DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates — November 23, 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=BQl2AGTfHfM
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 — A lot has happened since the last AMA. We released a spreadsheet showing the progress we are making on various fronts for the Serendale 2.0 launch and its a way for us to be transparent and show in real time how each of those fronts are doing and for the community to stay on top of it. We update it as we go. Make sure to check it out. Its up to date.
Serendale 2.0 Launch Checklist
I’ve had some people ask what this means for hte launch date and when we can expect the launch. I want to expect how we plan to do that.
We have that spreadsheet, and if you look in it, it has a column (G) notifying whether it has passed internal testing or not. A lot are in progress, a lot have passed. As we test (we have a lot of great testers), if there are issues found it has to go back to development and have them fix it, so its a very iterative process. Over time you’ll see more and more of that turn green.
We are launching on Klaytn which has 1 second block finality, subtlety’s with RPCs that are new to us and we want to make sure this is all well tested and successful. We are planning currently to wait until all of those turn green on testing before we announce that date for launch.
The flip side is that when we get to that point, we are very confident that it will actually happen at that date. It will be a much higher level of confidence. The amount of time needed after it turns green to launch is not very long at all. Hopefully within a day or two after everything goes green we’ll have an announcement of a date and that should hopefully be 6–7 days after that announcement.
We’ve had some internal committee meetings on some other items we’ll address later in the AMA, but I’ve been hard at work on Duel rank rewards so that it will be automated so that players can just go in and claim those rewards at any time and it will be a self serve automatic process and involve less stress and work from our team, so that as soon as you hit a rank you can just claim the reward right away in the middle of the season.
I’ve also been hard at work on the raffle system. You should see now that there is no limit to what you can submit at one time, whereas before it was around 1,000.
I also fixed our block hash oracle which secures the randomness for it. It’s now more robust so that it can’t be messed with.
Pinecone has been hard at work creating an infrastructure for us to be able to run our own nodes as well so that the randomness will always be there and secure.
Magnus is in a meeting with one of our partners, he’ll probably be hopping in half way through, but he’s been very hard at work optimizing a lot of our questing. So has Hubert. Hubert reached out last week interested in getting the solidity stuff set up on his computer and over the week he spent 12 hours a day helping hammer out code and basically figured out solidity and helped create a lot of optimizations. Those quests are able to be completed and submitted. That was the main unknown for Serendale on Klaytn and that is looking very good. Obviously we need a lot of robust QA around that, but we are in an excellent.
We have some more on tokenomics i’ll let Hubert cover that later.
Splittening
I was able to get 4 of the 5 buckets set up on testnet. The 5th one is Locked Crystal, which entails some more. We’ll do a pre-compile on our chain which will support us raising the cap to be able to allow us to do that locked crystal airdrop. That is going to take some time. That entails all of the validators updating to be able to support that and will involve a lot of testing. It will be the first time we will have had to do our own pre-compile. I stayed up late doing that last night and was able to get it running on my local but there’s a lot that needs to happen for that.
Locked Crystal from the splittening will be coming sometime after Serendale 2.0 launch so keep that in mind.
Bolon — When someone tells you over the weekend that they learned solidity you just stop talking because it definitely wasn’t learning solidity. Do we want to talk about the quest fund now?
Quest Fund
Frisky Fox — Yes this was an item we talked about in committee. Quest fund was one of the topics. We had 2.6MJ in Harmony, and the plan was to allocate that towards Serendale and CV quest funds, which will also have their own quest funds of Jade and Crystal (so its almost supplementary). So right now its basically used for extra rewards for the gardening quest. We had a vote on how to allocate it, we had allocated only 1M of it. Since we have been handling only CV quest fund for the last month and half, its received most of the drain since 100% of questing is hitting that. So the plan is for the remaining 1.6M unallocated, we’ll send 600K to the Crystalvale one here in a bit and the other 1M will go to Serendale after we launch, so that is how that will be split up.
There are about 100K jewels that have accumulated from Gas fees, and those have to manually be put in, and those will be added there soon.
Bolon — Hubert can you expand on how the quest fund impacts gardening?
Hubert — The Jewel side?
Bolon — Yes, and minimum rewards.
Hubert — The quest fund was designed in a way that it would never be allowed to go to zero and to do that, it has to have some guards against guaranteed rewards. So recently the Jewel quest fund passed that threshold and so the minimum rewards is no longer being awarded. If we did continue to do that, the fund would go to zero pretty quickly. With the Jewel fund in particular, we do not have many inputs into it. We have the gas going in, and then what we have left over from the quest fund in Harmony. From that point forward, the inputs will be from Gas and then any feature that would cost Jewel rather than power tokens. So it is a function that has feedback to it. It will grow if more inputs than outputs or shrink if vice versa. Sometimes we could see that balance go very low, especially on the Jewel side, there won’t be many inputs into it like on the power token side. Last time I looked we were really close to 1M crystal in the quest fund. It’s not quite there but almost there, so the Crystal side is growing regularly.
We can’t guarantee rewards, its all dependent on the quest fund and the ecosystem. That is just something you’ll need to keep in mind when considering which quests to do and in deciding if its worth it for you. We are looking for ways to increase the flow to that and I think with some things coming up the Jewel side could become healthier, but generally you can expect the power token quest fund to be healthier.
Dreamer (Business) Updates
Dreamer — This week is one that has been heavily focused on the dev side. A lot of my role has been around how to support leading up to the launch. We’ve always been focused on refining our internal practices and from a corporate governance perspective we’ve been trying to improve the visualization of our internal structure and provide transparency of all the committees and working groups that we have. We have a lot of output, but if people saw exactly how we were structured I hope there would be more excitement. So not the most exciting update, but we are working on that.
Next week is Miami, we will be flying out there. We have a number of people that got some tickets that will be joining us. Very excited to see people in the community and to represent DFK in the best way we can. We have a number of in person meetings set up. Maybe we will have some interviews. We will have merch, and a booth. Hoping to participate in some panels as well TBD. We have Beetle Dude coming out as well for the first time, so people can get some face time from him. Might be hearing from him on the panel as well. He is an incredibly talented developer but also a really great guy.
On the market side, I’ll refrain from specific comments. I’ve been very invested in allocating time every day to understand some of the inputs going into the broad market concerns. I would encourage everyone to do the same. I would suggest looking for multiple sources. People will claim XYZ, but the best thing we can do is be as educated as we can and not rely on one source of information as the truth. Just want to make sure during the holidays we all take some time for that so that we can all make good decisions.
Will try and hop into chat more, especially as volatility picks up. We try not to share opinions or views on things like this, but we do discuss this in team meetings, we have a channel for risk, and these things come up. Doing our best to look around corners and be prepared to react to various scenarios.
Castle
The Jester supports those building games that support our NFTs and Tokens.
We have the Archivist that is a way for non-game platforms and tools to be represented
We have the artist for those that are creating content and finding ways to elevate those, whether its writing, music, art, videos.
But there was a hole for some of our closest partners and those that we collaborate with. On most websites you’ll have a section for investors and core partners. And we wanted to have something similar and gamify it. We will be including a list of partners and close collaborators, things like other protocols that have integrated us into their protocol (things like Synapse, Avalanche, Coinbase wallet, Meta mask) so that anyone who comes into DFK can see some added credibility of all of those working with us and contributing to the building of the kingdom. We won’t require them to apply, we’ll just add them internally. You might see some of this go up quicker than the applications, its just that there is no application these are already existing partnerships and we want to list them for credibility and accuracy.
Jade Tokenomics
How does it compare to CV tokenomics for emissions and unlock?
Dreamer — We have not changed anything, so if you look at how we launched CV, we will use that as a standard. We felt that it would be disruptive to introduce changes that are unnecessary and create asymmetric unfolding of emissions. So for those that are familiar, the rate of unlocking for each epoch will stay the same. We could have considered different emission rates or different period for unlock. Those might have been confusing to those coming back. If we considered a different unlock schedule, I would think a smoother unlock over 5 years, but it would be such a deviation from what we’ve done and would be unwise to deviate from the unlock schedule of Crystal. So the quick response there is no change.
Frisky Fox — It will be the same model, just have some dates be shifted because it will launch soon. CV has already been out for a while, so obviously dates will be shifted.
Bolon — That will be reflected in our whitepaper soon.
BeetleDude (Builder) Updates:
Beetle— On the front end build side, Fox went over a lot of what's going on for the schedule of Klaytn 2.0. We are taking the opportunity to work through some stuff that had been in the backlog. It will be a great boon to DFK Chain and Klaytn. Doing a lot of alpha bug testing. Trying to make sure the launch will be great for current players and new players. Typicl working hard on the Kaekus wallet. Looking good as of now, but we’ll need a lot of testing with that.
Working through some awesome sound updates that Sam has been putting together and trying to build out the game feel of the app, and adding these sounds should make it feel a lot more gamified. Secondbestdad is doing what he does best, which is creating a bunch of cool new NPCs as we build out the world and the environment and trying to get things more consistent across the board.
Hoping this launch will be exciting for everyone and not just new players.
Magnus (Chain) Updates:
Magnus— Re gas optimization, we’ve been working to get under the thresholds needed for Klaytn. Very pleased with results. Hubert has been chipping in, picking up Solidity over the weekend. I don’t want to share exact numbers yet, but in a simulated environment its looking really good. Expect this to work not only on Klaytn but also on DFK chain in terms of lowering gas fees. Stoked on how this is going for optimization.
Made some headway on price feeds and VRF oracles integrating into DFK Chain. Nothing too big to share there but that’s moving in a good direction in terms of building out DFK Chain.
Jewel Burning Update
Frisky Fox — we have some Jewel to burn. A lot actually. As you know, a couple of months ago we had a vote for Serendale 2.0 and the way we plan to handle locked Jewel. Part of that was changing the 500M jewel cap to 125M. That was a big change. At the start of Crystalvale, as you know, Jewel is the gas Ethereum equivalent coin there on that network. So its not just a ERC20 coin. So that means at the start, we had to mint all 500M at the start and put it into a multisig with all the security around that. What we’ve done is we slowly refill the bridge for Synapse as it gets low as people bridge to our chain. So it sends the ERC20 from Harmony and they get gas on our chain. Since we’ve switching that to 125M, we now have 375M too many wrapped jewels on DFK Chain. We’ve been planning when and how to best burn this. We have a consensus now and we plan to update our docs and release an update announcement to those docs to explain how it will work.
Plan will be to have those 375M Jewel burned to the official address used for burns for all of our networks 0x00000000000000dead, so will be the same place as other Jewels that are burned, so if you track all jewels that are burned you’ll see it added there. So if you want to see only jewel burned from transactions, you’ll need to subtract 375M from the number that will now appear in that wallet.
Hubert — We’ll also be burning the amount of Jewel that was burned on Serendale and Harmony as well, so you’ll see that burned on top of the 375M.
Bolon — We’ll get those into the docs, along with the Jade tokenomics structure.
Game Mechanics Updates — Hubert
Hubert — been a crazy set of days here jumping into solidity. There are quite a few different things that came from that, not just optimizations but also some changes I’m pleased to announce:
A few changes you should be aware of once we start releasing:
- Mining and Gardening quests will no longer allow you to cancel early and get early rewards. Instead you can set the exact amount of stamina you want to spend when you start the quest. It will default to Max stamina, and you can change it if you want to, but then you are locked in for that period of time. If you cancel, you won’t get any rewards and will lose the stamina (essentially the same as how fishing and foraging work). That will be a big change and require some people to make some changes with how they do things, but for those trying to do specific amounts of stamina runs, will allow them to do that more easily and also allows us to simplify the code a lot.
- Value of Higher Level Heroes. I stand by my answer from the last AMA, but it got me thinking of how we can improve things and I did come up with something and the board approved it. One thing that will be changing along with all of these updates is that we are adjusting the way time per stamina works, so that there will be a reduction in time required to regenerate stamina, per level. So for every level you get 2 seconds off the total time it takes to get a stamina point. Over time it will get more impactful. We will then have a power up that changes that 2 seconds to 5 seconds. That will be significant to helping evaluate the value of higher level heroes and also addresses the problem a lot of people have noted about how having more stamina doesn’t help you because it all recovers at the same rate. So that will change the equation for a lot of people and be a general improvement.
Wanted to shout out to Sam, we don’t have this released yet, but he’s created a track that I can’t get out of my head and I can’t wait to have that out. You’ll be able to look forward to that, but may be a little bit still.
Frisky Fox — I’ll also add a couple of thoughts. I’m excited about this change, because as you get higher level it seems they should be able to do more in the same amount of time and gives more incentive to improve their efficiency.
Dreamer — I’ll also add, this has been something on our minds for a while. IF we had unlimited resources, we would try to do everything now and today. But often we have to assess what can we do, and in what order do we prioritize things, because we have limited but talented devs and artists. This made the cut, so excited that the team can identify things like this to prioritize. Grateful that we have good minds to come up with good solutions.
AMA Questions
Different in ROI on playing vs holding assets:
Frisky Fox— we historically haven’t commented on speculation. There’s a lot of factors. Our goal is to create an ecosystem with a lot of ways to play and earn and that has been our approach. We won’t start now on speculating nor will we in the future. We are just building to improve the ecosystem.
Dreamer — Our main focus is to make and build a game, that is safe and more and more fun that has deeper features and looks at what is in Web3, what exists in web2, and put a spin on it and integrate in a metaverse fashion. We take effort to audit contracts, have the best people putting code into production and have committees to make sure we get to the right place. So if a participant asks how can I get the biggest bang for my buck, I imagine if we looked back in time, the answer would change from day to day. This is not only something we shouldn’t be speculating on as the development team, but we couldn’t even if we tried, so we won’t. We just want to make sure the ecosystem is working and healthy. We do that by asking if there’s any piece of the ecosystem and NFTs and tokens if we need a balancing or new features to create utility that makes sense with lore. If I’m someone that has a lot of time and likes the idea of a tokenized RPG game with assets that are playable but also hold value I would hope that person would want to play. It probably comes down to what kind of player you are and how much time you have. We want to cater to all interests and try to create a place for everyone’s interests.
Duels — We have heard that Duels will reward players that level up their heroes, could you expound on that?
Frisky Fox—We’ve talked about this in prior weeks, we are on Season 1 of duels, we did a lot of changes between S0 and S1 to balance matchmaking. We are also monitoring how things are playing out with Season 1 and have a list of things we’ll improve for Season 2. A lot of those relate to matchmaking and hero levels and hero levels can play into rankings. So you’ll see some of those in Season 2. We want it to be such that higher level heroes can receive higher ranks than others and still have a rewarding way to play duels.
Dark Summoning — we’ve seen an increase in the number of dread knights, and higher rarity dread knights. Was this expected, any thoughts to the hero market on that front?
Hubert— The first part of that is that yes it has led to more dread knights coming into the market, especially in this early time where people were summoning for the Gen0 raffle. Looks like the number of Dread knights went up by about 150, and in that there were 131 that were burned.
Whenever we bring a new feature out it shuffles value as certain things become more scarce. If we see if there’s anything that is unbalanced we can make updates. Nothing definitive to say at this point in time and we are watching it. While the amount of dread knights went up the amount of sages and dragoons went down, leading to an increased scarcity on that front. There will always be a balancing and rebalancing every time there is a new feature. Efforts on our part is to make sure it doesn’t break the game or isn’t too adverse to the game ecosystem.
Pet Xp Bonuses — will the Xp boosts pet gives work for training quests?
Hubert—Yes and no. The base bonus for having a pet equipped will apply, but there is a bonus for extra Xp for running a specific profession quest would not apply.
Profession Quests lvl 10 and loot — is plan to have next lvl 10 profession quests have same items but different rates, or would new items be introduced?
Hubert—Same items but with increased drop rates, or increased yield rates for gardening and mining. For us to add a bunch of new tokens without further systems in place would lead to a further unknowns and speculation and we are focused on getting the next features out that will take those other ingredients into account, like PVP and PVE where potions will become more important and then as we get crafting out you’ll start to see more new tokens from quests.
cJewel/sJewel power ups. Any insights on how many power ups are currently planned/conceived and the anticipated range for opting into them?
Hubert— As far as how many there will be, I can’t answer that. Our philosophy will be to look at any given feature, is a power up appropriate and if so it will be added, if not then it won’t. The list of power ups will continue to grow as we go. As far as the initial layout of them, it’s going to depend on when we release it, whether before profession lvl 10 or at the same time. Currently we have around 6 that we are preparing for. As for the allocation amount, it depends on the power up. For things that are minor and a per horo basis, probably somewhere between 10–30 cJewel, for broader power ups, maybe 50 or higher. Will depend on what the power up is for. Generally sticking to the philosophy of how much jewel would need to be locked up for how much time? The system isn’t out yet so I can’t give any exact numbers, but hopefully that gives you some sense of what to expect.
Dreamer — I’m always thinking about power ups, when we hop into meetings I suggest lots of new power ups. We are thinking about what we can do in game, but also with third parties that will be offering services and maybe this can be an incubation type of service to collaborate with them. So if someone asks how many power ups long term? It will be like features and constantly changing.
Wisdom gaming involved in some AMAs?
Bolon— yes, but prior to that, I have the pleasure to announce that on November 30, Workhorse will be joining Rissen and I for a Chaso Cast. Assuming after that he is still willing to work with us then we will be planning some AMAs with Wisdom. They are super fun to interact with in our PVP discussion channel and I know people are looking forward to interact with and engage with them more. Tune in to that next Wednesday (announcement to come). That will be right on the back of Dcentral.
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
Beetle—excited to see everyone’s reaction to the features.
Hubert—The delay has been a blessing in disguise, allowing us to have a more fully featured release and focus on a few things we wanted to do for a while that required changing a lot of contracts, and we don’t like to do that very often.
Magnus—Excited about opportunity to do some overhaul and happy with progress with partners.
Frisky Fox — It’s been a really good week. Also a really good month and year. Its good to be in this space and building. I want to second what Beetle said. I have the pleasure of seeing the Alpha site and what is happening there and seeing the various features. It’s also great to be able to have the opportunity to refactor the code, which leads to cleaner and more efficient code, which leads to savings for everyone on gas. This sets us up to create some of the new features we have planned as well, where we are about to the point where that will be our main focus, to focus on those new features. We are about to launch this new realm with this coin and new genes and areas. Here in America, tomorrow is when we celebrate Thanksgiving. I’ve been thinking about what I’m thankful for and high on that list is this amazing team I get to work with and this amazing community. So that you to everyone for all the work in the code, the memes, the sites, the youtubes, and all fo that type of stuff. So much effort and time poured into this and its cool to see us all collaborating on this idea and to see this grow. I’m stoked about that and very grateful for everything. Bullish!
