DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates — November 17, 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=hQhqPiLvxDk
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
Frisky Fox —there’s been a lot of stuff happening. It’s crunch time. Exciting time, but a lot of work. Everyone has been putting in a ton of work. Happy to have BeetleDude back with us and we’ll probably have some updates from him. We didn’t have a release last week, the week before that we had cJewel and Dark Summoning. Now we are really focusing on Serendale 2.0 and making sure all of that is up and running and we’ll have some updates on that later.
Dreamer (Business) Updates
Dreamer — good to be back, missed AMA last week. Was able to hop in chat and good to talk with you all after all the events that happened last week. Given all the events that have happened over the past year we’ve been getting pretty good at looking around corners and trying to communicate with and stay sync’d with the community. It’s a crazy chain of events that have occurred, won’t focus on that here. We are focusing on building.
For those not aware, there’s a lot of articles there if you want to go read about them and the lessons learned. Hopefully the lessons learned will contribute to a safer ecosystem for Web 3. I’m interested to see how things develop, and I hope that our impact will be limited and our recovery maximized and take the lessons learned to contribute to future decisions.
Outside of the current events, Sunbear has been working closely with a lot of new partners, Rissen as well, hunting down leads from various events. We have pulled in an external sales contractor specialist, not on core team, but have a slack connect dedicated to that where we are ramping up efforts on Bus Dev organization. We have our own chain, games that want to collab, defi protocols that want to look into gamifying their interface. Some native protocols looking to launch on DFK chain, whether games, protocols, or gamified protocols. Also working with some games on Klaytn, and then also some major games outside of Klatyn or Avalanche ecosystem.
There have been updates on market makers. There is a Tier 1 market maker we’ve received an offer from. The update on that is that the offer includes a repurchase agreement. What that means is that in order to move forward on market making, which sets up centralized exchange listings, we have to consider budget and financially how we would support them. One thing they do is, rather than collect heavy fees, have a preset repurchase agreement where up to certain terms, we agree to lend them a certain amount of tokens at a fixed price to be paid back at a fixed price + some interest to a certain point. So it hedges some. It could be beneficial or worse, for both parties. So many options and moving pieces as it relates to Serendale launch and interesting game features.
We want to make sure timing is right and we don’t enter into an agreement where market is volatile and there are a lot of things that we don’t have control over. It’s not as easy as reviewing, stamping it and approving it. We feel pretty good about the approach, but the approach also has downside when doing it in an uncertain stage of development right before some massive launches.
Sunbear (Kingdom Builder) Updates:
Sunbear — Just a reminder we’ll be at DCentral Miami in 1.5 weeks. Excited that we’ll have our own players there that we were able to get tickets for. We’ll report on connections made there. Bus dev team is buzzing. We’ve beefed up our team and resources around this, especially around Klaytn, so many new partners, meetings, exploring how to integrate with each other, and so much coming once we are able to actually launch. You’ll see a lot more listed in the castle and a lot more partnerships that we’ll announce.
Have been building up our Kingdom Building team. Zipper is now a part of that and our committee is full force figuring out how community and team can build together and work on co-marketing. Very excited about some options that are coming.
Only other thing I wanted to mention is that DFK Alerts should be int he castle next week. Level is close, just waiting for them to move from Beta to Production. Then we have some great news that we’ve been working closely with Fight Klub and are finding ways to work with them in a lot of different ways. They are planning to launch raffles into their system starting on Saturday, so I’ll kick it to Bolon for an announcement on that.
Bolon — Yes fight Klub is planning to integrate raffle tickets on Saturday. They are doing final tests on raffle contract. With that, they’ll have a couple of different events going on, which I’ll leave to them, but one of those will be a live stream where I’ll be joining for part of it to celebrate their raffle ticket launch. Very much looking forward to that. They are a fun group and excited to work with them. I will also shamelessly plug, they’ll be tweeting, we’ll be tweeting, but one thing we’d like to start doing is that we are going to make the DFK Chain twitter account more of an ecosystem account rather than just technical chain details.
Frisky Fox — Zipper has been really involved as well on getting our stats and metrics reporting more accurately on other websites like Dappradar. Also, on raffles, we did refactor a lot of things with how those work so that it’s more efficient for gas. Some of the raffles have up to 1M tickets in them, which is crazy. We refactored that over the weekend, that is why they were down for a brief period of time. You should see now, if you were hitting up against the limit of like 1800 tickets at a time, that is now gone and you can put up to as many as you have at one time. We are also in the process of cleaning up old raffles that are on chain that are slowing our chain down. We are running a script now that will be cleaning those up over the next week or so and that will help with chain speed.
We set chain to be 25M GWEI limit instead of 30M. That’s still in place now and as that script run we’ll slowly be able to raise it back up to 30M. Magnus probably has some to say on that.
Serendale 2.0
Frisky Fox — a couple of weeks ago we announced launching Serendale 2.0 on 11/21 if all goes well. We’ve been working hard on that list of tasks and it has continued to grow. We have launched on a new chain before and we knew a lot of what to avoid and what to be careful about. One thing we learned with CV is that its interesting in a bull market having something launch with a less complete set of features and this time we wanted to rethink that and a lot of emphasis was placed on having a lot of things ready to go right at launch, it’s just good for the user experience. We have a list of all the things we want for Phase I, and then a list of things for the next release (or as soon thereafter as we can) for Phase II. Have testnet, audits, etc, involved. As part of that process we ran into a couple of things that are new, because there are a couple of unique things for Klaytn, such as a 1 second block time, which is something we haven’t experienced in the past and are excited about what that can mean for a faster user experience for users. On Klaytn, they make sure that every transaction has to execute in under 100 milliseconds and we ran into some issues on that this past week as some of our longer quests ran over that limit. What we came back with after talking to them is that we basically need to optimize some of our quests. So we are redoubling efforts there.
As such, mining quest and multiquester are over that limit and we are trying to figure out what we can do. We met yesterday and today about what we can do and what we should do with the launch date. One option was launch same date with less features. There are other features we’d love to launch that are almost there and we have an internal spreadsheet that has all of the things that we are working on and we are 90–95% on some of these things, and so we had a big round table on whether we should launch at 90–95% or wait and get them ready and postpone the launch. The consensus was to postpone so that we can give the best experience to the Klaytn ecosystem. Crystalvale when it launched there wasn’t much to do so people came and left. In the blockchain world, there are exploits that happen, lots of crazy things, we want to make sure there’s a lot of time for internal audits and testing. Because there will be refactoring we want to make sure we are good.
There’s also Kaikas wallet, which requires a lot of refactoring. 90% of users over there use that wallet and we want to make sure we are good right out of the gate.
Dreamer — I want to relay the conversation offline and live, the concerns, the dedication, the focus, the quality, of the team today and that we are very focused that what we launch is the gold standard in the blockchain world. Not only do we want people to be pleased and happy with it, we want to have 100% confidence. Thinking that 5% might be clunky or not fully tested, as a risk manager, I come in and say 5% is a lot and we need to get to 99.997% confidence interval. This is an opportunity for us to look at the industry and some of the projects we can look at and what is the best decision for everyone in DFK today.
This is directly related to us trying to do our very best and look out for us and future players. In the grand scheme of things, a few weeks or so hopefully won’t feel like eternity when we instead have a better launching pad into strong ecosystem. We’re doing our best to maximize that quality.
Frisky Fox — we are so close, but we want to make sure its a home run right out of the gate. There are some questions in the chat for what the means for some of the features that were to come later and there is potential for some of those to launch at the same time now, but cannot commit. We’ll have a much better picture tonight after we meet with the Klaytn team and all of the devs. Our plan is to put together a spreadsheet of all the features, where they are at, what is left, and share that here. We hope to be able to share a new date soon and what features we plan to have available at that time.
Bolon — we want to deliver the best product and sometimes that means pushing it back a bit. We appreciate all of you in the community. Watching you in chat as we say we have to delay a feature and seeing an outpouring of support we really appreciate that. On a broad topic, not going to call anything specific out, but we’ve all seen what has happened in the crypto market as of late with things not going the way that they are supposed to, exploits, etc. That’s what this is about, not finishing a contract on Sunday, testing it for only 4 hours before releasing. We want to make sure everything has thorough testing. That is a big part behind the rationale behind the delay, so that we can really test everything.
Beetle — want to emphasize how much work is being done by the team. One thing they haven’t mentioned is how much optimization is happening as part of this process and how it will benefit DFK chain as well. Also looking forward to quality of life improvements that may come with the re-release. Need to make sure that the users that come in will have a great experience.
We’ll be looking at the current list of Phase I and Phase II to see what might be able to change and be pushed to Phase I now that we are moving it.
Hubert — The optimizations that we are going to be doing are some of the things I’d been hoping we could turn our attention to earlier, but its always a matter of working on existing things vs working on new things, especially if the existing thing is already in a working state. Now we are being forced to optimize, and it will benefit everyone, regardless of what chain its on. Disappointed it comes with a delay, but my stance is that we want to have the best launch that we can, and at this state, we’ll have to delay to do that. Appreciate everyone’s support.
Magnus — we’ve been working on everything needed for launch, including airdropping items to those testing things out. I always forget how many contracts and items we have and it takes hours to deploy because there are so many contracts. We have 200+ maybe even close to 250 at this point. Getting things down to 1 second is a pretty impressive technological feat. To do that, they have some very specific computational requirements to help that be met. Whatever we do to optimize for Klaytn will also benefit DFK Chain. We have a call with Klaytn’s core protocol devs tonight to see what they could potentially tune on their side as well as showing them the results of our optimization results. Running a chain is like steering a cruise ship, and there’s only so much that can be done in a small amount of time, so we are doing everything we can on our end.
Pinecone — Since Klaytn doesn’t use the same RPC provider that we use for DFK chain we’ve been partnering with someone for that. I’m also moving a node to Korea as well so that we have better coverage in the world. I’m actually moving it right now, so if you notice anything let me know. I am glad to be working on a team that is thoughtful of delaying a launch to make sure its right.
Jewel Splittening Update
Frisky Fox — We took a snapshot earlier this week on Monday for all locked Jewel and lands. That is completed and we’ll be sharing that. They will go into 5 areas:
- Liquid Jade
- Locked Jade
- Locked Crystal
- Jade that will vest
- Jewel that will vest
Of those 5, 4 will be available at launch. Those are progressing really well. We had to create some smart contracts for those. The interface for that will be in the Jeweler, and will be similar to how we do xCrystal and will be for Jewel and for Jade.
There are other airdrops that will be happening with the Gen0s that Sashei and Bolon are going to be doing, and that is still scheduled for Tomorrow.
sJewel
sJewel will be launching at launch, and everything is the same except Jewel is gas on DFK Chain, but not on Klaytn, so you’ll have to approve use of the Jewel for example in your wallet.
Gen0 Raffle
Bolon — while we do have to delay launch, we are going to still do the raffle so that it’s all ready for when we do launch.
Sashei — we finished snapshot for the dark summoning, summoning and cJewel snapshots. We’ll send the snapshots out after the AMA. The actual raffle will be at 3:30pm ET tomorrow (November 18, 2022).
Bolon — we’ll send the info for the snapshots before that so that you can review your entries.
AMA Questions
Page 10 of eternal story. Do we plan to turn current pages off as a reward separately from the page 10 event?
Hubert— hadn’t been planning on it. More pages have been circulated than we originally intended, so we could either have more page 10’s (and we’ve been trying to close out this page 10 of the eternal story) or we stick to our plan and have a limited number of page 10’s and have a way to trade in other pages for new pages or something. In terms of turning off the drop rate, I don’t think we are going to do that. We could replace that chance with maybe an attunement crystal and that would probably work okay, but the plan for now is to keep moving forward and we’ll either have more Page 10’s out that initially planned or have some sort of trade in for the next season.
Bolon — taking a minute to announce that thank you to the hard work of Zipper, as of today, DFK Chain is supported by Dappradar. So we have statistics and reporting through Dappradar again. Major shout out to Zipper to coordinate getting that set up.
Frisky — Huge kudos to him. Our vision is for other people to use our metaverse and use our Jewel token for gas, very stoked about all of this.
Dreamer — We’ve been in close communication with Ava labs, and I think we have 47 slack connect channels, one of which is with DappRadar. These wins aren’t just going through normal channels and applications. It shows that outside protocols are wanting to partner with us in every sense of the word, and not just as a normal customer. It feels to me like it seems people see the vision. They see the community and they see the business model and the potential long term. The Dapp Radar win wasn’t just a quick application, it was a lot of back and forth work and collaboration and another team we are in close communication with.
Back to AMA Questions
If jewel is not used for gas and just sJewel, are there many reasons for buying Jewel on Klay?
Frisky Fox — sJewel is the big one. It’s used for governance, for snapshots, for sharing fees in the in game transactions. Its the same as DFK chain, just not used as gas… yet. We are looking into ways to potentially do that in the future.
Dreamer — I’ll say the one thing but the jewel-based power ups are going to be pretty awesome. The power ups will be a unique way to connect defi and NFTs and gaming and we’ll be exploring some unique ways to enhance holding Jewel, which is already on the receiving end of the fee allocation in the ecosystem, but also finding ways to allocate to power ups on the game side and on the tokenomics side. Today its harder to see what those power ups will be, but if we fast forward to six months, I think the reasons for a player, liquidity provider, or third party builder, we are trying to explore all functionality and application of these power ups.
Hubert — There’s lots of possibilities and things we’ve discussed that we could do. There will be plenty of reasons to have Jewel on Klay and not just DFK chain because power ups on Serendale 2.0 will come from holding sJewel not cJewel.
Updated Roadmap?
Bolon— yes, we are trying to get migration in place and then focus on the roadmap.
One piece of art we haven’t changed since Day 1 is the background picture between zones.
Secondbestdad— not sure on the origin of that picture, but there are plans to replace it, it’s just taken a sideline to pushing forward game features, people would prefer that to replacing a background (let me know if I’m wrong on that). We have ideas, and we have the talent to make one.
Bolon — we should reassessing the devs to the art team to handle this.
Several contracts in Github are not verified (for example Hero contract) and Github is not up to date currently.
Frisky Fox— we’ve had some troubles in the past verifying contracts that are upgradable. I’m not sure where that’s at at this point because they’ve updated a lot of things and Avalabs runs the explorer. We could probably try again and see if we can get that going. As for the source code of our entire repo, I’m not sure where we are at on that, we do want to make sure we balance audit and IP concerns, so I think at the very least we’ll want our ABI files out there (and I think they are on the doc site for developers) and want to have as much verified on the chain for safety so we’ll need to talk internally on what we want to do.
Magnus — I was working with someone from ava labs a couple weeks ago and the provider they use to verify contracts couldn’t verify our build file because it timed out on the API. All of our dex contracts that are on a different version of solidity are easier and we don’t have many of those, but all the new ones, particularly those that are upgradable are harder to verify. There are a few things we could tweak to address that, and its on our list, but its not our top priority.
Frisky Fox — I am a huge fan of it because it makes it a lot easier to see what’s going on in the explorer.
Raffle tickets between seasons — can you hold them or do you lose them between seasons?
Frisky — You can hold them, but you can’t transfer them. You can horde them up and use them in a later season. For the duels that will be on Serendale, those will be their own ecosystem, because you can’t transfer those across chains. So you can earn them in Serendale, but can’t spend them in Crystalvale.
Possible to add more heroes to dark summoning to give further increased chances? Like 3 for 1, or 4 for 1?
Huber— Anything is possible but its a matter of should we do that. The gene system would strongly resist that, because its a two hero system. Any additional heroes burned would have to only add to rarity or something. I don’t think we’d go down a road like this, because it’s fairly well balanced. There is likely to be more features in the future where more burning is available but I feel pretty good about where its at at this point.
Are the users and actual players a separate entity from the heroes or are the players the heroes? Does a player have a stable of heroes or is he represented by all of his heroes?
Hubert— We’ve gone back and forth on what is the identity of the player. The way the game plays, its a hero management game and you play through with your heroes, but you aren’t your heroes. You are an entity that controls what they do. At this point we haven’t come to any conclusion of having your presence be more deep than that, where you actually have a character. It’s possible that we’d decide to do that in the future but for now you are just a master of you heroes, like heroes of might and magic.
Frisky — It also plays into land and other things like pets. You are the master of your forces/empire. Players join guilds, not heroes specifically. So you are the player that controls them all.
UI and Map in different languages?
Bolon— yes we are planning to build that in, especially Korean given the launch on Klaytn. We are working with a translator for Korean. Because of timeline, we aimed for educational materials first because the game itself is 25,000 words right now, so we wanted to start with educational materials first to help people get into DFK and then circle back to the literal game itself.
Frisky — From an architectural standpoint we are set up to have different languages, and I’d like to see a bunch of other languages.
Bridge for DFK Chain to Klaytn?
Beetle— we have pet and hero bridge contracts ready to go on mainnet, still testing to make sure they’ll go through fine but it should all be ready at launch.
Magnus — For item bridge we are partnered with layer zero, as more and more chains come out, the more interconnectedness there is and people are trying to constantly make more so Layer zero is very busy on that. We are working with them to get Klaytn to DFK chain supported. Testnet is working, mainnet is on the priority list but not integrated yet.
Benefits of currently leveling heroes? Hero level, the way that it worked in duels so hero leveling for duels is not there, and then with profession quests, going on profession score rather than hero level, what benefits are there to leveling heroes?
Hubert— I’ll leave the duels piece to Fox, but regarding the reason to level, while the profession skill does play a large part in the profession results, stats also do matter to that. It does feel less at this stage, because the system was designed to work from levels 1–100. So level 1–2 you don’t see much of a difference, but if you look at the training quests, which are more focused on near term stat growth, you can get much better results a lot quicker by having higher stats, so that was partially an attempt to have something more near term important. Of course once we do get PVP out its going to be a huge factor in you ability to succeed in tournaments. Also land tournament system. Tournaments in general. Once we get further along with the travel system and PVE in place, there is going to be a lot of cases where even if you have the ability to do a lvl 20 profession quest you may not be able to do it because its guarded by lvl 15 montsters and you don’t have any heroes to take those lvl 15 monsters down. At this time it might seem like there’s not enough reason and if you feel that way you can make your own decision, but if you look at the roadmap I wouldn’t say that level isn’t important.
Frisky Fox — S2 duels will have tweaks to matchmaking so that heroes with a higher level will do better and have more advantages than those that do not. But we won’t have someone that’s level 1 playing against someone that is level 10. So to climb ranks it will definitely be in your interests to have a higher level.
With PJ land battles can we expect 1v1, 3v3, or something else? Are you prepare to say?
Hubert — won’t say at this point. We have two things planned and we will decide on those based on bandwidth.
Reminder on Jade Fake Tokens
DO NOT BUY JADE TOKENS THAT APPEAR ON KLAYTN, THERE WILL BE A LOT OF SCAM TOKENS. THEY ARE NOT DFK JADE UNTIL WE HAVE RELEASED OUR CONTRACT. THERE WILL BE FAKES FLOATING AROUND. BE CAUTIOUS AND WARY.
Closing Remarks
Bolon—Tomorrow Sashie and I will be doing the Gen0 raffles. Stay tuned tomorrow for more details on the Serendale migration update. We have the meeting with Klaytn tonight.
Dreamer— Will keep it brief since we are already a bit over. Wanted to express appreciation for everyone’s support. Any price action that might have been developing prior, its always an aggregation of what people are expecting vs reality. A shift in timeline can be viewed in different ways. What I see it as is higher quality, safer, short term loss in time but long term gain in quality, momentum, and traction at launch. I hope people can capture that vision. All the discussion on features also got me excited.
Frisky Fox — we are committed to transparency and letting the community know where we are at. It’s why we noted we were targeting November 21, and its also why we are telling you about the delay. A lot of speculation around timeline out there, but I think you may be suprised with how small of a delay it might be. Excited about the launch, a lot of great things happening at launch, new genes, splittening, Gen0 airdrops, and hoping to fit some of the cool features we were planning for Phase 2 and Phase 1, making it an even stronger release. Super excited about all that and for the opportunity to work here and to be creating this amazing app and protocol and having the pleasure of speaking to everyone in our community. Our team is very hard at work and I’m grateful for their efforts. Bullish!
