DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates) — June 27, 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 (mostly a transcript tbh). 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=dmRnakVdcaw
This week, the AMA was from members of several teams relating to updates on the project. AMA’s have different teams present to address different topics. Go to the new 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 State of the Project Update
Frisky — We want to let you know what we are working on what our plans are and how we are reacting to things happening in the space, feedback we’ve received and how we are reacting to it. We have Dreamer here this week. He’s been spending a lot of time on strategy and partnering. He was in New York last week and had a lot of really good discussions over there. We’ve spent a lot of time as a board and a project about what happened this week.
Obviously we had the Harmony hack which impacted everyone here in a very big way, and that obviously impacted our treasury funds in a big way, so we are feeling the pinch there. We are in the same boat as a lot of other projects and trying to figure out what that means for our project. We are trying to figure out what we can do so that whatever happens we can succeed and have continuity as a project, Dreamer will talk a bit about that, the strategies and the options on the table. We’re trying to be really transparent. We want to let all of you basically know our thought processes and where we are at and get the feedback of the community. Dreamer do you want to spend some time to talk about that, then we can talk about feature parity on DFK Chain after that, Hubert has some game mechanics stuff, Beetle Dude will talk about Raffles, Pieface can talk about merch.
Dreamer Biz Dev Update
Dreamer — I’m going to hit this in 3 sections. First — an update on Harmony from our perspective, not only with what's transpired the past week but how the overall relationship has been from a very factual perspective, and this relates to priorities and then also fund raising.
1. Update on Harmony
Dreamer — So the project initially launched on Harmony, low finality, low fees, and it contributed to the success we saw for DFK. It wasn’t something we started with VC funding or that folks from Harmony itself called people in to be on the chain. It was very self-community funded in a traditional decentralized manner. It was months later that DFK got the interest of Harmony and we started to establish a partnership and relationship. We had very big hopes for that (all contributors in DFK) and tried to be thes best partners possible. Wanted to have integrity, good comms, not leave prior partnerships. We also establishes a partnership with Avalanche in connection with DFK Chain, trying to make sure we also develop content on both.
In efforts of business continuity and cross chain utility, we launched the subnet on Avalanche. We also integrated synapse bridge into the game itself. It was our first effort to do that part of the business and we kept the relationship with Harmony in mind. In December we got a $1M grant from Harmony. It was publicized but never really came through. There were multiple efforts to try and work through that. We continued to go to events and have the building program. We put our own money into it and continue to build on our own side. The market was on fire, and we had capital to do so and so we weren’t trying to fuss about money and be the best partners that we could.
Then with the market there was a lot of depreciation in asset values. A lot of things happening in the world and within Harmony specifically. The gardens are tightly tied to Harmony and one could argue that a lot of pressure on ONE has impacted the gardens specifically. We’ve looked at how we can adjust expenses, set up entities, extend runway, etc. Priority one was lets start with the partners we have. So we talked to Harmony again and asked if we could get that $1M and repurpose it and get Kingdom Builders going and maybe even increase it a bit. If you look at transaction count, DFK makes up nearly 98% of transactions and a good chunk of the TVL. We would have been aligned in our incentives to make sure DFK was well funded and we had a narrative externally that Harmony supports builders, because there is currently a narrative that there hasn’t been the most support for builders. We are trying to be objective about what we’ve heard.
The request was rejected. The initially awarded $1M grant was reneged, and not to be performed on. It was disappointing but I’ll save my personal reaction for it.
Then last week we had the bridge incident. I’m still hopeful and I know they’ve been working hard. Comms have been limited but they’ve tried where they can to be transparent and we are all cheering for them because we love the community and are hoping for its survival, but there seems to be a lot of continuing news that it will be unlikely that there will be any recovery. We don’t have any information that the public doesn’t have, which is probably a function of Harmony focusing on the problem and doing everything that they can.
Frisky — Just wanted to add that it’s been tough. We reached out to them. They aren’t saying much publicly, and they aren’t saying much privately either. It’s been tough for us as the largest DEX on harmony to know what we should do. So we’ve had to put on our risk hats and ask what we should be doing given we don’t have any clear indication of what the future might hold. That’s why we’ve adjusted gardens and that’s why you are seeing stuff like that.
Dreamer — I’m looking at AMA voiceless chat and know people are being light with their comments, and this isn’t meant to be a negative update on Harmony. Just a fact-based update based on our experience. What’s our priority from here. What’s our plan, that’s the point of this. I have a lot of respect for so many core members of Harmony, they may have different priorities and I’ll leave personal experiences out and just focus on what we do and don’t know.
So what can we do if we look to prioritize the future of DFK?
2. Priorities.
Priority Number 1 is to increase overall features on Crystalvale. 99% of what we are doing on Serendale we are working to have as solutions on Crystalvale. The biggest of those is questing. It’s been in focus for a long time.
The biggest issue is bridging. There’s a lot of tokens to work through. This bridge is different than what we set up for the token migration to DFK chain. It’s intended to be seamless but is not yet complete. Also working on other option, in case there are more unexpected events like if the chain pauses. We are looking at all options available according to the next live block. Is there a possibility to burn and remint the tokens that were on Harmony onto DFK Chain (bloaters, locked Jewel, pets, etc), things that we don’t have a way to bridge yet. So trying to find out how to bridge what is not yet bridgeable. Also looking at getting DFK Duels and the Raffler over to DFK chain. Meditation, upgrade your heroes etc. There are other things not available yet, like land, so we can’t just snap our fingers and poof have land in Crystalvale. But the majority of things we can do on Harmony now, we want to make sure that no matter what happens, we have parity so that people have a place to quest and trade.
Any comments from anyone else about this?
Frisky — This isn’t a deviation from our plan, it's more of a reprioritization. We’d always planned this for the expansions and has always been part of being a multichain game. So its just a reprioritization of making this priority number 1. We’re actually further along than some think. We’re close on quests. Duels just launched on Harmony and I’d like to get it up on Crystalvale as soon as possible. Raffle Master is really close, we could launch that over there too. One thing that takes a lot of time is item bridging. We are looking into Layer zero and other tech to make that work.
People have asked what we can do and if our assets are safe in case XYZ happens. Yes, we have our own node and we will have an avenue to either bridge or remint people’s items. That is sort of what we are looking at there. We have contingency plans in place. WE are trying to do things in an orderly and planned process while also having plans for every possibility.
We have this amazing chain on the subnet. It’s built for games. I’ve the news of a lot of Harmony projects looking for good chains for games, and if people are looking for other chains, we have an interest in building up a metaverse for blockchain gaming. So reach out to us.
Dreamer — I’ll echo that invitation. Games that were looking into launching on other chains, Harmony or not, or that are looking for other options or that are already live on other chains I want to reiterate the offer. Harmony has so many great things to offer, low fees is one of them. We (DFK Chain) have engineered DFK chain to be very friendly to the lower fee environment. Anyone out there wondering, please reach out and we will look into different ways to integrate people.
I did miss one thing on the Harmony update. The Garden updates were supposed to be in by yesterday, Bolon did a great job by the announcement, but for some reason our ability to change that is pause on the Harmony side. It’s out of our hard in terms of the DFK team, but we are doing everything we can to make sure those go into effect.
Priority Number 2 — Serendale. If Crystalvale is close to feature parity, people have asked to move Serendale over there. So if we have feature parity, there are ways to move it over, but there are also many other chains that have been interested in DFK having a presence. Serendale is on Harmony and is live. It would be poor risk management to not ask if Serendale needs a new home based on the facts we’ve mentioned and the potential outcome of the current situation on Harmony. So priority 2 has been to consider what our options are. Who is out there in terms of chains that would be interested in Serendale being on their chain? Maybe it would be Serendale 2.0. It would definitely change tokenomics and we’d probably have to have a vote. THe reality is that a lot of people are interested. With everyone we’ve talked to, I can’t say anyone has been disinterested. The Web3 enviro we are in, it’s much different. People used to say I’m ABC Chain, I have a grant, come take my money. In the current environment some have money, but some don’t. The industry is evolving. There’s a lot of VC and smart money and people want to ensure that moving to any chain is coupled with more structure, and potentially equity rounds and raising money. So we’ve been asking what are the options and where does it make sense to go and who is interested and who is interested in helping us extend our recently shortened runway with creative solutions? The opportunity cost of moving Serendale to DFK chain is quite high. We have all this art that could live in another chain and if this chain has the opportunity for more geographical makeup, more player base, and strategic partners or other games and game makers and investors. I think that we need to consider what is the best move for DFK as it relates to the beautiful assets that have been created. The answer may be to stay on Harmony, but as we look at all of the facts, there are other options out there. We don’t want to ignore them, but we don’t want to make decisions frantically when there is a crisis.
The relationship with Harmony hasn’t been all negative, there’s been a lot of positive and some people have DM’d in the past why we haven’t left, but what type of partners would we be if we did that. So we are assessing risks, it would have to be the right opportunity, have the right incentives, we are showing that we are thinking about the right things.
I’ll leave chain names out for now so we don’t hype things that aren’t finalized, but not only are there incentives, but the ecosystem we’d be getting into, potential partnerships and collabs, and game studios and marketing platforms and entities that would participate in our marketing fundraising efforts are all being considered. That’s all we’ll say on that to be professional and respectful of parties involved.
Priority Number 3. Some people asked if things are just going to stall now. Some things will slow down, but not all things have to stall. As we look for new partners and investors (into DFK for equity) there are going to be some potential synergies. I am going to leave names out of this part as it relates to Pitch updates. But in the last week, keep in mind fundraising usually takes months (so anyone expecting we would show up today and announce a deal, I wish), but we’ve had great progress, but to manage expectations, any details would be at least a month out.
Majority of time at NFT NY was spent with people visiting. A lot were VCs, several were hedge funds. Every point of contact we had was net positive. There wasn’t a single negative reaction. That doesn’t mean people want to partner, but all conversations started very positive and there is interest out there. They see what we and the community has built and they see the value of the future. The second piece of that is that we’ve been talking with game studios on ways that we might be able to take our priorities and the need to build out the game and expanding on that to many others and asking if there are game studios out there in love with DFK or that we convince to be in love with DFK that could come in and not just be an investor but also have some synergies there. I’m going to respect people’s privacy and not mention any names, but we are extending it beyond just money and seeing what ways we can provide deliverables on the roadmap with these partnerships.
I will share one unique strategy that was discussed with one fund. It’s just showing how traditional finance professionals are getting into the space. When you look at IPOs, firms will offer a line of credit contingent upon them going public. Some firms are converting this into tokens. Some firms will give a line of credit, so that you can sell your tokens to them via the line and then they can’t sell unless the price hits a certain price. A lot of the hedge funds that I worked with in my prior job are starting to get involved in this industry and they all have really interesting ideas.
Frisky — As you guys can see, Dreamer is amazing and we are blessed to have him. He has a strategic mind and knows how to pitch and to sell. He has a plan for how to react, not in a very emotional spur of the moment thing and that’s why we’ve been very careful assessing what our options are under scenario A, B, and put a plan in place and be strategic. We’ve been trying to be the best partner that we can to all of our partners. That’s been our MO and we will continue to do that. We love Harmony, we love DFK Chain, we love this team and we love this community and project.
People have asked if we are planning to keep building and asking how our runway and treasury is. Our treasuries have been impacted but when you look at where we are now compared to a year ago, our team started building this with no funds and no guarantee. We have so many things going for us now that we didn’t have going for us back then. A lot of the same people that were there a year ago are still here. The future now is brighter than it was back then. Speaking personally and from what I’ve seen from others, still very interested. It’s obviously harder to build in the bear market and we are all sprinting and its a marathon and trying not to burn anyone out. Trying to continue building and being strategic and making what is the best ROI for our project and the community. I’ve been asked that a lot and that’s kind of our take on that.
Updates on Development (Beetle Dude)
Beetle — I’m excited to talk about this upcoming feature that we’ve got rolling. Fox did a ton of work on the solidity side of things getting this feature up and rolling. We’ll be releasing the raffle master soon. Hoping we could get it out today but no final promises there. This will be a place where you can use all the raffle tickets you’ve been getting from Duels, specifically the tickets you’ve been getting from beating me in Duels. There will be different sizes of raffles that will be available depending on the time of day. There will be mini, small, medium and large. They’ll be running at different times and will have different prizes. Mini have 15 min between each draw. Large is up to 7 days. You’ll use tickets to add entries and have a percentage chance of winning until the end of that raffle. There is a limit that you can enter for any given raffle so that’s something to keep in mind. It’s fully automated and is a seamless experience where raffles start themselves, end themselves, then someone will close the raffle and the winner will get airdropped the prize without needing to wait for any manual airdrop. Should be a great incentive to get people playing Duels more. There’s also something called the gold pot, my understanding is that this will contain all the gold from the Duel losers, mostly me, filling that up. The way the gold pot works is that you get a % of the pot based on how many tickets you put in. It’s not a chance to win, its a % f the gold pot, you can claim that after its available every day. That’s about it. you’ll find the raffle master in the castle. He is a goblin looking fellow in the castle and that’s where you’ll go to enter these raffles in an attempt to win. I’m excited about this and think it will up our game in the future to have the systems in place to have raffles and allow people to use these raffles going forward.
Frisky — Do we have a date and time for that release?
Beetle — Trying to get it out today. That’s the goal.
Dreamer — The raffle system is awesome for duels, but its also awesome for anyone out there with a game or is building a game. Maybe you have your own tokenomics and maybe you use part of the DFK tokens in your game. You don’t need funding or don’t need a grant but want to be integrated into this raffle system and it would be similar or appropriate amount of jewel for the amount of raffle tickets earned. Essentially this is made to connect to 3rd party builders. Please reach out if you are interested, would like to get started earlier for any games that are interested. It’s like an arcade where you have lots of games that spit out tickets and you go and spend them at the counter (which is the Raffler). It’s a lot of mini games aside from the core game.
Frisky — This really does allow us to do some cool things with anyone wanting to integrate, to have a pre built way to incentivize those things. To have a system in place for people to spend Jewels and earn rewards.
There have been some questions in the AMA channel I’ll touch on before going to Hubert.
Blessith asked about putting Serendale on the same map as Crystalvale. That’s an option we’ve looked at, but there’s a lot of pros and cons. One thing is that its a significant departure of how we’ve planned to do that with expansions. Another is that once we have feature parity on CV, there’s not really a benefit to having Serendale there as well, which is why we’ve had each realm on its own chain. Not saying that we won’t do it, but these are some of the things we are looking at.
There was one question about snapshots for Jewel and xJewel, this is what I mentioned with having our own node. We have contingency plans in place.
Question about off chain activities — we’re considering all sorts of different revenue generating opportunities. For example we’re also looking to integrate other studios that have experience in this.
Updates on Game Mechanics (Hubert)
Hubert — I was looking questions on the RapidR site and there was only one that was game mechanics related it seems. It’s related to when you spend extra Gaia’s tears and there was a bug where the bonus you would be getting didn’t show up on the card. We said we’d be giving special atonement crystals and that is the plan. Prior to land tournaments? yes. It’s a matter of getting the data from who summoned using extra tears. I will ping them and see if we have an update. Essentially once we have an update on who spent the extra tears, we will airdrop the greater atonement crystals. They essentially give random bonuses. it won’t be the bonus they should have gotten, it will be as thought you summoned with 2 random lvl 15 heroes with random stats, and at the time nobody had been able to do that so in general it should be good for everyone and you can use it on any hero. You don’t have to use it on the hero you spent extra tears on. I was hoping we could get it before this point, but there’s been a lot of other priorities we had to focus on. It’s just a matter of getting that list.
Dreamer — there was one I saw related to lvl 10 profession quests. Of all of our priorities, where does that stand?
Hubert — that work is essentially done at this point from the mechanics side. On the front-end side and smart contracts side there’s still a bit more work going. As mentioned we had to shift our priorities a bit to get CV questing set up so that will be first, but hopefully not long after that we can get the lvl 10 profession quests going. That is of course understanding that everything going on with Serendale may cause some delays.
Frisky — I also saw Q’s about current Duel pre season and whether there would be rewards other than raffles. When we do regular season when you hit certain ranks you’ll get airdrops, but for preseason that is not the plan. We still probably have a another 2–3 weeks, maybe more in preseason, with the priority shift.
Updates on Merchandise (Pieface)
Pieface — I just want to say I’m really proud and grateful for this community. I appreciate all of your participation in the merch. We were going to rush launch of the merch store, but I want to make sure we have the right quality. I received a hat, which is awesome. It’s the bullish hat, with wool blend, DFK logo on the back. I’ll drop an image shortly in AMA voiceless chat. We also got a tote bag that is made out of organic cotton. It’s actually pretty sturdy. I have a macbook and it fits really well in there. You can fit your groceries in there as well. Let’s see if I can drop these photos in here. I will drop photos when my computer pop ups stop going away. A little teaser is that there’s only a bloater beanie 2.0 that I’ll be receiving a sample of. We plan to launch our first drop of the Merch store next week. The payment with Jewel is still in the works and we will be implementing it.
Frisky — I’ve loved all of the merch at our events. When I heard the plans for our merch store, it is really exciting. They have a lot of cool things planned that blew my mind in terms of in game integrations and I think its going to be really cool.
Closing Remarks
Beetle — get hyped about the raffle master! I’m more excited maybe about the bloater beanies now that we know about those. We are going to keep building. We’ve talked a lot about reprioritization, but we are still on track to keep putting great stuff out.
Hubert— re Bloater beanie, if its anything like the bloater beanie I got in Denver, its the best beanie I’ve ever worn. We are still pushing forward and still building. Times are tough. That hack was really unfortunate. Sorry for anyone impacted. We were impacted on that. Bridges are a scary thing and its something you have to be very vigilant on. With all of that said, we are still here and we are still building and coming up with good ways to move forward.
Dreamer — I really just want to commend those in the community for their efforts to offer help in any way that they can. It’s not only appreciated but will be seriously considering many of those offers. If you are out there and you love DFK, it’s a hard market to bein and there’s been a series of unforuante events, but we are still here and building. There were people when i was in NY, and there was somebody and he loved the project and asked what he could do. I let him know our priorities. I asked if he was a coder or had a good network and also noted that we are fundraising. Within 24 hours he connected us with 3 people and 2 of those conversations have gone really well. People are reaching out directly in Telegram. If you know someone interested in an investment collaboration or partnership reach out to dreamerdfk on telegram. Dreamer@kingdomstudios.io is my email. Any help in any way is appreciated, especially in discord helping those that are new, fighting unfactual FUD or unnecessary concerns. I’m sure we will continue to have more. This is just a drawn out thank you and invitation to continue to participate. In web 2 we are all consumers of services and in Web 3 its all about ownership so everyone is more passionate about comments and participation so keep it coming and it will make a really big difference.
Frisky — I’ve been really impressed by those that have reached out. Lots that have lots of heroes and lots of Jewel and say hey I’ve been learning how to code solidity because of DFK and those people have reached out saying they want to help and give back. When markets are up everyone is excited, but when markets go down its everyone that has a long term vision that sticks around. Everyone on the team now are those that have a long term vision. I think we are trying to do something that nobody else in the space is trying to do yet. Excited about raffles, merch, DFK chain and all the options for people to experience our game. The sky is the limit, that’s why we are here, most of us have that same dream and goal. Thank you to the team and to our community. We’ll still be here and building. Bullish.
Just really excited, really happy and really blessed to be building with you guys as a project and community. Bullish!
Check out my Index of Samichpunch DeFi Kingdoms Articles For a list of all of my other articles. You should definitely bookmark this index. Follow my medium account to get updates when they go live!
