this? I feel like there will have to be salary adjustments, and with that taking place I love everyone here and don’t want to see anyone leave?
Frisky Fox— trying to change things to be more in line with market, but still above to be competitive, its important that we keep the amazing people that we have. A lot of us are here for numerous reasons, pay is good, but the project is awesome, and I’m here in part because this is my dream. Creating a project like this has unlimited upside and we have amazing plans and goals for this project. Obviously we need to stay conservative. Trying to balance those two things is something we’ve been spending a lot of time doing. That’s on our mind and we are trying to ensure we keep all of the good people that we have.
(Malience) I know with all the FUD going on that Devs are scrutinized for doing. I know there’s lots of fud campaigns. I think the best growth in the community is when everyone plays and everyone who wants to be part of the game can be. When you take that away, and you stop paying people in jewel, is it like taking them out of the game?
Frisky Fox— we have policies about how and when people can participate in the game. We don’t want them to compete against the community for limited quantity item, we encourage our team to play and to have heroes and do quests.
(Thanpolas) I’d like to preface my Q that I’m working full time developing services tooling content for DFK and I’m very grateful for this opportunity and DFK is changing my life. Under that scope, I’m going to ask a bit of a tough question in the sense that you mention you are all for the community and that community is first. What would you say are the actions you are taking that support the community and the active players from an engagement perspective. Whatever feedback I give through any channel, I don’t receive a response. It’s not a complaint that you don’t respond, but I know first hand I can elaborate and put you on the stand in a sense. I’ve used the form and submitted feedback. I’ve submitted feedback on proposals. I’ve been pushing for Uservoice platform since December stating that the game has not grown. The AMA is the only lifeline that is considerable in terms of work towards the community. Uservoice hasn’t been completely deployed in terms of how the AMA is conducted. It’s not always the best questions that get asked, its the same individuals that get to ask the questions. I’ve tried to go up the chain starting with mods and going up. I’ve DM’d Bolon and Frisk, emailed Frisky and haven’t received responses. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but what gives, are those coincidences experienced by just me? From what I hear from the community that’s not quite the case. So what can you enumerate that shows the actions you take to engage and empower the community?
Frisky Fox— So what do we do for the community and how can we improve comms with the community? What do we do? We build the project that adds utility to the tokens and assets. We also grow the project through the efforts of the people here. We also grow and maintain/upkeep the community such as the Knights and Bolon. We split up responsibilities like that. Certain people are in charge of building, others in growing, and others the community. Sometimes when you message someone who is not as focused on the topic you are seeking you might be slower to get a response. If you message a knight you might get a quick response, if you message me, I see that I have 5 unread messages from you, I get a lot of DMs and emails, and I do my best to keep up on them but that’s a moving target. You hit the nail on the head with Uservoice. That’s something we will be pursuing more. While our AMAs are some of the best communication I’ve seen int he crypto space, we can improve on that as well. I think its a questions of what are we doing, how can we improve and what steps can we take to get there and we are always looking at these.
(Thanpolas) So you are saying that engagement is that you have built a project. That doesn’t really align with engagement. And yes there's not a knight that didn’t respond. But how is action being handled? If you push engagement of the community to the knights. It’s not a concerted effort like a Uservoice would be. So the community doesn’t really have a voice, and when it was heard, it was because a very small minority had the loudest mouth. I can tell you for sure that whatever happened did not represent the majority. Like the FUD campaign when you asked for a vote of confident and 98% didn’t want that, but the minority was loud.
Frisky Fox — Yes, having Uservoice seeing what is important to the majority. That is the impetus of us needing something like that because like you said, its often the squeaky wheel in the community that is heard, but its not something that is felt by everyone. In terms of how we handle feedback, we have a channel in our slack group where our knights will come into our slack and say hey here’s an item that’s been receiving a lot of input and questions and if there’s anything that needs a response it ends up there and we see a lot of things there.
Dreamer — I’ll add to it as well. There’s probably a lot of people that have had your experience and probably a lot that haven’t. Another thing is issues as we build, and Sashei building the bug report, and the response rate might be higher on that.
(Thanpolas) That’s support and I’m not talking about Support, its entirely separate from community engagement.
Dreamer — I think you are giving good feedback that at this stage we need to provide a similar level of service outside of support. I think the Uservoice suggestion is something we’ve been trying, like with the Charities that is through Uservoice. Also through DMs and emails we’ll try to follow up with some of those things. As the project grows we recognize we need to evolve and its noted that we need to improve in this area.
Closing Remarks
Sunbear—Really appreciate you. Great community. Support is felt here. Thank you.
Dreamer—I know we are a bit over. Thanks for the questions. Lots to give us hope and is exciting. A lot of people in the background dealing with the market events that we all are. Stay positive. We’ll continue to deliver content. It’s not easy. We wake up to new news every day. The community give the team that life force to keep going and to keep building. Just like when the community sees releases and hops in discord and engages with the team, it gives a lot of uplifting energy. The future is bright.
Frisky Fox — It’s been a hard week in many ways int he crypto space. We’ve had some cool features put out though and have some fun ones planned. It’s really cool to step back and look at where we are at now versus where we were not even a year ago when we launched. If someone came up to me and said hey you have the opportunity to be on this project that has 90k excited really great members of the community that are excited for everything you release an dan amazing team you are able to pay above market rates and working on this thing that's so fun to build and have your brand and a chain, its just amazing to see how well positioned we are as a project and being able to head into any market and execute and add all sorts of value. I’m really excited about what the future looks like for us. We have an amazing team and amazing community. Stay supportive and stay kind. Stay excited because we are asl well and we have a lot of fun things planned and are going to go far.
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