DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates — December 22, 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:
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
Frisky Fox (General) Updates
Fox— Happy to be back. It’s been two weeks since I talked to you guys but a lot has happened in that time. It’s always amazing to sit back and look at whats happened over the past several weeks, especially this time at the end of the year to look back and see all the things that have happened this year. When I run my mind back along each month and everything that happened, there were so many amazing things. We have some great partners now we didn’t have last year, we have our own chain, new realm, new heroes, migrated Serendale to a new chain with 1 second block times and refactored a lot for that, duels, multi questing. It blows my mind to see the amount of things that have happened and where we came from and where we are at now. A lot of what we did this year I see as laying the foundation for us to build upon and that really good amazing foundation that we have right now is setting us up for next year. Having the team that we have and the expertise they’ve built over the past year+ to have the skills that they have enables us to be in a unique situation to do amazing things that I don’t think other teams could do, plus having the most amazing community in the space helps too. When I think of what's in the works and is coming and where it all goes, if you would have asked me a year ago where we’d be in a year or even a year and a half ago, I would have been way off and I think I would guessing the same for this time next year.
Duels S2 Launch
Real time claiming of rank rewards which is huge. Refactored some of the rank levels so that will work in a different way. Heard a lot of feedback about the new class bonus feature. It was a last minute thing we snuck in, but I think it’s good because it creates an automatically rotating meta that requires you to have multiple teams to take advantage of it. Speaking of matchmaking we are still monitoring and tweaking, especially as we approach launching S2 on Serendale, which requires some refactoring and optimizations as well, so some of the things we had to do for matchmaking were to make it both more efficient but also more accurate. Its a more exhaustive lookup to make sure we get the best match. It’s good but it also has side effects, such as it gives you the best match it can, but there’s not as much randomness. So we want to have some more randomness, but not have you match against people way outside of your league. I’m excited to continue to tweak that as we go.
Other
I was out for a portion of end of last week and early this week, and we also have Holidays coming around the corner. Hope you have some fun plans. It's a great time to rest and spend time with loved ones and I hope you can do the same.
Dreamer (Business) Updates
Dreamer — My updates will be less exciting and fun for everyone, but as we go into the end of the year there are a few housekeeping things. We’ve had meetings with lawyers and with accountants as we approach the end of the KS fiscal year end. Making sure we are doing our best and following the narrative of following regulations and tax laws to make sure we are doing it the right way and can have a long term stay. A lot of work going into that, as far as having good data for financial statements, and good legal opinions on legal structure, what is DFK, what is Kingdom Studios, how do our other contractors play into it, and all in the regulatory environment light. I think people should be happy that we are thinking about this. A lot of our success in building a fun game and deep ecosystem require us to be looking at things like legal, tax and market making. So just giving that update to make sure people want to know we are mature business running adults.
Beetle (Builder) Update:
Beetle — From the build side of things, we are continuing to push stuff out. Super excited we got some stuff out yesterday with the card back updates, sound and inventory. A ton of great work, a lot of quality of life stuff, but it makes it a lot more like a game and we’ll keep pushing in that direction and continuing to bring quality of life improvements where we can. I’m super bullish on PVP stuff. I get to sit in on those meetings and the talks with Wisdom and its really exciting to see what they are putting together and I’m working with them to get things integrated now into our system so super excited about that. I’ll be taking hopefully a little bit of time for the Holidays and want to wish everyone a happy holiday.
Magnus (Chain) Updates:
Magnus: Made some good steps forward integrating contracts into the game for PVP things. Super bullish on PVP as a feature in general. Have some cool releases coming on the avalanche side of things. They’ve announced a cross subnet messaging system similar to layer zero and synapse. That will ease some message passing and things like that. Really excited to see support for that at the native avalanche level. In terms of what we are working on in solidity, power ups is kind of front and center so that's what I’m working with Hubert on to build out. I’ll be taking some time off for the Holidays as well. Bullish for the new year.
Hubert (Game Mechanics) Update
Hubert — Echo what everyone else is saying. Having a good time working with Wisdom on PVP. Right now working to finalize some of the abilities for some of the classes so we can work on internal testing. As we go through this and the back and forth on specific abilities, the flavor is really interesting to me and has me thinking about all of the meta that will exist that we can’t even predict. It’s been good working with them and also things like working on power ups and trying to get that ready for early next year as well as pet bonuses, lvl 10 profession quests and pet feeding, which we are moving forward on as well. Starting to feel good about where we are at on that. Just a lot of work to integrate pet functionality into the system. We’ll need a new infrastructure for our quest core to be able to do that. It will be a bit of work but will put us in a better position at the end. A lot to do but I also do plan to be taking some time off for the Holidays as well and want to wish you all Happy Holidays.
Bolon
Bolon — As you’ve heard most of us are going to be trying to take some time to spend time with family. For next week AMA we are planning to be here, but we will do things a bit different. Unless we get some pressing questions that have to be answered we’ll do a shorter year end review type of thing rather than a traditional AMA. Same time next week. Aside from that lets take some questions.
AMA Questions
Art — Recently some Togwa workmen were working on the docks, they look like humans, so why do we treat them like pets if they are sentient beings?
Secondbestdad— A bit of Togwa lore for everyone: The Togwa have their own language and culture, and are known for their strong work ethic and willingness to integrate into human society. One unique aspect of Togwa culture is the use of turtle shells, which they wear as a form of adornment and protection. They also fit their young with turtle shells to blend in with and be raised by the native giant turtle population. They’re also not above pawning their eggs off on heroes to raise as pets, but they see it as free babysitting while they go about their lives unimpeded.
Bolon — You always take free babysitting. Togwa’s figured out how to do it.
DFK Runway — what is current runway and are we generating enough to support ourselves today?
Dreamer— I’ll be cautious here. We have to keep in mind that the market can change any day. If we had answered this on day X earlier in the year we know that a few hours later that answer could have changed. However, currently and for the past weeks and months, we’ve been running a surplus of fees in game activity relative to the cost of deployment and running the protocol, so not just paying people, but also running RPCs, events, etc. We have been running a surplus. In addition to that, our static treasury has continued to improve, mostly as a result of our surplus. We have benefited significantly from build incentives and Avalanche and the Klaytn investment arm. We’ve received about half of the Klaytn incentives, with the other half to come upon completion of milestones. They are very transparent with their community with these types of incentives. Post launch we have been on the receiving end, which has contributed to our overall treasury and is contributing to the weekly surplus relative to costs of development, running and marketing the protocol.
Thinking about transactions, price of tokens, health of dex, all of these things impact surplus. There was a time when we were not running a surplus, when we were looking for solutions for a chain that shall not be named and tokens that lost their value. The treasury has only gotten healthier since then. How we spend money will always be a moving target, especially as we plan to move some money to outside accountants, a market maker and also to attorneys.
Fox — I’ll add some thoughts. Excellent overview of all of that, Dreamer. I want to second all of that. It was kind of like a refiners fire. A lot was thrown at us as a project, and as a participant in certain blockchains, but it made us stronger, and it made us have to make changes that needed to be made and having those things happen put us in a stronger position, making us be conservative with our runway. That will always continue to be our goal. We love this project and aren’t going anywhere. So stoked that all of those things have had that effect on the project and really excited for the future. We are in a much healthier spot now than we have been in a very long time and it basically just gets stronger over time. I’m happy with that and the direction that we are going in.
Game Mechanics — Auto Questing Power up — possible, will we see something like this?
Hubert — Not only possible, but something we are planning to do.
Game Mechanics — Tears as a Raffle Prize?
Hubert— That is possible, I think that we’d have to look at it and I just want to note that our goal is not to have tears return to the way that they were so adding something to raffles we have to be aware of how much that will be producing. It may or may not happen. No guarantees at this point.
Bolon — For anyone that missed last week’s AMA. Hubert discussed the state of tears as well as the goal behind that little bit last week so if anyone missed that watch the recording or write up from Samichpunch.
Game Mechanics — Dark Summoning Summons remaining. Summons remaining follow the same as standard summoning, except that two heroes with two heroes that have zero summons that mutate into the next tier class won’t get at least 1 summon.
Hubert— even in normal summoning you wouldn’t even be able to summon with those parents, so we decided not to give that benefit, because you can already summon with the zero summon parents, which you normally wouldn’t be able to do. If you want to hit the mutations through dark summoning, then that will be something you have to deal with. I guess if you did have one summon left, maybe you’ll want to do a normal summon first, I don’t think that we are going to change that. For now I think it's going to remain that way.
Jeweler Fee Collections
Frisky Fox — We announced the fee collector that would be able to collect some of the Jade Rewards as well as Jewel that had vested. Basically there was amounts that had accrued in the old Jeweler from Harmony, and those have been redirected to the fee collector in Crystalvale and Serendale. The plan is to claim those quarterly. The plan was to claim the first batch of that today, this afternoon. I pushed the code up for that, so expect that to happen sometime this afternoon. So if you hold sJewel or cJewel you may get a little bump from that. Back over to you Bolon.
Series of Giveaways
Bolon — We have a series of giveaways, one by us and then one by Kirakua — who has been collecting prizes from the community. Pay attention for the current one to the side quest channel in discord.
Closing Remarks
Hubert — have a lot coming up next year. Looking forward to game content and PVP and all that will come out with that and then moving on to PVE. Think it will be a very exciting year next year and I’m looking forward to it. Looking forward to the holidays to reset and recharge and get ready to kick off the new year with full power. Thank you for supporting to us. Probably won’t talk to you until next year so have a great rest of it.
Magnus — Just want to say happy holidays everyone and looking forward to next year.
Beetle — Happy holidays from BeetleDude, and thanks!
Dreamer — I think that Fox mentioned that we have a foundation now, Hubert mentioned he’s excited about game content. Building on this foundation, a few months down the road when we look back it should show how strong of a foundation we’ve made and also show our ability to pivot and find solutions to market events and continue to build trust and credibility with the community we have here. Excited for next year for all the positives mentioned here, but all the blockchain gaming initiatives and potential new partnerships. When we look back at the ecosystem relative to other paths, it should be gratifying. This isn’t just a job, it isn’t just a hobby, I think we all see DFK as something we are contributing to as something different to each of us, but I’m just grateful we can be a part of it. Grateful to those in the community helping others, and for those having a bad day or for those where things are perfect the first time around, we want to be a force of stability and quality and innovation. Hope we can all reflect during this season. Wish everyone a happy holidays and a bullish new year.
Fox — A bullish new year. I love that. I said it earlier and it was reiterated here. I feel like this year we’ve accomplished so much and a lot of that has been laying the foundation for what is to come. Our team has honed its skills this year and is the best in the space in what we are trying to build. When we launched over a year ago, people said it was just another Dex, and we said its not just that its a dex and game, and then it was a dex and a game and a chain, and now its growing into a metaverse where other protocols can interact. our attitude has been to grow and build, and that will be our attitude. Its a real life win win for everyone building in this space. Stoked to see what will still be to come in this next year and what things we can’t even foresee that we’ll end up accomplishing this next year. Super stoked about that. Treasury is in a good place. Excited to be able to have the ability to do things that we weren’t able to do earlier. We have some cool initiatives started on the marketing, art and creative sides that I won’t say anything about yet but there are some cool things in the works. Happy holidays, happy new year. Bullish. Thanks for coming and being the best community ever.
