//State of the Chikn #3
It was a bit of a false start, and firstly we want to apologize to our community for any gas burned, and for teasing your coqs with but a few short minutes of $egg laying.
Here we break down exactly what happened, what we are doing, and the path we are forging ahead.
TLDR:
- We prematurely halted chikn from ‘roosting’ due to unforeseen exponential growth in gas costs.
- We have isolated the issue and are working around the clock to implement the new mechanics to resolve it.
- chikn will now lay ‘linearly’, rather than based on their kg percentage within the Barn. Each chikn will start at a lay-rate of 1 $egg per day, akin to their IRL ‘chicken’ cousins, and will now have a guaranteed increase per kg gained.
- How does it change the way you play the game of chikn?
It doesn’t. Your goal is still to $feed your chikn, to make it Biggr as quickly as possible before the $feed hard-cap is reached. - $feed hard-cap is reduced from 32billion to 12billion
- Digest times have increased by a factor of 2x, and ‘skip’ costs have decreased by a factor of 5x.
- $egg is now more scarce in the near-term, improving longer-term prospects of both mass adoption & counteracting inflation.
What happened
On 13th of Dec 1300 UTC we attempted to launch the chikn roosting and $egg laying features for our ecosystem. The hype was building, and the Discord was going ballistic in anticipation, which was so much fun. Deployment took longer than expected, but by 13:45 we had the roost page live. Our community flooded the site and began roosting, the barn filling with KG and egg being laid en masse. However, the excitement was short-lived.
Very quickly, the gas prices for roosting chikn ballooned from .01AVAX to 0.05 AVAX, then 0.1 AVAX, then as high as 0.21 AVAX. New chikn entering the barn slowed due to congestion, but with each subsequent attempt, gas fees continued to rise. While we were prepared for some ‘gas wars’ and frontrunning, we suspected something more fundamental had gone wrong, so rather than letting it ‘play out’ with unacceptably high gas costs — we pulled the roost page, nullified all egg payouts, and ended the launch prematurely. It was disappointing to say the least, albeit necessary.
Our immediate response
“chikn is our lives, if we rugged we would have nothing worth living for.” — Truth.
We knew we had to act quickly and remedy the situation. Keeping a continual presence in Discord, making quick announcements on socials, continuing with our unique chikn giveaway, and sending out yet another honorary chikn artwork for an OG community member, all on schedule.
Our community has been incredibly forgiving and understanding, and we couldn’t be more thankful. In the meantime, we got straight to work reviewing our codebase and game mechanics to isolate the issue.
Quickly we realised the root of the gas fee problem was, rebalancing chikn weights in the barn. Each chikn lays from a fixed daily total of 120k $egg emissions. The payout is calculated from the weight of a chikn in proportion to the total weight in the barn. So with every new chikn added to the barn, the proportion for each chikn must be rebalanced to account for the new total weight. As the number of chikn in the barn increases, the number of rebalances increases, slowly increasing the gas fee. Our testnet trials did not reflect this higher gas fee accurately, and we certainly didn’t account for such an exponential increase in the mad rush to Roost.
For the next release, we will do a live production test on the mainnet with dummy contracts which we will then replace with new live contracts. It’s not cheap, but it’s worthwhile. Diagnosing the problem and achieving clarity is the biggest step. We now had two potential solutions — fix rebalancing so it doesn’t blow out transaction fees, or replace this game mechanic completely.
Our devs spent the next 24 hours trying to peel back the smart contracts and rebalancing functions to be as lean as possible, hoping to reduce tx fees by way of total data included. The conclusion, however, is that rebalancing all 10k chikn as they all try to ‘roost’ simultaneously is simply not possible without blowing out transaction fees.
Encouragingly, we could also see from the data collected through this attempt that all our other mechanisms were working as intended. Concurrently, we explored alternatives to the rebalancing mechanism to avoid the issue entirely. Fortunately, with a few minor changes, we are able to replace the rebalancing mechanism entirely without impacting our tokenomics or gameplay significantly. If anything, these aspects are now even more robust.
What we are doing
We are replacing the rebalance mechanism with $egg production that is linearly proportional to the chikn level (kg). The main goal of the rebalance mechanism was to fix the amount of daily egg emissions to 120k, so it is more predictable in deflating the supply long-term with burn mechanisms.
On the gameplay side, it added a fun element of competing against everyone else in the barn to own the thiccest chikn and earn more of the daily $egg percentage. Now, very little changes in terms of gameplay tactics — it’s still a race to grow your chikn the Biggest before the $feed runs dry — however your ‘KillerGainz’ are no longer anyone else’s losses.
This new mechanism was always our backup plan if rebalancing could not be adequately achieved. It’s actually much simpler and ultimately gives you the opportunity for more $egg in the long-term if you are an active player/farmer.
All chikn will start laying at a rate of 1 $egg per day at 1kg, and increase their daily $egg laying by 0.25 $egg per kg gained. So a level 5 chikn lays 2 $egg per day, and a level 17 chikn lays 5 $egg a day etc. The general formula for egg laid per day is = [1+(kg-1)*0.25]. We call this linear $egg laying, as the amount of $egg per day increases linearly with kg. Importantly, linear $egg laying does not require any relative rebalancing, as every chikn lays $egg independently, based on their kg as per the above formula.
From a tokenomics perspective, this will not significantly impact the long-term properties of $egg. The hard-cap of $feed available means that all chikn will reach a hypothetical fixed level, and the barn will reach a fixed size, capping the daily emissions of $egg at whatever point the supply of $feed runs dry.
Previously, daily emissions were capped at 120k $egg per day from the start. Now the emissions will start low, at most 10,000 egg per day, and increase to approximately a 120k limit when the $feed cap is hit.
This ceiling, if you will, is enough for every chikn to hypothetically reach 45kg, or 12 $egg laid per day, at which point total emissions across all chikn is 120k. This point is hit when total feed emissions hit 7.8b, and we put another 0.2b on top account for any $feed that gets gobbled up by speculators along the way.
Of course, as before, some chikn will far surpass this average, and some will fall short — but the Biggest chikn will certainly be the most desirable in terms of gaming PVP advantages, as well as $egg laying.
We have allocated a further 4b in reserves for additional liquidity provision (think ‘feeding frenzies’), external $feed farming opportunities, and the backing of The $egg DAO treasury. This brings the total hard-cap of $feed to 12b.
So what’s different for the chikn Farmer?
From a gameplay perspective, this has little impact on the overall user experience. Growing chikn, $feed-ing chikn, staking $egg, swapping $egg, and digestion time mechanics are all the same. We have only adjusted the digestion time and the ‘skip’ digestion time very slightly, to suit the new linear $egg emissions. Firstly, the skip digestion time fee has been lowered from 500+100*kg to 100+100*kg to account for lower emissions at lower levels for the average player. We have also increased digestion time, from kg*30 mins to kg*60 mins, to prevent players getting too far ahead, too quickly.
The meta of the game is also still the same. This is a race to get your chikn as big as possible before the $feed supply runs dry. When that happens, some chikn farmers will have chikn far above 45kg, and some will be left scratching in the dust.
The final kg standings of all chikn dictates $egg production for life, and thus their future value. In this sense, outpacing the average is still vital to your success as a chikn farmer.
- Devs are further optimizing leanness of contract to ensure the lowest possible gas fees, so bulk-roosting your chikn remains affordable. chikn-whales: you’re welcome.
- All changes will be implemented and thoroughly tested on mainnet before this weekend.
- $egg, $feed and Roost re-launch is scheduled for this weekend UTC. Firm date and time to be announced in the Discord.
Thank you all for your patience, for the passion you have shown for the chikn project, and the support you have shown for our team. We won’t let you down.
Always building, always growing.
Love, your humbled chikn devs.
