DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates — December 15, 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.
Note that this isn’t a perfect 1:1 transcription so if you need to double check anything said please see their recording linked below.
Link to the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBP_ZQOIWtw
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. Note: These are provided for informational purposes only and nothing herein or therein is intended to be financial advice. If you are seeking financial advise, contact a financial adviser.
DeFi Kingdoms Website
DeFi Kingdoms Official Medium
DeFi Kingdoms Discord
Core Team Members Participating:
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Project Updates
Bolon — Fox was unable to join but has a message which I will pass along shortly.
Dreamer (Business) Updates
Dreamer —We are 8 days after launch on Klaytn. A lot has happened, both within the community, successful bridging, exciting new heroes, classes being revealed and found, really proud for the realization of so much work that has gone into this event in the past 8 days. We talked about this a lot the last 8 days, so I won’t go on too much on that. We are now in information gathering mode. This move was in response to some hard to predict events that impacted all of us and many in the world. Many other opportunities were considered and when we looked at Klaytn as one of the potential partnerships we were impressed by their eagerness to have us, their communication, and willingness to connect us to people in the eco and their partnership. We have Ava labs on DFK Chain that has been amazing and its hard to find such great value add.
It’s hard to gauge in a bear market. If we would have our own way, would we have expanded to our own realm if things that didn’t happen to the chain that won’t be mentioned? Probably not, but we are back to cross chain gaming and assessing the users that are here and the users to come.
We’re happy that we are stable, that we have success in the feature we’ve released with more to come. We are looking at data that has come in and looking to do an end of year recap. Looking back we’ve done a lot this year, in the bull market, then with reactionary measures, survivability, new features, revised and relaunched features. Maybe look for that in the next AMA or so. I’ve seen some comments, and people asking how many incremental users, we are interested in that info and are gathering. I will just remind the vision, that to gamify an entire blockchain with a realm catered to that specific chain, that can represent major value add protocols on that chain within a beautiful game it brings on a functionality filled metaverse. We aren’t looking for an immediate ROI on day 1 month 1, but we are now building a following from the initial presence. Kaikas wallet, the largest wallet used on Klaytn (2M users), majority of users use Kaikas. We are highlighted in their wallet and supported on their mobile browser extension and our tokens pop up in their suggested tokens. We are positioned very well to get some digital foot traffic there.
Now looking at other protocols there
KLAP, a lending platform. Chainlink. In the Envoy you’ll see Swapscanner highlighted, which is the largest aggregator. We didn’t have something comparable on Harmony and on DFK Chain, there are nuances of being your own chain, but there are some interesting benefits there. There are a lot of DeFi users on Klaytn and many of them use Swapscanner as their aggregator. A partnership with them is good from a co-marketing perspective as well as a liquidity perspective. Check out their tool in the castle.
Sunbear — Also wanted to highlight Le7el, they’ve just launched, they are in the Jester, you can go to the Jester. They are a service that help people get to Web3 gaming. They incentivize through their own token and NFT to help people go and do different tasks in Web3. We are kind of their premiere product. If you want to be rewarded in a different way to play DFK, go check out Le7el.
Dreamer — Just a reminder on incentivized raffles — pre launch we did a few and post launch we have some going on. We have the summoning raffle going on for the Lego and scholar Gen0. 75 of them. 1 ticket per summon that increases by .02 from each summon. If you are interested in summons check out the announcements.
We had the cJewel raffle in CV, and we have the sJewel going on right now. Learn about the timeclock release and how you get sJewel as well as the timing of the raffle.
There’s also 5 Gen0s being raffled away for the social media marketing efforts.
We also have a few more we will be announcing and I won’t spoil those right now.
Bolon has a lengthy update to share from Fox
Bolon — Frisky Fox Update:
Bolon — did send a lengthy message, I’ll drop it into AMA voiceless chat. For those on YouTube, sorry it would take 15 messages to send it all, but a brief overview — celebrating the success of Serendale launch and being able to combine features from Phase 2 into Phase 1 and being able to launch so many features at one time. Shout out to Synapse and Layer 0, Klaytn, Ava labs and so many others. 4 of the 5 splittening buckets are finished, the last is locked crystal, which is in the works. Celebrating the launch of Season 2, with new features like class bonus to encourage differentiating teams and a completely new matchmaking system, which will be reviewed. Real time claiming on Duel rewards. Looking back at this year and the many things that have been accomplished by our team and our devs. I’ll drop that in right now.
Message pasted into Discord:
Hey all, I won’t be able to make the AMA today due to a flight but I just wanted to share some notes and updates here.
It’s been a busy week as we are wrapping up the launch of Serendale on Klaytn. I’ve been really impressed by how smoothly things have gone. Never before have we launched so many things all at once with so few hiccups. I’m so proud of the team and all of their hard work and soul that has been poured into the project over the last quarter.
I especially love that we were able to roll most of the old phase 2 things into Phase 1, resulting in a far more feature-complete experience right from day one.
I’d also like to give a shout out to all of our amazing partners like Synapse, LayerZero, Klaytn, Ava Labs, and many others, who have been so instrumental in the smooth operation of the project.
I’m really pleased to have 4/5 of the Splittening finished as well, with the last one in the works.
Duels Season 2 has hit with a big splash, featuring new dynamics like rotating Class Bonuses, geared towards encouraging having multiple teams that work well together, as well as completely rewriting the matchmaking engine to result in better, more competitive matches. I’ll be following that closely over the next few days as it warms up, and making small tweaks as needed leading up to the launch of Duels and Raffles on Serendale as well.
I’m also really pleased to offer the new real-time Rank Rewards Claiming system, allowing you to instantly claim rank rewards as you hit them. Coupled with the new rank progression levels revamp, working on climbing those ranks should be more enjoyable and rewarding than ever.
As this year comes to a close, and I reflect back on the wild ride of 2022, I’m amazed and humbled at all of the amazing things we’ve seen, and at how we’ve weathered the storms that so often come to the crypto world.
We’ve done so much this year, from Training Quests, Crystalvale, DFK Chain, Pets, Lands, Duels, 7 new Hero classes, Barcelona, Singapore, Miami, Denver, and many other events, Multiquest, Gen 0 Rerolling, numerous big partnerships, Dark Summoning, Klaytn expansion, the formation of Kingdom Studios, and countless more things, it really blows my mind.
From humble beginnings to becoming the top ranked Web3 game on so many different metrics, our pace hasn’t slackened, but rather has accelerated. As we go into 2023, I’m so excited about all of the amazing things yet to come, such as PvP, Guilds, Equipment, Crafting, Achievements, Chat, Cross-Chain quest lines, PvE, Buildings / Lands utility, Travel, new classes… it’s a lot to build but we have the means, the team, and the community to get there, and we won’t stop.
Thank you for being the best community in the entire Crypto space. Bullish!!
Magnus is in the process of moving so he wasn’t able to make it either, but he wanted to note that in removing the allow list they are working on it and ava labs has been great in helping us prepare for that and also bringing up things that we need to be looking out for and preparing for prior to launching. It’s something that we are working on regularly.
Dreamer — I’ll add on to that that I’d hate for that to be interpreted as we aren’t working on it. It just shows the level of caution we take as well as the professionalism of Ava labs. In their whole vision of the subnet they want to make sure its value additive and doesn’t get bogged down and effected by negative things and so there’s a lot of benefits to building on DFK chain but there are some downsides for chains that have really low fees. It could be disruptive if done without thinking about it. Magnus has been working his butt off to talk to the big brains to make sure we are doing this correctly. We don’t want to cause negative backlash on the players and the users and the sustainability of the chain.
Sunbear (Partnership) Updates
Sunbear — If you haven’t looked at the NPCs in the Castle do so, you’re going to start seeing more and more of those. Jesters are the games that are built around our NFTs or have some sort of connection with us. You’ll see a lot more coming there. You’ll also see more services like Le7el come in, that are trying to help Web2 users come into Web3. If you are looking for tools and want to learn more strategies etc., check out the archivist we are continuously getting more there.
Then check out the Envoy, which is our list of partners. Also as an update, Mr. Zipper and I are working together to process applications for the artist, which is any art related to DFK, or any youtubers or content creators. Hopefully that will be just around the corner.
Secondbestdad (Art)
SBD — We have green eggs coming up soon. Cinnamon and I started pumping those out after the S2.0 launch. Also just wanted to drop a sample of what you might expect to see, I’ll drop it into the chat.
Sashei (Project Management) Updates:
Sashei — Duels raffles and the prizes we will be giving away. Same with preseason, we will be raffling away some Gen0s. We slightly increased the amount to 6 Gen0s. We also moved away from guaranteed wins to being a raffle. For Season2 we will also do a raffle that includes. General disclaimer that this season’s prizes may not be the same in future, they will be adjusted as needed. We went from 50 items to 200 at the end of the season giveaways.
Not to be confused with rank up rewards, which are fixed. If you saw the announcement earlier by Bolon, the raffle for DFK Season 1 will be right after this AMA.
I also want to mention some things about our release schedule. A long time ago we announced we will follow a 2 week release schedule, and with closing down serendale and migrating to Klaytn we were able to keep that schedule. But now that we are moving to releasing new features we plan to move away from a fixed schedule. For smaller items it could be every week, for larger items it could be every 3 or even 4 weeks. This doesn’t mean things are getting released more slowly, just that they’ll be released when they are ready and we are comfortable that they are good.
Beetle (Builder) Update:
Beetle — On the build side of things we got Duels out, Big props to Fox being the brainchild for adding some of the new features we are seeing there. Already loving the in-game rank reward claiming that you can do. Super excited about duels. We’ll keep improving it every season.
As far as things coming, we have a bunch of stuff on the Horizon. We have PVP getting worked on, its super exciting and in depth and complex. It takes advantage of the already deep mechanics that we have built in already. Obviously that is a big feature, if we could get it out in 2 weeks that would be amazing, but a feature like that takes longer, in the meantime we are working on QoL features on the front end. Some additional new UI. Looking at inventory is one of the next ones, then adding additional information on the hero cards so people can see some data at a glance.
There’s so much going on it feels like, I’m probably missing a ton of it. Typicool hard at work on things on his end. We will start working on translations for the interface, which should be a huge draw for many of our international communities.
Hubert (Game Mechanics) Update
Hubert — working on power ups and lvl 10 profession quests. Working on green eggs too. Will probably just be fishing and foraging first, a lot of time has to go into this. We’ll see if we can get it out around the same time. Mining eggs will definitely take a bit longer.
We had an issue on Klaytn where heroes that could do 6 attempts on fishing and foraging that it would sometimes exceed the time limit that Klaytn imposes to complete 1 second finality. We removed 6 possible attempts and limited it to 5. Magnus went through and found some ways to optimize how items are implemented and likely later today we will be able to lift that limit in the number of attempts for fishing and foraging.
Wanted to mention that with the splittening and what happened there, the Jeweler in Harmony received locked Jewel and has its own locked jewel balance. They’ve remained unclaimed by the respective jewelers. We are planning to implement a quarterly claim for what is available for those Jewelers for what is available until everything that is vested or locked has been claimed. We would do that next week for both CV and SD Jewelers. So there will be a bit of a burst of rewards once we do that. Just so you are aware that its happening, if you don’t have cJewel or sJewel just a consideration.
AMA Questions
Updates on a CEX listing?
Dreamer—an important Q, its similar to comments made on opening up DFK Chain allow list — we want to make sure we do it the right way and at the right time so that it doesn’t impact our loyal users in a negative way. We want to make sure we have a good market maker, which we do, setting aside appropriate liquidity. For those that don’t know what it takes to list on a CEX, it takes old school physical finance and having physical inventory used to make trades. Think of it like Goldman Sachs making OTC derivatives. CEX has to have some tokens. You have a market maker who will buy and sell and bridge to make sure there is liquidity on the centralized exchange.
Where we are now, we are relaunched on two realms. We are focused on building that bucket of liquidity to work with a market maker. Jan/Feb we will probably be looking more seriously for 1 or 2 major listings. To recap some recent market events, that was directly related to a centralized listing. We would want to make sure we get a healthy listing on a top 5 CEX. This may or may not take a while, since we will be taking careful steps. We’ve gotten interest from most major exchanges int he past. It doesn’t mean its shoe in, but we want to make sure we spend money in the right way. What we aren’t going to do is try and get listed on 10, 20, 30 exchanges.
First being that we would have to provide a lot of jewel to have enough liquidity. But it also benefits us not to stretch ourselves to thin. With the past year and a half, a lot of partnerships should give us credibility.
I saw a question about perps/futures and making it really easy to shortsell tokens through CEXs. Once you list and get a market maker, you can trade spot, or you can trade in whatever derivatives are there. A CEX will sell shorts and perps to meet that derivative based demand, which causes downward pressure. When we’ve asked if we can opt out, some say yes and some say no, we are focused on those that say we can.
Some exchanges have listed us without asking us, we did not engage them. We’d like to engage in partnerships that don’t impact our funds and budget in a negative manner or right after one of the biggest CEX blow ups in all of crytpo history. If anyone is expecting an update in the next weeks or month. If the exchange blow up didn’t occur we might have seen an update end of year, but now its an obvious sign and many of our partners have suggested that we don’t rush this. We get a good partner, we build liquidity, we launch on Klaytn, and then launch on a top 5 or top 10 exchange.
Two things we’ve seen come up, is people having trouble accessing the site, they are getting an SSL error.
Bolon — We’ve done everything on our end. We have our certificates. It’s being flagged by some ISPs, and its randomly enforced by them, not specific to a region or ISP. You can go in and whitelist the DFK website. For those having issues, we are still tinkering with it on our end, but we haven’t found any patterns of consistency. I’ve had people from both coasts of the states and australia and the same solution worked, and obviously they don’t have the same ISP. So if you see someone with this issue, you can inform them of this. Tango has noted that he’s made some potential progress on our end but they take time to propogate, but we’ll keep messing with it and we are still fighting it. Keep an eye out, and let people know they can whitelist the website.
User’s seeing long delays in the gardens loading?
Beetle— Tango has been hard at work on the SSL errors, thank you, Tango. As far s the gardens I don’t think the loading issue is new. it’s been around for a while. We’ve strated the process, but its a huge query on the blockchain to get the data. We are working to optimize that. I’m working on a proof of concept that we can serve up to Kaikas mobile users. Have to do some testing on it and make sure its working. Have to make sure its good before we push it out. It’s in process. Not much has changed with how the gardens have been pulled since Day1 and its never been super optimized but we are now getting it the attention it needs.
In the future we’ll probably make sue of our own APIs to cache that information. We are working on it, but its one of those things that are pretty tangled and need to be untangled and optimize one piece of it at a time.
PJ Land Battle Format?
Hubert— That is becoming slightly more difficult to answer due to the timing of our features. What was planned before may need to change because we might actually have PVP out at that time. The land system tournament is mostly designed but hasn’t been implemented but would require quite a bit of work from design and front end. May still be what we use for Land, and if it is what we do, it would be a 1v1 thing. It will depend on what our priorities are and I can’t say for sure one way or another.
Which realm is the “main” branch of development. Before Harmony Implosion, Serendale was the main branch first. With all the changes now, what is the plan on that front?
Dreamer—We can tag team this one. I’ll use some facts to answer this. DFK Chain is the dedicated chain for DFK. It’s the one we’ve invested in Hardware and make sure we have a team to make sure it will remain stable. We have a lot of control on it. We may have mini realms in the future on which we have less control over. If the question is around features, the desire is to have each realm have similar features and maybe some nuances. So try to be equal, but it may not feel equal at each moment, but we want to have it be equal for value add and functionality on whatever chains we are on. There may be some features that are only released on one realm at first. So if you take a snapshot today, you’d say that CV is the primary release realm because of Dark summoning, duels and raffles.
We’ve had a lot of success with DFK Chain and Ava labs. We have a great partnerhsip with Klaytn. We’ll have more in the future. Its a tricky question because point in time does not reflect long term vision and plan. Long term vision and plan is to have value add and similar if not equal levels of interest and excitement on all realms that we create. One might feel different at a specific point in time. For example if you look at prices of Jade and Crystal, one might say there’s more excitement for Jade because of the summoning event. The vision is similar focus
Beetle — from the front-end we build it out so it will work on both. Dreamer spoke to the more complex issue of strategy, but as for building out we can have it functioning on the same chains, not for smart contracts, but from a UI perspective we can.
Number of New Users that have Joined from Klaytn and Forecasting?
Bolon—Number wise we’ve been looking at it and we don’t want to get to into it yet because one week is not a very significant data set, but we are monitoring closely.
Dreamer — Its a little tricky. If you look at CV launch, and what was essentially the height of the previous bull market. Based on Dappradar at that point we had like 60k-80k average daily wallets leading up to that launch and 20–30M daily volume. When launching DFK subchain, we saw 8–10k incremental users. But that is tricky to say. In trad fi you have KYC. In web3 we can only look at wallets. So if you go super heavy on these types of analytics, because some of them may be the same people, just using a different wallet.
So if we saw 8–10k based on 60–80k, thats ~13% increase. On Dappradar we were seeing 6–7k average daily users on DFK Chain prior to launch and wallet was 13–14k based on the avax explorer which is just looking at unique wallets, I think we are 4–5k based on Dappradar, which I don’t know if they’ve included all contracts. Bolon mentioned that we have resources looking at it and tracking it and its unclear if they are new or similar, but its good info to have just not the main focus. This isn’t a short term cash grab or hype, this is a long term strat and a reaction to an unfortunate event and interested to figure out what we can do every day, week and month in the coming years to build out htese relationships so that oflks in the chains (like Klaytn) wan tto come and stay in DFK. So those are some high level numbers, they aren’t our official numbers. Look for more updates later this year and over time.
Pets — 1 pet per hero or one pet per group of heroes?
Huber— 1 pet per hero.
Any consideration on bringing back the wishing well?
Hubert — Short answer is no. As we’ve been developing CV out, we did reduce the drop rate of Gaia’s tears. At the time we had planned to keep things as is on Harmony, but with the unfortunate even that occurred and wish us moving over to Klaytn, what we did was stick with the same drop rates. I think the drop rates were too high. Tears were almost an after thoguht for people. It wasn’t consequential at all for the process. So this was an adjustment to make sure they serve a purpose and when new things are being generated, new pets, etc, it comes from the effort that heroes are putting into the questing system, and previously that effort did not translate into the system. So now tears are a bit more consequential and that was the design goal in the beginning and we are closer to where we wanted to be initiaily.
For those here in the beginning, we didn’t hav ea source for tears and they became quite expensive, and we probably over reacted to that and made the drop rate too high as an over correction. We also needed a bunch more tears in the beginning. Expect it to continue as is.
One of the pet bonuses is, however, a bonus to tear drop rate.
Pets soul bound or unequippable?
Hubert— No soul binding but there will be CD timers to unequip and equip, to prevent you from passing one pet to all heroes and getting the benefit for all heroes from just one pet. 24 hour time limit or something like that.
Potentially moving to Bi-weekly AMAs
Bolon — We spent a lot longer than we have in the past on updates, we’ve been receiving less and less questions on a weekly basis, which isn’t a problem. We are considering potentially moving to bi-weekly AMAs. It is kind of dependent on what is going on our end and what we have to update on, as well as the amount of questions that are coming in. We may look to make that shift, assuming things continue running smoothly and we dont have as much to talk about as we have over these last several months with the long stream of things happening. Not saying its definitely happening, just an option and something we’ll be considering.
Also we have holidays coming up, I don’t think we have anything that conflicts with an AMA, but we’ll let you know if we reschedule one to another day.
Closing Remarks
Sunbear — I’ll remind people that we have some amazing bloater plushies that are ready to be part of your holiday season. So grab your plushies!
Dreamer — I’ll keep it short so you can hop over to the raffle stream. I’ll echo what Bolon said. A lot of good questions came in on voiceless chat. If you see anyone act a Q in the channel, encourage them to use the talk.defikingdoms.com site. We do like thoughtful questions. We like to hop on and give as many updates as we can. We probably only cover 20–30% of everything we wish we could say every week, but thoughtful questions are great. Excited about Duels, its our mini game that informs us a lot on how and hwy and in what way we want to conitue building and incentivizing and our name game features. I’m impressed with Fox and his focus there, also those that are supporting that mini game. There are a lot of changes that go into rewards and incentivization. We want to make sure its fun. if you’ve played it a long time ago, but haven’t recently come check it out. Excited, grateful and proud of the team. Hope that everyone out there is having a great holiday season. We are long-term focused and we hope that people see that ability to weather storms. Thank you everyone for joining. Bullish!
