DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates) —August 3, 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 should be available later this week and I will update this to reflect that.
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
Project Updates
Frisky Fox — Blown away with the speed of roll out of CV feature parity. Big Kudos to the builders cranking those out. Dreamer will be sharing some things from the strategy/business dev side. Sunbear will share some updates from the (https://build.defikingdoms.com/) side.
Business Dev (Dreamer) Update
Dreamer — Updates on business dev side. Chain partner — discussions progressing very well. Term we’ve been using is “front runner” for a new home for Serendale. Discussions are very detailed. I know we want to be able to say $XYZ from ABC chain to move Serendale over. Don’t have that update today, but things have been progressing in a way that the interest of the frontrunner has increased.
We’ve been focusing on Crystalvale parity. Hope the experience for everyone moving over has been low fees and smooth. Believe its been very good for many. Even with that, we’ve been considering a new home for Serendale where it might be a good partnership going forward. As we work on CV parity we are considering these other options and we want to be able to say we know what we have in Serendale, what the long term roadmap is etc. Seems like every day a new chain reaches out. Trying not to rush this too much while we get CV parity out while other team members focus on business continuity.
We have meetings for this week and next week. Getting close to being able to talk about who potential partners are. We’ve been following the updates from Harmony. The communities reaction to that was not positive. We share the broad sentiment and we don’t know anything the community doesn’t know.
Frisky Fox — As you move an agreement like this along there’s lots of phases. Starts with what we think would be cool and what we think we could do to here’s what we need to analyze things and the information we need. It gets more and more detailed with each phase. Kudos to Dreamer for doing such a great job of it. I’ve had the opportunity to sit in on quite a few of these calls.
Mining just launched on CV and there’s some cool stats I’ll drop in CV. You can see that when we did fishing/foraging there was a big bump on DFK Chain, then with mining the same. Duels, in the works, will also be big. Someone said we were doing 1/3 of the transactions that Ethereum is doing. That is burning a lot of Jewel, not as much as some people have hoped, some have asked if instead of 1/1000 of a penny it could be 1/100 of a penny and burn more Jewel. We are talking with Avalanche about this. We could still be the fastest/cheapest out there but also still increase amount of Jewel burned.
Dreamer — when I am available to hop into discord I see people ask if its worth it to move over to DFK Chain from Serendale. With mining, foraging and fishing available, if your goal is to mine with gold, you can have gold miners running in both Crystalvale and Serendale at same time. There’s also a few new tokens available in CV. I don’t think it has to be all or nothing. Give it a try and consider moving a few over. Look at the gardens, look at the realm, it improves every week. Use the in-game docks and try moving a few heroes over.
From a business dev standpoint, the more activity and success we have on DFK Chain the better it is for discussions and valuations. Not only is it better for experience but its better for us as a whole. So people ask what they can do to help and with priority 1 being CV parity, for those who haven’t tried it out, give it a try and hit socials with it. Transactions volume goes a long way with our discussions.
While on the topic: Question re process from moving Serendale — Will it be built up step by step like CV over time, or what will the functionality be if its moved?
Frisky — It will be a bit tricky. You are replacing one realm with another. What does that mean for existing ERC20 tokens, is there a snapshot involved, how will we bridge things that need to be bridged. We are spending a lot of time talking about these things and what the execution of this move would look like. Then you’ve got the contracts that need to be in place to turn this on. Obviously we want to keep things as seamless as possible. Having CV up and running in the meantime is important so that there is a realm to be used in the meantime during any transition.
Bolon — so there will be a rampup, but mayben not the same process as CV. With the move, we should be able to do more of that ahead of time. There could very well be a ramp up, but it won’t be as comparable to CV specifically.
Frisky — That’s right. All of the art would be done. We would do some touch ups and refreshes on a few things to match the chain, but for the most part those are done. Logic on the smart contracts have to be redeployed. It’s not a simple copy paste and then we also have a chance to fix a few things that were already fixed in CV. Now that we are redeploying them in SD we have a chance to fix them there as well. So fixing security and ease of use in a few contracts will also be something we do. We are working on aligning our ducks for the partner we end up using as well as details on what that means for the assets in Serendale. It is a top priority in our meetings.
Dreamer — So far Bolon and Fox have hinted to a phased roll out and that its not just an easy copy and paste. There’s also some other newer features that would be considered. One of which is making some touch ups on art and partnering with that community. Also talking about something new and fun in game that would be unique to the chain. Can’t say much more than that. But we are trying to consider this from more than just a funding perspective, but we also want this to be fun for the community where we would launch.
Someone just asked in chat if this is a recording because I sound the exact same as last week. These meeting and this process takes a long time and we appreciate everyone’s help in this.
Dreamer — Another significant update is that as you know all of our resources and focus has shifted to CV parity. On our roadmap we had a few things coming up, some of which revolved around combat. With our focus on CV parity we haven’t been able to focus on whats next on the roadmap prior to combat. While having all of these conversations with partnerships we had one studio ask if they could help make introductions to gaming studios and that they love DFK. Things vibed well, and prior to global unfortunate events occuring they had a lot of skillsets we would have needed to hire into to take PVP to the next level. As we’ve talked, we’ve gotten tot he point where we’ve entered into a service level agreement where they’ll sit in on discussions on our game development as it splits into new features (combat as it relates to PVP, which will transition to PVE and others). We’re in talks with their marketing team. We’ll probably have a series of AMA, announcements, twitter spaces, etc. talking about who they are and how they will help. If we think about specific skillsets we’d need to get us over the line, we’d need to hire quite a bit of skill. While we have some unreal/unity skills, ours skills lie most in other development areas. And even if we did, its arguable that its better to partner with a studio that does have those skills and has worked on very large and successful games.
Part of this agreement, we have gotten a very good deal from this. Collab with this studio is not only exciting, but goal is that combat as it relates to PVP and other features, we’d like to have it progressing simultaneously while we focus on all of these other issues that have come up over the past months. We think this is a very happy medium, especially due to their interest in DFK, which allows us to work with them for a much cheaper cost than hiring it out. Questions probably coming up are whether we are handing things over, we are not. They are part of our game vision discussions, and helping with things our devs don’t have time/expertise to carry us to the next level, this is where they will really fill in. So rather than get all of our ducks in a row in CV, Serendale and all things on the roadmap prior to combat, they can be working in tandem on those features.
Frisky Fox — We’ve been trying to focus on all these things related to Serendale 2.0 and things we weren’t planning to have to do. We have great skills in those areas. We have some of the best solidity devs who know what they are doing. At the same time, having to prioritize those means some of the other game features have been put on the backburner and we don’t want that to be the case. So having this partnership, a really skilled profession team, is awesome and we are stoked to see what they can help with. The game is a large part of why we are here so we are excited about that.
Sunbear — for months we’ve been hearing we want to play we want to play, lets get PVP going. I love this idea, this team we’ve been working with has some great ideas. It’s a good deal. We are also seeing more community members and potential partners coming forward and saying how they want to help and what they can do as they see the potential in DeFi Kingdoms.
Bolon — Also really excited about this. Very much looking forward to being able to give more details.
While on the topic: Question re whether there’s any information we can give now in regards to PVP for people looking to level their heroes and what kinds of things they should be looking for in those level ups.
Bolon — Not a lot we can give now because some things are subject to change, especially with this partnership. They are a very talented team that can bring some new ideas to the table. As it gets built, tweaked and finalized we can share more.
Dreamer — If the Q is as simple as will the level of my heroes and stats correspond to PVP? The answer to that is yes. We’re still participating in the founding stage of a long term game that is intended to not just be cool and new in the blockchain world, but also fun. There will be things to cater to all sorts of players. Some may play simply because they want to play. Some will be here just because they want to earn. Some will be here to have fun. We want to emphasize the fun aspect while fully integrating all of the aspects of our NFTs. So will it matter the stats/levels? yes, we are just working on the full details and aiming to maximize the full utility of our tokens while incentivizing the right participation and making it fun.
Question and update re Bridge Security and Synapse:
Dreamer — I won’t talk through all of the details of it and maybe some time we can do a collab with them, but security is very important to us. Natively, internally, we are constantly looking at things we need to question and consider. In risk management its all about looking around corners and not being reactive and stress testing. I don’t want to speak for the synapse team, but when we work with them as intimately as we have, we realize there is a lot of risk and with that you need a proportionate amount of risk management. I’m not going to claim there was adequate or inadequate risk management of the Horizon Bridge hack for Harmony, we all have our thoughts there. But that has shown us the importance of security and I’ve dropped some tweets in the discord from Synapse about how they are addressing security and you can compare and contrast the risk management between Synapse and the Horizon Bridge. It makes us feel more comfortable, however there is always risk out there. Even with what is in those tweets and what we see in quality teams, your risk management is never done and is never perfect.
We see the same thing with Ava labs, they are so professional. Seems like they monitor DFK Chain in real time and anytime they see a minor blip, they reach out and ask if we changed something and what can be done to assist.
On the bridge side go check out those tweets. If there’s more questions maybe we can do an AMA collaboration with them.
Bolon — Synapse has been so responsive. For anyone that had a hero or tokens get stuck in the bridge, let us know. We have a shared discord with them and they are incredibly responsive and supportive. They are always monitoring that channel for us and are quick to act and fix anything that needs fixing.
Frisky Fox — its a scary world with all of the hacks. In 2022 there has been nearly $2M stolen in just bridge hacks. Our team members have been impacted, team funds have been impacted. Early on our strategy we talked about multichain. Part of that was bridging and whether we should build our own or partner. Synapse was recommended by Avalanche and its been a great partnership. We are making sure to measure twice and cut once with partners for the new home for Serendale. We’ve got good partners.
Dreamer — a related update, Ethereum will now be supported by Synapse for CV. We are getting close to that 24 hour window since the announcement, but the CV emissions will change soon as it relates to CV being supported. Go check it out. Crystal<>Ethereum will be the biggest of the new pools. We will also have an Ethereum<>USDC pool.
https://twitter.com/DefiKingdoms/status/1554611811093123072?s=20&t=CeEwbcD7NX-nC6ry62rtdA
There’s also some big pool rebalances. One of which is a hefty reduction in Jewel to xJewel which was at a 60% allocation and now will be moving down to 35%. The intent was to have that be the founding pool and overtime as we reduce that and allocate to other pools.
As it relates to questing. If we only had 4 pairs and we were to go live with gardening questing in CV, that’s only 4 active gardeners at a time. This will pay down the road, three more pairs now so three more gardeners at any given time gaining experience and rewards.
Question re whether reducing Jewel<>xJewel pool disincentivizes holding it?
Dreamer — so that pool is down 20%. When we add new pools we don’t get more emissions. Most of the reduction to that pool went to the Ethereum and crystal pool. So the incentive one could say went from holding Jewel to Crystal, but they are still all DFK native tokens. There is 4% moved to another Jewel pair. I think that people have to look at the vision of what this means. As we attract non-native TVL to DFK Chain, people look at that non-native TVL as being more credible. As we attract more AVAX, USDC, Ethereum, and in the future maybe Bitcoin and other main tokens from other EVM compatible chains, it just adds to the overall utility of the DEX. I think its fair to say that as it relates to those who are LP farmers, does it reduce focus on Jewel? To an extent, but this has been in the plan all along.
Written Questions from Talk.DefiKingdoms.com
Reminder you can submit questions on https://talk.defikingdoms.com/.
In game botting — can we create a terms of service and design the mechanics and features around not being advantageous to run a bot.
Frisky — it’s hard to fight against bots, especially in a blockchain set up where the whole point is to be decentralized and having direct access to the contract functions. How do you create a policy for bots, why do you create one and how do you enforce it? Obviously we don’t want the game to just be a bunch of bots, because that devalues the tokens. A lot of games recognize that and have policies in place to make sure that's not the case. In our game, where questing is the main thing to do, and there’s not a lot of actual gameplay in terms of skill-based decisions, its easy to bot. So the Q is how much of a scorched earth approach do we want to take right now? Our thoughts are that we have some leniency here until we get to other parts of the game, where it will be more important that we don’t have a lot of bots (PVP and PVE). When it comes to the profession quests, those won’t be the main spotlight of the game. We’ve been talking internally about what we can do and what type of outside the box things we can offer for those that just want to quest. There was the champion program which we’ve had on the radar. We’ve also considered what we can do to incentivize real players over bots. I think the current set up is wrong, because as you queue up more heroes you get dinged. its actually more incentivized to send one at a time, and maybe we can make it more efficient to queue up more at once rather than use a bot thats running 24/7. That’s something we’ll be looking at in the short term.
Dreamer — let’s say botting is a risk we want to manage. It’s a good narrative to say we don’t want botting. How do we do that? We put a control in place that says no botting, okay but then how do we execute on that control and police it. I don’t think there’s a good solution for that anywhere in blockchain, because it would go against a lot of the core values of web3 and decentralization. So for us to have a good game that is cross chain with a broad range of participants, is there a place for botting? if there is we would try to make sure it doesn’t hit the fun aspect, but maybe it could play into the click through aspect. Focus is on trying to make the experience better for everyone so that they can focus on the fun things, PVP, items, minigames. There will be a time to continue to evolve. We are trying to find the right balance on saying what people can and can’t do. Maybe it could be a boost for people clicking through. We’re trying to work with builders in every aspect and add utility but also have a good balance. We are working towards a balanced roadmap that will be fun for everyone.
Frisky — we’ve talked about options to allow players who don’t have time to queue things up and let those queue’s rollover and continue queuing up your heroes. Obviously we don’t want to have everyone be on their own trying to find someone to play their account for you (prior to Champion program) or having to find some third party code or botting (which can be risky, personally I wouldn’t do those myself because I’m paranoid about security) but we want there to be alternatives for people. So things we can change from a mechanics perspective where you could subscribe and queue things up indefinitely are options we are considering.
Question re Tokens between Serendale and CV and Alchemist because certain items require Serendale only tokens to craft.
Bolon — Hubert isn’t here but I spoke to him about this one. We are looking at options. We are aware of it and taking into consideration the strategy. Obviously we don’t want an interruption in SD to mean that you just can’t craft stamina potions in CV.
Question re update on incentives from chains?
Frisky — Before everything crashed down, the main hold up was getting our legal entity and board set up. We’re in a much better state now than we were back then, as far as the incentives for incentivized crystal pools and then matching incentives on ongoing perpetual basis that we would create a fund for.
Dreamer — we did have a plan for incentives before all of these interesting things in the world. We had a plan for both of us as partners to contribute. Resources are obviously strained for us and then to cap it off the Horizon Harmony Bridge incident. I think anything there is TBD until further notice. We don’t want to say we’d be getting certain incentives promised by Ava labs at launch of CV while we ourselves are unable to follow through with our originally intended incentives for builders. I do want to emphasize that ava labs has stepped up and contributed to our overall CV parity in a completely separate incentive for the team. Not only being good partners, but also helping with some capital in the form of a pre-commitment to our raise. Just wanted to make sure people understand that those are different things.
Training Q’s and Eternal Story pages? They were put out on April 20, we were planning on seasons that would be ~3 months long. Do we have any timeline on how long we’ll keep these story pages attainable and any plans on when we are doing the 10th page or has Harmony situation delayed this?
Frisky — We will definitely be doing the 10th page. I don’t have an exact timeline on that. I know that TQ’s are on the docket for the upcoming release, hopefully next week, which is exciting.
Sunbear — Another thing that has been a plan for next week is the vendor.
Bolon — and the updated pricing model as well for the Vendor.
Leaderboard with Harmony issues — are we planning on taking them down, switching off of Jewel, etc?
Dreamer — we have a few on the team and in the community for ideas on the leaderboards. When they first came out they were intended to be a form of social interaction for profession quests. Then with DFK Duel coming out and the raffle system there is another way to incentivize gameplay. With the new focus on CV parity, we don’t know what tomorrow brings, but we are considering how we could improve that experience on CV, how maybe it could work cross chain and what we are doing for incentives on the raffle side and how things could be more balanced. I’ve seen people ask about whether we’d incentivize leaderboards on both. I think we’d go a different route because we’d be doubling overall rewards for the same inputs. Lot of problems to solve here. Leaderboards that we know today have been helpful and continue to serve their purpose but we are looking for ways to enhance that and part of that might be pausing the leaderboards on Serendale while we figure that out. no official next steps there.
Frisky — Leaderboards are a great tool and they’ll likely be tweaked and changed to incentivize the right behaviors.
Is Kingdom Studios operating at 100% productivity for content creation? Is there a bottleneck somewhere?
Frisky — I would say look at some of the stuff we’ve been churning out with feature parity. The dev team is getting more and more streamlined as we go. I think we are moving in certain ways faster than 100%. In terms of timeline, its tricky because there have been unforeseen things, more than we could have anticipated. The partnership with this new studio will be a big part of helping this as well.
Dreamer — the output of the team and what we’ve been able to do in the bear market (pet hatching, duels, secondary marketplace for pets, new ways to burn tokens, all the CV parity) I would say even if we weren’t to answer that question, hopefully the output speaks for itself. If the Q is relative to previous output and efficacy now, I would say that we are working with our resources and getting more and more effective with what we have. At one time we were building multiple things at once, but we are focusing on our priorities right now. Efficiency is definitely up, but active people working on multiple things at once would obviously be down.
Sunbear — there is a lot happening and we are pushing hard on it, as demonstrated just by the fact that this AMA has already been 75 minutes.
Jewel unlocking — since we are moving to a new chain is there any general concept or idea that can be implemented about Jewel unlocking?
Dreamer — this is a silver lining of all the bad events that have impacted us negatively. Silver lining is that before all of this nobody was asking if SD was safe and if we should stay on Harmony. When we all woke up and realized that might be a problem we would need to solve for, part of the silver lining is that its pretty well timed with unlocking and there’s been a lot of Q’s about relocking or amending the unlock schedule or impacting locked jewel utility. There have been a ton of ideas that poured in that we’ve been considering. As we review this in our tokenomics committee, we can hopefully resolve some of these issues as part of this transition. Narrative has shifted a bit with our priorities. Our plan for Serendale 2.0 and how that will impact locked jewel is in discussions and we want to work with the community on how that will end up. We will have more to share on this as discussions with front runner continue.
LPs on Serendale — we’ve mentioned in the past that we are taking snapshots if the worst were to happen and the chain were to stop. Does that include at least the jewel side of LPs?
Frisky — we have a full archive node up and running in case the chain halts. At that point we could snapshot and say okay when did it halt, here’s what it looked like when it halted. We could control and mint the jewel side of those LP tokens. The other side of the LP token we cannot. But we could at least do the Jewel side of them. If the worst case happens we have things in place to take care of our native assets and tokens.
Duels — mention of rewarding people based on their rank. Are we still considering that? Also what is timeline for Season 1.
Frisky — we mentioned previously that we would launch Season 1 on DFK chain. We don’t want to launch any new features on Harmony right now, it will create more work later. To launch DFK Duels we need to get the gold bridge launched. Magnus is working on that. The earliest time you might see season 1 would be three weeks, but there’s obviously lots that can happen in the meantime. I think that having duels on DFK chain will be huge. What does that mean on Serendale? We’d turn them off the same time that we launch Season 1 on DFK Chain. If you hit certain ranks we’d probably do airdrops for hitting certain ranks. Then on Serendale we’d keep raffles running for a week or 2 to spend their unused raffle tickets and then CV would be the only place to be doing it for Season 1, and then Season 2 we would look elsewhere.
Last AMA it was mentioned some builder proposals had progressed, any update on which ones?
Sunbear — next week I can give an update on how raffle process is working for people that want to build into DFK chain. One of the proposals is Weapon NFT, a part of the dungeon crawler proposed by Bless’ group. We’ve had great conversations with them about what this could look like and tokenomics.
DFKEarn has a couple of proposals and we are scheduled to work witht hem.
DFK Arena is cleared to build on DFK chain and be comarketed with the Jester and the website. They’ve also applied for the raffle system for DFK Chain.
FightKlub is another that has applied for co-marketing and the website and they are good to go there and we are looking at options to integrate them into the raffle system.
Adventures in DFK has applied for a co-marketing and will be listed on our website.
There’s also an escrow system that has applied that we are working with.
Regarding Duels on CV will it cost Gold and Crystal or Gold and Jewel?
Frisky — plan right now is Crystal but that can change. We are looking at a few things, especially in the context of Serendale 2.0 and the utility of Jewel.
Closing Statements
Sunbear— there’s so much happening. It’s exciting. Come check out the build site and comment on the proposals for co-marketing and raffle integration. Keep it up and let's keep doing this together. On build.defikingdoms.com website if you have any interest in consulting you can hop in and build a proposal and there are templates on there that you can use.
Dreamer — some of the discussions I’ve been able to sit on, I’ve heard people asking if we’d be open to XYZ being built on DFK Chain and I’m surprised because yeah of course we want people to integrate. If you haven’t gone to the build site and asked the questions head on over there. Please reach out, even if its a brainstorming phase. We want to hear from the community. The metaverse of DFK is not just the native features, but also 3rd party apps, including in DeFi and NFT/gaming space. Excited about everything we’ve talked about, even if all the detail you are seeking isn’t there yet, please be patient. Realize that a week is a long time, but these types of things don’t progress in just weeks. Things are progressing though. We are doing what we can within our power to maximize CV parity. As we get that parity (while important to find a good home for Serendale) every week with more features on CV reduces that concern. I’m having a lot of my meetings middle of the night. I’d like to get this resolved and topics of Jewel unlocking and other tokenomics resolved. Hope to have more to share next time.
Frisky — Appreciate having you here Bolon, moderating this is not easy. We’re coming up on 1 year since we launched. It’s amazing what we’ve accomplished in the meantime. If you are in the moment and living it, everything makes sense, but if you stop and look back on the past year its crazy. I look at where we are at now and what we have planned for this and the vision and I’m still blown away by the amount of potential that is still there. In my opinion I’m very happy to be here and I still think we are early with the amount of content we have in the future and the direction the entire space is moving with decentralized gaming. Super excited about that and super excited/blessed as a coder to be supported by such great and smart/expert business development and community builders and others on our team. Super blessed to have all of you guys here in the community.
