WAIFU Token Roadmap Update
It’s been a while since our last Medium update and we have been working diligently to grow our network of creative partners, engage with the wider community on Twitter, and become more visible in the crypto space and beyond! We’ve exploded to new highs on every metric, yet we are confident this is only the beginning. There are a few important questions we have been asking ourselves and discussing with the wider NFT community in light of an explosion in the space of digital collectibles. It seems we are on the brink of a mainstream movement but it’s important to consider the “why?” for WAIFU Token and our growing catalog of content.
What gives NFTs their value? Why should any user care about a protocol focused on anime gifs? Why is the ERC-20 WAIF necessary when users could simply deposit ETH or a stablecoin pair LP to farm HAREM?
Below is an outline for our roadmap thru Q3 2021. After many months of planning, development, and improvements to our platform we think WAIFU is ready to take the big step and begin building out our full WAIFU 2.0 experience complete with more opportunities to claim your own unique WAIF, an artist marketplace, updated tokenomics for WAIF and our HAREM farm, an entirely new twist on staking NFTs, and a host of other developments bound to bring in even the most discerning weebs and investors! Let’s dig in.
BIG PLANS
Our NFTs have started to catch the eyes of serious collectors as shown by recent market prices. Both primary sales through auctions and the secondary volume for our HAREM NFTs have surpassed our wildest expectations for a NFT series that is only three months old. We have hitched ourselves with some promising creative partners who are able to turn our dream characters into animated reality! We believe that the value behind WAIFU lies not in the prices of our non-fungibles but the relationships and community that surround it. Our list of partners is growing rapidly and, as always, we are so excited to show off the next drop and spill the beans on our future collaborations being planned for the next month.
As we thought about the ERC-20 token and it’s role in an ecosystem centered around anime portraits and high quality digital works that can potentially live forever as tokens in the Metaverse, it was obvious that $WAIF itself represents your piece of something bigger than just a contract with NFTs made from links to .mp4 files and a neatly constructed database.js index. WAIFU is much more of a curatorial platform that seeks to reward its users (we consider you major stakeholders). Not only does $WAIF function as the utility token to earn points and claim the latest content for yourself, it’s also become a bit of a hybrid between a fan and governance token. Of course, the community is showing their support for our creators and our vision while reaping the rewards for tokenized fanship. On the other hand, we’re now seeing some interesting possibilities for folks who want to use their tokens to have more of a voice in the platform to help influence the future of development and content curation. As WAIFU matures into an actual marketplace for exclusive anime content from the best talent we can attract we will be implementing new ways to use WAIF to show your support for certain artists, vote for proposed additions to our collection, and even lock it up for an extended period and get a pretty damn sweet bonus on your personal HAREM emissions.
Our long term goal is to build a platform for everybody who is interested in anime collectability for NFTs, physical products, and even subscriptions or commission engagements with artists that are denominated in familiar fiat terms. Much like NBA Topshots, WAIFU will be a USD-denominated experience with support for credit card payments! Anybody with a smart wallet and USDT, ETH or WAIF may transact on our marketplace for a frictionless, non-custodial experience. In the future we hope to enable for gas-less transactions that still use blockchain for the back-end storage and transfer of NFTs.
What specifically are we changing in the short term before the full update is ready to roll out?
MISSION CRITICAL
Here are a few of the urgent items we are looking to roll out or improve on in the next two weeks.
— Remove the barrier for entry
One problem we keep encountering is the mandatory web3 hook to view our gallery on nft.waifutoken.io. Folks without Metamask or any other browser-based wallet cannot see the beautiful content we’ve created, so we are removing this requirement ASAP before we deploy the new website. We want to make it easy for users unfamiliar with cryptocurrency!
— Fiat on-ramp
New users who are not part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem are always the hardest to onboard. We will be deploying a widget for purchasing ETH (or others) using a credit or debit card. While this will be a simple on-ramp at first, we hope to hook it into our HAREM farm as well as NFT gallery in the near future. This means there will be a simple one-click way to deploy fiat into the WAIFU ecosystem! All you will need is a valid credit card and an Ethereum wallet.
— Physical merch
To kick off our COLLAB series we’ve forged an awesome partnership with @Sushinobi_nft and @SaltSeaCake — both of whom are talented digital artists with a track record of stunning work. Our first two drops were a massive hit, selling out within seconds each time. You can look forward to a new NFT drop featuring one of their original characters paired with a 3D file for home printing and tinkering each Wednesday from here on out!
In addition, we have just begun selectively releasing more AAVE Dakimakura NFTs out on to the market. Currently 5 have been airdropped to random addresses which were staking LP tokens with any amount of HAREM in their wallet. 2 more units went to some very generous bidders on Opensea, while there are 5 remaining to claim on our NFT site for a cool 5,000 HAREM. Please be patient while we set up our redemption portal! We will have an update on this later in the week. All 69 pillows are currently en route to our hub in Canada where each piece will be hand packaged and sent out to the lucky collectors who choose to redeem their token for a physical item! Remember — as each pillow is claimed and turned into the actual dakimakura, that corresponding NFT is forever removed from the supply. We expect there to be a number of diehard pillow fans who will NEVER sell! This is healthy and encouraged. You can look forward to more dakimakura NFT giveaways from this series and another one we are currently dreaming up.
We are also looking into simple ways for users to order high quality glossy prints of NFTs they currently own!
— NFT 2.0
Releasing this next week in cooperation with @ChargedParticles to show off a system that we have implemented with their help. There are some important distinctions between how their NFT “charge” works and our WAIFU 2.0 tech, but between their initial framework and some clever customizations from The Arcadia Group we have a truly unique solution for how to create an interest-bearing pool attached to whichever NFT we desire under our upcoming Gacha Collection. Stay tuned for an announcement on the drop with Charged Particles and we will have more information about the technical underpinnings of NFT 2.0!
— WAIFBASE dApp Redeployment
The WAIFBASE dApp has an interesting history and was a creation of one of our earliest developers. Originally anybody who held 10K WAIF in their Ethereum wallet could access our WAIFBASE and browse a large collection of memes. This was a fun idea implemented many months ago but was not redeployed with our new website we launched back in December. We’ve discovered wallets can HAREM to exchange in return for access to high-resolution meme downloads, and there is a way for everybody to upload their own .jpegs and .gifs. Whatever you have found on Twitter or anything that was shared in our chats is fair game! We will be looking for other ways to give HAREM utility, but this will be an interesting experiment to see if we can encourage a more robust staking economy and gamify a non-transferrable token vis-a-vis community-produced content.
— Mobile support for staking
We know you’ve asked and we will get this done! Not all users are able to successfully stake and claim HAREM on our nft.waifutoken.io portal yet. This is a lower priority at the moment since the majority of wallets are on desktop, but we want to provide the same experience for all mobile users in the future. Stay tuned for this!
— BSC Integrations for HAREM
While we were excited to deploy a much cheaper pool for people concerned about gas fees, we ran into a snag using the Burgerswap bridge. Currently the team is waiting on an official response from the Burgerswap team on missing $WAIF that has been sent to their contract without the commensurate bWAIF available for claim on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) side. We have discussed this internally and are looking towards another option we can endorse as a safe alternative. As of now there is no ETA on lost funds and they require you to fill out a form pinned in their Telegram channel with information about your transaction.
In the meantime we are waiting on approval to be listed on https://bridge.poly.network/ and two other bridge dApps to convert WAIF on the Ethereum chain to BSC. As soon as we can confirm there is a safe and reliable route to do this we will commence with our LP reward program for this trading pair! Let us know if you have a recommendation for a smooth bridge dApp to move across chains!
But despite all of this, our Pancake swap bWAIF-BNB pair is live and you are invited to swap for super low gas fees! Stay tuned for news on HAREM farming and how this process will work between ETH and BSC.
Q2 goals
Our bigger goals will take a bit longer, but we are focusing on hitting all of these notes in Q2, 2021.
— Rebuild our experience from the ground up
We are currently in the design stage for a scalable UI/UX which will provide users a more streamlined experience on our nft.waifutoken.io site. Whether you’re looking for more of a gallery experience for viewing your WAIFU NFTs, or you’re simply trying to stake with fewer transactions or view HAREM farm metrics, this upcoming NFT platform should give you plenty to tell your friends about.
— Card packs
We will be releasing a number of card packs as part of our Q2 content schedule. In total we are aiming to double the amount of current NFTs currently available at a significantly lower claim price (denominated in ETH or WAIF) so more users are able to grab one of our collectibles without spending a fortune on an auction or locking their funds up for weeks at a time. This new collection will feature a mix of valuable heirloom pieces collateralized with LP tokens and nearly a dozen common-level WAIFUs that are animated and similar in quality to what we currently offer for farmable NFTs.
— HAREM 2.0
Designing solutions to tokenomic problems in an experimental economy with little data to draw on is always tough. When we first launched the HAREM NFT farm $WAIF was a fraction of the cost today and the user demographics were entirely different. Not only were people able to meet the max size for staking pools while prices still felt relatively fair and unrestrictive, there was a greater sense of long term commitment to the NFT drop cycle because we simply had not established a rhythm for releasing new content. Today our users are much more focused on the competition for earning the next drop and we find many wallets moving in and out of WAIF on a biweekly basis. This is suboptimal and we have re-imagined how HAREM is rewarded to participants who either want to stake 1) WAIF, 2) LP, 3) NFTs, 4) LP WITHIN their NFTs, and 5) all of the above. By implementing diminishing rewards we give smaller wallets a better chance at establishing a base emissions rate which can be modified by several bonuses we identified as a relatively fair way to reward NFT holders and liquidity providers.
Improved farm contracts that feature curved emissions with diminishing rewards past a stake size of 2.5M. Users who wish to stake longer will receive a modifier on their staking rewards while being able to claim and spend their HAREM balance at any time. An improved and streamlined staking experience will allow new users to simply deposit ETH and earn the maximum amount of HAREM rewards. In turn, we hope we will be able to deploy some of the funds that are collected on NFT resales and market fees from LP tokens in a manner that rewards everyone who is helping provide liquidity on our Uniswap pair. Not to get too excited, but we think actual platform dividends paid back in ETH would be a very cool thing to do.
Most importantly we will eliminate the “scramble” or “gas war” to claim the most recent drop as soon as the transaction is posted. A lottery style system for drops will prevent this manic crush to claim. Wallets must have a predetermined number of HAREM in their wallet to participate in individual lottery pools for new HAREM NFTs.
— WAIF TOKEN 2.0
An overhaul of our ERC-20 token includes better governance functions, actual rewards with fan token incentives, new ways to earn WAIF as yield, and a deflationary tokeonomic structure that takes a small percentage of each transaction and adds it to our liquidity pool. The redeployed WAIF v2.0 will be suited to better meet the long term needs of WAIFU learning from the best projects in DeFi as well as the specific needs of a grassroots cryptocurrency built for long term NFT value generation. This subject is worth it’s own long explainer on how we can maintain seemingly contradictory promises such as an increased supply of WAIF while keeping the circulating total deflationary. We will touch on this more in the coming months but this is a large undertaking and is slated for the end of Q2.
In the meantime…
There’s a lot more on the immediate horizon! We have three great COLLAB drops coming up in the next few weeks and some new partnerships to announce related to our art catalog. The Sushinobi x SSC 3D piece will be released on Rarible this Wednesday, March 24th and our next HAREM NFT drop will be on Monday, March 29th. We sure hope you have been farming because that’s only a week from now!
If you didn’t notice, our Japanese Telegram (https://t.me/waifujapanese) is also up and running and we are beginning to expand our presence in Asia. The meme contest is going strong for another 5 days and each winner has earned their 5,000 $WAIF prize from their quality contributions. You will probably see it all on WAIFBASE soon, anyway.
Are you an artist looking to introduce yourself and partner with us? Please show us your stuff along with a short bio at art@waifutoken.io. Don’t be shy, anon, we’re just looking for some new friends! There is also an upcoming art contest that we will be hosting with some great cash prizes. We cant wait to share all the details!
xoxo,
The WAIFU Project
