DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates (cJewel details)— October 7, 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=ftBsiMzz6gY
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
Core Team Members Participating:
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Project Updates [Summary rather than trasncript this time]
Gas Fees
Frisky — Made a change yesterday, after extensive discussions, including with Ava, the change resulted in lower gas fees. Possibility in the future if lots of spam to incrementally increase. Shout out Magnus.
Magnus — constantly monitoring, there’s a limited subset of things we can tune due to EVM, things can go exponential fast so we are constantly monitoring.
Transactions and validators
Frisky — Have done over 50% of all the transactions Avalanche C Chain has done all time. Restaking our validators, which started 6 months ago, and now restaking them for 1 year. Prepaid for close to a year for all the validators.
Team Changes and Priorities
Frisky — The bear market compounded with the Harmony hack has made it hard for projects to survive. Have had to be conservative with runway. Entire team at one point was essentially working for sweat equity, many stayed and worked hard and we’re grateful for their efforts. Had to assess each role, criticality and necessity of each role. In a better spot, but it’s tight still. Nobody on the team is earning straight wages, everyone still earning half wages and half equity of some sort. There were a lot of people that were essentially inactive (already found jobs elsewhere or stepped away unofficially). While in this new founding phase of 2.0 of the project, we felt it was a good time to make sure the org was cleaned up, inactive people removed from slack channels, that the active contributing people were able to earn wages, and that decisions were made with anyone in between.
In addition to runway this helps put us in a position of strength for pitch deck for raise as we can show exactly what everyone is doing.
Dreamer — Kingdom Studios is essentially contracted by the offshore entities that own the DFK protocol wallets. Kingdom Studios isn’t intended to be the only contributing service provider. Prior to downturn in market there was a lot of creative freedom and incentives with a variable price asset (Jewel). Those contributions have been great, but had to make a shift to make sure our budget was used to make sure chain was running smoothly, that code was safe and smooth, that we work with best partners, that we establish a self sustaining cross chain ecosystem, that we take the vision of PVP and take it to fruition. E.g. we realized we couldn’t hire internally enough people to build out PVP, so we partnered with Wisdom. There may be others to contract with and others in the community.
If you look at Kingdom Builder program there’s a big hole in the creative side (fanart, fanfic, lore, youtube videos, podcasts). Lots happening but its not in the game yet. Working on an awesome NPC to be added in castle that will give a nod to community artists. We want all of them included and highlighted in our metaverse and to have a place in game to drive people to that content.
This is a first step in that direction and we want to make it clear who is working for tokens. In future, some people may be contracted in through Kingdom Studios, or maybe another company is contracted in where we see familiar faces.
Frisky — We have amazing community members making art, music, helpful resources. Others are building mini games and apps. Also want to have them highlighted through our interface. Idea is to give people a platform for their creative works.
Website is updated to show who is on team and being paid. It’s up to date and accurate.
Beetle — people we’ve worked with are talented, and there will be opportunities in the future.
Frisky — they’ve brought us to where we are now and excited for what is coming next.
Locked Jewel Snapshot — Chance to Help Certain Community Members
Frisky — lots of people have been getting hacked. Be careful with your keys. It happened to me in 2017. Everyone owns their own assets but its a two-edged sword. Brought up that there is an opportunity as we do this snapshot to make some of that right. Would need community vote for some of these, but there were two people that interacted directly with contract using the “transferall” function and transferred to themselves and lost all locked jewel. Not possible in UI, but possible if interacting directly. For those, we have evidence and can see what happened.
- One proposal would be to restore the locked jewel to those addresses. Hope most people would agree.
- Second — for some well documented hacks with police reports, incident reports to Harmony, etc. Some wallets locked, but the locked jewel are locked into the wallet of the hacker by Harmony. But that wallet wouldn’t be blacklisted on these other chains. We have an opportunity to not hand it over to the hackers wallet.
Bolon — we’d confirm we are giving it back to the right person and that it wouldn’t result in duplicate tokens. Requirements: has to be in a blacklisted wallet, need some kind of official incident report with their real name on it (not crypto name), then need to provide ID to us, then a few transaction requirements to confirm wallet ownership. This opportunity is unique to transitioning away from Harmony, normally there’s nothing we could do. Other benefit is denying tokens to hacker. Unique chance to help community members.
Dreamer — After the hack we had to assess what we can do to survive and in that process we saw opportunities to help some of our community members. Educate yourselves on the proposals then consider voting on them.
Bolon — vote for both proposals next week.
Frisky — an additional vote for CJewel (discussed below)
Chainlink SmartCon Event
Frisky — Attended with Magnus. Chainlink provided tickets and lodging and we spoke at event. Cool to see the energy of other projects building and be with like minded individuals. Developer-centered conference and learned about some great tools, particularly around Chainlinks on chain randomness. Had lunch with 5 Chainlink execs where they asked questions about gamefi, randomness and automation.
Magnus — time split between technical talks to stay at forefront of web3 world and meeting with execs and other web 3 projects. Chainlink has some products coming out that align with blockchain gaming. Did a presentation on on-chain randomness, packed room.
Frisky — lots of conversations about our subnet and also met various Ava people.
Singapore Token 2049
Dreamer — Of all the events we’ve been to, this had the most professional and positive energy. First time meeting most of the Klaytn team, they are very organized and sincere. It was a lot of time and effort. Yielded in discussions with various games, many of which noted DFK gave them the ideas for their game and weren’t sure how we would react to that. We invited them to the kingdom builder site to see what ways we can collaborate.
Many centralized exchanges there. Four came to discuss potential listing of Jewel. Previously we had not been very interested, but with the token reworks, it makes more sense for some Jewel to go off chain to some centralized exchanges. Most of those discussions involved reduced or removed listing fees. We will pursue these discussions slowly.
Lots of interest from other projects. Many discussions on why we chose Klaytn. Many guilds approached us about ways to get involved. Excitedment about multi questing and other features, including in automation and the Champion program. Champion program would involve PVP more than questing, since we are solving for that differently.
Spoke with a legal professional in the industry trying to see what holes were in our structure to see what services he might offer. Comforting to respond to him and realize we are set up very well with our legal advisors Ashbury.
Tax professional spoke to Sunbear at length, we may work with them in the future to find more options for in game tax options in the countries in which they live.
Dexs and aggregators were there, lots of conversations, in addition to many we have goin on in telegram already.
Bolon and Rissen just as lively in person as they are in their streams.
Bolon — great to meet community members I otherwise wouldn’t be able to meet and people I’ve interacted with many times virtually. Lots of people excited to work with us.
Rissen — biggest takeaway was that I’ve never seen people as excited about the decisions we are making, the move to Klaytn, the progress we’ve made during the bear. People are noticing.
Pieface — location of Klaytn booth was awesome. Lots of foot traffic. Learned more about crypto space in Asia generally. Excited about expansion to that market. Very grateful to Klaytn for inviting us. Loved seeing people’s eyes light up for the swag. Meeting community members was awesome. My background is Taiwanese, there’s a youtube channel of some guys in DFK from very early on and was great to touch up on my Chinese with them.
Poppy — second what everyone else said. Lots of people have heard of us. Made a lot of great connections. Lots of people that want to write about us. You’ll probably see more news about us.
Sunbear — in past events I spend most of my time telling people about how to use DFK. This time lots of people interested in partnering and working with us. A few groups wanted to improve on and off ramping for various parts of world, to gamify their protocols. Lots of guilds or tools to support guilds to bring web2 gamers into web3 and wanting to include us in that process. One person said his CEO plays DFK and the CEO sent him to come get some swag. He’s a crypto tax professional group. We told him about the bounty we did last year with the tax program. You wouldn’t imagine we were in a bear market being at the event.
Frisky — when I was over there, it seems almost like its not even a bear market, its a much different energy.
Serendale Shutdown:
Frisky — should be converting into an outpost this next week. Will still be ways to bride your assets out. Then we go overdrive to work towards Serendale 2.0 launch.
CJewel Mechanics
Frisky — this whole transition has created an opportunity to see what has worked well for xJewel and what we can improve on. Hubert has suprised us with some of his own solidity code (shout out Hubert). Hubert has been heavily involved in the math with this. He has some slides and info he’ll be sharing, and we’ll eventually have a proposal to be voted on early next week.
Hubert — buckle in. I do have coding background but not like Fox. Just something to help them out and get started. Here is a link to the presentation.
Functionaly the same thing, they are each the xJewel for each of Crystalvale and Serendale.
Based on veToken model from Curve. With veToken model, not only do you deposit Jewel into the jeweler but you also set a period of time that it would be locked for. Anywhere from 7–1095 days. Then uses a formula based on how long you deposit and how long you are locking to determine how much you get. If you deposit for a short time you get a small amount of cJewel. (1 week to 3 years).
Works differently than xJewel where there is a ratio that changes over time as more jewel is fed in from fees. In this case we can’t apply the same model, so we will do it a bit differently. All fees come in and are deposited to CJewel holders but the process is a bit different.
Frisky — these subscriptions would be less of paying, but more of activating the subscription by staking for cJewel, and so you still always own the Jewel.
Hubert — right. Say there are 5 different subscriptions that require cJewel, you’d have tohave 100 cJewel, it doesn’t actually take it away, you just have to allocate it and can only allocate it to one thing.
It’s not just about how much Jewel you have its about how much you have and how long you are staking it for.
Frisky — This really helps to reward smaller players that are long on the game to have more of an outsized say and rewards. It rewards those that are really invested in the long term. Whales are still rewarded, but they can’t influence things very quickly without having a lot of skin in the game.
Dreamer — when it comes to votes or really attractive screenshots, it will be harder for people to come in with big balances and right before the snapshot get a bunch of what was previously xJewel and do it and then sell it all. You stil can, but now there are big advantages for smaller wallets that stake for longer periods of time.
Hubert — with Jeweler now there’s only 3 functions, (1) withdraw, (2) deposit, (3) claim (and claim just converts all fees collected into xJewel).
Here you have to set a time and locking period. If you want more Cjewel you can deposit it and it would lock for the same period as what you previously locked (you can’t have multiple sets of locking periods). You can also just increase you unlock time and not deposit more and get more cJewel.
7 is an important one. Because its time locking, if you unlock before there is a 50% penalty of the Jewel you locked up. Only for emergencies, but it is there.
Explains how fees from the game go into this contract. Essentially you have a fee collector contract and then anytime someone interacts with jeweler contracts, it will cause what is in the fee collector contract to be converted to Jewel and distributed to cJewel holders. Same as how the garden contract works. It’s complicated but quite beautiful. Here is a link to how it works: https://dev.to/heymarkkop/understanding-sushiswaps-masterchef-staking-rewards-1m6f.
cJewel is soul bound to your wallet but can’t be transferred. If we didn’t soulbind it would break how this all works. You still can hold cJewel after locking period expires, you only lose your cJewel with you withdraw.
You can only withdraw the FULL balance. If you want to reduce your balance you have to withdraw the whole balance and restake.
Suspects that most will lock for 1 year or less. Emphasis on understanding what it means to lock for a long period.
Additional Details dropped by Hubert on cJewel in the Discord:
Frisky — this is the 12th or 13th iteration of token models. Solves a lot of the pain points that we had with xJewel, especially the impact on making it harder for a whale to come in and influence a vote then dump all the jewel. We don’t have to worry about people gaming snapshots if we announce them in advance. Unlike xJewel where you accrue Jewel until you withdraw, you can claim rewards like in the gardens while keeping your Jewel staked as cJewel.
Dreamer — most decisions now are not made by 1 or 2 people, they are made by committees. We most recently spent almost 4 hours in a tokenomics committee meeting on this. The high fee for emergency withdrawal is planned to be 100% burned. If there is a run on the Jeweler and everyone wanting to withdraw and exit to other assets in a crisis, this model helps prevent downward pressure. In a tail risk scenario this is a huge benefit, especially for those that didn’t want to withdraw but felt that they had to.
Bolon — cJewel for Crystalvale, sJewel for Serendale. But wanted to pass along a question — is fee sharing chain specific?
Yes — fees on CV feed in cJewel rewards. Fees on sJewel feed into sJewel rewards.
Frisky — That’s right so you can choose which one you think you’ll be playing on more and which one you think will generate more fees per c/sJewel.
Closing Remarks
Frisky — stay tuned for proposals coming next week. Excited about the cJewel change, it takes the good things about xJewel and reduces painpoints of xJewel. Ask any questions you have in the chat or on the boards. We’ll be sure to answer those.
Didn’t have a chance to get much into the AMA questions but we’ll make sure to hit those in the future.
