Metaverse Duckpaper

Introduction

Waves Ducks started as a game with creative rounds where players from the Waves community competed against each other and earned EGG tokens. The token had virtually no value other than the proof of merit among other players.

Now, Waves Ducks is an economic game. There are ~100 EGGs issued every day, and each player’s task is to get their maximum share. This can be done in different ways: participating in Duck Wars, investing in collective farms, or creating your own farm. The EGG influx into the economy from rounds is still there, but the current amount is insignificant.

Here are the Waves Ducks’ current stats:

- over 10 million battles in 4 months since the launch of Duck Wars,

- more than 100,000 players have engaged in battles at least once,

- over 19,000 ducks created,

- more than 2000 people own at least one duck,

- 16 collective farms created, with about 80,000 participants who hold their share tokens.

With time, Waves Ducks is going to transcend its original game status to become an entire metaverse. This document represents our vision of this metaverse and the future development of Waves Ducks.

What is the metaverse?

We see the metaverse as an alternative to our physical plane. The precursor of the metaverse was the game called Second Life, which offered to live a virtual life in addition to your real one. The metaverse connects different virtual worlds where you can spend your time and enhance experiences within each one of them.

The metaverse should offer the same range of possibilities as the reality:

- digital identity, the distinction between players

- a variety of earning options,

- leisure and entertainment diversity,

- communication between players, the interaction with a person, not a device,

- connection to the real world, especially when it comes to economics.

The key feature of the metaverse is a broad variety of engaging experiences, as well as worlds, planets, and other places where you can do different things. Users are not stuck with a single game mechanic, like in World of Warcraft, EVE Online, or Lineage.

In the metaverse, all interactions are purely between users. There is no centralized decision-making entity that can change the rules on the fly, like in conventional games. All interaction protocols are stored on a blockchain and open to all users, who can be 100% sure that no external forces are affecting the game environment.

In the near future, many people may choose to actually live in the metaverse, akin to The Matrix, only occasionally stepping out into the real world. An essential driver for the imminent rise of metaverses is the rapid development of VR. Games will rival both movie theaters and amusement parks: people will be able to have a much more compelling experience with just VR glasses at home. And there will be no constraints of the real physical world.

This is the kind of metaverse Waves Ducks is going to be.

Waves Ducks as a metaverse

In the Waves Ducks metaverse, it’s all about NFT ducks. Duck owners gain an advantage over other players, and the level of privilege depends on how rare, unique, and high-ranking the duck is. Rarer ducks also generate higher income in farming, which is essentially a production of new EGG tokens.

The variety of activities and economic strategies distinguishes the metaverse from ordinary games. You can already have fun in Duck Wars, MetaRace, and in the future, expect to see the 3D shooting and arcade games pitting guilds against each other. We actively cooperate with game studios to create new games involving ducks.

Play-to-Earn mechanics have an important role in the metaverse. Earning money in games and providing services to other players will be an alternative to having a regular job, not labor-wise but income-wise.

To bring this concept of a duck metaverse to life, we plan to make the following adjustments in the coming months.

Metaverse gateway

The Waves Ducks website will be completely overhauled. Duck owners and those wishing to have ducks will be able to try all sorts of entertainment, ways to earn money and compete with other players. The site will feature all the activities in the metaverse: Duck Wars, MetaRace, Breeding, and many more. The site will also become a marketplace, a catalog of benefits for duck and duckling owners. This will be implemented during January-February 2022.

The user interface will evolve to eliminate barriers for new players, including those completely new to blockchain technology. The home page has already been redesigned, and onboarding is on the way.

To attract users from other blockchain ecosystems, we will also add MetaMask integration.

These changes are due before the end of February 2022.

Monetization for game developers

An essential factor in the metaverse development is offering earning opportunities for the third-party creators of new games and mechanics. Each game creator can deploy their own smart contract. Duck owners will send ducks to this smart contract to participate in the game. The smart contract, in turn, will be able to send these ducks to farming to produce EGG tokens. This way, the game creator will be able to generate income from the attracted ducks.

Let’s say you want your duck to become available in MetaRace. First, you will have to buy a denim suit and a truck, and then send the duck to the MetaRace contract. The MetaRace contract automatically sends the duck to farming. EGGs generated by this duck go to the MetaRace smart contract, not the player who owns the duck. The MetaRace team will be able to utilize those EGG tokens as they see fit: either for organizing tournaments, buying back the RACE token, or sustaining their work.

Ducks with a higher rarity bring more EGG in farming, so the creators are incentivized to have as many rare ducks as possible transferred to their games. This motivates game developers not just to use ducks in the game, but to implement advanced game mechanics dealing with a chance to win according to rarity. With such mechanics, rare duck owners will be more willing to send them into games, leaving fewer of them simply farming.

Additionally, it is proposed to allocate 50,000 EGG in grants to attract new projects and teams. The grants can be used both for marketing and game development. Grants will be given in advance under transparent conditions: the recipients will be required to publish reports and release the game. If the game is not released or does not attract the agreed number of ducks, the team must return all EGG received. Also, games will get free perches for the ducks sent to their smart contract. Each game will be able to receive up to 1,000 perches. See [EGG tokenomics](#egg-tokenomics) below for more details on the EGG distribution.

The variety of ways to spend time in the metaverse is extremely important. So if you want to create a game for ducks or ducklings, the Waves Ducks team is open to discussing all possible scenarios and ways to help with your idea in the duck metaverse.

The first game to receive support from Waves Ducks will be announced by the end of January 2022. And by the end of 2022, the Waves Ducks team expects to have at least 5 different games in the metaverse.

Duck Wars transformation

Right now, Duck Wars is the main play mode in Waves Ducks, but in the future, it will become just one of many ways to have fun, earn or spend EGG in the metaverse. The game will become much more diverse and entertaining, with many new cards and their use options, as well as more vivid graphics. Duck Wars will also get a new interface in March 2022.

Ducks Wars is meant to evolve from card battles between two ducklings into a full-on war of the guilds (collective farms). Guilds will fight each other for resources, such as ducks, ducklings, artefacts, or land.

For example, guild A can declare war on guild B, and guild B will be defending for a week. The more players of the guild take part in the battles, the higher its chances of winning. If guild A wins, that is, more players win more battles, then guild A gets to take a certain resource from guild B.

Land gives a guild extra protection: the more lands a guild has, the easier it is to defend and the fewer players will be needed to repel an attack.

Guild managers will seek to attract players to fight on their side. Guilds with poor recruitment efforts will eventually be eliminated by other guilds with more active communities.

Guild wars will appear before May 2022.

Duckling growing service

There will be a service of growing ducklings on demand. Players will be able to earn by playing Duck Wars and raising a duckling for a fee. The customer can be either a collective farm or another player who wants to join the duck owners and receive privileges.

Governance

As mentioned above, there should be no centralized decision-making entity in the metaverse. All of the major decisions in Waves Ducks will be made by the EGG token holders via voting.

Voting will be implemented on principles similar to Curve. In order to vote for a particular decision, it will be necessary to block EGG tokens. The longer the chosen blocking period, the more voting weight tokens will receive. The maximum blocking period can be 2 years, with tokens counting at a weight of 24 when blocking for that period (numbers may be adjusted.)

Decentralized decision-making will be primarily dealing with economic parameters. For example, the following parameters can be set through governance:

- The amount of EGG to be released and distributed through farming in the next year,

- the formula multipliers for calculating the cost of hatching a new duck in the incubator,

- marketplace commission,

- the price and number of loot boxes, and so on.

Voting for multipliers and economic parameters of games through EGG will be launched in March 2022.

Later on, decision-making through governance will spread to all new features and mechanics in the game. In this way, control over the parameters of the surrounding world in the metaverse will be fully transferred to EGG token holders. It is also possible that the right to vote will be given to duck owners as another privilege, factoring in the rarity of these ducks.

EGG tokenomics

EGG is the main currency in the Waves Ducks metaverse, and one of the important aspects of the EGG development. As a new utility, we will introduce EGG staking.

EGG staking will give participants a number of benefits, including:

- Increased odds of acquiring loot boxes. Right now, it is first come, first served. We plan to have oversubscription sales: those who want to buy loot boxes pay a deposit in EGG, and the loot boxes are distributed among them randomly, with the probability increasing proportionally to the amount of EGG in staking.

- Increased probability of getting the best artefacts in the loot boxes.

- Reduced commissions on the marketplace. Commission for the seller will be calculated dynamically depending on the amount of EGG in staking. It may range from 5 to 10%.

In addition, we propose the following changes to EGG tokenomics:

- Reduce the total number of EGGs from 1 million to 300,000. In the first eight months of the project’s existence, only 80,000 EGGs were distributed to users through farming and rounds. The majority of these tokens were distributed among users within the first rounds, after which the rate of token distribution greatly decreased. Therefore, burning about 700,000 EGG will make EGG supply and market capitalization clearer and more predictable. In the future, if necessary, we will be able to issue more tokens.

- Allocate 50,000 out of 300,000 EGG to third-party games.

- Give the team 45,000 EGG (15% of the total supply) with a vesting period of 2 years from the date of publication of this document. The team that creates the metaverse needs to be expanded and encouraged.

- Change the number of EGGs generated by ducks in farming in June 2022. However, we expect this change to be made by the duck owners and EGG holders themselves, rather than dictated by us as the development team. Therefore, the change in farming parameters remains outside the scope of this document.

- Increase the marketplace commission from 5% to 10%.

An important factor in increasing EGG liquidity is getting into new blockchains. Thanks to Waves.Exchange, EGG gateways in Ethereum, Polygon, and Binance Smart Chain have emerged. A portion of EGG will be used to launch liquidity pools in the largest decentralized exchanges of such blockchains as QuickSwap, Pancake, Uniswap, and so on. The pools are scheduled to launch in January-March 2022. A big marketing effort will be to spread the word about the EGG token in the respective blockchain communities.

Сross-chain NFTs

Right now, all ducks are on the Waves blockchain and can only be sold on the internal Waves Ducks marketplace. Soon, the interface of Waves Ducks will include a selection of marketplaces where you can place a duck for sale. It is also planned to add third-party marketplaces such as Rarible and OpenSea. It is expected to have a full-fledged integration with Rarible, so that it would be possible to trade Waves-based tokens on this marketplace, including NFT tokens.

Furthermore, NFTs can be transferred to the Ethereum network as ERC-721 tokens and traded on any platform supporting this standard, primarily on OpenSea. Initially, the plan is to use a centralized backend to transfer the ducks, and only transfer special, super-unique ducks. The user will lock the duck to a Waves smart contract by paying a fee to issue an ERC-721 token, and the corresponding smart contract on the Ethereum network will display the duck as an ERC-721 token on OpenSea (or simply transfer to the Ethereum address specified by the user). In the future, instead of a centralized backend, we plan to create a decentralized gateway for NFTs to be transferred from one network to another.

Conclusion

The Waves Ducks team has extremely ambitious goals of turning the game into a metaverse with a massive variety of games in the next six months. Each game can have its own economy, as well as an economy built entirely on EGG. The EGG token will become the main currency that binds all of these games together, similar to the US Dollar acting as the world currency with each country having its own national currency.

This document reflects the team’s current priorities, but the dates are subject to change. We plan to release an update to this document in March 2022.

Remember to join the Waves Ducks group and subscribe to the Waves Duck’s Twitter!