About a year ago an idea was born out of a last night Twitter Space. A generative NFT collection featuring cute little Dik Diks, jokingly named ‘Dik Dik Pics.’ The artist, Brie, reached out to me with the idea and said that she would really love it if the collection could be something more than just cute art, and it just so happened that I had been pondering a gamified staking mechanism that could fit the concept.
That is when Dik Dik Defense was born. A play on the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, with a small twist. Instead of just playing against a random number generator, it would be PvP. After seeing the issues faced by Defi Dinos (IYKYK), it was obvious that a turn based approach to this would not work. Instead, I devised a mechanism where you would have defenders (or stakers, essentially) sit in a pool awaiting battle, and have Chainlink VRF randomly select one of these defenders to play when an attacker made their move. This way, even though everything is on-chain and passive, an attacker never knows for sure who they will be playing against.
Originally, my idea was to make this even more complicated by adding in Zoog-like stats and items that you could equip to give yourself a better chance at winning. I began work on a wrapper contract that could be used turn any NFT into a super-charged rock, paper, scissors-playing machine. A lot of progress was made before the brutality of the bear market, an extreme slowdown in NFT activity, and some team disagreements eventually led to the shelving of the project.
The $COQ Hackathon
Enter, the Coq Inu Hackathon, a competition to drive utility and adoption of the #1 meme coin on Avalanche. After putting Dik Diks on the shelf for so long, and with NFT activity picking up in the AVAX ecosystem, it almost seemed like too perfect a moment to begin work on the project again. However, with only two weeks to build and deploy a working product, the original vision of a Battle Wrapper and item-based game would need to be simplified.
I quickly began working with Brie again to ensure we could have something ready by the hackathon deadline, and started simplifying the gameplay and modifying the Dik Dik contract. Dik Dik NFTs would now be minted using $COQ instead of AVAX, and in order to join the defender pool they would need to stake $COQ. Attackers would also need to stake $COQ, and winners of each battle would be rewarded a share of their opponent’s stake. In addition to this, and to make the project even more $COQ aligned, Brie added special Chikn traits to the collection.
The only question that remained was what NFT collection could serve as the attackers in this new version of the protocol? Seeing as how this was a Coq Inu hackathon there was an obvious choice, Pepe Portraits by CryptoNumpty. These NFTs are already in the wallets of the $COQ community, there are plenty of them available, and the art is good. What more could you ask for?
The End Result — Mint Details
Ultimately, I am happy to say that we were able to get the project completed and submitted to the judges by the deadline. While I don’t yet know whether or not Dik Dik Defense will place in the hackathon, I think that it can stand on it’s own as a fun and novel gamified staking protocol, and the Dik Dik NFT art is truly great.
Dik Dik NFTs will be minting soon for 6.9 million $COQ at https://dikdikdefense.com, with the gamified staking protocol opening up shortly after. Keep an eye on the official twitter for announcements. Both contracts are already deployed and verified, and you can find more info in the Dik Dik Defense Docs.
