AMA Highlights — Seascape Network
By Daniel Dal Bello, Director.
March 2, 2021–7 min read.
On Friday 26 February, we welcomed David Johansson and Nicky Li from Seascape Network into the Hillrise Group Telegram chat for an AMA. David and Nicky are both co-founders of Seascape.
Seascape Network is a Substrate-based platform working on bringing the future of DeFi-enabled gaming to market.
Within the gaming niche, they are improving the user incentivisation model creating an innovative platform and minimising hosting costs for game developers.
As blockchain-enabled gaming and NFT’s have continued to gain momentum we’re excited to explore the novel applications for both Seascape games and the ecosystem as a whole.
In this post, we have compiled key questions and answers from the event.
Daniel Dal Bello
Welcome to you both and thank you for joining us today. With the recent surge in gamification of all things DeFi and yield farming, we’re very curious to get to know more about what you’re working on in this niche of the industry.
Could you please start us off with an introduction to yourselves and how you came to be leading the Seascape project?
David Johansson
I guess I’ll start off with the basics. I’m David Johansson, founder and CEO of the Seascape Network. Been working in the game industry for the last decade with studios such as Paradox and Youzu. Got into blockchain around 4 years ago and immediately knew that it would eventually have a huge impact on gaming and how users interact with digital worlds and items.
Nicky Li
Hello all again, I’m Nicky. Personally, I’m very passionate about games and stepped into the Gaming industry in 2014. Experience at established Chinese game studios such as Yoozoo, Forgame and Moonton. Worked as a project manager of <League of Angels>, which won the ‘BEST FACEBOOK GAME’ in 2014. It was a huge success and led to very good market performance. Also worked as a designer and operation team leader on <Liberators>, a WW2 strategy game that also won the ‘BEST FACEBOOK GAME’ in 2016. And that’s basically how I met David, we worked together and made many successful projects.
Raymond Reijnders
As an introduction to what you are building, can you walk us through how you’re meshing DeFi and NFTs together?
David Johansson
Sure thing, while we were developing BLOCKLORDS, which received grants from and was released on protocols such as NEO, Tron, Loom, Matic and Icon, we realized that all these chains had one major issue in common.
Their dev tools were painfully inadequate, meaning small teams like ours had to spend months to figure out how to make simple blockchain features integrate with our games.
Once we noticed this issue was common across all platforms, we decided we should focus on lowering the barrier of entry for other game developers and started throwing around ideas for Seascape, which would be a game platform designed entirely around DeFi and NFT integration, with accessible tools that would make it much easier for developerss to release their games with implemented DeFi mechanics.
Rowan Zwiers
Paywave has been implemented to create a more sustainable circular economy. With a fixed token supply and your project’s massive expansion in users, how will you start newer users/gamers on a more even footing?
Nicky Li
So yes, let me explain how PayWave works.
In Seascape every player who owns Crowns will receive PayWave drop. The PayWave supply is taken entirely from the spent amounts of tokens in the Seascape Network ecosystem and game platform. This PayWave function makes it easy to create a passive way to increase stacks of Crowns holders, further pushing the growth of its community.
For example, in the upcoming game: NFT Brawl, players need to Spend CWS to mint random quality Scape NFTs, those spent CWS will go into the PayWave pool. Once we think the amount is decent enough, we will trigger the PayWave, and all CWS holders will get the rewards.
We also think this is a great way to attack new users because everyone can see that join our DeFi game or let’s say ecosystem can be rewarded in many ways. These are also the words we want to put out there: Play to earn, your game time and asset will have value and we will reward all the players who really joining all our events and projects.
David Johansson
The PayWave is one of many different incentives we have in store for our users! For example, we just dropped $1,000 in CWS to all our NFT holders the other day, so it will pay off to get involved early.
Raymond Reijnders
You have recently launched your own NFT series, Scapes. In your announcement blog, you mentioned that these can be used as financial assets, which made us wonder: What purposes do they serve as of now, and what do you have in store for the future?
There has been tremendous mainstream hype growing within the NFT ecosystem. Can you tell us more about where you see the overall NFT ecosystem going?
Nicky Li
Yes, definitely. It’s exciting to be watching all the innovation that has been happening in NFT space for the last few months!
In order for NFTs to really breakthrough, two things need to happen. They need to have a real value attached to them, either in cryptocurrency, or in fiat, and that value needs to be redeemable within the NFT itself. This is something we will explore a lot in the Seascape Network gaming ecosystem.
For instance, in our upcoming NFT staking game STAKING SALOON, the longer you stake Seascape NFTs, the more you will earn, so this is a solid strategy if you want to maximize your return per NFT, but if the token is staked in the game to earn CWS it will have to be burned when claiming. That said if you prefer collecting the NFT itself that is definitely an option you can take. We will also implement different ways of earning for other NFT holders in the future for users like you who want to hold on to their NFTs while still earning an income!
I think there is still a lot of space that we can explore, use NFT into different DeFi gameplay and make NFT truly valuable.
Raymond Reijnders
There has been a lot of talk about the collateralisation of NFTs to borrow assets. However, the nature of NFTs is that an ordinary (low value) NFT might easily be artificially bid up to increase its value. It could then be fraudulently collateralised to take a loan. How do you think that the NFTs we see today could ever be collateralised like this?
One way to mitigate this is using something like the price floor indexes seen in NFTX — collateralising the Index token instead of the actual NFT. In your opinion, how would this be mitigated?
David Johansson
Yes, there is still a lot of work to be done to come up with accurate ways of valuing NFTs, each project really has to find what works best for their specific assets. In our first use case, we really want to hit home the idea that staking NFTs will provide a stable revenue in Crowns, but that claiming these rewards will destroy the NFT and it’s earning potential, thus leading users back to previous games or to the market to get more NFTs
this is only one example, but I think we are going to see a lot of innovation from different projects to try to solve the valuation of NFTs
Daniel Dal Bello
In traditional gaming we see a clear focus on community, how are you tackling this at Seascape? We already came across your first airdrop incentive for NFT holders, it’s great to see early adopters be rewarded so generously.
Also, are there any specific intrinsic motivators that you focus on for your community? Would love to learn more about how you manage to captivate people with your games outside of monetary incentives.
Nicky Li
Yes, the community is the key. We always value the community opinions since we develop BLOCKLORDS and we will keep doing so.
But at the same time, I also think that as game designers, we need to lay a good foundation for game platforms and game products. And then we building on top of that and reward CWS to the community according to contribution.
David Johansson
Think the best way to build a community is to keep providing new games, update the old ones, and our added focus on user incentives should add another element that doesn’t really exist in traditional gaming, so we see a lot of potential by focusing on this path!
Rowan Zwiers
In a bid for scalability, you’ve started to develop Seascape on Binance Smart Chain. Can you walk us through the process so far and how opportunities may differ between chains?
Nicky Li
Yes, actually we just deployed our BSC token pCWS yesterday and now CWS holder can transfer token from ETH to BSC by using Poly Bridge.
Then, what we are working on now is update our game platform website with new UX. The player can choose different entrance before they go to the game app and within each game app page, the user can easily switch between different network option.
Soon, we will launch our 1st DeFi game — PROFIT CIRCUS on the BSC network. Hope you can join it with a low BNB fee and a high APY % reward!
In March, we have other 2 games about the launch, NFT BRAWL and STAKING SALOON.
Raymond Reijnders
You’ve got a lot of things lined up in your roadmap up until the end of 2022. Can you tell us what you’re most excited about?
David Johansson
I’d say the Scape Store is what we are building everything towards.
2021 is a year of testing many of our theories out on different platforms, with real users and value, meanwhile refining our tools for other game devs to integrate.
The Scape Store will make it possible for non-blockchain gamers to be initiated into this wonderful world of DeFi, and I cannot wait to release it.
Nicky Li
I’m also excited about the cross-chain NFT bridge, actually, we already begin working on it. This can help a lot of NFT project and traders to reach better value.
Hillrise Group supports ambitious Web3 startups with early-stage venture capital and fundamental research.
Seascape Network is a gaming platform designed around the DeFi & NFT economy.
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