Aavegotchi — Telegram QUIZ & AMA — January 25
On Monday, January 25, we had the pleasure to welcome to our Telegram chat:
Jesse Johnson, Co-Creator.
We asked them questions about the development of Aavegotchi.
Some sentences have been slightly edited for readability but the meaning has been conserved.
Summary
Aavegotchi is a DeFi-enabled crypto-collectibles game developed that allows players to stake NFT avatars with interest-generating aTokens and interact with the Aavegotchi metaverse. It is a unique combination of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and NFTs.
Aavegotchis are pixelated ghosts living on the Ethereum blockchain, backed by the ERC-721 standard. Their value is determined by rarity level, which is calculated via multiple factors, such as base traits, amount of staked collateral/aTokens, and equipped wearables.
Aavegotchi was launched on Matic Network. Aavegotchi was able to preserve the UX that most DApp users are used to with MetaMask to introduce a smoother, far superior experience.
Rarity farming rewards players for discovering and developing rare Aavegotchi. Raising Aavegotchis and equipping them with powerful wearables can lead to GHST token rewards as your Aavegotchi climbs the leaderboard. Rarity Farming will distribute over 500,000 GHST tokens.
Introduction
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: What did you do before crypto and did you have any other previous venture in crypto? What is your role at Aavegotchi?
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi: I’ve been working with NFTs for the past few years. I co-founded Mintable.app, the very first place you could go to mint your own NFT.
Before that, I was working for ZB Group, China’s largest digital asset exchange group. I was immediately inspired after attending Consensus NYC where an acquaintance paid for his lunch by transferring me a CryptoKitty!
Leaving exchanges to go all-in on NFT products made a lot of sense as this is the ground floor of “digital property”. I do not doubt that NFT products will grow into a household name taking on many forms in the coming years.
Mintable was the obvious low-hanging fruit and I also had the pleasure to visit GAINS last year when I was building Bullionix.io. Bullionx was the first project to stake ERC20 tokens to specific ERC721 NFTs.
This project’s unique escrow contracts have done a lot to help push my team’s understanding of what’s possible and served as a proof of concept for the big enchilada: Aavegotchi!!
Product
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: What is the project about in a few simple sentences? For how long has the team been working on Aavegotchi?
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi: Aavegotchis are pixelated ghosts living on the blockchain, staked with specific amounts of Aave’s yield generating tokens. So in a way, an Aavegotchi is like a digital piggy bank that earns more interest than your real-life bank!
The thing is they also have a TON of randomly generated, 100% on-chain features such as personality traits, kinship scores, and more to make the gamification of your web3 avatar complete!
We’ve been working on Aavegotchi since early summer of 2020. It was indeed a natural outgrowth of the technologies we were already pushing with Bullionix. Working with DeFi and yield generating elements allowed us to push this project to new exciting places.
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: I love these images and the look of your website. You don’t have the conventional website of the average crypto project out there. What is the inspiration behind these?
A — Coderdan from Aavegotchi: Nostalgiaaaa, future funk, NES, and Tamagotchis. We even have chiptune music! (click the play button). You can read more about the project and team at our community-created wiki.
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi: We have an awesome lead designer and OG crypto artist in Xavier.
Q — Twitter user @Shekwoyemii: Would there be a need for more team members and ambassadors and also what can token holders earn? Are they any provisions for staking?
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi: We have a fast-growing team and an ambassadors program that now covers over half a dozen countries and languages including French, Korean, Vietnamese, German, and more.
Staking GHST is a major part of the Aavegotchi experience. We have had 3 amazing NFT Raffles so far. To join a raffle, you need to stake GHST to make FRENS points. These points convert to raffle tickets.
Each raffle event uses Chainlink’s random number generator to distribute exclusive themed wearables you can’t buy in our shop.
Here are the wearables staking GHST would win you for Raffle 2. The AAVE themed set.
You see, an Aavegotchi has NFTs on top of NFTs, each wearable is an ERC1155 NFT itself.
Your goal here is to climb the leaderboards and improve your rarity score, rare Aavegotchi + rare wearables. Farming NFTs by staking GHST is a great way to achieve that!
A — Coderdan from Aavegotchi: Many of our rarest wearables were selling for $4000, $5000 on Opensea!
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi:
Here are the classic Marc Zeller wearables set.
Q — Twitter user @CryptoMatvey: Why did Aavegotchi choose Matic for Layer 2 solution? What are your expectations after the launch of Matic and what new features will be available to the community?
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi: Exactly, no AWS servers. (a dirty secret for most NFT projects). All our pixel art is stored on-chain.
Matic was a great choice because we’re able to preserve the UX that most DApp users are used to with MetaMask etc. Instead of sacrificing and gaining more friction, we introduce a smoother, far superior experience.
We have over 7000 members in our Discord and they are moving over to Matic day by day. I’ve yet to hear of a disgruntled user. Everyone gets over there and is like “Oh God! This is how it used to be!”
QuickSwap is a gas-less, fast version of UniSwap. Already, 4.5 million GHST have migrated to Matic. Our community is having a blast on the Matic side so far.
If you already have a MetaMask, you need to try it out
Unlike other L2s, Matic has explicitly engaged with NFTs and Blockchain Gaming. Over 70 projects are building there and even OpenSea, the main NFT marketplace, is launching a Matic version in Q1 this year. After the last week on QuickSwap.exchange, it pains me to use Uniswap. Joining our MATIC migration from Jan 29 — Feb 12 also gets you the opportunity to be a Quickswap LP with 1000 QUICK tokens per day as QUICK-GHST rewards. This is 10x their usual 100 or even 50 QUICK pools.
Doesn’t hurt that QUICK has more than 10x’d recently. It’s a microcap embracing more liquidity from projects like ours.
A — Coderdan from Aavegotchi: You can see when our migration started 😛
Q — Twitter user @Ontortk: I’m a gamer. Why should a player enter Aavegotchi? And Why do you think blockchain games are better than traditional games?
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi: That’s because we’re obsessed with exploring why blockchains games can swallow a huge section of the mass market. Play to earn is a model you will be hearing more and more about. We’re pushing it to the Nth degree.
Rarity Farming is a big piece of our Play-to-Earn model. A few weeks after our Aavegotchi launch on Matic, we will begin Season 1 of Rarity Farming.
Rarity Farming will distribute over 500,000 GHST tokens (worth more than 280k USD today). This will take place over 8 weeks (four two week rounds). These massive rewards are allocated to the most active Aavegotchis across three categories: “Rarity Score”, “Kinship Score” and “XP Score.”
Rarity is the biggest and involves opening portals, and summoning ultra-rare Aavegotchis. Then equipping them with the best matching wearables
Kinship is cool too, unlike my crypto kitties gathering dust in my wallet. We incentivize you to interact frequently with your Aavegotchi.
Every on-chain interaction you do (changing clothes, playing a mini-game, or simply petting) will earn you a plus 1 point to your kinship score.
You can gain a point every 12 hours whereas a full 24 hours of neglect will result in a -1 hit against your kinship score.
XP is great because you can earn experience points for voting in the DAO or attending our awesome online parties (usually on Discord). These rewards come from our tokenomics model that redistributes 40% of portal and wearables sales revenue to our most active players. To balance this, a 33% burn of GHST revenue is also instituted.
We think these are some of the reasons people will love blockchain gaming.
Q — Telegram user Gonzales — The Dabbing Penguin: Where can users interact, buy and sell Aavegotchi NFT? Will your NFT be available on OpenSea?
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi: Our NFT raffle tickets and wearable vouchers are already trading on OpenSea. Some are fetching very high amounts! Find them here.
Q — Telegram user Vlasov: I started playing Axie too late. Are there any advantages to starting now at Aavegotchi?
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi: Axie Infinity is another great game by a team that shares our values. They have done a lot for play to earn, but if you’re looking to get in early to play and earn, Aavegotchi is going very big with the rewards structure. I think taking the time to read our wiki and learn to add Matic Network to your MetaMask are well worth the potential return. Season 1 Rarity Farming will start shortly after our Aavegotchi portals arrive this February.
Team
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: How many people are on the team?
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi: We have 8 full time and are quickly expanding! We’re hiring more game designers and solidity developers right now. We also have an army of active leaders in Discord where our AavegotchiDAO conversation is happening.
This fall Aave joined our friends and family round to take an equity position in our dev house, Pixelcraft Studios.
Partners
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: Why did you choose Aave? And is their team involved in your project in any way?
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi: Coder Dan participated in the ETH Global Hackathon last year and they were the lead sponsor. His Yield Hero project ended up winning a top spot in the event and he got to work directly with Aave’s leadership.
From there, it made sense to pitch them our “sequel” idea to Bullionix with some very specific Aave inspired twists.
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: Is there any special reason behind choosing Matic?
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi: We looked at all the L2 options available including Xdai and the likes and found Matic has everything we need.
MetaMask compatibility is huge and their recent Meta Transactions mean even less friction.
Dan and the team just completed our first meta transaction.
It means you can interact with our DApp on Matic but you don’t need to spend any MATIC tokens to do so.
Finance
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: Did you raise funds so far? If so, how did you handle them? Are you planning to do any future raises?
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi: Yes, the only equity raise so far was the early entry of Aave.
In September, we launched our DAICO (DAO+ICO) inspired by Vitalik himself. This is a superior version of a typical ICO in that the funds raised are secured by a bonding curve’s smart contract.
Only a very small percentage is streamed to the dev team over time. This keeps us responsible to our token holders as GHST holders can vote to increase or decrease our funding at any time.
The DAICO is an AMM that functions with one DAI/GHST pair. The DAI stays in the curves’ contract as collateral supporting our token’s price. GHST has been trading on over a dozen exchanges and can be viewed on CoinGecko, CMC, etc., and is finding a lot of liquidity on the NFT friendly layer 2: Matic Network.
We have a slew of incentives for anyone who helps bridge GHST from Ethereum to Matic between Jan 29-Feb 12.
100k USD worth of farming rewards that come 50/50 in GHST and MATIC tokens. Those fees were just enacted by the DAO and will help fund their soon to be hefty treasury.
If anyone wants to participate, that farmer's almanac has been published and has everything you need to know.
A — Coderdan from Aavegotchi: Notably, our DAO (composed of all the GHST holders) just voted to add 0.3% fees to buying and selling on the curve. Those fees are revenue for the DAO treasury! There’s been over $90,000,000 worth of volume on our bonding curve since it launched in September.
In addition to these rewards, there will also be 1000 QUICK tokens distributed to GHST-QUICK LPs every day for up to 14 days. Currently, 1 QUICK is going for $20 with quite a decent volume. So about $20,000 in QUICK rewards per day for up to 14 days.
Q — Telegram user V Λ C U U M: How do my NFT tokens retain their value over time? Is there a deflation mechanism inside Aavegotchi, such as buyback and burn? Is there an NFT limit for every object in Aavegotchi?
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi: The first “Haunt” of Aavegotchi includes 10,000 Portals.
Each portal can summon only 1 Aavegotchi. Any future Haunts will require a vote by the DAO and may have distinct features or metadata.
For comparison, Crypto Punks is a wildly successful NFT collection that also has only 10k created. One of theirs just made headlines selling for $270,000!
Q — Telegram user Fatih Arslan: What economic strategies does Aavegotchi use so that its currency does not depreciate and always maintains its value?
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi: We have a very special tokenomics where there is no cap on GHST. Instead, GHST tokens are minted and burned dynamically by the bonding curve
When you put DAI tokens in, the bonding curve mints more GHST and sells at a higher price. When you sell GHST back to the curve you get DAI and the GHST is burned. This dynamic supply is very healthy for the long term sustainability of our token and our Aavegotchi economy.
Business Development
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: What stage is the project at? How far along are you concerning your roadmap and what should we expect in the coming months?
A — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi: We are mere weeks away from the first generation of Aavegotchi being released! Expect a release date somewhere in early to mid-February. We’ll have an exact date soon.
We were going to release the first generation of Aavegotchis on Jan 4. The Ethereum network clogged and we realized instead of doing a “two-step”. We’d just go straight to launching on Matic right out the gate.
We’re launch-ready. Simply waiting on Chainlink to confirm their VRF oracle is working on Matic. That’s a random number generator that’s part of our fun. When you open a portal, you see ten Aavegotchi randomly generated. From those ten Aavegothci, you can summon 1 to keep. The other 9 disappear forever.
To summon it, you will stake a certain amount of Aave’s aTokens. On Ethereum, that would be another expensive transaction but on Matic, it’s free and fast!
This was a big week in that we opened a user-friendly bridge to Matic for GHST and USDC and also completed the first-ever Layer 2 bridge for Aave’s aTokens.On Matic, they have square icons and are called maTokens. Aave is supporting the effort and providing initial aToken liquidity on Matic!
Do have a look at https://aavegotchi.com/bridge
A — Coderdan from Aavegotchi: You’ll be able to get maTokens for your Aavegotchi on Matic natively. You won’t have to send them from Ethereum (unless you want a LOT to stake in your Aavegotchi pet). DeFi is moving to Layer 2. There are so many great opportunities on L2.
It was a pleasure having you join our community today Jesse and Coderdan! It was great learning more about Aavegotchi and the amazing stuff you are doing with NFTs. Anything else you’d like to say? Where can we follow you? — Ayeley from GAINS
Thank you for having us. You can follow us to get more updates on: Aavegotchi Wiki, Website, Telegram, Discord and Twitter — Jesse Johnson from Aavegotchi
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