Mocaverse Post-Mint Town Hall
Speakers:
Tyler Durden ā Head of Projects at Animoca Brands
Eiman ā Lead of solutions and success at Thirdweb
Creedo ā Project manager at Animoca Brands
Prima ā Mocaverse community member
Community members ā Mocaverse community member asking live questions
Full Transcript
Tyler Durden
Tyler here leading Mocaverse. Iām the Director and Head of Projects at Animoca Brands (AB). Most of the projects are managed by my team and I assign a project lead and CEO of the project. For Mocavese this is the most important project for AB and Iām personally leading that.
Itās great to have everyone here. I want to show appreciation and say that without the community we wouldnāt have been where we are at right now. To put the numbers aside, the sentiment and the vibe of it, everyone being so supportive. I can easily name people who have been supportive during the tough times and we really appreciate everyone having empathy for the team working around the clock making things happen.
For example Prima, Jetlag, CK, Chang, NFT Brad, Lena, Mason ā I canāt name everyone but I want to say we really appreciate everyoneās support during the minting process. As I said, itās not what we envisioned.
Weād been planning from 6 months ago (December 2022) ā very iterative, a long journey. There were 3 principles we followed when designing this:
1/ Security: Need to make sure that no one eligible wallet can mint more than what theyāre eligible for.
2/ Fairness: In terms of fairness, making sure everything is truly randomised and no one can cheat the system.
3/ Fun: Make sure the minting experience was fun. We know it wasnāt smooth. We really hope you got the chance to go through a smooth minting experience. The team was really excited about it. If you look at Sebastian the Sandbox founder posting the full minting experience once we fixed the issue it was pretty fun.
For example DJTsoi, one of our core team members, produced the music on his own.
We put in a lot of thoughts. We almost thought about putting in the music of community members, but we didnāt want to infringe on IP so we didnāt do this.
I think the whole experience that we actually wanted to provide to you following the 3 principles. At the same time you see the packed luggage process ā the reason we did this, we wanted everyone to have the Tribe that speaks to themselves, and going through this experience, the community members can determine what Tribe they want to belong to, and they eventually get that tribe in terms of the NFTs theyāre minting.
It would have been such a great experience for everyone. Itās not that we didnāt do any testing. We did a lot of load testing, a lot of testing with the smart contract.
The original mint date was February 21st if everyone remembers and then there was a curveball from OpenSea on royalties 1 or 2 days before the mint.
And I know this was a very risky decision, but I decided to make this decision to protect creator royalties. Weāre investing royalties back into the community. I made the bold move to extend the mint. There was a lot of work in terms of upgrading the contract. We decided to go through a router contract architecture, and that impacts the SDK and that results in a lot of changes.
We didnāt want to wait for too long for the community, so we wanted to launch the new update as soon as possible. But we didnāt rush things, we just worked more, slept less, and worked around the clock to make it happen.
We did a bunch of testing, load testing, performance testing, SDK and all that. But I just want to be here and own all mistakes, but also be here and provide transparency on what happened and the principles that we followed and the experience we wanted to provide to you.
Not just what happened, but also the rollercoaster of emotions that the team has been through during mint.
We started going into the office at 4am. I asked the team to do squats and stretching because I wanted the team to be fully focused. At 4.30am we start testing with our own team wallet, minting NFTs. Thatās why some minting happened before 6am HKT. So basically each team member used different tokens to make sure everything was fine. It was not front-running or us having first mover advantage or anything like that. And actually everything was fine, and then around 6am HKT once we announced minting happens, there was a lot of traffic flooding in.
We know the hype of the project and the attention, that was understandable. The minting experience we wanted to provide to you requires a lot of on chain data query. If we donāt want the tribe to be over claimed, we definitely need to make sure that we curate the on chain data and it doesnāt exceed the maximum capacity allocation if we want to make sure there is an actual accurate count of 1 wallet, how many they minted, make sure thereās no double mint, we also had to curate a lot of on chain data.
So we actually did a lot of fixes along the way. Itās not as if we were just sat there drinking coffee, chilling or drinking or something! Starting from the first 30 minutes, we had been on live call with our smart contract partner Thirdweb, which Eiman is here on stage right now and with AWS Amazon non-stop for 12 hours trying to figure out the issue.
Itās not that we didnāt prepare enough capacity for the mint, we definitely anticipated a lot of attention. We tried 3 things basically to fix:
1/ Scale up the cloud infrastructure
2/ We assume itās potentially an RPC issue, so we switched from Inferior to Alchemy and at that point we realised that Alchemy was not working, and thatās why there was 45 minutes of the minting not working then I decided to fall back to the original RPC
Every step improved a little bit, but didnāt move the needle.
3/ So we started looking into the logs and we realised there were some small fixes to be made to minimise the load to the API. After 12 hours we basically fixed that and the minting experience was smooth.
Thatās the whole story. No one wants this to happen, we definitely want to take full ownership. Itās not an excuse, but I wanted to explain in terms of full transparency what happened. This is the whole story. Definitely not ideal, but at the same time, I want to be here and take full ownership of this.
Welcome all the MocaFam, you have been amazing. We got messages like āI canāt mint right now, Iām sweeping from secondary to support the MocaFamā. I almost cried seeing everyone supporting us.
Weāve been planning this the whole time, working with Eiman. ThirdWeb is a very legit company and we have been working closely together for the past 6 months and theyāre invested by Mark Cuban and Gary V, all star investors so thatās great. Really appreciate that!
Eiman, not sure if you want to talk about our journey? Eiman stayed up until 3 or 4 am working on this, so just want to show our appreciation to you Eiman on this as well.
Eiman
Thanks Tyler itās great to be here actually. We started 6 months ago, I was always looking forward to this time. In terms of introduction. My nameās Eiman, I lead solutions and success at Thirdweb. Iāve been working in the web3 space with some of the biggest names and some of the most prominent drops, so Iāve seen a lot when it comes to web3 and different projects and unique characteristics.
But this, the idea of the Moca drop was put together ā it was amazing, very unique mechanics, everything from A-Z. To create this world on-chain and in the metaverse, the idea of the Tribes, really making it so that people can in an on-chain sense be a part and claim their Realm in the Mocaverse via that Tribe was super fun to be a part of and then obviously this week ā I want to reiterate what you mentioned Tyler. Iām a visual person and I would summarise everything you said by saying we built this highway, and we also built some checkpoints into that highway. We wanted to make sure we could maintain fairness, maintain the mechanics, make sure it was secure. For those of you who have participated in other NFT drops are familiar with the way folks have been able to manipulate or attack from the outside or be able to mint things they shouldnāt have been able to on chain. So the collective team with Animoca, we spent a lot of time dotting our Is, crossing our Ts, making sure we had the right checks in place.
Unfortunately, during the live mint and with the volume itās like we had a bit of a traffic jam. Now weāre in a situation where weāre doing our best together to identify the issues, resolve them in a deliberate way. The aeroplane has already taken off, we need to make sure that if we fix something, we do it in a way that protects all those aspects we were talking about.
Super excited to be here. Want to say Tyler for me, when we were in the thick of it, during the heat of the moment, still to see Moca being number one or number two trending on OpenSea and even today I checked, seeing that excitement around the project bodes very well and Iām super excited to see what the next phase of Moca is.
Tyler
For sure. The traffic jam analogy is really vivid. We tried to expand the lanes on the freeway, we tried to increase the horsepower of the car. But again, I take full ownership of this. Me as a decision make taking full ownership. We take the learnings, there are a lot of them. It was definitely a unique mining experience, not just about your fingers or how many times you click the button ā the whole design was supposed to be very unique.
Again, showing appreciation to all the community. Especially to Creedo as well. She has been on the stage for 5ā6 hours on the stage answering questions. Everyone was asking questions, frustrated, so we really appreciate Creedo addressing the concernsā¦ oh actually it was 13 hoursā¦ There were a lot of core community members coming up to help out addressing concerns as well so thatās amazing. Big claps to Creedo, sheās been amazing.
Welcome everyone. Itās been a bumpy but exciting journey. Thereās a lot of things we can look forward to.
Weāve talked about our vision quite a lot. In terms of what we envisage the reach of Animoca Brands network. We want to emphasise that Animoca Brands has 400+ portfolio companies and the network is not limited there so with our reach ā itās not just our portfolio companies.
If you listened to our AMAs, I did one with the co-founder of Polygon, Sandeep, I did one with Nansen, and Amazon. All of these are to articulate how big the reach should be with Mocaverse.
The value of holding Mocaverse is really, if you think about the network effect being entirely accrued to one collection. Animoca Brands is fully behind and supporting in terms of resources. We will announce more later, but itās going to be exciting news, very interesting. Weāre going to stretch the limit of things that no one has ever done before.
Our vision in the next 3 months, we have that vision in mind, and we will share it very soon. We are making small adjustments in terms of visuals. How do we actually leverage this network effect and bring different interactive and engaging experiences across applications and having the layer on top (Mocaverse) to fully leverage and utilise the portfolio companies we have. The companies we have reached and that will provide reach are massive.
Half of our portfolio is gaming companies, and another half is gaming, sports, music and all of that. Even healthcare and education. We have different reach.
Not sure if youāve been paying attention to who is minting: Kevin Rose, founder of Proof minted, the founder of Axie minted, and Machi Big Brother. There are a bunch of really big names that are holders. Imagine how big a network effect these people can bring to the Mocaverse. For example Dingaling has been the biggest supporter since day 1. He bought 900 tickets for example. All amazing supporters that we appreciate. There are even more big names that we will share later. Justin Sun for example as well. Lots of people are supporting the project. All our ambassadors are big names too: founder of Axie, Alexander, weāve been talking day to day.
So actually to look ahead. We were sponsoring a trip to LA ā the first winners couldnāt go due to VISA issues. But it will be a cool IRL experience. Really cool exclusive dinner with celebrities, with Yat, and myself. I will be speaking with Yuga Labs, Cool Cats. And itās just going to be an amazing experience to meet people IRL. I hope the person coming to LA to have dinner with us, having a good conversation will be spreading the gospel and bringing this back to the community. Being a representative. Thereās a lot that will be coming out soon. In the next 2 weeks weāll be announcing a lot.
Appreciate all the patience.
Before questions, I want to talk about fairness in terms of how we design the randomisation. There is a way for you to check your Tribe right now. You can call an on chain function to know what tribe your NFT falls under. In terms of fairness we know which range of tokenality falls under which tribe, but we donāt know exactly the rarity, the traits of each NFT. The reason being we want to maintain fairness. But also within the same Tribe, there is a true randomisation process. Even the team wouldnāt be able to guess or be deterministic about which exact metadata or JPEG youāre going to get. How this works ā when we review, there will be a truly random number that would become offset basically to randomise the token ID and the metadata mapping. That is the true randomisation process. I hope you guys love it. It will be interesting to see what you get at the end. The tribe once itās defined thatās it. Within the Tribe, the actual NFT youāre getting is being randomised.
Community Member ā Prima
We were so excited leading into it and not to put more salt into wounds ā it was tough for the community and the NFT space is so often not forgiving in terms of stuff like this. It was amazing to see how resilient the community was going into this, and how you guys responded, and how Creedo was always available on stage. It was pretty incredible.
The questions are ā my first ā is how do you think the community reacted and responded to the issue during this mint period?
Tyler
Definitely frustrating. If I put myself in your shoes, I would be frustrated. In the peak, the first 5 hours, we got 2 million API requests which is crazy. At the same time we understand why people are pushing the F5 button and refreshing and clicking the mint button and trying to make it work.
There was also community feedback via DM ā ātake your time, fix it, make things work, we understand how frustrated the team is working around the clockā and people supporting on secondary. Itās been a bumpy ride and I understand frustration from the community but we also appreciate the support here.
Prima
Iāve been a part of many mints, and it was interesting to see how much resilience the community had, and how much conviction we have in you, and how much we trust you and the network effect, and the resources you have, and the vision ā it shows a lot of strength. Having a strong foundational community is so key in this space, and this has strengthened us and thatās beautiful.
The next question: The Wormhole. Initially I thought it was burning the Mocas, as thatās what wormholes or black holes do. But we donāt want to kill Mocas apparently lol, so what will you say is the benefits for putting these Mocas in the Treasury vs burning them. Talk about why you chose to do that.
Tyler
Initially we had a plan to have 2000ā3000 in the Treasury. Based on the fact that some people would forget, or not paid mint, or make some error. And we didnāt want to over allocate, and we wanted to give as much as possible to the community, Realm Ticket Holders, and active members. And thatās why we reduced our guaranteed Treasury to 888 instead of 2ā3000, and gave everyone a window to mint as many as they want. If they forgot and didnāt come in during that window then we would mint those to the Treasury. Itās really just to balance the fact that we donāt want to over allocate. But also at the same time how much do we actually need in the Treasury? We will actually leave it to community hands on how much Treasury we would have. If everyone remembered to come in, everyone from Realm Tickets and everyone paid mint, weād have only had 888 in the Treasury. So thatās the beauty of the design ā basically, not deterministic, weāre not centralising these decisions, and not over allocating. Weāre respecting the community. You canāt imagine how much the team has to actually brainstorm in terms of whatās the best way to give the most to the community ā giving them the maximum allocation without over allocation, so everyone gets to mint.
How do we use the Treasury? In terms of Animoca Brandās growth plan, our projection is going to be investing in lots of portfolio companies. For example you see a port-co founder tweeting about them minting ā theyāre going to give back to the community with their allocation. Weāre going to work with hundreds of companies and in the future when we invest in the company, the treasury will be used in that way.
Right now, we have reduced the supply, but at the same time, we can make sure that whoever we bring into the ecosystem, theyāre only going to bring more value to the ecosystem ā so thatās the reason why the wormhole exists.
Prima
A little bit more about the post-mint experience. Is there more to it than the NFT LA trip, is there other stuff you can talk about in regards to that?
Tyler
We actually planned already a couple of months ago for the first experience. And thatās just the first taste. So we are definitely experimenting with different types of experiences we want to bring to you. Iām flying to Japan a week from now ā I canāt disclose who Iām meeting. But the experience weāre going to bring here is to learn, to do good, and to play together with the game portfolio we have.
The first experience is planned and will be implemented. We launched the NFT LA experience so you didnāt have to wait. We have been seeing each otherās JPEGs for a long time, it will be amazing to actually see peopleās faces and then to actually get people to meet with the core team and with Yat, and different industry thought leaders in real life.
Thatās the first, and we have different events coming up that will be pretty exclusive in New York and Hong Kong so weāre super excited for it.
Prima
Iāve been trying to manifest that trip for a very long time now so Iām very excited and Iām definitely going to LA whether I win or not.
One final question if you have time: A lot of people are listening in today and I think you know ā what can the community, holders, and investors expect in terms of roadmap, utilities coming forward in the future ā give us a sense of whatās to come if possibleā¦
Tyler
I can say there are 2 key things:
1/ Mocaverse holders are going to get access to portfolio companies and all the experiences. The experiences will be synergetic ā they wonāt be one off experiences. Thatās one.
2/ Second is the resources that will be put behind. We will announce these in a week or so.
Iām not concerned about the utility and the experiences, support, and resources ā that is not an issue to Animoca Brands. What we are concerned about is how we can connect all the dots together so that the experience isnāt going off in one direction and then chop chop chop and people are confused about what we represent, what is our brand, what do we stand for, what are our principles.
Every day we want to live and breathe our principles, and every action and experience is going to reflect this. That is very important to me personally, and important to the team. This is the biggest challenge.
Also our branding and storytelling ā the lore of the collection ā understand our principles ā what do we say no to?
Prima
Thank you so much for answering the questions Tyler, I appreciate you.
Tyler
Appreciate you Prima, you have done a lot so really really appreciate it.
Mason, Lena, all of these, Cheng, Kiko, these are all great community members ā I cannot express greater gratitude to the community as a whole ā we wouldnāt be here without community support. It has been amazing.
Community Member
A lot of membership NFTs ā BAYC projects ā I believe a lot of holders would like to know how Mocaverse differs from other membership NFT projects.
Tyler
Other membership NFTs donāt have the reach or the connection or the network like us. Sandbox is a subsidiary and we own a majority. We have been talking to Sebastian on a day to day basis, we already confirmed the collaboration and what Sandbox is going to contribute to the pool (I canāt say too much). Sandbox has committed in terms of what the experience could be and what the community can get from it. There are almost 100 companies who proactively reached out to us and said āwe want to do this with you, this is how we can help, this is how we can contribute to the communityā. There are upcoming mints across portfolio companies and all of these will add value. Iām not concerned about the value we can bring. People who can do the membership NFT like us would be two types of company: 1/ is finance, and we donāt think theyāre going to launch an NFT, and 2/ blockchains. But chains are going to be biassed towards the chain, and Animoca Brands advocate for chain agnostic. We have projects on flow, we have projects on Polygon, we have projects on Immutable, on Solana, on Ethereum, and we are just chain agnostic and the reach is not limited by chain, and our reach is hundreds of companies.
Community Member
Another question ā Animoca Brands is currently operating in Hong Kong ā in the future I believe the roadmap partnership with other projects there is some potential issue with regulators ā Hong Kong ā how do Mocaverse projects deal with this?
Tyler
Animoca Brands has been one of the biggest advisors to the FSC and the Hong Kong government so even the advice letter to the government, we were the author of it. We did a layer zero hacker house in HK and the government came to be the speaker (the HK monetary association) head of that came to talk and say how supportive theyād be of Animoca Brands and the web3 industry so we think probably people underestimate the influence of Animoca Brands ā not saying we want to be centralised or leverage our influence, but what we are saying is using our influence to do the right thing for the web3 community. We have been proactively advising the government on what the right thing to do is. The recent effort from the HK government ā definitely one of the big influences is from Animoca Brands.
Community Member
Thank you, that is all of my questions.
Creedo
Some members where concerned about not being able to go through the āsend to realmā function, and whether or not it will impact the trait of their Mocas. Tyler can you tell us more about that easter egg function?
Tyler
That part wouldnāt affect the benefits or traits or value youāre getting from your NFT. Itās really a way for us to do a survey to understand what people are interested in. Itās almost a DAO vote in terms of what the first experience we should launch.
Based on the data ā itās pretty equal. The winner is Play Realm though. Interesting to see the data. We know some people pick the pack of items in the luggage and they skip the process. We checked the data though ā every wallet, we tracked the items that you picked so donāt worry. Once you come back again, itās already captured your database, so the Tribe is already recorded. The Tribe is already locked down in the database.
One point on the Treasury: Not all of it will be used to onboard new partners. This is an ecosystem play, and a platform to bring on new partners, so the Treasury will definitely be instrumental to add value, not a zero sum game, and adding additional value to the Mocaverse ecosystem. Part of it will be allocated to the DAO, and youāll all have an opportunity to decide how to allocate those allocations in the Treasury to different people and different companies.
Community Member
My question is about the DAO. I want to ask for example like a partner project like Sandbox, and Yuga Labs ā can you explain the governance of Animoca Brands ā what will their involvement with Mocaverse be?
Tyler
In the next few days there will be an announcement from Animoca Brands about the Mocaverse. Everyone will be comfortable with that announcement and weāre not worried about the resources.
I saw some comments on twitter about a cash grab. But if we wanted it to be a cash grab, it wouldnāt be a free mint and a paid mint, it wouldnāt be 0.13 ETH. We will be reinvesting everything that we have in the community, and at the same time weāll put additional resources to put behind projects as well.
Community Member
Perfect ā looking forward to the announcement!
Tyler
There were 5 categories of people eligible for mint. One is investors (for example Tiger Global Ventures, Sequoia) ā those are AB investors and they deserve allocation. Second is portfolio companies ā we have 400 port-cos, 200 submitted their wallet. Theyāre not just getting it and selling it. They distribute to the community, to the diamond hand holders to reward the community for their support. Imagine 300 companies being a part of the ecosystem. Third is employees ā we have 1000 globally. 150 in HQ in HK. France, Latin America, France, US ā subsidiary employees all eligible for mint. The 4th category is partners. ThirdWeb is very impactful and sticks with us, showing appreciation to them ā they are one of the partners that kept the mint. No debate about this. Fourth is people who won from Realm Tickets ā dropped to holders of Animoca Brands NFTs and Tokens and Yuga Labs and Cool Cats holders ā they are our investees and part of the family. We went through 3 randomisation processes for the winners. We saw that some forgot to come which is a shame. We also distributed to active members, being active, posting memes, posting suggestions. Everyone on the allocation well deserved it.
Internally at Animoca Brands, they forgot to register, and we couldnāt even add them to the list! If you missed the registration, we canāt do it for you. It was fair ā even if you were an employee and you forgot the whitelist, we couldnāt add you to it.
Community Member
Iām a degen ā any whitelist for other partner projects?
Tyler
We will have whitelist for multiple projects. There will be different mechanisms to shortlist Mocaverse holders to get eligible for those whitelists. But donāt want to distract everyone from the core value of Mocaverse which is interoperability and cross-platform experience. Whitelist is great for the community, but at the same time I donāt want to over index on that, despite it being important. Thatās true direct financial value weāre bringing to the holders, but at the same time I donāt want everyone to only focus on that.
Community Member
If you donāt own a Mocaverse NFT, how can you participate?
Thatās exactly why Realm Tickets exist. In terms of Mocaverse holders, itās going to be very limited in terms of how we scale the community. Realm Tickets right now we have 120,000. Thinking about how we decentralise and scale the community with the Realm Tickets is going to be very important. So basically the Realm Tickets will be the way to be part of experiences if you donāt own a Mocaverse NFT.
This is a gesture weāre not hiding from the minting experience.
We did a rank of who clicked the mint button the most, and weāll be rewarding the 3 wallets that clicked the mint button the most so you can raise the mouse so you have a better clicking experience next time you mint.
The max mint button clicker ā they bought the NFTs and never sold them. Diamond Hands.
There will be a mechanism where you need to own to participate in certain types of experiences. We will announce in a couple of weeks what will be required, and diamond hands will definitely be rewarded in a good way.
Creedo
Tyler can you share the latest Alpha for the community?
Tyler
Youāve put me on the spot here. I would say there will be a launch of experience where this community can influence a vote significant enough to make an influence, but not enough to be centralised, of another major community and I think you need to think about the implication of that and we can talk more about it. It will make two families even more tight together ā we are already super tight, but this will make it even more tight.
Outro
Thank you so much. I love you all. We can co-create amazing stuff. Just imagine the network and the reach is at your disposal. One community can make a vote together to make things happen. That is the ethos of the Mocaverse. Eventually, we want the Mocaverse to be self owned, self operated, self run, but that takes some time, so looking forward to building together!
Thank you Creedo, Thanks everyone.
Thank you!
ā End of Transcript ā
About Mocaverse
Mocaverse is an ambitious project by Animoca Brands that aims to bring together the companyās portfolio projects, subsidiaries, joint ventures, and partners through a unique NFT collection. Mocaverse features 8,888 Mocas, which are NFT profile pictures (PFPs) that serve as a membership pass for Animoca Brands team members, investors, partners, and certain token holders. The goal of Mocaverse is to unite the Web3 community through shared purpose and values by allowing holders to exchange ideas, learn, connect, play games, and build the future of Web3.
Follow us on:
Website: https://www.mocaverse.xyz/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MocaverseNFT
Medium: https://medium.com/mocaverse
