DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates — September 22, 2022
For those unfamiliar with the project, the DeFi Kingdoms leadership team holds weekly AMA’s with the community on the discord server.
Not everyone has time to listen to the recording or wants something they can just read instead so I’ve been writing these written summaries. You can find the transcripts/summaries of the prior AMA’s in my index of DeFi Kingdom’s Articles.
Link to the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyEVyNoP38Y
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
Team Members Present:
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Project Updates
Frisky Fox General Project Update
Frisky — This is our second AMA of the day. At this rate we’ll have an AMA every 4 hours for the rest of the year. Dreamer is on a plane right now. He’s headed to the Singapore event. We’ll have a few others there as well. If you are in that area, feel free to pop over there and we’ll be there with our own area.
We also have the NYC event at Smartcon we’ll be participating in. Magnus and I will be speaking there on the 29th. A little section about randomness on the blockchain. It’s a developer focused event. It’s really cool to be there with Chainlink and for them to have sponsored us a bit. We may or may not have some exciting news at that event. These events are on the same day at opposite ends of the world.
Milestones
Turned off questing last week. Basically saw most of the transactions from two chains are now consolidated onto one chain. We saw our transaction skyrocket and saw some cool milestones. We hit it with no issues. The trajectory we were headed at we had to ask if we could sustain this long term. We had to analyze this with Ava labs and Magnus was involved in this. Looking at usage, memory usage, CPU load etc. Magnus can you update some on that?
Magnus — Over the past weeks we’ve been targeting a gas fee increase with the goal of ensuring chain is stable over time. This was a proactive step we were looking to do then we saw some high volume over the weekend particularly and consulting with ava labs came to the rec to increase the fees. Just a note on gas fees, its a balancing act. Things on both sides of the equations. Making sure its stable and the validators, then the other side is keeping gas fees low in terms of USD. As more tx’s are submitted, validators have to work harder to keep up. We want to stay clear of any issues. We’ve been consulting daily with ava labs to make sure we’re turned for the awesome amount of volume. Gas comes down to supply and demand. We have a finite amount of space we can fit on the chain in a 10 second space per se, so if volume goes up gas goes up. You can always go with the minimum, which is 1 gwei. What MM recommends gives you other levels you can pay on top of the base fee so that you can be picked in that gas auction system. Most chains have this system. Other chains have tried no gas fees and had to move away from that. Chains have tried static and most that did that also moved over to dynamic. A few things we can do is change how reactive it is. Having it ramp up more slowly or more quickly for example. Those are some things that we will be conservative with as we go forward. We want to keep the chain as stable as possible. We can also tune a rough target for the amount of gas we want spent per 10 seconds. Just to give a comparison on DFK we are doing 10x the transaction volume of C-chain. Seeing 20–30 transactions per second, where C chain is seeing 2 per second. We are still several times lower in terms of USD though. We are nearly 110M transactions on DFK Chain, while C Chain has 200M to date. We likely will surpass that soon.
On another note re validators. We had a validator drop off the network on Monday. That’s kind of an actually occurring phenomenon where they have to be restaked. That will happen over the next 6 weeks then will be promptly restaked. There is an issue with the subnet explorer where it didn’t immediately report that but that’s since been patched.
Frisky — To reiterate, Avalanche C Chain has 200M transactions to date, we are sitting at 110M, doing about 10x the amount per second. I too would expect us to surpass that pretty soon. Looking at that last week I saw numbers that were 50–100 transactions per second at some points. Looking at the trajectory that we are at and being very proactive and seeing how our app has basically broken chains in the past we are trying to make sure that doesn’t happen to ours. Another part of that equation is validators, we have 8 validators with beefy specs and can support high volume, but we are headed towards a decentralized system where anyone can come be a validator. We have to make sure fees are enough to cover the infrastructure cost to attract more validators come to secure our chain. Just as a reminder, half of all the jewels spent on gas are being burned. 25% go to the quest fund and 25% go to validators. Its very different from a lot of other models in other blockchains which mint new gas tokens for the validators. So we have a deflationary model. As more transactions are placed there is less and less jewel. Especially last night we turned off the garden emissions in Serendale so there are no new jewel being minted. Every day there will be less jewel. That’s largely in part of DFK chain burning jewel and things like Duel burning jewels. Then summoning and other transactions burning Jewel and Crystal. It’s amazing to see some of these milestone and seeing that we are being proactive so that we can continue this high volume.
Kudos to Magnus and Avalabs helping us and our validators. We’ve updated our validators 5–6x in the past couple weeks, which is also a fairly large undertaking. 4 of us who hold keys to the validators and we have to coordinate on updating them at the same time which is no small undertaking.
Speaking of gas fees, it is dynamic now. We had it set at a base fee of .04 before any changes, then we changed it to 1. For context, Harmony a while back was at 1, then they changed it to 50, then again to over 100. We are still quite a bit smaller than the base fee of Harmony and having it be dynamic ensures that it scales up and down based on the load. Looks like its averaging around 11. Some people have run analyses on questing and how much Jewel equivalent is earned an dhow much it costs to run those quests and they are still profitable.
Magnus did make some tweaks this morning to structure for gas to lower it a bit. There’s a lot of variables involved. He’s monitoring that and the impact it has on state tree, IO operations, load and validators. We’ll be looking to fine tune that as we go until we have 100% sustainable but as low as we can get it to be. Big kudos to all of the effort there and our team.
Heard a lot of Q’s about xJewel and what we plan to do with that in the future. I’ll be talking about that more here in a bit. First I wanted to give some time to others for updates.
Beetle — Build Updates
Beetle — We are working very hard to get multi quest starting/completing out. Super excited about it. Can’t wait to be using it for our own heroes. We are getting down to last minute refinement. That’s really exciting next week. Next week we are working for more parity items. Pets are a big one that we are trying to finalize. We have some of the contracts moved over and working on getting them hooked up and applying the different pets from CV and Serendale together.
We have stone carver as well coming down the pipeline. At that point we’ll be pretty close to having parity completed. We are getting down to the last items in the barrel to have CV caught up to Serendale. It’s exciting and hopefully we can continue bringing you cool features after that.
Sunbear — Kingdom Builders Updates
Sunbear — After launching Jester and Archivist we saw a lot of applications on the build site, a lot of content creators wanting to bring their content to the community. We are trying to figure out what the best way to feature that stuff is. We are excited about the possibility there. Wanted to highlight a couple of people we didn’t hit last week:
- Adventures in DFK. Great tools and great information and great feel of community.
- Eggspert — if you are looking for infographics and trying to understand the game and strategies better, this is a great place to get some guides.
- DFKEarn — their p2p swap, now on DFK Chain, you can swap any items within the game with other folks. Great service there, check it out, excited to have them built on DFK chain.
Also excited about next week. Dreamer, Pie, Bolon and Myself will be at Token 2049. Setting up lots of meetings with new partners that we will be able to co-market with. Lots of possibilities opening up.
Also just wanted to mention DFK Arena and the DFK Fight Klub. As you can see on the build site, they’ve applied to the raffle master, just like the ones we do in Duels. That is progressing. Shortly after we launch Duels Season 1 you should start to see those folks coming in as well. So that is building on DFK Chain as well.
Frisky — Want to each that these events are a huge opportunity for networking and bizdev. We are sending our A team with Dreamer, Sunbear and Bolon. Poppy, Pieface and Rissen will be there as well to meet with all of these untapped markets and potential partners that are already integrated with Klaytn to see if they can integrate with us as well. Same thing over in NYC as well. Lots of opportunities for me and Magnus to be networking with people there. Then Chainlink, we’ve been in touch with them over the past few weeks and excited to see what ways we can work together.
Also, very excited about the raffle master. With Duels season 0 we burned 100k jewel from the raffle master itself and 100k jewel were sent to the quest fund. It’s a good case study on how these mini games using the raffle system can result in a lot of jewel being burned and a lot of jewel going to the quest fund. Excited to see other apps out there that are building.
Bolon Update —
Bolon — Token 2049, excited for that, but worth the specific mention that Klaytn is the highest sponsor level of Token 2049. They have a really large booth and its their booth that we are utilizing a portion of. That was all done at their request, so Klaytn wants us to be there. They are providing us the space to use during this event to support us being there. Just wanted to give that shout out. They’ve helped to make that possible. We couldn’t have done this without their support.
Wanted to give a shout out as well to Samichpunch who transcribes all of our AMAs, including today where he is transcribing two of them. We appreciate greatly what he does [FEELS WEIRD TYPING THIS]
AMA Questions/Other Updates
On CV questing, you can have up to 5 attempts of the quest done at one time with heroes approaching 30 stam are we planning to up that so that you can run more than 5 attempts per time.
Hubert — I think the question was about training quests specifically right? There’s a reason we limited it to 5, we were going to tie in a functionality with leaderboards. We were close to that but the transition is taking up the priority. Once done with that we will look back into implementing that. If we don’t pursue that, there will be no reason not to increase it to 6 so you can use 30 stam. The intent was so we could better track win loss over 5 attempts. It will take some time getting leaderboards back up though so we’ll revisit.
Dark summoning and the impact that it would have to current heroes?
Hubert — I think with that question it seemed like there was a concern that it would negatively impact heroes? I’m not sure I see that that would be the case. Two heroes burned for a new hero to be created. While its true the dark summoning has some additional benefits to offset the losses I think its balanced enough that not everyone is going to do this. Also you lose both heroes so it does come at a cost. Every time we introduce something new it does cause a rebalancing on the eco and that is part of how this all works. We do our best to make sure that its good and that its going to be appealing to people do it, but also that it won’t completely overshadow summoning.
Frisky — I also like that analogy of rebalancing when you introduce new things. Look at the real world market. When new tech comes out, things rebalance and some old things become obsolete. That’s how progress works. That is very healthy I think for the ecosystem.
Community vote to add incentivized pools for DFK Gold?
Frisky — We’ve talked about this internally. This has come up in the past as well. It is interesting. There is a lot of good arguments to be made to having an incentivized pool. It’s not in line with our gardening policy which was voted on back in February which outlines what we would be able to add for gardens in terms of blue chips and other tokens after vetting. What I’d like to get to and what we are working towards is to allow holders of Jewel that we use for governance, if you hold over a certain amount have the ability to propose votes under our system, which I think is very healthy as well. You need to have ways for the invested community members and invested holders of a token to be able to propose votes. That could be a separate vote outside of the gardens policy entirely.
I can talk about that a bit more with the xJewel stuff as well. There are some pain points there that are tying our hands with doing that. For example, xJewels are very liquid, so a bad actor could come in and buy a bunch of xJewel and if they have that system in place they could propose a vote, vote yes, and then go and sell all of their holdings. Which is not what we want to incentivize. We’ve seen other projects have attacks from a system like that. That is one of the pain points we are trying to fix in the refactoring of xJewel.
So It’s not within our current power to unilaterally add those pools but could be a vote in the future.
Duels — its an idea for giant raffles, maybe a monthly one with a larger prize?
Frisky — how we created the system was very flexible, so we could have any number of raffles that last any amount of time and have it be under that same system. Is it possible? Yes, and it probably makes a lot of sense. Maybe we will do some for valuable items like Gen0s and that would be fun and cool to do. As part of the changes that we are doing for Duels we will be changing the frequency of some of the raffles to, so this may be a good time to do that now, plus we’ll have other mini games feeding into the raffle system.
Hubert — With the two new ones that will be using the raffle system (DFK Arena and DFK Fight Klub) that would be a lot of fun.
Frisky — Yeah two confirmed and then others also pending. So at least two of them will be using it for Season 1.
We have the timeline for the closing of Serendale, but as far as the timeline for whats next in CV, Duels, Lvl 10 profession quests, then rewards for top leaderboards from preseason what about those?
Frisky — Duels season 0 we are working on some of the airdrop rewards for those. Some of the categories we are looking at for those are pretty cool. Looking at things like how many duels fought, highest scores, win loss ratio, etc. Need to finalize the number, which I’m trying to pull from the chain to submit to the tokenomics committee before its approved. We are getting there.
Duels Season 1 we obviously changed up a lot with that and that will entail a lot of testing. The main thing we changed was how we do matchmaking. we are introducing a new factor called hero power into the duels so that you can look at not only the players score for matchmaking, but also the combined level of the heroes, and they’ll try to factor that in to try and match you with other heroes around your same level. I’ve introduced a new system so that there’s a larger pool to choose from at any given time so there will more often be a chance to be paired with someone of your power level, so that people can put forward their best heroes that are most optimized that are perhaps the same level but higher quality because of how they have been leveled up. Under the old system people felt they were always matched with people that are too powerful, or people up high were afraid to play to hurt their score because of the randomness. Hopefully we see a lot more people playing this. The old one was far from a failure, 400k duels, 100k Jewel burned and 100k jewel into the quest fund and I think this next one is set up to be bigger. As far as when, we’ve been close, we are close, but there are some tweaks after our meeting with tokenomics committee. Those are in final development then it would go to alpha testing.
Profession quests lvl 10, Hubert and Beetle might have bandwidth there, but a lot of bandwidth is taken up with parity and shutting down Serendale and preparing to bridge to Klaytn.
Hubert — Maybe Beetle will have more to say but we are getting really close to parity on CV, then we can focus our attention to moving Serendale to Klaytn.
Beetle — we are getting to the end of parity which is awesome, then we need to really focus on migration. On the front end we might have time to put towards new features at the same time, so fingers crossed. Trying to plan as much as we can. We don’t know what we don’t know until we get there. Just going to try and get as much done as we can while we do these things that are necessary like migration and parity. We are excited about the new features as much as everyone else so we will keep pushing on those.
It’s been mentioned that maybe all xJewel on CV will have to be bridged back to Serendale and converted back to Jewel. Is it expected that everyone will need to unpair Jewel/xJewel in CV and convert it themselves? If so we will want to make it pretty clear that the Liquidity for that pool is going to go down fast and be extremely volatile if people try to convert to Jewe in CV via the dex rather than use the jeweler in Serendale. Maybe you can disable swaps on that pair (if that’s even possible) for a short period?
Frisky — we’ve talked about this for a while and that’s part of why the Jewel/Xjewel pool is reducing emissions. It was intended to be a bridge for us to build out the CV dex with liquidity in other blue chip tokens. We have been slowly moving towards that. What the future of xJewel is and also reducing the Jewel/xJewel allocation is part of the upcoming phases. You’ll see that Jewel/xJewel allocation continue to fall until it is removed.
Part of having the Jewel/xJewel there was essentially to have a synthetic Jeweler on CV, because on Serendale we have the regular Jeweler for Jewel. Having a pool where people could swap it into xJewel was a great solution. As we put in this new model for Serendale 2.0, Jewel is changing the utility and will be more of a protocol based worksystem. Crystal and KPT will be more of the in game power tokens.
So part of that is launching a Jeweler on Crystalvale itself and having that be a way for you to stake Jewel as the protocol token and you’ll get C Jewel, that’s a bit of Alpha. We had a vote on that and ended on that, which loosely stands for Crystalvale Jewel, we’ll also have S Jewel on Klaytn. This is what you get for staking on the respective realms.
Doing that allows you to participate in votes, earn from protocol fees with fee sharing powered by things like summoning, gardens and more. It’s very equivalent in many ways to the old xJewel and the ways that you are able to earn from it but we are also planning to implement some new things but also fixing some of the old pain points. Some pain points were that its hard to do snapshots and airdrops, because people would wait until right before and go and buy a bunch then sell it all after, which led us having to be more secretive about snapshot dates. It also required us to do things where we’d take snapshots every day for a 1 month period which was manual, hands on and not very intuitive. Then also the problem where if we had a big proposal, players could come in and buy up a lot of Jewels and have a very heavy vote on it and then sell them. we don’t want to incentivize that. We want to reward the people that are staking and maybe even locking up their staking for a period of time. We are looking at other models for inspiration. We’re working on the math and working on a model that will address these pain points and allow you to work on the pain points.
Then we are also creating a system where you can stake C Jewel towards premium features that allow you to unlock premium features or grant access. Hubert you want to add to that?
Hubert — A bit of alpha drop, but we were talking about different things that we could implement and benefits. Could be EXP bonus for staking a certain amount, some premium features we haven’t announced and generally being able to have a tiered approach where by virtue of you staking and holding you gain access to benefits in addition to the fee sharing and governance rights. So just adding more utility.
Frisky — It’s almost like a subscription service but instead of paying, you get your Jewel back for staking it for a period of time and at the end you get your Jewel back with the interest.
Probably the best option you can do right now is if you hold xJewel on DFK chain, move it via the bridge to Serendale, visit the Jeweler, convert it to Jewel and bridge it back. There are other things we’ve discussed like having a pool of Jewel available on DFK Chain perhaps at the Jeweler that would allow you to trade it in there. It’s tricky to do because the ratio is always changing. It’s not changing as much but it is some. Then there’s things with the set up of integrating with our interface which takes time away from other features. The choice hasn’t been made to do that yet. Currently the main recommended way is to bridge back to SD and convert xJewel back to Jewel. Then once we have C Jewel available you’ll be able to stake for that.
I presume this also means the Jewel/xJewel pool has to be shut off right after it’s all converted as well right? There won’t be need for this “synthetic Jeweler” once these changes kick in so do we have any sort of timeframe on when that would happen? Just want to make sure we understand timeline on phasing that pool out since the last AMA maybe indicated more of a slow phase out but if the tokenomics changes will kick in any time soon then this xJewel pool would have to be decommissioned at the same time right?
Frisky — I would say its definitely a short-term time frame. We’d like that to happen around the same time as the new Jeweler. Looking at weeks not months.
Once all xJewel is converted back into Jewel will that ratio essentially be scrapped since each new realm will have its own x token for Jewel? And does that mean we start back over at 1:1 for CV and 1:1 for Klaytn? But see also question below on whether there will even be a ratio at all anymore after the change.
Frisky — Just to back track a bit. xJewel will exist. We can’t just nuke it. It will still technically be able to earn fees from the Serendale 1.0 dex, which we can’t turn off. That will always be there in Harmony. We won’t show it in our interface and won’t be any use for it, but it will technically receive fees from arb bots using that Dex on Harmony. We’d like to keep bridges open as long as possible. We don’t want to burn bridges (probably a bad joke there) with any chains we are on. It's tricky to support players that are busy but maybe come back in two months and want to access things. We are talking about allowing them to access that on Harmony even when Serendale 2.0 has launched and they could bridge it out. With that in mind the snapshots wouldn’t need to happen and instead we’d encourage people to bridge once they come back to the game. So basically as long as Synapse still supports those bridges and Harmony is still up and running we can’t control some things and we’d allow them to bridge.
Some things can’t be bridged. Locked Jewel will be snapshotted and airdropped. Also land. We’re talking about maybe making our own land bridge to Serendale 2.0 though. Don’t quote me on that, we might end up doing a snapshot, but there are difficulties with snapshots as well. Problem with that is that someone could snapshot then scam sell to someone not paying attention.
Hope that clears up some of our current thinking on this. Would probably be something of an outpost on Harmony if you go to the website that would show your inventory, hero, jewels and allow you to unstake things in the gardens, split seeds, etc.
To circle back to the question, yes C Jewel and S jewel will have their own new ratios. The intention there is that if you are able to get in right at the start you are going to get the best ratios there and will get the most bang for your buck for those Jewels and hopefully the most bang for your buck for voting and for those subscription type services. It’s a great opportunity for people to get in at the very base ratio.
Any update on pets/atonement crystals?
Magnus — Still working with synapse on pet bridge. They’ve been doing a lot of things so we have to be patient while they work on the backlog. They are very busy and launching some new products as well, working with them to get it out as soon as we can.
Any anticipated changes to the fee sharing for xJewel? Since a lot of the ratio fees seem to come from Jewel spend in game, and since Jewel won’t be used for in game transactions (other than Gas on DFK chain) does that mean that the “ratio” concept for Staked Jewel will be scrapped since “returns” from staking Jewel in CV and in Klaytn will be in the form of a share of Crystal or KPT spent in game? There won’t really be any more Jewel spent so it seems the “ratio” won’t really exist anymore and instead you’ll just have some sort of claim button where you get your share of Crystal or KPT fees? Or am I missing something?
Frisky — The current Jeweler, how it works its called the banker contract, but it receives funds from the Dex in terms of LP tokens and will periodically sell those for Jewel on the DEX and put that Jewel into the Jeweler pool, it will work the same way on CV and SD 2.0. Summoning will use Crystal for example, that Crystal used will be sent to the Jeweler and swapped for Jewels on the Dex and then used to increase the ratio. Plus things from the gardens as well in the same way with the LP tokens.
Duels in CV will use Crystal or Jewel?
Frisky — Crystal. Everything on DFK Chain will use Crystal. The raffle system will be burning Crystals and feeding into some of the fees there. I probably said that wrong there when I said Jewel burning. On Serendale 2.0 it would use the new power token. A portion of those crystal fees would burn just like Jewel did.
Atonement Crystals
Magnus — those on our the radar and we will get to them.
Stuck Heroes
Magnus — several still stuck and can’t be bridged. We will have to manually run a script to get them unstuck.
Closing Statements
Sunbear — If you didn’t catch the Klaytn AMA, go check it out, they talk about how they support community builders. One of the events that I’ll be attending next week is the Blockchain Gaming Event 2022, one of the main organizers is Klaytn. They are putting on a Hackathon gaming day. They are actively working to support builders.
Frisky — Lots of alpha in this AMA. Lots going on and a lot of questions. Hopefully you’ve noticed we’ve tried to be more active in Discord. Trying to communicate as much as we can as well as on the talk site. I appreciate this amazing community. It’s amazing to wake up every morning to this community excited about all of the stuff we are building. Thank you for all of your support. Huge Kudos to all of the team for all of their hard work. Every step that we do we make sure to have a committee of some sort and its a lot of work, effort and coordination but it really pays off. Helps us to measure twice and cut once. There is great energy in our community and in our team. Everyone is working well together. Felt a lot like it did last year around this time when there was a lot of synergy. Excited to see what's on the horizon for us, Klaytn, Serendale 2.0 and some of the other partners that we’ll announce in the future. Wanted to wrap that up with a BULLISH!
