Chrome Knights
An NFT project on $NEAR ecosystem led by SOL and ETH enthusiasts and collectors.
Abstract
Before launching Chrome Knights, every member of our team had spent a significant amount of time lurking around the NFT space. We have participated in a great amount of projects released over different blockchains as investors and Web-3 enthusiasts.
Over time the Founder Knights have formed our own principals for running an NFT community. Those principals were formed according to the practical knowledge we have gained through empirical research. This knowledge stands on a data that we have gathered over time.
First and foremost, while trends tend to change each other extremely fast in the Crypto space, art is still one of the key factors. Of course, unlike the very beginning of the NFTs era, nowadays successful project requires to provide utility in a combination with art to gain attraction.
However the visual element of the NFT still plays a huge role due to the fact that all enthusiasts associate NFTs with something unique and aesthetically pleasing, as they are collectors in the first place. Thats why we have spent a great amount of time focusing on Knights visual appearance.
Secondly, it’s indisputable that modern day project requires strong and innovative utility in order to create high return rates for investors. However the term «utility» nowadays has been washed off by a huge amount of speculations around it. There might be endless / infinite ways of delivering utilities, and even more of their forms. But at the end of the day, the goal of this mechanism is always the same — establish value adding assets for collections DAO.
Thirdly, it’s a commonly shared idea that tokens add value to the collection. But creating the token itself is only the top of the iceberg. We want to create as many ways to use and utilize it as possible, therefore the demand for $CHRM will always spike the demand for our initial NFT collection.
What are we thinking about? Definitely P2E games, as they are becoming the future right now. Multiple studies show that this part of the market is growing. We strongly believe that a well worked on combination of tokenization and strategic online game will create a stable mechanism that will help to develop Chrome Knights NFT into a blue chip collection on $NEAR ecosystem.
In order to know what will our game consist of and how will the gameplay process look, get yourself a cup of coffee, or some blizzy to spark, whatever makes you feel good, and dive with us into the world of Chrome Knights White Paper.
Chapter 1. About the Project.
Design and Lore.
Let us begin by focusing on Chrome Knights visual appearance, as it will play a crucial role in the way our P2E game will be looking.
First of all, we have chosen the pixel art not by chance. When Chrome Knights NFT was just born as a concept, everyone who started working on it came up with an idea of building a game, however the form of this game was different from one team member’s view, to another.
Finally, we have came up with a strategic pixel art based game. We were heavily inspired by the Heroes of Might and Magic, which we used to play in the good old days. In order to establish a proper integration of NFT characters into this type of game, our NFTs needs to be pixelated as well.
As for the Lore, an interesting backstory makes a good game even better. What can be more exciting rather than a battle with monstrous evil creatures? In the world of Chrome Knights, one needs to be ready for a battle with death at every given moment. Knights are strong and powerful, but the evil nature of their enemies gives them a hard time fighting the creatures.
Concept of the game revolves around a complicated mechanics of survival and military development. Being a strategic game in the first place, Chrome Knights brings a number of important strategic decisions to make. Evil can’t be defeated by ones sword, it could only fall to a strong alliance of all four Strongholds.
But as we know, human is biggest evil on earth. Will the strongholds combine their power to save their kind, or greed over power and $CHRM will take over? Will you help another stronghold to battle the monsters or leave them alone to rob their treasury afterwards? It’s a cold world full of evil and only a true men of good can bring peace.
Staking and gaming mechanics.
There are several way to earn $CHRM tokens.
You can stake your knight at the stronghold and forget about him. Knights staked will be used in battles when stronghold takes a collective decision to do so. The percentage of staked Knights will be adding to the security points of each stronghold as well.
When your Knight is staked you can only travel around the map and complete side quests, which will not benefit you in $CHRM token.
Your Knights might be unstaked — in this case, you are opened to do what’s called «Mercenary quests». Depending on attributes of your Knight, he will have a starting set of power. You can either upgrade it with $CHRM ( bought or acquired via staking ) or go as it is.
«Mercenary quests» will give you a chance to defeat an enemy and your reward will be $CHRM.
One might ask if there is any purpose behind the decision to divide our collection’s community into 4 Strongholds: Renegades, Royal Division, StoneMasons, Saint Order, creating smaller groups inside of it. We can answer that this decision serves a particular mission, which is, creating closer ties between members of Chrome Knights community.
We strongly believe that by gathering people into even smaller groups, it becomes easier to develop more quality relations between all of the members. By communicating on a more private scale, we aim to create groups of people that are sharing a high percentage of their personal space with each other. Those conditions will inevitably lead to an increase in the quality of alpha and overall communication.
At the end of the day, many recent events in the NFT sphere ( you can take blockchains like SOL / ETH and their recent most popping communities ) prove that people behind the project matter the most. Strong community gives a great boost to any project, especially ones where the core team tends to work as well.
Utility
The main utility for Chrome Knights NFT will most definitely be the game that we plan on releasing. However, a major part of our utilities is devoted to token.
The overall logic here is pretty simple — we see that currently there is a strong demand for tokenization on the NFT market. However, while some collections tend to develop strong economy utilizing their own token, others just provide their users with a very simple set of burn mechanics and limited ways to use the token itself.
In order to solve this issue, we decided that there should be some type of assets to back the initial price of $CHRM.
The foundation of our utility will be based upon a combination of $CHRM token and a game that will be used in order to provide tokens value. We decided to chose this strategy due to the fact that the NFT sphere itself might be claimed as a combination of investment and entertainment. The majority of the enthusiasts are looking for next big plays and solid projects to either multiply their investments or at least save them, while combining it with entertainment gained through communities and mainly game-fi mechanics.
By trying to combine token and P2E game, we are not only looking to develop both of these spheres, but to create a sustainable source for value support of our NFTs.
Staking and token will work towards establishing a passive income for holders, while a P2E game will serve as a value creator for the collection. It will give people an opportunity to invest in a real product, rather than a simple mechanism of tokenization.
Chapter 2. Initial marketing strategy & stealth approach.
A thread on marketing strategy.
As NFT enthusiasts with experience on SOL and ETH blockchains, Chrome Knights team members have formed our own vision on how a project should develop over time.
Hype in the NFT space is as big nowadays as it had never been. But is it good for the scene in general? We tend to believe that the correlation between hype and overall quality of the project can be overvalued. Thats why we do not plan on using multiple manipulative mechanics to build a huge hype bubble around Chrome Knights.
As enthusiasts and consumers, we see each solid NFT project as an opportunity to multiply our investments. But when it comes to making serious decisions on whether to buy in or not, we do not want to consider pointless hype.
Instead, what really matters is the vision, the plan, the detailed explanations behind every decision made by the team and of course, transparency.
That is why Chrome Knights will be launching public discord with no private invites forehand. We won’t be using «WL grind» methods to build fake engagement.
We will build a web-site, provide our supporters with a roadmap and a white paper to gain your trust in our future utility.
We then will be hosting a stealth mint, which will give everyone who wants to join Chrome Knights and believes in the team an equal opportunity to mint.
Why stealth mint.
We have chosen stealth mint as in our vision it gives more of an equal chance for everyone interested in our collection to mint. Why? in order to explain our logic behind this decision, let’s analyze the alternative way of handling a mint — which is a WL mint.
From our perspective, WL mints in the form that they exist nowadays bring several issues. First of all, fake engagement. There is little correlation between the quantity of messages in chat and their quality. People tend to use bots to farm levels, while contribution of real users is left behind. WL grind for tokens makes the chat go brr, but does it represent the real interest in project’s ideas and plans? We believe that this is not the case. Secondly, recent patterns tend to show a major spike in FP for hyped WL only collections straight after the mint. However, the majority of them is falling down in less than a week.
We believe that a successful long term project should follow another pattern, which shows a healthy correlation between utility being introduced and FP growth. Last but not the least, we believe that a successful project should be unique. With bringing stealth meta back in the game, we want to differ from the majority of other NFT projects launching nowadays from the very beginning.
Chapter 3. After the mint
Starting utility.
First and foremost, we will proceed to token creation. As it was mentioned earlier, token will serve mainly as a foundation upon all of our further utilities. In fact, all in game economics.
On the early stages of our development, token will be earned by staking and won’t be eligible to use in game (due to the fact that the game itself is planned to arrive later). While there won’t be no usage in game, we currently thinking of the ways that will help us to add utility through these «mid» stages. There are several options, the wisest of them will be to just save your token and wait for game to release. The other one will feature different raffles, entries for which will require to pay a certain amount in $CHRM.
Tokens utility
- Stake your Knight and gather $CHRM tokens automatically. This way will create a fully passive income source for you.
- Customize your Knight.
- Strongholds can be upgraded.
- Strongholds can buy bots as soldiers.
Treasury investment rounds.
With everything that we have already promised and created as a plan, it becomes evident that additional seed rounds will be needed in order to fill the treasury with an amount of funds enough to launch all of the stages. Those rounds will be held in the forms of additional side collections, minted by public investors.
Right now we have multiple ideas in mind. First of all, as it is stated in our roadmap, we plan on dropping a 1/1 collection. Why? To begin with, it is evident now that 1/1 art became a significant chunk of the NFT market nowadays, not only economically, but in a cultural aspect as well. By dropping 11 fully hand-drawn unique Knights, we aim to contribute to unique art market and attract new audience of potential investors.
In addition, we believe that our ecosystem ( the one that might be potentially build inside of the Chrome Knights P2E game ) can be referred to as a source of public investments rounds in a form of small sized NFT mints. For example, we plan on adding a playable class to the game. It will be referred as cavalry and will feature a horse that can be tamed by a particular Knight. While being a fun and visually pleasing NFT itself, it will feature new ways of making $CHRM for its owner, as well as additional multiplier for staking your OG Knight NFT.
Such collections are planned to be rather small, approximately around 50–150 pieces per one collection. (Other variants are strongholds, commercial building that you can build inside your stronghold, etc)
Chapter 4. A peek into our tokenomics
Mint money distribution
The money which we will be able to generate from mint is essential for our future plans. We are planning to distribute it in the following way:
10% will be shared between the team members.
10% will be used to launch a marketing campaign post mint.
30% will be used on game development. Of course we are planning to raise more funds with treasure investment rounds, details on which were shared above, but this will be a powerful starting point for us.
50% will be used on liquidity pool to make sure that $CHRM is pretty stable and does not fluctuate a lot. Now let’s talk about $CHRM more specifically.
$CHRM Supply
So there are a few ways how the token may be released: the whole supply may be released all in once or partially. Our thesis is the following:
NFT world is changing at a very fast rate, a day in real life world is like a year in NFT and crypto. Therefore, the project should have maximum flexibility in making decisions and changing some concepts and plans. Hence, releasing the whole token supply at once leads to a so called exhaustion of the total token supply and leaves no flexibility for the long term plans. Therefore, we are planning on releasing our tokens in 3 waves to have the ability to implement any changes, if needed.
Stacking returns
The team developed a custom stacking mechanics in which returns on your asset are going to depend on a several different aspects, such as: lock period, quantity and combination of strongholds of knights staked and whether you own a partner’s NFT (TBA). Let me set a few examples of how this will work for people who hasn’t dealt with staking:
Staking a knight without a lock period would result in a accrual of X tokens per day
Staking the same knight with a lock period of 3 weeks results in a 21X (21 days multiplied by daily tokens) * (1 + 10%) (10 % income buff)
Staking a knight with a lock period of 6 weeks results in a 42X*(1 + 0.2) (20% income buff for a long lock period)
It should be stated that you can not sell your knight when it is staked and you can not unstake him until the lock period ends (these conditions would be provided in the smart contract developed by the team)
Also, if you manage to collect one knight from each stronghold, and stake these 4 knights around the Kingdom you will get a 20% income buff! So, if you decide to lock your 4 knights away for a 6 week period, you will have some juicy $CHRM returns.
Another way to increase your $CHRM return can not be revealed right now, as we are still in talks with someone, but let us give you a little hint: holding some of the established NEAR bluechips may increase your $CHRM returns👀 More information on this will be released as soon as we establish some official partnerships.
Important information.
We have decided to not use absolute values of $CHRM in our tokenomics in this stage as there are quite a few factors on which it will depend on. In order to state how much $CHRM each knight will generate and the initial $CHRM to USDT swap price we need to know the exact amount of USDT which will be generated from mint.
Right now, we are not sure whether we are going to sell out (although we will be doing our best) and we don’t know the $NEAR price at that moment (although 50 USD is fud)
We have built and tested 3 different return models for different situations, but we don’t want to state absolute numbers right now, because they may turn out unrealistic after the mint.
Therefore, we’ve written this part using X variable and providing you the formulas and models of how the tokenomics works.
Few days after the mint, we will have full understanding of which one of our 3 models is the closest to reality and release updated tokenomics with absolute values.
Conclusion
What differs Chrome Knights from many other NFT projects? A vision. We have one and we will make it work.
Unlike a number of NFT communities, we do not plan on launching an art based collection and then thinking of an utility that might make it more valuable for people. Chrome Knights original NFT mint serves as a basis upon a long away ahead.
Modern technologies are giving us indisputable amount of new possibilities. The team behind our project believes that the following path of launching a global P2E project is yet to be paved. We are extremely bullish to have a chance of building a project on $NEAR blockchain so early. With all of the competitive advantage that we have just by capitalizing on right opportunities and being early at the same time, Chrome Knights NFT aims to become one of the founding P2E collections on $NEAR, giving all early adopters and investors highest return rates that can be achieved.
