DFK Day: Dev Panel
Speakers: Frisky Fox, Mr. Faun, Nonlinear Penguin, Professor Tango, Dreamer
Dreamer:
Hello everyone! Welcome to Defi Kingdoms Day! Our team is in green shirts. If you haven’t met them feel free to meet them. We’re about to start a panel. The panel is going to have our founder, Frisky Fox, and three of our devs that are going to introduce themselves. Many of you are builders brought here through Harmony. We’re excited to introduce you to all of us through our panel, explain how we got into this project, and what we have coming up. If you have any questions raise your hand. Let’s welcome our devs!
Frisky Fox:
Hi everyone, I’m Frisky Fox. I have Professor Tango, Mr. Faun, and Nonlinear Penguin up here with me. It’s been a crazy ride with this project. I get asked a lot why DeFi Kingdoms? How did it happen? What’s the story? It’s a pretty cool story but it can be summed up: I was bored at my regular job. I like to code and create things, and I found myself climbing the corporate ladder and managing people more than creating things and I was just looking for a creative outlet. I spoke with Pieface and said “Let’s create something in crypto that no one else has done before, that will give utility to a token and it’s not something the explodes and crashes and fizzles out.” So what does that look like? Well there are games, and everyone love games. Trying to figure out what we wanted to build was fun. Early stages involved something with plants and gardens and came to what we have today.
We launched August 22, 2021 and went to Pieface’s house for a launch party. There were 4 of us there and a few people remote, and we launched. We had a lot of people creating bots to snipe tokens in the beginning and we added some things to screw over those attempts and it worked and that was a victory for me. I guess they were “outfoxed”. It was a fair launch and a lot of people were able to get in early for a fair price. A lot of people wondered at first what the project was and why we were anonymous. Our answer to why people should trust us was that you can trust us because we’ll earn your trust through time by what we produce. It’s been months since anyone has asked why they need to trust us. We grew rapidly from 2, 4, 6, 10 to almost 50 people on the core team today, and 37 moderators in Discord. Thank you to all the Knights out there. The community has over 80k members and growing.
What is DeFi Kingdoms?I’ve heard some people here don’t know what Harmony is. Most people know Harmony is a blockchain with really low fees. DeFi Kingdoms takes advantage of that in a big way. There is no other chain we could have launched on and had the same level of success. Why do we need low fees? We have tons of transactions every day. Millions of transactions. We have our game logic on the blockchain which makes this game unique. Our NFTs aren’t just art pieces, they have stats like strength and dexterity, and as they do quests they can increase the value of NFTs which is a whole new paradigm that you won’t see other projects doing. So that’s what we are. NFTS are a big part of it with our heroes. It’s a fun place to be. It’s a play-to-earn game. You put in money and you earn money from it. We grew really fast and we have had people from the community come join the team. Professor Tango was someone in the community who came to us and joined.
Professor Tango:
Like Fox said I came on from leading a team in the banking industry. I’ve had a lot of experience in the last few decades leading teams in a normal corporate environment. One of the things that made this project stand out to me in the crypto environment was just looking at the opportunities that were available and all the things we could do. When I saw this and realized it wasn’t a normal project or people out to make a quick buck, but people who wanted a creative outlet and to be part of something bigger, I think that is what we all want and what decentralization is all about, and finding a team that is completely dedicated to this concept and isn’t out in the normal corporate environment and is really invested is amazing. The other aspect that drew me to this is the team, and the amazing people who have joined as well as the amazing people in the community and the amazing ideas coming out. That is exactly what this is all about. Coming from leading large teams in a corporate environment is tedious. You work with a lot of regulation, and that is still the case today but it’s truly different when people care about their project. In a corporate environment everyone is usually in their own silo and things don’t flow well and you’re lucky if they do. I see similarities to that in the blockchain, but the difference is that people are all in in for the same purpose and really dedicated to what they are trying to do and collaborate. I am super excited to continue the decentralization of projects and technology and finance. Kudos to this project and all of us.
Frisky Fox:
I have a question to you before we move on. What aspects have we brought from the corporate world have we brought to this project and what have we changed?
Professor Tango:
There is a lot of good in big corporations and what they are doing. We have taken a lot of policies on what companies do to protect themselves and their communities. But we make sure that everyone is allowed to work on what they enjoy rather than stifling. As we look at relationships like hey we are building a game but we are also a dex, but we are trying to build something that is fun, and trying to make them work together so building relationships between third parties, so being able to navigate the ins and outs of a corporate environment but also make sure that everyone feels like they are part of the family and build those relationships. I think we have built a very inclusive environment and that’s a huge win for us.
Frisky Fox:
It’s tricky trying to find good talented people for a crypto project that you can also trust. There is a lot of money on the line and users are putting their trust in us, so we are trying to make sure that we toe that line using security best practices from the corporate world. One of the things that was hard for us was to find really good solidity people. I was trying to do it myself while also trying to run a lot of the project. I was struggling with it because there aren’t a lot of people out there that do solidity. If you’re not doing it look into it because there is a lot of need. So I started attending crypto meetups in the areas with the express purpose of trying to find talent. I would approach people telling them I am from this project and that’s how I met Mr. Faun.
Mr. Faun:
It was an interesting experience like a movie. A guy comes up to me and hands me a business card about a game on the blockchain and I was like who the heck is Frisky Fox? I was not sure I wanted to leave my nice job, but I am totally glad I did. That experience has led to so much in the last 3- 4 months I have been on the team. How many people in this room consider themselves a builder? My journey into this world started as I was working in web2 and I remember talking to developers more senior than me that would tell me back in the day this was super hard and there was no documentation but now you can just google and someone can tell you how to do this. And I was so glad I didn’t have to do that. But now that we’re in web3 it’s like being back in the 90s with the new innovation going on and we face challenges, but that is what attracted me to DFK. Even though on the surface level DFK is meant to appear simple and someone out here has told us their child is able to use DFK to learn about this space, and that’s half of it, but the other half is the complexity that goes into the background. The unique challenges inspire me and probably is what inspires most of you builders. It’s been a joy to be on the team.
Frisky Fox:
It was so great to hire Mr. Faun here. That single act took so much stress off my plate. The first thing he did when he got in was throw out all of my code and organized it in a more efficient way to get us to a better place to become a cross-chain project. What was it about DFK that made you want to take that change?
Mr. Faun:
I always start with a really high level of skepticism for every crypto project, and what intrigued me was the level of comfort of meeting Frisky Fox, and when I understood what lies beneath the beautiful map and art it got me so excited to leave my other position. I was working on another exciting web3 project but…
Frisky Fox:
I’ll save you from doxxing yourself. We have a history of stealing people away from other projects because people start on just working 5–10 hours a week and then people want more of it sort of thing. I’d seen it happen with everyone else on the team because once you get started you want to do more of this, so I knew after a week or two you wanted more.
Mr. Faun:
Yeah that was definitely it. I was let in on Crystalvale before it was leaked to the community and I have always been part of metaversal projects that expect to be long term and large and I was worried DFK would be just a small dex on one chain, but as I got involved in the planning I realized there wasn’t a single person on the team who didn’t have a larger goal, so it was just obvious I needed to make the jump and come in.
Professor Tango:
I think I have seen that same story over and over as we have grown, and people end up staying on the project because of the team and the project and what we have wanted to build here. And we have seen that in the community as well that people see what is going on and do their research and we have such a solid plan for the future and making it the best of all worlds for everyone regardless of what chain you’re on. We’re trying to build things out to the point that you could come in at any angle with any objective and hopefully find something for you. Compared to other projects this is something we feel obligated to share with people and don’t consider ourselves gatekeepers but want this to be a living breathing entity of its own that people can feel safe here and experiment and try and play. The more people that come and the more energy people bring the more successful we are.
Mr. Faun:
One thing I have seen is how much the executive team and team leads want to give back to the community it is something that makes us successful. We have been working a lot with Sunbear. We’re working with OpenZeppelin to bring their project to the Harmony Network and I think just that alone coming to Harmony is going to be a huge payback for the benefits Harmony has given to us. Whenever I hear anyone talking about the roadmap it’s always how can we help the community and not just how can this help us.
Frisky Fox:
We are trying to see what we can do to build up the Harmony ecosystem and what that can do for all the builders out there and help the builders be able to securely create and launch their projects. One of my goals from the start of this project was to incentivize builders to come and build with us. A lot has been built based off of our tools, which we want to see happen. There is also the Grant Program we have to give back to the community and the devs out there. We want people to be rewarded for spending their time on our community. We got a grant from Harmony in December and we hadn’t applied for a grant because we just launched ourselves, and we didn’t really need the grant money but we did want to have something to give back to the community so we applied for the grant and got $1M which is a lot more than a lot of projects, and what we did with that money is that we decided all the money is going straight to the community to go to outreach and creators and decided to match that with $2M from our own treasury so we have a huge creation fund out there to help incentivize our community. Speaking of the community, AilaSpiritBox is here, and any crypto project cannot survive without a strong community builder and all the knights that are here, thank you so much for that.
So, we are a dex like we said, and we started out with that and then hit the ground running with let’s start a game on top of that, which starts with a lot of planning. So we brought on Hubert Cumberdale, and that brought us Nonlinear Penguin and he has been amazing with analytics and simulations and writing code.
Mr. Faun:
Anyone who thinks smart contracts are hard needs to have this guy behind you and this team is incredible.
Nonlinear Penguin:
I appreciate the kind words. Like Fox mentioned I was brought on to the team through a referral through Hubert Cumberdale. My background is not really crypto at all. It was just focused on solving interesting problems, which has led me to interesting endeavors. It’s brought me to robotics and ai to social systems. I have a mixed background which has led me to a broad understanding of a lot of problems. So when I came to the project at first my broad understanding led me to know there have been a lot of flops. So I wasn’t that invested and thought I might put in 5 hours a week, but after the first week and I read through all the docs it really turned things around for me and I immediately went to full time and it’s been an amazing experience since then. It’s not just a game, it’s a vehicle people are putting their money into, and you have to be careful with what you’re doing. Overall my builder mindset wasn’t built in crypto but Istill have a builder mindset and like to solve problems.
Frisky Fox:
It was a breathe of fresh air when he came on to the project. Before that we did spreadsheets and projections and I thought we were doing pretty well and he came along and started doing simulations and really took it to the next level. What are some approaches you take when you’re asked to create formulas?
Nonlinear Penguin:
I thinking of everything as a system. So with systems theory you’re trying to assign everything numbers to the system. As long as you can assign a number to something and look at how it changes you can start to assign mechanisms to it and see how things are changing. In the game it’s easy to assign numbers to things and when you see a problem and want to understand it more, the numbers are all there and on an amazing thing called the blockchain and you just need to ask what those numbers are and you can work with them.
Mr. Faun:
This guy knows what’s going on.
Frisky Fox:
We started with where a lot was originating from the solidity team and we transitioned to where Hubert and Penguin would create a functional specifications document where he’ll outline all the formulas that we have to write into the smart contract in forms of solidity, and it’s been a huge help.
Nonlinear Penguin:
It’s always good to be aware if you’re on a team of what your team members deal with. I feel like every person on the DFK team is a one man army and so strong, and in any major project with other people involved you need to be aware of what everyone is working on.
Professor Tango:
As Fox mentioned we do need more solidity devs, but the majority of our team came from non-crypto spaces. At the end of the day the team isn’t saying we have all this crypto experience, everyone has a strength that can be applied to the larger team and we have been successful because of the team coming together. We of course have people who really understand the crypto space, but we also just have people who come in with their strengths and trust other people on the team with their strengths and come together. We want people not just to build DeFi Kingdoms but to build your own strengths and talents. We just want to bring people together to build on the blockchain. We will do better the more we collaborate together.
Nonlinear Penguin:
I joined and then DFK launched its first bounty program for tax tracking software, but when I saw how much we were investing into the community and the resources that went into it, that was the nail in the coffin for me of how great this community is and the great investment we are putting into the community.
Frisky Fox:
I always say the whole is greater than the sum of the parts when it comes to crypto. We are where we are because of all the expertise brought into our team. If we were just a game it would be a little indie game and most people wouldn’t care, if we were just a dex most people wouldn’t care, but put them together and it becomes a huge thing. It’s the same thing with the community. That’s why we are building these tools. To add things to that sum and increase the value that is out there. We’re excited to see the ideas that are out there. And now we will open to questions.
Q&A
Dreamer:
You can ask any question but we might not answer.
Question:
I am glad to know you in person. I flew for 14 hours to get here. Congratulations. Do not lose your focus. I have a kid who is learning crypto from you. My questions are: When was a stellar moment you had why do you think it was a stellar moment? And for people who are here who flew here is there anything that is not digitally out in the community that you can tell us here?
Frisky Fox:
This has been an amazing ride, and I remember when we launched heroes we tried to figure out a price point, and we decided to sell them for $1K JEWEL and people thought we were insane. Everyone thought there was no way they would ever sell. But we really strongly felt like it had a good ROI and the sale lasted 7 minutes and it sold out. There hadn’t been anything like that on Harmony to that point, and that’s when I realized we were onto something. Also when we overtook SushiSwap as the biggest dex.
Professor Tango:
Just being inside and working with the dev team and coming across things that could be bugs or issues, I remember the first time we came across something that someone could have used against us and the consensus was that we needed to fix it now, and I have never had any concerns or questions of the integrity of the team, and we could pieces that weren’t intentional but we knew we had to take care of things for the community and I just knew the integrity of the team.
Nonlinear Penguin:
After I joined we broke the top 100 coins on CoinGecko and that was awesome to see. My interest in seeing how we reached that point and seeing it all come together just was a stellar moment for me.
Mr. Faun:
A couple stellar things have happened, but on a lower level I woke up one morning and read a message on our internal channel about how a team member helped their grandmother not be foreclosed on their home, and Purple Onyon helped someone save their hero before they got hacked, and seeing people in the community change their lives in positive ways in the real world has been stellar for me.
Frisky Fox:
It’s amazing how this thing that wasn’t even an idea 12 moths ago has changed so many lives. As far as alpha goes we have plans to announce around dinner.
Question:
Hi. I want to ask about locked $JEWEL. Recently there was introduced this service of transactions on locked $JEWEL so I want to know your thoughts on that or if we see patterns that could impact DeFi Kingdoms.
Frisky Fox:
So locked $JEWEL is an interesting part of our project that encourages people to earn and invest early and for the long term. So some projects have been set up to help people trade locked $JEWEL in a secure way. But it was outside of the original economics. So we held a vote and we decided it was a good opportunity for us to upgrade that functionality and add some extra safeguards and we are currently creating something that is still being built in a secure way and we need to make sure that’s 100% tested. We originally had that functionality so you could transfer between your own wallets.
Mr. Faun:
Many of you may not know this about smart contracts, but at the very core smart contracts are immutable after deployment. So that makes things hard when things occur our hands are tied. It’s a difficult thing we have to deal with. There was a misconception that when people transfer locked $JEWEL that they could unlock them. So just to be clear that’s not the case. It remains locked until it’s unlocking time.
Question:
I am curious to see if you guys have any initiatives for environmental actions.
Frisky Fox:
We set up our Grant Program to give back to the community and the world. We had a thing around Christmas where there was a typhoon in the Philippines as our first charity grant. Education, disaster relief, trying to make things sustainable are all important to us. That’s a large part of why we chose Harmony.
Question:
As a user and member of Harmony, have you been working closely with Harmony on transactions and things like that, and community sentiment on Twitter there are people have been having a hard time.
Frisky Fox:
So stuff like RPC and issues with the network? So that has been a pain point as we grew so rapidly. A lot of the underlying infrastructure was taken by surprise by the volume we threw at it. We have been working close with Harmony and their devs to talk about the challenges we see on each side of that. There are other things we are doing like exploring creating our own RPC nodes and stuff like that.
Professor Tango:
Harmony has been incredible to work with and there are somany people out there willing to share their information. Harmony has shown me stuff they have done to improve their infrastructure as well as given us pointers on how to improve our code to work better with their infrastructure. Our systems get better and we are hoping to expand out more on that, and we’re building out having our cached data more accessible and to 3rd party developers who want to work with that data. Harmony has been great to work with and we want to make sure we’re doing the right thing the right way.
Frisky Fox:
Pine Cone Coder has been amazing taking our Api to the next level. I think everyone who has used the tavern lately can agree it’s better than it used to be. We had to have growing pains and we have built something from scratch which has been an amazing process. We have always planned to be a cross chain project, which is why I was excited to hire Mr. Faun because he has experience in other chains.
Mr. Faun:
I would say it’s been great to be part of a project and community with the Harmony team and have direct communication with them and with other teams we plan to work with. That communication will continue to expand and be more involved. I’ve been very impressed with the Harmony network and excited about the Avalanche network. Every chain has its own benefits and negatives. If we threw this amount at any network there would have been difficulties anywhere and we’re grateful for Harmony for working with us.
Question:
By own RPC do you mean subnet?
Frisky Fox:
It’s not a subnet, but a subnet would use RPC. We are looking into what would be involved with creating our own RPC for a number of reasons. Having our own special RPCs set aside for the API is a part of that process.
Professor Tango:
You can’t go to google to find answers. We are working with a lot of different chains to make sure that we are building the right infrastructure. We have to customize as we grow which does involved RPCs, validators, anything that is out there is potential something we could use that could benefit all chains if we could implement it properly.
Question:
What are your thoughts on the heroes that have leveled up faster than you realized? When is questing going to be on the normal non beta site?
Frisky Fox:
We reward players that level up faster. We have airdrops that are to incentivize people to level up faster. It drives the market of stamina potions. Rewards are high. We want to incentivize people to level up.
Professor Tango:
We don’t have higher level questing available yet, we are aware of everything everyone is doing and what we might owe someone. Essentially, there is nothing that should stop people from playing and leveling up and doing the best they can for future events coming out.
Frisky Fox:
Part of the fun of these types of games is being the best that there is and we don’t want to impede anyone on that journey and we want to reward those who put in that time and effort. Some things coming out will reward people who have higher levels.
Mr. Faun:
To give context our site has a production and beta environment. Things in beta could still change, and there is the understanding that this isn’t set in stone yet. Questing is expected to be a core part of the experience. Right now they are on beta. We expect to have various levels of quests and have a lot more coming. We want to protect the community and want such a core part of our game to be as good as possible, but moving to production means that it won’t change and we want to be fully confident before we give that approval.
Question:
Have you thought about building a gamified lending platform and if you do will you have revenue based financing of heroes?
Frisky Fox:
We do have a dex in our game. It’s crazy we have a real world economy embedded in our game. We have traditional swapping and staking and there is opportunity to add to that.
Dreamer:
I think when it comes to leverage and lending, it makes me uncomfortable when we add that to crypto. However, we are trying to innovate, so there is a balance, and offering leverage on NFTS is hard to solve for. We do have our own marketplace and ability to provide liquidity for NFTS. So it is possible. Banks take money and offer loans. We don’t have a program that supports that yet. We are constantly trying to brainstorm how we can innovate gaming and defi as well. We aren’t there yet but are getting close. We also have our grant program that people can use to build what they want and we aren’t restricting what that might be. Fill out a grant and let’s talk about it and work with you.
Professor Tango:
There are situations we haven’t thought about with lending but there are projects that are doing that so we might partner with them or offer some sort of grant. There are so many ideas out there that we would like to leverage but we know we won’t be the ones who build everything.
Frisky Fox:
There are also regulations and uncertainty about what things will look like the USA in the future so everything we do is with the mind of reducing risk and securing the longevity of the project.
Nonlinear Penguin:
So in closing, I would say to anyone who wants to build in this space, is develop a broad skillset. Everyone on this team is a one man army so if you can do that you are off to a great start but then find other people who complement your skillset and that is my advice usually.
Mr. Faun:
At the end of every DFK meeting we have something we all say, so I’ll just say “BULLISH”.
Professor Tango:
Super bullish. For me I just want to reiterate the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. There are better games, maybe better dexs, there are always people doing something better than you, but what makes us unique is combining it all together. We are trying to be the best of what we are and we have a lot of learning and growth to do, and it’s about collaboration with the community. We couldn’t do it without everyone on the team and everyone on the community and everyone across the board. The future is very bright.
Frisky Fox:
As he said the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. 3–4 months ago I was speaking with PieFace and I said do you realize what you have done? How many lives have changed throughout the world? I could say the same for everyone person who has come onto our team, and the same to all of you here. You’re here with ideas and you will change the world too. Happy to be here with all of you guys. I’m proud of everything we have built and I am excited for the future. Thank you to everyone.
