DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates — Announcement of New Serendale Home) — August 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 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=XDV4L95WYeU
This week, the AMA was from members of several teams relating to updates on the project. Go to the website https://dfk.rapidr.io/ and submit AMA questions there and Join the discord to also see responses to AMA questions not covered on the weekly calls.
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
AMA Questions:
The recording starts a bit late — but appears to start around some questions and a general discussion about the partnership with Wisdom Gaming, the studio that will be helping to build out DFK PVP.
Details on Wisdom Gaming Partnership for PVP
- No % of equity in Kingdom Studios
- Very fair price to DFK community and Kingdom Studios with tokens and some USD as a retainer.
Planning to hold some AMA’s with Wisdom. They have expressed interest in talking to community. Will also have a discord channel with Wisdom members having a special role where community can chat with them.
The way the agreement is structed shows the faith/bullishness that Wisdom has in this because a lot of their comp and upside will be dependent on the value of tokens going up, so they benefit based on what they put into this.
A lot of the Wisdom Gaming people are community members, some from the earliest days of DFK.
What about the PVP Prototype? What’s the state of that? Is it still being used? Has it been scrapped?
Hubert: That was developed with the combat devs we had previously who are no longer on the team. With Wisdom Gaming we are going from 2 devs to 8. We are looking to expand it, but also utilize the skillset Wisdom provides and take it further than the prior prototype.
Frisky: A prototype is exactly that, a system to test things out. It was still a good test and we were able to test a lot of cool things like abilities which will influence or at least inform things in the new system. We also realized that having everything on chain is hard and we will be able to sus out some new architecture which we will be pioneering. A lot of good things came from it, but am very excited about what we are building there now as well.
Are there any timelines available for initial development? Any plans to involve community in Alpha or Beta testing?
Frisky: I know they are really starting in earnest these past couple weeks. Don’t have an exact timeline, but do know they want to have a demo that they’d like to show to the community really quickly. Having that put out sets the stage for discussion and feedback. I have a lot of faith in their experience and am excited to see what they come up with.
Dreamer: Have to be careful with timelines because this is a new partnership. Lot of skilled people and good background and intent but we need to see some proof of concept of working together and sharing timelines. We have goals, and those goals are not years, but those goals may adjust based on new problems that we may identify. We are looking to share progress as there is progress that comes out and there are some exciting deliverables for the committee next week internally that may return to releasing something in the following 2–3 weeks after that. Roadmap and timeline after the 1st month will probably be more clear. Right now focus is on quality of the output and not arbitrary deadlines on the inputs.
Trailer for marketing involved in this? Will Wisdom be providing a trailer, will we be doing a trailer?
Dreamer: Let us come back to that one. We will want to have marketing efforts. Trailers cost money and we are focused on which areas to spend the money, but I do think that there are a lot of skillsets in the parent company at Wisdom that may be able to participate in the collaboration but we haven’t decided on anything yet.
What experience from Wisdom let us to partnering with them?
Dreamer: met with a bunch of game studios. Some were very large, some were talented but not familiar with DFK. Wisdom was smack dab down the middle. Their energy and excited to worth with its off the charts. They have their own great successes and have gotten a lot of requests from other projects.
It has become clear this won’t just be only a transactional collaboration where we want A we pay B you give C. Instead we come together with really talented fans who have organized themselves in an unrelated fashion and are coming together in a mutual interest to make DFK incredible. That was something that really stuck out.
It's always possible to find people that can do what you want to do and pay them money, its completely different thing to find people you vibe with you get on the phone with and start bouncing ideas off of each other and timelines. It's not about butting heads and stress and conflicting views. It's about creating a game that is supposed to be fun and incredible and innovative. We’ll see how it goes, maybe there are other groups that are suited for other types of features. We shall see. This is our first effort on this. We are excited though because of how passionate they are about this.
Bolon: Every time I’ve talked to them its clear they are believers in the project.
Compensation — payments made in DFK tokens. Is there any timelock or are they stagged to prevent a rapid sell off?
Dreamer: No tokens are being paid that can be sold immediately or in a rapid way or all at once. We’ll let the structure of the deal be the structure of the deal. There’s no exchange of liquid Jewel that can be sold in the short or mid term. Even when they can, its a longer schedule of release. At no point in time today or tomorrow or even 4–6 months from now would they be able to sell the whole chunk. They would essentially be over a multiyear horizon.
PVE and PVP — what are our thoughts to balancing buffs and nerfs. Are we going to be hands off?
Hubert: looking at how games are developed, especially of this scale, it’s necessary to do balancing. For the amount of interactions possible it would be impossible to test everything. There will be things where we say a class is too OP or there's a class that doesn’t have a enough strength. There will always be a need for balancing. We hope to get to a point where its balanced enough where we can be hands off until something new is introduced that we need to consider balancing.
Any updates on stuck heroes from questing in CV?
Hubert: Apologies to those who have been effected by this. The cause was due to an upgrade and a bug we didn’t notice while we were testing. We created a situation where if you were impacted, unless we fix in manually, the issue will propagate even after we fix the buzz. So at this point we believe the bug has been resolved. If you think you have stuck heroes report that so that we can get it taken care of.
When we started out with questing, heroes did not recover stam once quest timer was time and you could only work with the stamina you had the time of starting so if queuing multiple parties in advance you’d waste a lot of stamina. The system now takes into account the amount of stamina you’d gain waiting in queue, and makes sure you are recovering stamina after.
Having an ingame address book, we have the ability to send within the UI, but having an address book where we could save web3 addresses would be nice.
Beetle — like that idea, maybe something that we could surface on the front end on each item, but maybe people want the catalog.
Bolon — we have a lot of quality of life improvements that will come but have been postponed while focusing on CV parity.
Do you have a timeline for the top duels rank rewards?
Frisky: no, not an exact timeline. I have some ideas and we’d like to launch this around the same time in December. We’d want to do these around the same time as Season 1. So in terms of date no, but in terms of what comes after we’ll announce the date that we will close down duels in Serendale, and we’ll say “on this date, this will be the last duel fought” then we will announce the date of the raffle in Serendale. We’ll give it a period of a few days to a a week for anyone that still has raffles on Serendale that they’ll be able to use those, then the Duels season 1 will launch on CV along with the raffle master and all of the refactoring in place there. We’ll also look to be adding airdrops for those that hit certain ranks, as well as planning certain achievements as well as doing some special drawing for all participants to win some cool things.
Plans for Birthday of DeFi Kingdoms (Birthday is August 22, 2022)
Frisky: We launched 8/22/21. We have some cool things planned. Poppy has a write up she’ll be putting out tomorrow. Keep eyes out on twitter and also stuff in the town crier on how to participate. Go participate! That’s all I’ll say on that.
As far as before moving off Harmony and waiting for recoveryONE team response?
Dreamer: I’ll be delicate about this and probably be too nice rather than too harsh. Our focus has been to be really good partners with everyone we worked with. Harmony was great for founding the project and initial growth. We saw that as we need to grow bigger and look for new goals and do right by our community that we have partners that see the vision, support builders and focus on technology and communication. I feel that we’ve seen less of that over time from Harmony. On Avalanche we’ve seen how great it can be to work with teams that focus on that. We had to start looking at different options with budget, strategy, navigating this crazy market in the world, regulations, central banks, and crypto in general in this market. We feel that we’ve given ample time to look for a solution that might warrant giving up all opportunity costs of potentially moving to another chain. There has been an overwhelming amount of requesting that we consider leaving, and I’m proud we didn’t have a knee jerk reaction and just run right away. We did review Harmony’s initial plan and them going back to the drawing board. I hope they come to resolution. What is best for DFK and what is best for our risk management needs to be independent of their plans on how to make Harmony users whole, however. At this time it would probably not be the best risk management or business focus to continue to pause and wait and not consider other options and partners. That’s the initial response there.
Frisky: A lot of speculation about why do we do multi chain vs single chain. There’s a lot of things involved in having an app on multiple chains, you have to have bridges etc. Or why did we do a game on chain. We do things not because they are easy. There’s a lot of pros and cons of it. One major pro is that I’m a huge fan of being able to work with all of these great teams in the space. Avalanche has been amazing to work with. We’ve interfaced with so many teams, there are so many that we’ve had the opportunity to work with that are very professional and are in the process of creating very groundbreaking and pioneering things. That’s one of the major pros that I see and look for when working with other projects that we are trying to integrate with. Even if its not easy.
Update on the New Home of Serendale !!!
Dreamer: going to try and be a bit transparent here, but on the Birthday of DFK we are going to have a special AMA or roundtable and we will go into this topic in detail. WE are going to name drop here in a second but a little bit of an intro following which we will have on the RapidR site threads for questions that we will collect and feed into the AMA next week. We’ll also hopefully have a 1–2 pager about impacts on token migration, tokenomics, etc.
We’ve spoken to a lot of different chains, some of which have followed us for a very long time and some that have some really good benefits if we built on them. I won’t list them all here, but one question we’ve been asked a lot is if we’ve talked to Polygon, and yes we’ve been talking to them since November. They’ll always be in focus to build on at one point.
There is one really big thing that we are excited about for Polygon and that is a realm that is themed and created for them. Just as we created Crystalvale for Avalanche. When we are considering on the back of the events that happened we have to consider a style and theme for that realm and there's upside in terms of user acquisition in that ecosystem. Polygon is not that solution. Stylistically, Serendale does not match Polygon themes, and I don’t want to overpromise but I see it being more futuristic mecha, a lot of cool stuff could happen in that them.
Was there interest from Polygon to go there? Yes, lots of interest. Lots of talks, discussions and meetings. Going all the way back to November, there was a different view of what Serendale would look like if we moved to Polygon and it was inconsistent with what we had in mind, but its still soft earmarked for a future realm. We aren’t focused on a new realm soon because we are really focused on the interplay between Serendale and Crystalvale.
I wanted to address that since a lot of people are asking about MATIC. Polygon has been incredibly interested and incredibly helpful. Very professional. For this specific move though, its not the best fit and we see other fits down the road.
Frisky: I’ll add that we had a very clear vision of what we wanted to maintain for multichain, and the expansions that we have planned. We want to make sure that those things that represent opportunities for growth in this project remain strong.
Dreamer: So what is our main focus? It’s a large opportunity cost to uproot Serendale and move it away. In no way do we have animosity towards Harmony, but there needs to be a benefit and a strategy and upside for this disruptive move. What we look for in chain partners and one of the biggest things is that we need a stable chain to operate that is fast and cheap — we have that with DFK chain. We need good partners that are well positioned in Americas, EMEA to help us navigate spaces. We have that with Avalanche as well. What could benefit the ecosystem? We don’t have much exposure in Asia. We have select communities in Asia and Southeast Asia that are building in strength but in terms of true partnership in that region we don’t have much.
We started to look into options there and whether there are some chains that are better positioned there and one in particular stuck out. This chain has a tremendous amount of partnership announcements in the past year and a half. I invite you all to do your own research and see what you think are strengths and not, but user acquisition and the potential for increase in user acquisition in the next phase of Web3 and Web3 gaming whether accompanied with a bull market or not, is definitely in focus. Everyone is looking for where are new users going to come from in the space. People are looking for ease of onboarding, governments that support it, partners that support it. If you look at chains, those that are well partnered with regulatory authorities, with banks, with gaming studios, traditional gaming studios, new studios coming up, art, and overall technology, those are among the best positioned and in Asia we found that Klaytn was one that stood out for a number of reasons.
Klaytn is a blockchain in South Korea. They launched in 2019 and in the first year they amassed 1M users. As they built their user base and ecosystem, a couple of partnerships caught my eye. I lived in Korea for a few years and I speak Korean. I also lived in Singapore for a few years. I saw that Klaytn is very well partnered with large companies like Altavagroup in Singapore, EastNFT in Thailand, Soramitsu in Japan, Chainlink partnership and full integration. They are already partnered and connected to Synapse bridge, which is our main supporting bridge gamified in the docks. They are working very closely with some very large banks, you can go do the research I won’t name drop them all.
When you have funding, when you have tech, when you have a lot of giants coming from different countries in a region, you identify a huge potential foundation to create a springboard in the next potential progression and innovation of this space. This was a decision to be very strategic about leaving Harmony. What is the upside to the new partner, is it similar users that we already have exposure to? Similar tech or similar competitor to where we are already strong, or is it a strategic bet on a newer area where we could expand our offering and our net globally and our strategy, marketing and user acquisition model.
So how does this tech check out? They’ve been around for a few years and they’ve had their bumps like any blockchain. Since last year there have been a number of enhancements to their main chain. They offer an equivalent of subnets that they call layer 2. They’ve already launched a few games on their layer 2’s, one of which is called NiNo Kuni.
We are looking at the potential of not doing our own Layer 2 and launching on their mainnet chain. We have looked at historical transactions and had their folks in technology look and confirm they think they can handle our transaction. We are going to be partnering with them closely on migration and launch and many details will be announced next week with supporting material. Some numbers to throw out there. There’s about 51M people in South Korea. According to a few articles, about 75% of the active population are gamers. So a lot of people that might have been in Starcraft or League of Legends or some other games, you know that South Korea region is an are that is big into the game. 51M, 75% are active gamers between ages of 21–50. That is directly in the range and mindset of people that could look at the next stage of web3 gaming to be potentially new users for hte game and new users for the financial instruments.
With all of these reasons, we considered Klaytn as an option. We’ve spent over a month working with their team working with them. We’ve given updates on the 2-way job interview type of scenario, also some negotiation, because we will be spending resources building for their chain. We aren’t going to announce any of the details at this point, but we have come to an agreement on good incentives for us to consider the move as being worth it not just for the initial work but also to extend our runway and to align our mutual interests in DFK and their success in Klaytn.
Frisky: This is a really exciting development. I’ve been on the edge of my seat as we look for partners and try to find the perfect fit. All of the chains have pros and cons. All types of things we are looking at in partners. One of the main things that is important and exciting is players. We have to have lots of players. As alluded to earlier, there are tons of players over in South Korea. Star Craft is life there, they have so many esports over there. When we look at all the chains as options that we looked at, none of them brought that same opportunity to acquire a lot of new users. There are many other things that are great as well, it has a lot of good connections with official entities over there in Korea to ensure that they are always doing things that are on the up and up, its important to look into building out these new markets that are untapped, a lot of the chains are focusing on the western world. China has had a very hard and strong stance against things in Crypto but there are still a lot of people over there that are excited about it and building on it and I feel that Asia is on the verge of just exploding into the web3 world. This sets us up nicely to be one of the main offerings for players wanting to get into blockchain technology and things like defi can come and try and use and learn to see how it works. It was all very much aligned with our core ethos as a project.
There is a lot of other cool things. They are creating some new tech that would allow for us to allow our players to use Jewel to spend for Gas. They are working for a feature that would allow for that. That’s one of the main things I love about DFK Chain. We have started internally doing some refactoring with our codebase and smart contracts to allow us to take all of the things that we improved for CV and do them in Serendale in 2.0 so that it will be even better and more secure once we launch over there.
Bolon: I started the rapidr thread for people to start posting question about this transition and we will have the special session on Monday to address those.
Dreamer: I do want to cap what this means, and its related to the incentives as well. We’ve been doing our best to identify creative solutions with all of the problems in web3 and the world. Looking back, I think we’ve done a pretty good job. Our initial focus was survive, then survive and be better, then survive and improve and not miss out on the upside. I feel like this decision sets us up for the long run. One thing is probably not as noticeable, so what we did for CV parity is that we went to our partner, Avalanche and asked if they could help incentivize and immediate switch of 100% efforts to CV and they showed up with help, support and an amount of precommitted funding that will convert into overall equity. That was initial price discovery of paying for Kingdom Studios and paying for the overall offering. This is a second example. Although the deal structure can’t be announced yet and we want to be respectful of Klaytn, this is another major chain paying for a collaboration with DFK. What do we do after this? We resume the fundraise and we will have a lot more data points. We’ll have these two data points, we’ll have a lot more data points on what we are doing on DFK chain, so if you aren’t over there, head over there it helps tremendously, with transactions, active heroes, progress. With our partnership with Wisdom and our PVP offering it shows we are continuing to progress the overall roadmap while trying to solve for these other priorities and then our potential new user acquisition plans and all the fun things we have planned that we will announce on Monday. When I think about this and go back into fundraising mode I feel that it starts to put us back into a position of strength. When the world was crumbling beneath us we were not in a position of strength. I feel we are turning back to a strong foundation, not just one that will survive a bear market but can not just take part but take over. For a while there we were looking for capital and getting questions we didn’t know how to answer, things like what's the situation with harmony, what's your user acquisition strategy, what are your plans to build out your other offerings, what's your mobile solution, what's your global strategy. I’m really excited to back to work as we finalize priorities 1 and 2 with Serendale and Crystalvale Parity, because as we go out to the major funds out there, those that are interested in investing in Kingdom Studios we have a much more complete picture. I’m sure it will continue to evolve and change, but where we are today compared to six weeks ago feels very different to me.
Frisky: We will be announcing a lot more next week. It’s been an amazing ride for this past year. It’s right in time for our birthday as a project. We are off and on to bigger and better things. I’ll turn the time over to Bolon and then wrap this up.
Bolon: The board is live and is pinned in chat (available here as well: https://talk.defikingdoms.com/contribute/klatyn-serendale-move-questions/)
Frisky: Huge thanks to everyone coming. Especially huge thanks to Dreamer and everyone hard at work with all the things we are building. Sunbear with Build program. Beetle killing it on the builder side. Secondbestdad art is amazing. Hubert doing amazing work with mechanics. Thank you to the community. Wrap it up by yelling bullish!
