DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates — November 4, 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.
Link to the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UOP9p86G9U
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.
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 —this week was especially momentous because we launched a very long awaited feature, Dark Summoning. I’ll let Beetle and Hubert talk more on that. A lot of work went into this feature. A lot of really long days and weekends on everyone’s part. Excited to go kill some of my heroes, I’ve done two and need to do more.
We send our condolences to the Korean community and will let Dreamer talk a little bit more about that. He actually speaks Korean and is one of our main interfaces with the Klaytn team. That tragedy weighs heavily in our hearts.
For stuff we are working on there’s a lot going on. Not the least of which is Serendale 2.0 launch on Klaytn. Starting to near the final stretch I guess you could say. We actually just had an all hands meeting to look at all the things we still have to do. The list is getting shorter and shorter every day and we are getting close to the point where we can announce a launch date. Won’t announce today, but hopefully soon.
There’s a lot of excitement that comes along with this, including the new community, player base, tokenomics, Gen0s (which is always super exciting). There is a lot of opportunity on how to earn those, which Dreamer will be talking a bit more about.
CJewel is also really close, we are in the final stages for the alpha testing. We are planning to hopefully have that wrapped up soon and released in an off cycle release manner. It’s not something we may wait until our next release date for (two weeks) it will be a lot sooner than that. I want to give a date but we are still waiting for final approvals, and you might be suprised on how close we are.
Speaking on cJewel I’ve been working on the time lock contract and on chain governance aspect, which opens the ability to do on chain votes to change allocation in the gardens or change some of the settings for our smart contracts and have them automatically happen rather than have us have to go and execute it, which is a big step towards decentralization and the spirit of the blockchain.
I also coded myself coding a smart contract for an hour last night because Rissen wants to start a behind the scenes how do we do our work series. I was coding the snapshot airdrop contract, which will be sort of a cool new thing we can do with cJewel which allows us to look back in time and see someone’s balance at a certain block number, which allows cool options for automatic snapshots at a specific block number based on cJewel holdings. That will really reduce the overhead on the admin side on snapshots and airdrops. We’ll start to see those a lot more common and might start to see things every week or even more often potentially. There are so many things I love about the new cJewel model.
Also working on things for automatic Duel rewards for ranks. Trying to move away from manual rewards because its a lot of overhead, so that if you hit certain ranks in Duels you’ll be able to automatically claim rewards as you hit those ranks. Also lowering the threshold for those ranks so that rank 1 isn’t 0–500, it would be quite a bit lower and then just scale up as you go. You’ll probably see some of those in Season 1, others in Season 2. That’s it from me.
Dreamer (General and Business Development) Updates
Dreamer — Frisky Fox, did you include the updated fee allocation?
CJewel Fee Allocation Changes
Frisky Fox — no but I’ll sneak it in right now. So part of cJewel we’ve restructured how fees flow into the Jeweler. Currently the fees for the Jeweler come from Gardens, Dex, Summoning, Pet hatching, meditation circle, in game transactions, etc. And is set to be:
- 10% fed to the Jeweler.
We had an internal vote on our community to change the fees up a bit, so now it will be the following after we launch cJewel:
- 15% to the Jeweler (increased from 10%). So it will get 50% more fees than Jeweler 1.0 did from in game transactions.
- 5% burn (increased from 1%).
Both of those increases will come out of the amounts that were going into the treasury wallets. So decreasing what goes to the project and increasing what goes out to the community. This is all set up to reward those willing to stake their Jewel and be a participant in our protocol. Thanks everyone for that and I’m super excited for the direction wee are going.
Back to Dreamer
Dreamer — Jeweler 2.0 launch is huge for Jewel. A lot of Jewel has been sitting around looking for a home and now its going to have a home. Huber, Magnus and Fox have thought of great ways to increase utility of Jewel, cJewel and sJewel. Also, taking 9% from what was going to development wallets and giving it back to the community is big. I hope everyone is excited about that.
On the Klaytn note, I wanted to echo, our hearts out to those in the tragedy. Did some last minute adjustments to our events and announcements to reflect this. Thanks to the community for support and joining in this effort as well.
Gen0 Heroes
Dreamer — shooting for 500. Two ways currently live to earn them are below and we are upping it to 75 each rather than 50.
- Summoning on Crystalvale (75)
- Dark Summoning on Crystalvale (75)
If you look at CV and how we released Gen0s, we want to learn from lessons. We want a good amount to be available upon launch of summoning in the realm, but not all of them. In CV we did a big chunk at fist. We are committing ourselves to half, so 250 will be available when released, the remaining 100 (after the 150) will be for cJewel stakers and holders in the Crystalvale Jeweler. People should be excited about the announcement on that tonight.
So 75 for summoning, 75 for dark summoning, 100 for cJewelers, with more to come on the remaining 250, which will be announced after Serendale 2.0 launch.
Collaborations
Really excited about this, lots of cool things coming up, including game collaborations that we’ll be getting more detail, talking about third party games and platforms integrating.
Bolon — Couple of Clarifying Statements and Questions on Gen0s
Dark summoning is running until 11:59 pm Eastern on the same day as the regular summoning event.
Also the Gen0 rewards for Duels and Duel raffles and where there are any updates on that front?
Frisky Fox — For season 0 we had some Gen0s awarded for top ranks. That was a one off thing we don’t plan to do as a regular basis for future seasons, but we also did a Gen0 allocation for the general raffle that was held at the end of S0 of Duels where everyone’s points got included as part of that. We do continue to do that, so if you have the highest rank then you obviously have the highest chance. We’ll announce more on that as it comes close. We’ve also allocated certain amounts of Gen0’s overtime to go to things like this. Can’t say too much about it right now but more to come on this.
Beetledude (Build Updates) Updates:
Beetle —working hard on cJewel, testing happening as we speak. So far things looking pretty good. Looking forward to get that out on an off cycle release. Dark summoning is our first big feature after CV parity. It was a huge group effort across the board. This opens up the door to keep plugging away on other new features as well. Excited to be working on Serendale 2.0 migration. After that the sky is the limit. We have a bunch of stuff on the docket and we are working through it as quickly as we can.
Dreamer — If I can add on the celebration of various burns, months ago, in different market conditions, there was lots of requests for token and NFT burns, and I feel like we are really delivering on that. Lots of talks and write ups on how to keep an ecosystem stable in an extended bear market, and most of them include reasonable and not forced burn options. What we’ve delivered so far and with new features coming out, not to mention a 5x increase on burning from fees, all the other burn percentages from Duels, heroes, etc., and now looking forward to other opportunities and be creative and innovative and not break the balance, that we also don’t need to roll back the moment things start shifting. A lot of thought goes into this. A lot of minds thinking about the stability. Its an awesome beautiful fun feature, but want to acknowledge we’ve been working on these things for a while. We’ll continue to make our best efforts.
Hubert (Game Mechanics) Updates:
Hubert — been working closely with Wisdom gaming. It has been a very great experience thus far. Have a great chemistry between the teams. Coming up with great ideas. Picking out the path forward to PVP and PVE in the most efficient way that we’ve been able to up to this point. Excited about the future and what we can do with those guys.
While we’re in the process of PVP and hero skills, we had the opportunity of using that time to say okay we have 4 new classes coming, so lets define the flavor of them now and make sure that we have the most in depth look at their stat growth compared to the flavor we want with them. Being able to work with them on that, with PVP already in development feels good. The first heroes were designed before any PVP so a lot of guess work there, but here its nice to have the systems we are developing feeding into the new heroes. Just finished getting the new heroes all defined and I feel good about that. Also working to finish up what we need to deploy lvl 10 profession quests and pet utility as well as other features coming in the future. Lots going on in the background, we don’t talk about them all the time, but we are working hard with our resources.
Sunbear (Kingdom Builders Program) Updates:
Sunbear — as we add partners and builders to the castle, I like to highlight them when they get in there and celebrate their partnerships. Leila’s ledger has been added to the archivist. Last December we ran a bounty for a transaction report to collect info on their gains and losses to help with taxes. Mellow Green Giant who created Leila’s ledger won that bounty and has done a great job keeping it updated. Wanted to highlight that co-marketing relationship, please check it out.
Also DFKanalytics has been added, they are a great data visualization tool, if you want to learn everything about heroes and pets it's a great tool.
In the weeks to come we’ll hopefully have Level integrated the jester and other protocols that support gaming or support bringing gamers to web3.
Continuing to work on getting the artist ready to go for content creators. Come apply at build.defikingdoms.com to apply.
Dreamer also noted other games we might be able to integrate into. If you go to build.defikingdoms.com you’ll see a proposal from one of them with some alpha there.
Magnus—Chain Update:
Magnus— just got off call with Ava labs, new release coming today, which after testing will allow us to move forward to contract deployment on the chain by others without needing to be whitelisted. If testing goes well next week we’re looking at being able to launch that in the next couple of weeks after that. We’ll make an announcement of the hard fork when that comes. Still a few things to hammer out but mostly out of the woods on that. Ava labs found a lot of optimization and some overhead we can improve in our contracts like Questcore and Duels. We’ll be working hard on that and they’ve been working hard on that. DFK Chain twitter will be the best source of information there, as well as the AMAs.
AMA Questions
Dark summoning with heroes where stones and crystals have been used or perilous Journey survivors, any planned benefit to doing so?
Hubert— Iwas directly DM’d this and answered him (Crypto Grady) but to reiterate the intent with dark summoning was not to overtake summoning or a complete reimbursement of your heroes if you had used crystals or stones on summoned heroes. So the main thing we want to make sure we are communicating is that you are thoughtful about which heroes you sacrifice, any crystals or stones you’ve put into them are lost and not carried over, same with perilous journey. Those are things you should definitely consider before using dark summoning.
One thing we’d like to do to help people be aware of the value of their heroes is have more info on their card, so it shows which stones/crystals have been used on the card. That would be helpful not just for dark summoning, but also listing on the Tavern. That’s something that can at least help with the feeling behind this question, but directly to answer, no, no extra benefit for using a hero that has had stones or crystals used on them and not planning to change that.
Dark Summoning — mentioned in the past you could use locked tokens for Dark Summoning, is that still the plan?
Hubert— we didn’t have time to implement with the initial launch, but its still something we’d like to build out, for this and for other in game spend features. Hopefully we can get it out sooner rather than later but I don’t have a timeline for you on that.
Frisky Fox — We will wait until after at least the splittening because we want to make sure everyone is on equal footing when we launch something like that. So you are probably looking at least a month out.
Duels — Mini raffles. The timer was increased on how long they are running. Why was it increased?
Frisky Fox — S0 was a test. We changed a lot in S1, and one of those was increasing the time so that it was 3 every hour rather than 4 every hour and there weren’t a lot of participants so we wanted to space it out a bit more. Also Hubert was looking at how many items were getting injected into the ecosystem. It also precipitated a lot of talk on whether Serendale would have a separate raffle system and we are still talking about that. We do want to be cognizant that if we have 2 raffle systems (which seems likely) that there will be a lot more items flowing around and we just want to be cognizant of supply and economics of that.
S1 is also very much an experiment. We’ll continue to see as we go and that’s not the last change you’ll see either.
Hubert — I pay a lot of attention to the markets for various tokens. There is a desired rarity and trying to keep that relatively in tact. With S0, it was experimental and we needed to see what participation would be like. The changes in S1 were in response to what we saw in S0. I wouldn’t rule out further changes, either making it more or less rewarding. Each season is a reset point.
Frisky Fox — Someone mentioned the full question wasn’t asked can you repeat it?
Bolon — more max tickets able to enter the raffles, but that’s correlated to the timer.
Frisky — as you slide one it impacts the other. It comes down to us looking at what is circulated, making tweaks and making changes in both directions. It’s something we’ll be constantly balancing.
How is max tickets calculated for entering a raffle?
Frisky — looks at how long a raffle has until it closes, you can put in one ticket per every 2 seconds for how long it has until it closes. So if its about to close you can’t put in a bunch of tickets as though you would at the beginning. It’s in place to prevent people from sniping it at the end and having it be a little bit more fair.
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
Sunbear — I’ll just mention i’m really impressed with and enjoying conversations with people connected to the Klaytn system. outstanding parnters and a lot of excitement to have us be a part of that ecosystem. Looking forward to announcing some of those partnerships.
Hubert — Just want to echo that I’m excited for the future. I’ve seen us go through a crucible the last several months and think we’ve come out stronger in the end. I feel really good about where we are headed.
Beetle — We have a great team, continuing to push forward, and I’ve seen how efficient this group of people can be and that we can push out some awesome things like Dark Summoning. Appreciate everyone here and everyone working in the background that doesn’t always get the credit because they aren’t up here. There’s a lot of people helping us push forward. Thanks to the community as well for your support.
Dreamer — I’m excited about new releases. Can’t emphasize enough all the work happening with Wisdom gaming, Hubert, Secondbestdad and all the things coming up. Some nights I can’t sleep thinking about all the cool things happening. The extremely high amount of focus and dedication and care that is being taken with this launch of Serendale on Klaytn is very impressive. It feels very exciting and energizing to see all of these bits come together with our team. We’ve now been together for a while, if I look at my previous jobs when I’ve been doing something for over a year it feels like its been 5–6 years. When I look at the past year I think about everything we’ve done in just a month. Everyone always says “we have great people” but we really do, we have incredible minds, talent, personalities, good conflicts resolutions styles, we are getting good at looking around corners for risks in the industry, we are getting good at getting ahead of communications, also at keeping a good balance and keeping people happy. We continue to look to the future on how we can evolve and progress. Excited and bullish. Grateful to be here.
Frisky Fox — Want to echo the same sentiment. Staying awake at night with head spinning about all the possibilites, very aware of that. That was me last night. So many cool things happening in Web3. We’ve been at the cutting edge of the web3 space, and our project in particular has been at the cutting edge of that edge in terms of what you can do on the blockchain and how you can mix things with games and finance and a metaverse world that uses real world economies and markets. I think you’lls ee more of that as people realize how much sense it makes to do that. Lots of ups and down but as I’ve said before you build in a bear market. We’ve not been slowing down, and if anything have been speeding up during this time when its hard to do so. Our team has basically put the pedal down and is surging forward. Parity is done, so we are able to work on all the fun stuff now. Excited about that because we have a lot of really cool features planned. Its a good time to be in this project, with Serendale 2.0, new heroes, a new token, airdrops that will include all players, so that you can be a real participant in this new launch. I’m proud of how we handled these expansions, we’ve always been really careful on how we hand out rewards to our community and players rather than just a money grab mint. Really excited about things coming out and the metaverse building experience. people have been reaching out to use our NFTs in their game. Also some other projects looking to launch their games in our ecosystem. Feel very blessed to be here. Several people I worked with reached out and asked if I was done working with NFTs and want to go back and work with them and the answer is no. Love what I do and very grateful for everyone here playing our game every day. Bullish!
