Levana December 2021 Update

With a new year almost upon us, the Levana team is working in overdrive to bring our vision to life. Here’s a quick recap and roadmap of what we’re working on. For further details, check out our second Town Hall, and read the Levana Litepaper here.

What is Levana: TLDR

Levana is a protocol for generating leverage on any asset. It is also the acronym: Leverage Any Asset. We’re a technology to build out methods of generating price exposure via leverage on the Terra blockchain. The practical application for this is broad. It can be used to power a leverage exchange of Perpetual Swaps, and it can be used to create farming and rewards for products in the Play 2 Earn Gaming industry.

The team at Levana is passionate about adventure and exploration, as reflected in everything we do. One example is by interacting with the volatility of markets and extended markets with tools like leverage. Another is with the creation of an evolutionary NFT game that continues to advance and surprise. A further example is our creation of an epic story, the salvation and terraforming of our sister planet, Mars. Everything we do is focused around delivering adventure and delight to our users.

On a technical level, Levana is a Delphi incubated protocol led by a team of crypto veterans who understand that leverage trading represents a huge opportunity for the crypto space. The leverage tokens and perpetual swaps to be offered by Levana are positioned to capture significant market share. Levana is also designed as a fully governed DAO. The market for derivatives is exponential — the spot market is 80–90 trillion dollars, and the derivatives market is 40-200x that size. Levana enables a user to no longer simply be exposed to the markets based on their current financial standing; the only limitation to your potential for success in a trading market is your level of confidence.

The core Levana DeFi product is a leveraged synthetic asset trading platform for perpetual swaps. That’s a long way of saying we’re building the most advanced decentralized exchange in the Terra Ecosystem. Behind Levana is an experienced and diverse team, solid investors, and a community of excited supporters.

The Levana team is composed of sci-fi, fantasy, and adventure geeks. While building the exchange, we have seen similar protocols struggle with branding in an effort to set themselves apart. Therefore, we decided to trailblaze the Terra NFT space in support of our vision to create our NFT project.

We established an entire world of backstory and lore around dragons (leverage), dragon riders (leverage traders), and are building a strong community of dragon keepers who enable the platform. The Levana Dragons NFT project launched last month with our unique evolutionary NFTs in a 44-hour Meteor Shower launch. By its end, we received roughly $4M and minted more than 41,000 NFTs by +6.3K community members.

It was the largest mint in Terra history, with the largest number of unique wallets. The funds raised are being used to create a trading pool for the first DeFi product we will bring to market, the Levana Leveraged Index tokens (LLI’s), the first of which is Luna2X.

Since our NFT launch, our NFTs continue to be one of the largest NFT project on Terra, with the largest number of wallets, and in the top daily trading volume for weeks running.

NFTs

Meteor shower

The purpose of the meteor shower was to create a well-defined core community that enjoys participating in exciting gamified experiences, while at the same time creating the initial pool of Luna that would be used for generating LUNA2x.

Fun Fact: The methodology of the meteor shower was written in 2019 as a research paper for the distribution of collateralized NFT’s for collaborative gaming. It sat for over 2 years as a dusty document with comments from many economists and crypto researches waiting until it would find the right project for implementation.

Prior to the shower, we released an in-depth article, How to Participate in the Levana NFT Meteor Shower. The event resulted in the creation of more than 41,000 NFTs, of which 8,888 held dragon eggs in various tiers and roughly 32 thousand held meteor dust. In total, over 6,300 people participated, including 20 players who bid in every single hour of the 44 hour shower. The funds donated totaled 3.98M UST, including $110,262 from the Levana team for meteors we plan to use in giveaways and other marketing events.

There is no concept of a ‘winner’ and ‘loser’ in this journey. There are different paths in a symbiotic game that requires overlap, integration, communication and team-building among participants who own different assets within the ecosystem.

Meteor Cracking

Meteor Cracking opened on Nov. 30, 2021. Cracking the meteors reveals either a dragon egg or meteor dust, both of which play central roles in the game. The game mechanics ensure that all of the dust will be consumed through different mechanisms and crafting, to create 8,888 fully equipped dragon riders.

At the end of this game, the goal is for there to be no meteors, dust or unhatched dragon eggs remaining; rather, there will be 8,888 fully equipped dragon riders who will exist in different factions (teams) and continue to play and compete in Levana-based experiences.

Crafting

The Levana Dragons Game is designed to utilize crafting. Through alchemy, a player will be able to use meteor dust to create many different types of items.

In turn, these items will be available to different factions: Guardians, Free Martians, Council Members, and Terrans. Based on the dust accumulated, a player will be able to see what they are capable of crafting, and what they will need to collaborate with other members of the community to trade and collect, in order to get the dust their avatar and faction requires.

Dust is not designed to be a scarce resource. This means that future iterations of software built by the Levana Team or other teams will allow for the minting or farming of more dust. This mechanism will coincide with the creation of more items that may be crafted.

Avatar

A player’s character is an equipable figure that becomes their role in the game. A player may have more than one avatar, more than one dragon, and may be in more than one faction.

For the avatars, we have been working with Joseph the Penguin, a talented member of the Delphi team. Joseph created the concept for avatars related to your wallet’s public address that can be equipped with items skinned to different environments. This could be a proto-asset to a metaverse, which would allow for different protocols to participate. Our sister protocols, Mars and Astroport, are also looking very closely at the avatar standard, to determine how an interactive and rich experience on-chain could be created using their intellectual property as well.

Hatching

Each Bottle of Dust and Dragon Egg has its own level of rarity and meta, creating the requirements needed to hatch dragon eggs. Dust also contains various compositions, infusions, and gems. There are many assets in each bottle of dust and for each egg. How a Dragon Egg is hatched and the traits found within the egg itself will impact the final dragon created inside, including its special skills and history, and the look and feel of the dragon that emerges from within.

Hatching will happen in 3 stages, each of which will require a player to mix dust and eggs:

• Nesting
• Customizing
• Hatching

More details will be released on the subject in another blog post.

Quests

• The various items minted from dust will determine the player’s ability to become a member of certain factions. Players will go on quests with their companion, initially a baby dragon. These quests will enable the baby dragon to mature to full size. The dragon and avatar will have different slots to fill for customization and uniqueness. Meteor dust from meteor showers have spirit levels, and a player will inherit the dust’s spirit levels when applied. Spirit levels carry over to crafting, so your character or dragon will have an overall spirit level, which will be the sum of all its parts.
• In the Meteors.Levana.Finance domain we’ve deployed the Cave, the Cracking Station, and previews of the Crafting and Avatar Stations; These are different ways to create assets, which will be used later in multi-project metaverse activity.

• In response to questions about having an integrated marketplace, we have no information ready for release with regard to a marketplace within the UI for trading, but we’ve had calls with one of the popular Terra NFT marketplaces. The idea is to minimize the 4th wall as much as possible, and create an immersive experience that allows players to be able to accomplish everything needed within a quest or mission without having to leave any environment. More will be revealed as we advance in the development of our game.

Dragon Riders

Though dragons are limited in number, all players will be able to interact with our growing set of experiences. This means the game will also be open to players who do not have a dragon. We intend to release other types of companions, (such as other animals) and players will have the ability to interact with them and participate in the metaverse.

Leverage

Levana began with the concept of making leveraged assets available for anyone. The first iteration is through leveraged baskets. Our introductory blog post expands upon this vision. This short video also does a good job of explaining Levana’s LLI token concept.

Perpetual Swaps

Levana is building a perpetual swap platform. Perpetual swaps are the most cost-effective mechanism for creating leveraged assets. Currently, there are 6 devs around the world who are working on this project. We’ve completed work on the virtual AMM, which has been rolled out into vault contracts. The actions around opening and closing a position are finished, including support for multiple positions, per user, per asset.
For the initial spot price, we’re using Chainlink on Testnet on Terra, though we are excited to explore potentially adding other Oracles as well.

The technical design work has been done for the liquidation logic, and we are simultaneously working on the documentation for this.

LLI’s

Beginning with Luna2X, Levana is rolling out Levana Leverage Index tokens (LLIs). We’ve finished the auto-staking on the front end, the core-staking page is complete, and both have gone live on Testnet.

We’ve completed stage 1 of audits and are addressing changes based on audit feedback.

It is critical to Levana that everything that can be done to minimize risk is done. Luna2X is currently planned for launch shortly after Mars Protocol launches in early 2022.

DeFi and NFTs and Gaming

Who has done this well? Defi Kingdoms

In the course of our research and quests for inspiration to build something innovative in the DeFi space that overlaps with the Metaverse, a lot of supporters pointed out DeFi Kingdom. Members of the Levana team have been grinding and playing DeFi Kingdoms, along with other examples of gamified DeFi, to gain exposure to this space and user experience. These games are great predecessors and inspiration for our larger vision. At present, it does not appear that anything like this can replace a traditional DeFi user interface, but it can connect to it, expand upon it, and make it approachable, palatable, and understandable to a gaming audience that is roughly 100x as large as the audience currently participating in DeFi today.

The DAO

Levana believes creativity and risk are critical to success in DeFi, rather than repeating what has been done before. This sentiment is one of the value drivers that permeates the Levana DAO. Levana is a rapidly growing Protocol and your help is needed. If you think you can be useful, please get involved on Discord. We have an incredibly flat hierarchy, meaning the people who show up and contribute are the people who become part of the DAO.

LVN tokens

Liquidity incentives: there will be opportunities to provide liquidity to the platform. Whether it is liquidity for UST to LVN, or to Luna for the Luna2X pool, there will be liquidity rewards for providing funds to the protocol.

Airdrops

LVN token airdrops: LVN is the governance token of Levana. No information has been published about the requirements for receiving the LVN token airdrop. Once information becomes public, it will be published on this blog and distributed amongst the community.

The LVN airdrop contract is now functional, and integration with the vesting contract is in design. The balancer, which was the largest blocker that needed rewriting, was successfully updated and has been merged back into the project.

The UI is functional on Testnet now and includes swapping, farming and governance.

The UI is fairly simple. Its main goal is to provide users the ability to go from holding Luna to holding Luna2x in one click. Simplicity is key, both to be a Levana liquidity provider, and to farm LVN tokens.

What’s Next

Book

We’ve created and released Levana Lore chapters 1–5. These are short stories that outline the narrative of a young Terran named Zahava, who raises a dragon named Levana and dreams of something more than the life she was born into.

A writing team has been turning these initial blog posts into a 1000 page novel trilogy, which is planned as a trilogy that will consist of 3 books targeting the young adult audience.

These books will initially be distributed as NFTs, and whoever has primary sale of the NFT will also get a printed copy of the lavender-scented book.

For the longer novel, we have completed chapter summaries for 1–30; with the first draft of the beginning of the book being reviewed.

Game Design

Levana is releasing two minigames around launch: a “Mario-style” platformer game and a Choose Your Own Adventure game.

In anticipation of releasing more games, Levana interviewed 26 gaming studios and engaged the top two to design a Play 2 Earn, Player vs Environment, Terra-based game.

Choose your own adventure Minigame

We completed the decision tree-map and artwork for a short “choose your own adventure mini-game.” This is being built into a Discord bot. The game has been passed to a writer who is taking each part of those decision trees and turning them into roughly a page of text, while a comic book artist will add illustrations to every part of the decision tree. This is the next part of the lore, and we hope to roll it out before the end of the year.

The game design will come from both of these studios that have been working independently so as to produce different ideas. This unique workstream fits in with the decentralized nature and DNA that Levana brings to the table. The initial game design, including the mapping out of mechanics, concept artwork, and fundamentals of the Play 2 Earn work game is roughly a two-month project. When complete, we plan to share with the community the research gained from working with these gaming studios.

We brought a number of requirements to the game studios, as indicated in this graphic:

There are different factions in our narrative. The Terrans (who can be thought of as merchants or farmers), the Council (wizards), the Guardians (warriors), and the Free Martians (akin to rangers/ninjas).

We plan to incorporate other NFT and DeFi teams to the metaverse, which will allow a low barrier of entry for game design. This means that if another organization wants to participate, such as Galactic Punks or Space Loot, they will not be required to build a whole game or expansion; they may create a mini-game that would be accessible on our platform.

Final thoughts

Big and exciting things are happening both from design and operational perspectives. Levana is not just one concept, though our products and adventures share the same value drivers. We see emerging markets, and Levana is working to merge these markets. It is our belief that the combination of DeFi, gaming and NFT’s is the next major innovation within the crypto space and Levana intends to cover all three of these categories.

We also recognize that our journey is experimental and requires time and iteration. Everyone involved in the Levana project is passionate about inventing something new that has never been done before. Thank you for taking the time to keep up to date on our progress and please feel free to reach out to us through direct messages on Twitter or join our Discord, including private chats for NFT holders.

If you want to get involved, you can look at our open positions: https://levana-protocol.notion.site/Job-Descriptions-1ca31065e7e544819f7cee005ad71324

Follow us for updates:

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