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  • Islander IDE x XAVA Airdrop: Initial Distribution Event

    Islander IDE x XAVA Airdrop: Initial Distribution Event

    Despite the advantages and intrinsic fairness of life in a decentralized world, good information is fragmented and even the best projects can be passed over if they don’t get needed attention from jump.

    As anyone who has attempted to navigate the landscape of crypto can attest, messaging is spread far and wide. For those seeking even the most basic knowledge, there are endless social media outlets espousing the virtues of their favorite chain, project or technology. Ordinary people can find it overwhelming and often resign themselves to being exposed to a mere glimpse of what is out there.

    For marketers, it is similarly problematic. Even the most qualified are often siloed and entirely left to their own devices as they labor to reach an overwhelmed audience. There are just too many flags planted in the ground and not enough cooperation and cohesion in the message. Islander has set out to change this through the creation of the ISA token paired with a rather inventive “learn-to-earn” model.


    The Reveal

    This is a project that is a long time coming; having been forged over the course of many months through friendship and a basic desire to make the space better. For Avalaunch as a platform, we have noted the genuine strides Islander has made in recent months—from both a business and technical perspective. Their raise overall is modest as it is a grassroots projects so initially, despite our relationship and support, we wondered if an IDO would be possible.

    Not wanting to raise more than what they need, a boutique style offering was created for the Avalaunch community totaling $300,000 USD worth of ISA. We thought it might be a great time to show appreciation and support for the community as well as the Islander initiative and purchase this allocation for our second IDE (Initial Distribution Event).

    To that end, the Islander public sale has been purchased by Avalaunch and will be distributed at no cost to our devoted community through our second IDE (Initial Distribution Event). The IDE will operate similarly to our IDOs, minus any costs to the participant.

    But wait…there’s more!

    In addition to the Islander allocation, Avalaunch will be adding $300,000 USD worth of XAVA to the IDE, bringing the total up to $600,000 of pooled assets.


    Overview

    At its core, Islander is a decentralized affiliate marketing program that is powered by NFTs and intent upon revolutionizing the legacy affiliate model via its learn-to-earn mechanics. Central to this proposition is the native token Islander (“ISA”), which serves multiple purposes:

    • To help projects discover, grow and maintain an audience of bonafide supporters.
    • Allow key opinion leaders the opportunity to leverage their combined marketing power and earn.
    • Create earning opportunities for content creators.

    Additionally Islander provides:

    • Intuitive toolkits for users to manage multiple projects
    • Full support for developers
    • Wallets, plugins and management apps
    • A payment gateway platform

    A permissionless, share and earn proposition that is powered by NFTs could represent a boon for crypto projects, content creators, marketers and enthusiasts alike. If there ever was a grassroots, community-driven project building on Avalanche, this may well be it. The Islander team is driven and spirited. Their raise is modest in size but their ambitions are by no means small.


    Islander — Links & Team

    Website| Telegram (Announcement)| Twitter |Medium


    Partners and Backers:

    Naturally, a project that aims to aggregate content creators, key opinion leaders and the litany of qualitative contributors to the crypto ecosystem, it stands to reason that those they are working with is a good indicator of their development.

    Their list of Avalanche ecosystem partners and backers is also considerable:

    “Avalaunch has always been our most trusted partner from Day 1 of this journey. We are very happy to finally work with Mark, Dave and the team not only in this IDO, but also in many other activities in the future. Islander and Avalaunch both value honesty and integrity and these shared values will undoubtedly ensure a long-term partnership between us,” states Viet Anh Tran, Founder and CEO of Islander.


    Final Thoughts

    The idea of aggregating marketing power and community is not lost on us—we are, after all, only as good as our community and the projects they embrace. Islander has come a long way in a relatively short period of time as evidenced by the inroads they have made in the Avalanche community along with some notable fundamental progress. Having had the fortune of knowing them for many months, they have matured to the point where we feel they are ready for launch.


    Funding Numbers:

    • Seed: 770M ISA at .0005 USD — $385,000 USD
    • Private: 1.05B ISA at .001 USD — $1,050,000 USD
    • Public Sale: 200M ISA at .0015 — $300,000 USD

    Total Raise: $1,735,000 USD


    Supply — Breakdown & Vesting:

    Total Supply: 15,000,000,000 ISA

    • Ecosystem: 4.5 B ISA (30%)
    • Staking Rewards: 2.25B ISA (15%)
    • Team and Advisory: 2.25B ISA (15%)
    • Marketing & Partnerships: 1.715B ISA (11.43%)
    • Liquidity Provision: 15,000,000 ISA (10%)
    • Private Sale: 1.05B ISA (7%)
    • Seed Sale: 770M ISA (5.13%)
    • Content Creators: 750M ISA (5%)
    • Avalaunch: 200M ISA (1.33%)
    • Testnet Airdrop: 15M ISA (0.1%)

    Total of 99.99% resulting from rounding


    Vesting Following TGE:

    • Ecosystem: 30-day cliff, monthly vesting for 60 months
    • Staking Rewards: 30-day cliff, monthly vesting for 40 months
    • Team and Advisory: 12-month cliff, monthly vesting for 20 months
    • Marketing and Partnerships: 3% at TGE, monthly for 32 months
    • Liquidity Provision: 600K at TGE (2-sided), discretionary Unlock*
    • Private Sale: 10% at TGE, 60-day cliff, monthly for 18 months
    • Seed: 5% at TGE, 3 month-cliff, 24 months vesting
    • Content Creators: 3% at TGE, monthly for 32 months
    • Avalaunch IDO: 50% Unlocked at TGE, weekly for 4 weeks
    • Testnet Airdrop: 100% unlocked

    *Following TGE, the liquidity unlocks are discretionary as their overall listing plans are not yet fully finalized.


    Other:

    • Initial Circulating Supply: 332.45M ISA (excluding liquidity tokens)
    • Initial Market Cap: 498,675 USD (excluding liquidity tokens)
    • Initial Liquidity: 600K total—300K ISA and 300K USD of AVAX
    • 100% of the sale will go to community stakers of XAVA

    Recap

    • Total ISA: 200M ISA
    • 100% will go to the community stakers of XAVA
    • Size: $300,000 purchased by Avalaunch
    • Vesting — 50% Unlocked, weekly distributions for 4 weeks

    Islander IDE Instructions

    As this sale is unique, the steps to participate will look slightly different than our regular IDOs.

    1. Registration

    You will register for the IDE as normal during the registration period. You will still need the 1 AVAX deposit, which will be returned to you during the claim process.

    2. Sale

    There will not be a validator or staking round where you purchase your allocation. To be eligible for your ISA and XAVA allocation, all you need to do is register with your stake or validator as normal.

    3. Redemption

    We will deploy a claim card on our airdrop page for you to claim your allocation, instead of you needing to purchase it during the sale. This means you don’t need AVAX to purchase or deal with gas fees during the IDE.

    4. Redemption Details

    When the claim card is live, you will be able to claim your allocated ISA, XAVA and 1 AVAX deposit in one single transaction.


    The Islander IDE on Avalaunch

    • 200M ISA (Total Supply: 15B ISA)
    • Purchased and distributed by Avalaunch

    Registration Schedule:

    • Registration Opens: January 2nd at 3:00 p.m. (UTC)
    • Registration Closes: January 5th at 6:00 a.m. (UTC)

    Claiming Schedule:

    • Claiming Goes Live: January 7th 6:00 a.m. (UTC)

    The XAVA Airdrop on Avalaunch

    Those who register and participate in the Islander IDE will also receive an equal dollar amount worth of XAVA.

    • 300K USD worth of XAVA at market value
    • Price to be determined after registration closes and prior to the beginning of the claiming round
  • Imperium Empires AMA #2 — Technical Deep-Dive with Cliff Yung, CEO (Recap)

    Imperium Empires AMA #2 — Technical Deep-Dive with Cliff Yung, CEO (Recap)

    On 12/19/2021 at 10:00 p.m. (PST), an AMA session was held on Avalaunch with special guest Cliff Yung , CEO. Imperium Empires. Below we present to you an excerpt from AMA with questions and answers.


    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Hello and welcome everyone to the sequel of our most epic AMA with Imperium Empires. This Part II will be more of a technical deep dive and we are fortunate to have Cliff Yung aka @darksoulrepo, one of the Co-Founders of Imperium with us here today. Cliff, before we get started, we appreciate you joining us today. How are you doing?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    Doing great! thanks for hosting me, and a big thanks for our supporters who registered for our IDO!

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Indeed Sir. Let us not wait as our community is eager to know some more about Imperium.

    To begin- Imperium Empire sets out for a new era of blockchain gaming — a challenging feat indeed, but let’s start from the beginning. To help everyone get a full picture, why don’t we start with you telling us about yourself. What did your education and experience look like before you transitioned into a full-time role on the blockchain?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    Sure, before I went into crypto, I used to be a corporate finance lawyer, and have worked with a few top tier international law firms. But I’ve always been interested in new technologies, so when I first heard about bitcoin, ethereum and smart contracts around 2016, I spent a lot of time looking into crypto, and was fascinated as to the impact that it can make!

    I finally got into crypto in 2017 as a crypto lawyer, helping projects do ICOs, and also helping crypto funds with regulatory compliance when they trade cryptos.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Well personally, I’m glad to hear you got out of corporate finance and joined the movement

    Next question — With such high-level mechanics and something as demanding as building a metaverse. How long has Imperium been in production for? What sets of technical difficulties did you encounter and have these challenges changed the direction of the project?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    Yes there’s a lot of work to do, and we’ve been working on it over the past 6 months — starting with the game design, which we are able to map out the most important parts early to ensure the execution is smooth.

    I guess a lot of people will think that the biggest challenge will be the graphics, but that’s actually not the case. Since our team is highly experience in building high-quality games, AAA-quality graphics for blockchain games is pretty easy for us to do.

    The most difficult part is in fact the backend infrastructure. Since Imperium is a MMO game that will potentially attract hundreds of thousands of players, we need to make sure that the game servers are robust enough to handle that traffic, while at the same time cater for the low-latency requirements needed for our players in South East Asia.

    So far we’re sticking to the direction we originally envisaged!

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    The team is impressive to be sure. You have onboarded a genuine all-star cast. Global MMO backend sound a little scary. Kudos to sticking with the vision. With all the trends, it can be easy to stray.

    Imperium Empire is built by pioneers with years of experience and vast pedigrees in blockchain and game development. How did a team as strong as this come together, and unify their vision into this metaverse project?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    Great question — to do a project of this scale and complexity, it’s rly about building a talented team.

    We started to build the team since early this year. Having met with hundreds of people, I finally found the best devs and marketing team who are capable of doing a project like Imperium.

    We currently have a team of 40, including an experienced in-house game development team led by our lead game developer and art director — he has 12+ years game development experience, having led the development of 8 games across PC/mobile/console with 7m+ total players.

    As for our blockchain and back-end game server dev team, we have a few senior blockchain and full-stack developers — each of them used to work with Animoca Brands’ parent co. and has 15–20+ years experience building and maintaining game servers, and working with smart contracts.

    One of our product managers also used to work as a business development and product manager with Tencent, the largest gaming company in the world, covering extremely popular titles such as League of Legends — he’s helping us to curate the go-to-market strategies for the different segments of our player base as well.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Yeah, the 40 number came up the last time. It’s a layer 1 size group so I’m now upgrading it to an all-star “ensemble” cast. It is well layered to across disciplines so kudos for that. Moving along — With integrations of NFTs and DeFi solutions, what set of challenges do you envision to encounter and what measures have you taken or you think will be required to take in order to tackle them?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    The biggest challenge we will probably encounter, is how we can make the DeFi integration into the Imperium metaverse seamless, from a UI/UX perspective.

    The key to successful partnerships with top DeFi protocols like BENQI, is being able to let our gamers enjoy the benefits of DeFi without needing to learn concepts like TVL, liquidity mining, yield farming, etc.

    So our game designer team and UI/UX team are working closely together to look at (i) games that feature a thriving in-game currencies economy; and (ii) how businesses in the non-crypto world are able to provide better UX for their customers through digital transformation. So we can put these together when we design the UI/UX of how players will be interacting with the DeFi protocols in game.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    As a Metaverse project, how immersive will the experience be? In addition to land and spaceship sales, what other actions will gamers be able to perform? Can you talk to us about the guild tournaments and how these will power the ecosystem?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    So Imperium Empires is a 3rd person, real time strategy, massive multiplayer online space game. Every player controls a fleet of spaceships in a vast metaverse, mine resources, build and expand their empires, and compete with other guilds to take control of territories in the metaverse.

    So we pioneered the Team-to-Earn mechanics that bonds players together in a guild. Playing Imperium Empires becomes a fun and social gameplay experience, which means players will be much more sticky with our game in the long term, because they have personal connections with other guild members.

    The guild tournaments will work this — each guild will need to buy or lease a piece of land sector in the safe zone, build structures to support guild members (e.g. spaceship docs and hangers, material collection points, etc.). Guild members can also stake IME tokens to upgrade the guild technology level. Upgraded guilds can hold more guild members and have more powerful structures on their lands.

    So guild members will venture out into the combat zone and war zone to take control of the territories there, as well as battling with other players.

    Guilds will compete in seasons — top guilds will be rewarded with lucrative play-to-earn rewards based on a range of factors (e.g. the most regions and landmarks occupied, kill count, etc.).

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    That’s an @mleotan level answer. He must be proud. 😁 This is super informative and helpful as you can sense the layered quality to the game.

    Very cool so anyone taking a closer look at the Imperium gamefy metaverse will realise that its core is rather complex. Can you give us a high-level overview of the core mechanics that define the Imperium Empire?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    Yes — the core mechanics evolve around two things — PvP battles and guilds.

    For the PvP battle system, what is unique about it is that NFTs like spaceships and spaceship components can be destroyed in battles. This leads to natural deflationary tokenomics and NFT supply directly related to the Imperium gameplay.

    Players who destroy other players’ spaceships or spaceship components in the combat zone and war zone, will also be able to loot the destroyed spaceships for components.

    As for the guilds system — I’ve given a brief overview above, the key is to enable players to compete in teams which is way more exciting than 1-to-1 PvP gameplay!

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    The vision as the world’s first AAA GameFi 2.0 is solid with not many people daring to even dream of, but it is clear the team at Imperium took the time to devise features, rivalry to the most popular blockchain games of this time. Can you describe how these features enable Imperium Empire to become unique even among niche games like Axie Infinity or Illuvium?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    Yes, we are not just another AAA-quality blockchain game. In fact, Imperium is the world’s first metaverse that has the following features:

    1. Deflationary tokenomics: most GameFis have a hyperinflationary NFT mint mechanism, even Axie — the supply of NFTs scales exponentially with the number of players. So without a NFT burn mechanism to balance the supply growth, the supply always outgrows the number of new players coming in, reducing the rarity of the NFTs minted.

    Therefore, to solve this problem and as explained above, core to our game design is a deflationary PvP battle system where NFTs owned by players (e.g. spaceships) can be damaged, disabled or destroyed, along with the looting mechanisms

    2. Seamless DeFi integration by Gamifying DeFi: many GameFis fail to live up to their promise of the “Fi” part, with limited DeFi integration except for simple staking. We take a completely different approach by seamlessly integrating DeFi throughout our whole metaverse — whether as part of the core gameplay, or NFT drops. The partnership with BENQI we explained above is a good example of this.

    3. Guild based gameplay: As explained before, gaming is now more like a social experience with your friends than playing the game itself. And given the huge number of players playing blockchain games (e.g. Axie Infinity has 2 million active players), it makes perfect sense for a blockchain game to be an MMO game like ours, so having a well calibrated guild system is a must. Guild based gameplay is also highly beneficial to the players, as the saying goes: team-to-earn, more returns!

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    I take back what I said earlier. This is a Leo level answer! Thank you for that. It’s enlightening.

    Speaking of a unique position in the blockchain and gaming market, can you share any insights into where the deal flow for the gamers is coming from?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    Sure! Our main target market will be South East Asia, where many blockchain gamers are currently in. In fact, not just the blockchain gamers, but also the huge population of gamers in the SEA region.

    So our marketing team is very experienced in SEA — I’m sure you all have met our CMO Leo — he’s a native Filipino who has a huge network of influencers in both the Philippines and Thailand (50%+ of Axie’s players are based in the Philippines). Many of his connections are well-known celebrities and will help us a lot in terms of hyper-localized marketing.

    And since we are targeting non-crypto native gamers, we’re also in talks with one of the largest gaming and e-sports company in the SEA region to explore partnerships.

    With these strategies, we’re very confident that we will be one of the blockchain games that can bridge the gap between non-crypto native gamers and blockchain games. After all, globally there are 3 billion gamers so the market size is much bigger than existing blockchain gamers!

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    This is cool stuff…Seeing that you’re building on arguably one of the most engaging communities, is there anything you can reveal at this time for the more savvy audience about the alpha testing programmed?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    We’re working very hard to build a gameplay demo, so that we can show the community some gameplay by the end of Q1 2022 — a lot of details are yet to be finalized, but stay tuned for our announcements!

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    We threw you a softball there. 😃 Let’s get back to it — Imperium Empire will essentially be the first metaverse project built on the avalanche network. How hard has it been for the Imperium team to build the first Metaverse project on Avalanche, and what helped the team decide to build on this chain as opposed to other chains?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    We’ve looked at many other protocols, and Avalanche is the only blockchain that fits our needs because of the following 3 reasons:

    1. Close and long term partnership: As one of the few AAA-quality blockchain games in the market, we’re here for the long term and looking to have a close and long-lasting relationship with the blockchain that we build Imperium upon. Out of all protocols that we’ve spoken to, we feel that the Avalanche Foundation offers us a lot of support other than investment, and the Avalanche eco also has a lot of high quality projects that we can partner with and build our community upon.
    2. EVM-compatible: One of our main target market will be South East Asia because a lot of blockchain gamers are based there, and they are so used to tools like Metamask — therefore from a UX perspective, it’s important that we can port blockchain gamers over from other EVM-compatible chains such as BSC to Imperium on Avalanche.
    3. Fast and stable blockchain: As we gradually move our game logic on-chain, there will be more on-chain transactions. Being an MMO game, transaction speed and stability of the protocol are super important for a smooth UX.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Thank you again. Value prop of Avalanche and Imperium in general is very clean.

    What do the long-term goals look like for Imperium? What are your plans for expanding the metaverse, will there be a higher level integration with DeFi or will you focus more on expanding more on the game side?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    Most of our 2022 will be hyper-focused on building out the game — the most important thing for us to do for our community is to get our game ready so they can start playing.

    The DeFi integration will probably come at a later stage after our game release, but of course this can be a moving piece and we’ll closely listen to feedback from our community.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Well done Cliff. To conclude this leg of your journey here…Thank you for this amazing interview, is there anything you would like to share with us today? Are there any specific look-outs you’d like the community to be aware of?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    Sure, you can find more about Imperium Empires in our website and socials, and do join our community below:

    And of course, the next milestone in the short term will be our genesis NFT sales — stay tuned for our announcements!

    Twitter Questions

    @Tomie_chana who asks — What are your roadmap milestones that can retain investors prior to the game launch?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    As explained above, we aim to have a gameplay demo ready to show by Q1 2022. There will also be alpha testing and beta testing of our game staged between Q2 and Q3, prior to the official launch of the game in Q4.

    @muinlyreol— People are worried about transaction speeds and transaction failures. With Imperium Empires does the number of users spike transactions and get congested?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    Great question — our back-end game server is structured in such a way that it can scale as the number of players increases, so we aren’t too worry about a spike in our player base. We also believe that the robustness of the Avalanche blockchain is able to handle any increase in traffic.

    @komando911 asks — Is Imperium Empires planning to use subnet technology?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    We’re currently building on C-chain because we prioritize getting our game out to our community members to start playing. But we’ll also explore the use of subnet in the longer term!

    @chimponzi_jam — Did you consider using any other chains or was Avalanche always in your plans?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    Multi-chain is not on our current roadmap, because we will to take the maximum advantage of the Avalanche community. But we’ll also listen to the community’s feedback to see if multi-chain is also the right fit for our strategies!

    @hasantahsinler — When you designed and conceived of the game, did any other games or movies inspire or influence you?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    Yes, I’ve always been a big fan of RTS games and MMO games, so I’ve always been fascinated by games like EVE Online, World of Warcraft and Travian — where guilds play a vital part to the gameplay!

    Telegram Questions

    Jenny 💎Crypto GIRL Кузнецов

    Metaverse is getting famous because of Facebook’s grand plan to create a great Metaverse. How do you view this? is this a threat or an opportunity? How do you turn this into an advantage for Imperium Empires? What will u do to attract more people to Imperium Empires?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    I think this is a great opportunity — it is quite clear to be that the metaverse that everyone will be in, wont be the closed one created by a centralized company like Facebook, but it will be one that listens and develops alongside with its community. So it’s great that they’ve ignited everyone’s interests in the term metaverse, and help us with onboarding players

    Yogi Yogaswara

    What do you think about Asia market? Is your team planning to reach other countries with potential crypto markets, gaming, etc. do you interested to work and cash in on gaming industry in Asia?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    As explained before, Asia is one of our major market to focus on, because a large population of blockchain gamers are currently based in Asia. But of course, we’ll concurrently develop markets in other regions as well!

    Andre W

    So many games said that they are Play to earn but they all ended with pay to win system because the game required gamers to buy more items to unlock more features and level in the game. What is your opinion about that Mr. @darksoulrepo ? What is the strategy that can ensure Imperium Empires will not ending like this?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    As a RTS game with a well designed guild system, it’s very unlikely that the game will ever be pay-to-win, since it depends on a lot of factors to play the game well — e.g. how to customize ur spaceships to suit what you wanna do in the metaverse, which guild member will be specialized for which roles, etc.

    Janna

    Is Imperium Empires functional for mobile devices? Or are you planning to design an app based on Android & iOS in the future?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    yes, Imperium Empires will be available both on PC and mobile, because we cater for the needs of the huge crypto and non-crypto gamer population in developing countries

    Dmicic Dark

    Can players earn passive income while playing Imperium Empires?

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    there will be a range of PvE and PvP gameplay where players can earn play to earn rewards — and of course the best part will be that you can earn with your friends in a guild — team-to-earn, more returns!

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Congratulations and thank you.

    On a final note — Cliff, both you and Leo have been exceptional guests. Highly thoughtful answers and cleanly shared information. We’re happy to be hosting your IDO and wish you all the success we imagine you having. Very much appreciate your time today and look forward to your launch and beyond!

    Cliff Yung | Imperium

    Thanks for hosting me too! We’re extremely grateful to everyone in the Avalaunch community who supports Imperium Empires — we’ll continue to do our best, and make sure that we deliver on our vision!

  • Imperium AMA #1 — Project Overview with Leo Tan, CMO(Recap)

    Imperium AMA #1 — Project Overview with Leo Tan, CMO(Recap)

    On 12/16/2021 at 10:00 p.m. (PST), an AMA session was held on Avalaunch with special guest Leo Tan, CMO, Imperium Empires. Below we present to you an excerpt from AMA with questions and answers.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Hello and welcome to another riveting discussion on the Avalaunch Telegram. Today, we have an outstanding guest in Leo, one of the co-founders of Imperium Empires. We at Avalaunch are particularly excited about the prospects of AAA gamefi on the Avalanche chain so let’s get started but before I do…how are you doing?

    Leo | Imperium

    Hi everyone! Glad to be here — I’m pretty excited to get this ball rolling!

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    To kickstart the introductions, can you please tell us about your role and briefly touch on your previous experiences prior to joining the blockchain-gaming industry?

    Leo | Imperium

    Definitely! I’m the CMO & Co-Founder of Imperium Empires, but my previous roles were actually spearheading disruptive technology initiatives as a Product Manager; It all started with my stint with Uber as a Brand Ambassador in South East Asia during their first expansion in the region.

    Seeing how this simple idea of “summoning” a vehicle on your command changed the way people move from point A to B sparked my love affair with disruptive technology — from providing last-mile transit solutions to blockchain-based authentication platforms; this life-long thirst for innovation keeps pushing me to go for what’s next, and with blockchain. and the metaverse taking over the space — Imperium Empires is really a no brainer!

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Yeah the Metaverse has gotten some mention recently 😄

    Let’s segue into #2 then — Since the public rebrand announcement of Facebook to Meta, the metaverse became an exciting topic, one that is set out to provide the pillars for the transition between the real world to the blockchain industry. Can you tell us more about the Imperium Empires — what it is, and how it fits in this rapidly expanding ecosystem?

    Leo | Imperium

    Imperium Empires is the world’s first AAA GameFi 2.0 space metaverse. When the world learned about the possibilities of blockchain gaming, NFT assets took the world by storm by introducing true in-game asset ownership — it opened doors to publishers and enthusiasts alike to have their own piece of the metaverse.

    With Imperium Empires, we believe that the pioneer projects who help catapult this phenomenon have only opened doors for projects like us to realize the learnings from their journey and breathe life into what’s next — GameFi 2.0. By having deflationary tokenomics via NFT burns in PvP battles and seamlessly integrating DeFi with Gaming, we are able to unify two very different emerging categories in the blockchain space and provide an avenue to onboard more than 3 billion+ gamers worldwide.

    More importantly, we’re putting a strong emphasis on the social experience of playing games through guild based-gameplay; allowing us to pave way for the new era of a social gaming experience on the blockchain.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Excellent. Thank you for that. “true in-game asset ownership” The potency of this can not be overstated. This is the transference of wealth that is going to change a bit of everything. Deflationary is going to matter in the years to come for sure but you need to onboard users first so….

    By building the world’s first AAA GameFi 2.0 project, which challenges or market needs does Imperium Empire aim to address?

    Leo | Imperium

    We see four major problems in most blockchain games that Imperium Empires will address:

    A. Low-quality graphics and limited gameplay — simply put, there’s no fun playing them;

    B. Hyperinflationary and unsustainable tokenomics — no NFT burn mechanisms, and play-to-earn rewards drain fast as the number of players grows;

    C. Lack of deep DeFi integration — most GameFi projects fail to live up to their promises of the “Fi” part, with limited DeFi use except for simple staking; and

    D. Lack of guild-based gameplay that bonds guild members together and make gaming into a social experience.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    As I understand, Imperium’s vision is to bring together key aspects of the blockchain under one umbrella term known as the Imperium metaverse. One that is able to integrate gaming with DeFi and NFTs. Can you give us a high-level overview of how this flow-model is going to be achieved?

    Leo | Imperium

    The recent rise of GameFi play-to-earn (P2E) games has catapulted DeFi integration into gaming through a gamified interface of DeFi. One reason why DeFi hasnt been able to reach non-crypto natives is because of the learning curve — it is often difficult for a layman to understand concepts like TVL, liquidity mining and yield farming. Therefore Imperium aims to become be a gamified hub of all major DeFi protocols on AVAX, bringing the benefits of DeFi to 3 billion+ gamers over the world. — through our gamified interface, DeFi is seamlessly integrated, so players no longer need to grind through the difficult DeFi concepts.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Gamified interface of DeFi sounds like a definite improvement over stablecoin arbing.

    With the goal of presenting the first AAA GameFi 2.0 project as a disruptor in the blockchain-backed game industry, can you tell us about what the PvE mechanics look like? What about PvP?

    Leo | Imperium

    The Imperium metaverse features a wide variety of PvE and PvP gameplay, where players team-to-earn by joining a guild of friends to conquer the metaverse and build their empires.

    PvE: asteroids mining, materials transport, cooperation missions and more — the majority of the rewards will be in IMC.

    PvP: players compete for seasonal rewards in guild tournaments by taking control of various zones in the Imperium metaverse, destroying and looting other players’ ships — the majority of the rewards will be in IME.

    Our PvP economics is vastly different from most blockchain games in the market. We’ve implemented a NFT burn mechanism that ensures NFT supply and demand is well balanced. What is truly unique about this burn mechanism is that we closely tie it with the thrill of high-stakes PvP battles in the Imperium metaverse — meaning that some NFTs like spaceships will be damaged or destroyed when players voluntarily leave the safe zone in the Imperium metaverse.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    This is way more thoughtful than what we are used to seeing

    but let’s name names for a moment and do a little compare and contrast — There are numerous billion dollar projects such as Axie Infinity and Bloktopia with PvE and PvP mechanics in place. What would you say are the key features that make the Imperium Empire unique? How does Imperium ensure a competitive edge over these already launched and established projects?

    Leo | Imperium

    We are happy that projects like them have paved the way for us to design better game mechanics and tokenomics. We believe we are better than any popular blockchain game in the market because of our following competitive advantages:

    A. Deflationary tokenomics and NFT supply: most GameFis have a hyperinflationary NFT mint mechanism, even Axie — the supply of NFTs scales exponentially with the number of players. So without a NFT burn mechanism to balance the supply growth, the supply always outgrows the number of new players coming in, reducing the rarity of the NFTs minted.

    To solve this problem, core to our game design is a deflationary PvP battle system where NFTs owned by players (e.g. spaceships) can be damaged, disabled or destroyed. The destroyed spaceships can be looted by other players for rewards, so they will earn lucrative play-to-earn rewards by winning the PvP battles (but the lootable value will always be less than the original value of the NFTs — thus deflationary).

    B. Seamless DeFi integration by Gamifying DeFi: we already explained the details before — none of the popular blockchain games in the market know how to merge GameFi with DeFi.

    C. Guild based gameplay: gaming is now more like a social experience with your friends than playing the game itself. And given the huge number of players playing blockchain games (e.g. Axie Infinity has 2 million active players), it makes perfect sense for a blockchain game to be an MMO game like ours, so having a well calibrated guild system is a must. Guild based gameplay is also highly beneficial to the players, because a well played team can earn more than playing alone. As the saying goes: team-to-earn, more returns!

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Wow

    Just taking that all in. We got an A, B and C. Kudos for that answer and all that typing.

    I feel like we should give you a lunch break after that but we are a tireless community so — As a metaverse with a long-term vision, a sustainable ecosystem and implementation of DeFi elements, what partnerships are you looking to secure in the foreseeable future? Have any partnerships been agreed yet?

    Leo | Imperium

    Yes — We’ve already announced partnerships with leading AVAX projects like BENQI and Yield Yak, and of course we’ll explore more partnerships with other DeFi protocols — stay tuned for our announcements!

    Since guilds are central to our gameplay, we’re also discussing partnerships with some of the largest guilds, and listen to their feedback as to how we can perfect our official guild management and scholar management systems.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Look forward to some guild partnership’s!

    Following on from the previous question, what can you tell us about your business plan? Are you actively looking for collaborations with other projects and protocols?

    Leo | Imperium

    To onboard players into Imperium, one of our main target market will be South East Asia, where many blockchain gamers are currently in. In fact, not just the blockchain gamers, but also the huge population of gamers in the SEA region.

    I’m actually a native Filipino and am fortunate to know a huge network of influencers in both the Philippines and Thailand, many of whom are well-known celebrities and will help us a lot in terms of hyper-localised marketing. We observed that 50%+ Axie players are based in the Philippines, and a lot of them have very high engagements on TikTok — in fact we began our TikTok marketing just a few days ago, and engagement is already super high with our contents having 250k+ views.

    And we’re also in talks with one of the largest gaming and e-sports company in the SEA region to explore partnerships, so we can also target non-crypto native gamers.

    As mentioned earlier, we also strive to be a gamified hub of the major DeFi protocols on AVAX — we’ll continue to partner with synergetic protocols and make them become an essential part of the Imperium metaverse — stay tuned for more partnership announcements.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    You’ve definitely got some traction and hype, for lack of a better word. This is a relatively mature project and I would think in something as ambitious in gaming, you have to be underway more than most things. Moving on to the token — Looking at the tokemomics there is a dual token economy at play, one maintained by IME and one by IMC. Can you tell us about the utility of each of these tokens and how they serve the protocol and its users?

    Leo | Imperium

    A. IME is the governance token of Imperium Empires, and it has a capped supply of 10 billion. Players of the Imperium metaverse earn IME by the following ways:

    i. Seasonal tournament rewards: guilds compete with one another in seasons, and those who make to the top leaderboard will be awarded with IME tokens (based on a range of factors, e.g. area of territories occupied, guild members’ kill counts, etc.).

    ii. looting destroyed spaceships: when players destroy spaceships of other players or pirate fleets, they can loot the destroyed spaceships for spaceship components, which can be sold for IME in our official NFT marketplace.

    The utilities of IME will be mainly for: Purchasing NFTs and guild-related staking

    B. IMC is the game-currency token of Imperium Empires, with an uncapped supply to match the growth of players. Players of the Imperium metaverse earn IMC in the following ways:

    i. Selling refined ores: ores mined from asteroids need to be refined in guild owned refineries, after which they can be sold into IMC in the guilds’ star-bases.

    ii. Rewards distributed by guilds: some structures built by guilds are revenue generating (e.g. refineries, star-gates) for the guilds. These rewards can be distributed back to the guild members based on their contribution to the guilds.

    The IMC earned by players will be mainly used for: repairing damaged spaceships and components, paying for guild facilities fees, and contributing IMC to the guilds (that result in a larger share of the rewards distributed by the guilds).

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    You win an award for most thorough and organized answers for an AMA. Truly impressive stuff.

    We have a couple of more before we move on to the good people over on Twitter

    If you were to imagine Imperium past the milestones highlighted in the roadmap, what do you envision the long-term success of the Imperium Empire to look like?

    Leo | Imperium

    Haha, thank you — you’re too kind. In terms of our long term sustainability, as GameFi enters the era of GameFi 2.0, we are looking to onboard millions of players into our Imperium metaverse. A lot of our players may well be part of the 3 billion+ gamers who are mostly non-crypto natives — they will get into blockchain because they want to play our game.

    We also hope that in the long term, Imperium will be more than a blockchain game — we can craft a separate space inside the Imperium metaverse as a venue to host all kinds of events (like all those concerts on Fortnite), where users are here to socialise in addition to playing our game!

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Thank you again — As final thoughts, is there anything else you would like to discuss or are you excited to reveal to the community that we haven’t covered already?

    Leo | Imperium

    We are already building the game, and target to have a game demo ready to show a bit of gameplay towards the end of Q1 2022. Of course, prior to that, we’ll be conducting our public sale (watch out for our announcement on this soon!) and the first batch of NFT sales, along with the launch of our NFT marketplace. The official game launch is currently planned to be Q4 2022. Here’s our trailer and some graphics of our spaceships and character NFTs in case you haven’t seen them before!

    Twitter Questions

    @Starterx13 asks- You mentioned about Gamefi 2.0, what is that? What will that change in game area?

    Leo | Imperium

    GameFi 2.0 is the next evolution of the existing “GameFi 1.0” market — beyond staking, GameFi 2.0 enables real integration of DeFi protocols in-game by gamifying the experience; enabling DeFi protocols to reachout to more than 3 billion gamers worldwide.

    @valtori21 What do you think is the key to a healthier economy in the metaverse compared to other game economies that collapse over time?

    Leo | Imperium

    Deflationary tokenomics and gameplay related NFT burns are extremely important when it comes to sustaining a healthy economy. Most other blockchain games has no NFT-burn mechanisms and an over-emphasis on idle playing PvE rewards (which means the rewards are zero sum games between the project foundation and the players — whatever the players earn, they all come from the project, and the rewards will eventually dry up).

    Therefore our NFT burn mechanisms through high-stakes PvP battles, and allowing players to loot rewards from destroying other players’ spaceships, ensure that NFT supply in Imperium is much more constrained.

    @hugo41618550— What has the team done to make this attractive for beginners or just to make it easy to get started?

    Leo | Imperium

    Our metaverse is divided into three different zones to cater to different types of gamers — the safe zone, combat zone, and the war zone. Of course, even though there are more rewards in the combat zone and war zone, spaceships or components can be destroyed in the combat zone and war zone, so players who just started can stay in the safe zone and perfect their skills first before venturing out into the deep space.

    Of course, we’ll also produce a lot of introductory content like video tutorials to get the beginners started!

    @CengizYakn2 — Can players earn passive income while playing Imperium Empires?

    Leo | Imperium

    As mentioned earlier, you can earn play-to-earn rewards by engaging in various types of PvE and PvP gameplay including asteroids mining, materials transport, cooperation missions, guild battles, etc.

    @jvlassco1980— Will the graphic and game play match today’s expectations, eg like pc an PlayStation games?

    Leo | Imperium

    Yes, our team is very experienced in delivering high-quality games over the past decade. We are currently a team of 40, and we have an experienced in-house game development team led by our lead game developer and art director — he has 12+ years game development experience, having led the development of 8 games across PC/mobile/console with 7m+ total players and peak monthly grossing of US$6m+.

    So we’re very confident that we can deliver high-quality graphics and gameplay that everyone is looking forward to!

    Telegram Questions

    Techa

    The graphic of Imperium Empires is very nice. 👍👍 however

    1. Will there be when there are too many people playing at the same time 🖥or prevent majority of mobile only gamers📱?

    2. And will the game be using too much resources on graphic rather than player REWARDS?🏆

    Leo | Imperium

    great question — we have a very strong gaming server infrastructure team to make sure that we can accomodate a lot of players playing togerther at the same time, using our server meshing technologies — we’re also well aware of challenges associated with potentially unstable internet connections in South East Asia, so we’re also optimize mobile gameplay to be low-latency to ensure a smooth user experience

    Nelda Haller

    Do you have any plans to attract non-crypto investors to #your project Because it is the success of a project to get more investors who are still not in the crypto world. What are the plans to increase awareness around your in non-crypto space?

    Leo | Imperium

    yes — one of our main target market is actually non-crypto natives — you may recall that we mentioned earlier, we believe blockchain games have a much larger market outside of the crypto natives as this is the first blockchain application to reach the mass market.

    That’s way a major part of our marketing strategies, is to partner with tier-1 influencers in SEA outside of the crypto space, to promote our game to layman and traditional gamers, and onboard them into our metaverse

    Nolan Nguyen🥎

    Do the token holders have the right to participate in the governance of the project? What kind of decisions can they vote on about the project?

    Leo | Imperium

    Yes — there will be some key decisions related to our game mechanics that we will allow our community to participate in decision making prior to the official release of our game. We’re well aware how important it is to listen to the feedback of the community, so everyone’s happy at game launch!

    Hoang Bavo

    How many team members do you have? Do they have enough experience in the blockchain field? Do they have any experience on working in crypto and non-crypto project?

    Leo | Imperium

    we’re currently a team of 40, including experienced game developers, game designers, game back-end architects, blockchain developers and marketing professionals — a very well rounded team to ensure the success of the project. You may also recall we mentioned that our game development is all done in-house by our team of experienced Unity developers — they have produced 8 games across all platforms with a total player base of 7m+ (with peak grossing once reached US$6m+ per month)

    Crypto Wiz King — The 🅡ⓗino (alt)

    What are the plans to educate and raise awareness and adoption among the community to make more people understand about the project easily?

    Leo | Imperium

    Yes — you might have noticed that most of our tweets are video contents, which you seldom see in many crypto projects. We are doing this because we have a very high standrd of making easily digestible video contents to intro our project, and make sure that we welcome both crypto-natives and non-crypto natives in our Imperium metaverse.

    We also mentioned before that we’re not just focused on marketing on TG and Twitter (which most crypto projects do), but we’re making use of highly effective traditional marketing channels like Tiktok to reach the broader non-crypto natives — engagement is super high with 250k+ views on our Tiktok just over the past week!

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Leo, it’s been a pleasure and really informative. Kudos for having such well laid out and comprehensive answers. It should give our members something to chew on. We very much appreciate your time @mleotan and look forward to doing our next AMA with Imperium. Thank you.

    Leo | Imperium

    Thank you as well!

    Enjoyed this!

  • Join us in the Avalaunch Telegram group for a Spotlight AMA with the Dexalot team.

    Join us in the Avalaunch Telegram group for a Spotlight AMA with the Dexalot team.

    Join us in the Avalaunch Telegram group for a Spotlight AMA with the Dexalot team.

    The focus of this AMA will be the business development, vision, road map.

    In addition to Avalaunch’s questions, we will be giving the community two opportunities to ask theirs, and we will be rewarding the 10 selected questions with 5 XAVA each, for a total of 50 XAVA in prizes

    Date & Time

    AMA Contest Rules

    To be eligible to have your question selected, you must:

    🐦 Follow: Avalaunch & Dexalot

    ✈️ Join: Avalaunch Telegram & Dexalot

    ♻️ Retweet: Tweet & Tag 3 Friends

    There will be two ways to submit questions:

    1. Commenting on the Twitter post announcing this AMA
    2. Live during the AMA

    Shortly before the AMA, we will select the 5 best questions from the Twitter thread and those will be asked during the session.

    During the AMA, we will open up the chat for community questions. The 5 best questions will be selected by the guest for answering.

    If your Twitter or community question was chosen, you will be contacted to receive your prize.

  • Imperium Empires AMA #2 — Technical Deep-Dive with Cliff Yung, CEO

    Join us in the Avalaunch Telegram group for our second AMA with the Imperium Empires team.

    We will be joined by Imperium Empires CEO, Cliff Yung, where we will be covering the technical underpinnings of the project. The focus of this AMA will be the underlying tech, development and roadmap.

    In addition to Avalaunch’s questions, we will be giving the community two opportunities to ask theirs, and we will be rewarding the 10 selected questions with $25 USDT each, for a total of $250 in prizes

    Date & Time

    AMA Contest Rules

    To be eligible to have your question selected, you must:

    🐦 Follow: Avalaunch & Imperium Empires

    ✈️ Join: Avalaunch Telegram & Imperium Empires

    ♻️ Retweet: Tweet & Tag 3 Friends

    There will be two ways to submit questions:

    1. Commenting on the Twitter post announcing this AMA
    2. Live during the AMA

    Shortly before the AMA, we will select the 5 best questions from the Twitter thread and those will be asked during the session.

    During the AMA, we will open up the chat for community questions. The 5 best questions will be selected by the guest for answering.

    If your Twitter or community question was chosen, you will be contacted to receive your prize.

  • Imperium Empires AMA #1 — Project Overview with Leo Tan, CMO

    Join us in the Avalaunch Telegram group for the first of two AMAs with the Imperium Empires team.

    First up is Imperium Empires CMO, Leo Tan, where we will be covering the project at a high level. The focus of this AMA will be the business development, vision, road map, and post-IDO plans.

    In addition to Avalaunch’s questions, we will be giving the community two opportunities to ask theirs, and we will be rewarding the 10 selected questions with $25 USDT each, for a total of $250 in prizes

    Date & Time

    AMA Contest Rules

    To be eligible to have your question selected, you must:

    🐦 Follow: Avalaunch & Imperium Empires

    ✈️ Join: Avalaunch Telegram & Imperium Empires

    ♻️ Retweet: Tweet & Tag 3 Friends

    There will be two ways to submit questions:

    1. Commenting on the Twitter post announcing this AMA
    2. Live during the AMA

    Shortly before the AMA, we will select the 5 best questions from the Twitter thread and those will be asked during the session.

    During the AMA, we will open up the chat for community questions. The 5 best questions will be selected by the guest for answering.

    If your Twitter or community question was chosen, you will be contacted to receive your prize.

  • Imperium Empires x Avalaunch: IDO Announcement

    Imperium Empires x Avalaunch: IDO Announcement

    There has been no shortage of NFT gaming and metaverse projects entering the market in recent months — the storied success of Axie Infinity and other play-to-earn propositions have grabbed headlines, along with the re-branding of Facebook as Meta — has brought the metaverse to new heights. Undeniably, the metaverse is a whole new way to earn income, and in a post-pandemic world, it is already transforming our views on work. The massive potential and jaw-dropping projections that the metaverse could generate upwards of one trillion USD a year in revenue is rooted in an existing stalwart, and that is gaming.

    While gaming is a huge industry generating ~US$200B revenue per year, all players retain zero ownership in any game assets. Against this backdrop, Imperium Empires has a firm belief that blockchain and NFTs will return the value of players’ hard-earned assets to players, and take the gaming market to new heights. While many have tried to solve the same problems, as a rule, they often resort to building low-quality blockchain games with unsustainable tokenomics, and simply do not have the right personnel to deliver the solution.

    Having worked closely with the Imperium Empires team for the past few months, Avalaunch believes it may well be hosting an exception to the aforementioned rule and is proud to offer “The World’s First AAA GameFi 2.0 Space Metaverse”, Imperium Empires, as our next IDO.

    The Strekzans, one of the many spaceship NFTs that players can command in the Imperium Empires metaverse.


    Overview

    It has always been clear to the Imperium Empires team that a breathtaking high quality blockchain game is what the market has been waiting for. Imperium Empires is a 3rd person space RTS MMO game, and it addresses 4 major problems commonly seen in most blockchain games:

    • Low-quality graphics and limited gameplay: simply put, there’s no fun playing these games;
    • Hyperinflationary and unsustainable tokenomics: no NFT burn mechanisms, thus play-to-earn rewards drain fast and collapse as the number of players grows;
    • Lack of deep DeFi integration: most GameFi projects fail to live up to their promises of the “Fi” part; and
    • Lack of guild-based gameplay that bonds guild members together and makes gaming a social experience.

    A closeup of the Strekzans NFT spaceship, with a Sporak standing in front of it.


    Imperium Empires’ solutions to these include:

    • Building a AAA-quality metaverse with an experienced team of in-house game developers, game designers and blockchain developers;
    • Embedding a unique NFT burn mechanism where NFTs (e.g. spaceships) can be damaged or destroyed in PvP zones that players voluntarily enter;
    • Gamifying DeFi and seamlessly connecting 3 billion+ gamers worldwide to DeFi through integrating top DeFi protocols on the Avalanche ecosystem into the Imperium metaverse; and
    • Pioneering “Team-to-Earn” where players join and compete in guilds — guilds can also easily find, manage and train their guild members or scholars through Imperium’s official guild and scholars management system designed for guilds.

    The Trident-M, another NFT spaceship that players can add to their fleets in the Imperium Empires metaverse.


    Play To Earn Mechanics

    • Dual Token Model: IME and IMC tokens. IME is the governance token with a fixed supply, while IMC is the in-game currency token with an uncapped supply.
    • PvE: asteroids mining, materials transport, cooperation missions and more — the majority of the rewards will be in IMC.
    • PvP: players compete for seasonal rewards in guild tournaments by taking control of various zones in the Imperium metaverse, destroying and looting other players’ ships -the majority of the rewards will be in IME.

    The Sporak, one of the many NFT faction characters in the Imperium Empires metaverse.

    Imperium is a thoughtfully crafted game — the result of the combined effort of an accomplished team of experienced game developers, blockchain developers and business development professionals. The core Imperium Empires team includes:

    • Blockchain and Game Infrastructure: blockchain and full stack developers from Animoca Brands’ parent co, each with 15–20 years+ experience that includes building and maintaining low-latency MMO game servers, developing smart contracts, etc.
    • Game Development: Experienced Unity developers, game designers, 2D and 3D artists with 12 years+ experience developing 8 games across all platforms (with a 7m+ total player base and US$6m+ peak monthly grossing).
    • Marketing: Marketing team led by an Ex-Uber brand ambassador with a strong influencer network in Philippines and Thailand (where ~60% Axie Infinity players are based); along with an Ex-Tencent BD and PM with 10+ yrs experience in go-to-market strategies for popular games (such as League of Legends).

    This level of talent and experience can not be easily duplicated and warrants standalone mention. Avalaunch believes that Imperium represents something of a breakthrough, as the gaming industry moves from for-profit Web2 endeavors that accrue value only to game publishers, to a new era that blends real ownership of game assets and play-to-earn in a high quality space metaverse.


    Imperium — Links & Team

    Website| Telegram (Discussion) | Twitter | Medium | YouTube | Instagram


    Partners and Backers:

    “We are happy to support Cliff and the Imperium Empires team to introduce their upcoming GameFi metaverse on AVAX. From our initial discussions, we were impressed with the team’s in-depth understanding of the existing pain points experienced in most GameFi projects.” — Christian Ng, Principal at GBV


    Closing Thoughts

    The proverbial AAA game is a sort of holy grail for blockchain. With an accomplished team of experienced game developers, blockchain developers and marketing professionals, Imperium comes with great expectations and promise — and is delivering what they envisioned through their work to date. Avalaunch feels fortunate to have met them so early and looks forward to contributing to their journey.

    “We’re fortunate to have Avalaunch’s support in growing our community in the Avalanche ecosystem. Both Dave and Mark have been great partners — we appreciate their valuable feedback and expertise in connecting us to the right partners, so we can deliver the first grand scale AAA-quality space metaverse on Avalanche.” says Cliff Yung, Founder and CEO of Imperium Empires.


    Funding Numbers:

    • Seed: 208.33M IME at .0024 USD — $500,000 USD
    • Strategic Round 1: 254.55M IME at .0033 USD — $840,000 USD
    • Strategic Round 2: 210.00M IME at .0036 USD — $756,000 USD
    • Public Sale: 222.22M IME at .0045 USD — $1,000,000 USD

    Total Raise: $3,096,000 USD


    Supply — Breakdown & Vesting:

    Total Supply: 10,000,000,000 IME

    • Play-to-Earn and Staking Rewards: 4.5B IME (45%)
    • Team & Advisors: 2.0B IME (20%)
    • Community: 1.605B IME (16.05%)
    • Liquidity Provision: 1B IME (10%)
    • Token Sales (Seed, Strategic 1, 2 and Public): 0.895B IME (8.95%)

    Vesting Following TGE:

    • Seed: 6-month cliff, daily vesting for 15 months
    • Strategic Round 1: 10% at TGE, 6-month cliff, daily vesting for 15 months
    • Strategic Round 2: 10% at TGE, 6-month cliff, daily vesting for 15 months
    • Public Sale: 35% at TGE, 1-month cliff, weekly vesting for 8 weeks
    • Team & Advisors: 6-month cliff, daily vesting for 24 months
    • Liquidity Provision: 10% upon listing, discretionary unlock based upon exchange listings
    • Play-to-Earn and Staking Rewards: daily vesting for 36 months upon launch of game or staking
    • Community: 5% at TGE, daily vesting for 36 months

    Other:

    • Initial Circulating Supply: ~203M IME (excluding liquidity tokens)
    • Initial Market Cap: ~913K USD (excluding liquidity tokens)

    The Imperium IDO on Avalaunch

    • 222.22M IME at .0045 USD — $1,000,000 USD (Total Supply: 10B IME)
    • Sale Size: $1,000,000 USD

    Note: If you are a resident of one of the following countries, you will be prohibited from participating in the Imperium Empires sale: United States, Antigua and Barbuda, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Belarus, Burundi, Burma (Myanmar), China, Cote D’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Crimea and Sevastopol, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ecuador, Hong Kong, Iran, Iraq, Liberia, Libya, Macau, Magnitsky, Mali, Morocco, Nepal, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen and Zimbabwe.

    Registration Schedule:

    • Registration Opens: December 16th at 3:00 p.m. (UTC)
    • Registration Closes: December 19th at 6:00 a.m. (UTC)

    Sale Schedule:

    • Validator Round Begins: December 20th at 6:00 a.m. (UTC)
    • Validator Round Closes: December 20th at 3:00 p.m. (UTC)
    • Staking Round Begins: December 20th at 3:30 p.m. (UTC)
    • Staking Round Closes: December 21st at 6:00 a.m. (UTC)

    IDO Recap

    • Total IME for sale: 222.22M
    • Price: $.0045
    • Size: $1,000,000
    • Vesting — 35% at TGE, 1-month cliff, weekly vesting for 8 weeks
  • Platypus AMA #2 — Technical Deep Dive with Mr.BeaverTail, Smart Contract Lead (Recap)

    Platypus AMA #2 — Technical Deep Dive with Mr.BeaverTail, Smart Contract Lead (Recap)

    On 12/12/2021 at 12:00 p.m. (PST), an AMA session was held on Avalaunch with special guest Mr.BeaverTail ,Smart Contract Lead, at Platypus. Below we present to you an excerpt from AMA with questions and answers.


    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Hello and welcome honored viewers to our 2nd AMA with Platypus. Today we have Mr. BeaverTail with us to go into more detail on what is heralded to be a revolutionary project.

    @MrBeaverTail is a visionary and we wanted to do something a little different today and ask some unpredictable questions. Sir, are you ready?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Hey guys 👋 glad to be here with you!

    Yeah let’s do this

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Let’s start off with a brief introduction about yourself. Can you tell us about your background, career path, and how you found yourself as the smart contract lead for Platypus?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    I’m a software developer with a background in back-end applications, data and distributed systems.
    I discovered cryptocurrencies back in 2014 when a professor at university told me he wanted me to find vulnerabilities in Bitcoin.

    I really wanted to prove it was bullshit, so I started researching everything about it.

    The more I started getting into it, the more I got sucked into the Matrix… it then became my passion

    Back in 2019–2020 I started getting really interested in DeFi and its applications. Again, I am a very skeptical person. So I like to do my own research, read white papers, analyze the math… And really got interested in how we can disrupt the current financial system.

    My opinion is that our current financial system only serves the purposes of a few people, and not the general population. So I really became a matter of purpose to me and I decided to leave everything behind and focus solely on DeFi

    DeFi still has a long way to go to become “Open Finance” but it is the best we got as mortals.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    This is some high minded thinking and the world appreciates it. Serves the greater good.

    Outside of yourself, how many developers are working on Platypus? Who is responsible for front end and back end development, and how closely does that team need to work together?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    We started out as a team of 4 people.

    Currently, I think we have around 10 people helping with development

    FrontEnd development is handled by Shinji, our FrontEnd Lead (kudos to his great job behind the scenes btw)

    We work very closely and are in constant communication.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    I think people are going to learn how important a project this can really be and the work you’re putting into truly making finance “open.”

    for us mortals, can you simply describe your role as smart contract lead? And for anyone interested in pursuing a similar path, how do you suggest one get started?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    As smart contract engineer, you need to have a broad knolwedge of computer science as a whole.

    I got into it because I realized this was the missing piece of technology to get rid of all intermediaries.

    With smart contracts, people can interact with financial systems without the need of an expensive broker or a lousy bank.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Disintermediation is a beautiful thing. Death to the fee taking middleman!

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    My role as a smart contract engineer is designing, implementing and maintaining our codebase to make sure it achieves its purpose: bring a financial service to our users

    In our case, we want to provide the greatest stableswap experience to our users: lower slippage, greater capital efficiency and best UX

    Security is one of the main aspects involved in smart contracts. I’d really suggest you to start there. It is what makes this job so special and so stressful at the same time.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    The efficiency this could create is hard to overstate.

    At a high-level, could you describe the Platypus smart contracts, what they do, and how they come together to create the smart contract architecture?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Platypus smart contracts are actually more complex than any other protocol I’ve seen from the mathematical standpoint.

    If you’ve read our Yellow Paper, you can see that math is truly our foundation and our research team is damn good at it.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    My color palette is limited to white but I may have to try now

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    So our architecture tries to keep things as simple as possible while keeping gas costs at a minimum, taking into account that several math operations are need to a user to perform a simple swap.

    It is truly an accomplishment for us to provide a such simple service because it requires so many hours of research and development.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    This is the big question from us lay people that have peeked under the hood — Uniswap, Curve, and other AMMs, rely on the use of invariant curves to establish the relationship between tokens in a liquidity pool. Platypus takes a different approach. Could you explain what an invariant curve is, what its shortcomings are, and how Platypus achieves an improvement over this design?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    We need to explain first what an invariant is: a property of a mathematical function which remains unchanged after operations or certain transformation.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    So it sounds like a catalyst

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Yes, in a way it allows Uniswap/Curve pools to maintain a certain property.

    So, no matter what happens, Uniswap invariant curve will always be : x * y = k

    with k being the invariant of course

    This was a big breakthrough at the time but nowadays we see its limitations: impermanent loss, the need to provide liquidity in pairs, fees, etc.

    In the context of Stableswap, this will mean that the liquidity provider may get back asset as a combination of tokens that are different from what he / she has original provided.

    An additional shortcoming for stableswap like Curve or Saddle is that their stableswap invariant requires all tokens within the same pool to have the same amount of liquidity to reach its equilibrium state, making the least popular token the bottleneck for the growth of the pool.

    Moreover, it is impossible to add new tokens into existing pool (particularly if the new token’s liquidity is not comparable to other existing tokens in the pool), which hindering the scalability of the protocol.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Right. You’re there thinking “this isn’t what I signed up for.” So, Platypus offers DeFi users a stableswap with higher scalability and greater capital efficiency. Could you touch on what these concepts are and what the implications of progress forward in these areas means for both Platypus and DeFi as a whole?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Sure, to illustrate what capital efficiency is, we can head over to Uniswap analytics.

    We can see that there are over +100 pools that contain ETH asset.

    These pools do not communicate with each other

    They do not make use of each other’s capital

    There is a big percentage of the pool’s liquidity that is dormant

    This is just a limitation of the invariant curve model. Curve tries to get around this limitation by increasing the amount of assets in the pool… But as I said earlier the bottleneck is always the least abundant token in the pool!

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    So…Defi is supposed to be inclusive, shared economy and resources but these pools are siloed.

    So it defaults to the lowest common denominator

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Exactly

    In contrast, Platypus uses a single-variant slippage curve.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Right so instead of invariant curves, Platypus is the first to leverage a single-variant slippage function. In your opinion, why is this alternative viable now, and not before? Did we need to start one place to end in another, or is it simply a solution that wasn’t considered previously?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    So a single-variant slippage curve is just just a normal function f(x) where x is coverage ratio.

    It varies in function of x, the coverage ratio

    I really think this alternative was viable before, just as bitcoin was viable since computers were invented.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Understood. So to you it’s a self-evident evolution of where this should be going.

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Banks and other financial institutions have used coverage ratio in risk management for years

    why shouldn’t we use this for DeFi?

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Right. So you define the range and cover it accordingly.

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    The missing link was using coverage ratio alongside single-variant curve to determine slippage

    This allows the protocol to handle risk autonomously

    But designing these types of protocols is not an easy task… It requires years of research to make sure the protocol is viable

    Mr.Duckbill is truly a visionary I must say

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Right. The defined function and range is intuitive enough but building it is another story haha. Yeah, Duckbill and Co are on point.

    Could you introduce us to the concept of “asset liability management” and its place in Platypus?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Asset Liability Management is defined as the process of managing the use of assets and cash flows to reduce the firm’s risk of loss from not paying a liability

    So as I said earlier this concept has been used for years in TradFi

    Coverage Ratio is just one key indicator of risk of a certain firm

    The higher, the better!

    Coverage Ratio = Assets / Liabilities

    Platypus leverages these concepts for the first time in DeFi

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Let’s get into the token and pools for a minute — since you’re redefining DeFi and making it, well, smarter, I’m sure our users want to understand utility

    The PLP token is staked to generate vePTP, an “asset” which is not transferable or tradable. Once generated, vePTP is used to boost a stakers APR on the provided liquidity. Could you help us to understand the necessity of this design, and what improvements it offers over simply staking vanilla PTP?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Stableswap tokenomics require special design.

    We want to incentivize users to become long term supporters of the protocol

    To understand this design, I need to explain what dialuting and non-dialuting emissions are

    Dialuting emissions are token emissions that dialute the value of the token on the market. This is what most projects use to incentivize users to provide liquidity.

    Dialuting emissions can make any token become a farm and dump token, because value is not being captured for the token holders

    If I provide liquidity on sushiswap to farm Sushi, I don’t really need to hold the Sushi token

    Non-dialuting emissions are emissions that do not dialute the value of the token in the eyes of the market.

    We want to make 50% of emissions non dialuting

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    How does this happen? A token being put on the market is an inflationary event.

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    That is indeed true. But what about a token that is given only to those who ready to stake this token in the long term ?

    Since the token is being held in a smart contract, it cannot be sold and therefore sell pressure is reduced

    So by incentivizing users to stake $PTP for vePTP, we make sure that inflation is controlled

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Apart from generating vePTP, how would you describe the utility of the PTP token?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    PTP token is the gateway to all things platypus.

    Initially, Platypus was going to be launched as a multi-vertical protocol. But we realized that the right path was to launch 1 vertical first, then expand to other verticals.

    If you want to support the project, stake $PTP to obtain vePTP.

    We’re going to make sure vePTP holders get well taken care of.

    vePTP is the governance token of the protocol (ve stands for voting escrow)

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Always nice to hear this

    changing gears — Very simply, what is “withdrawal arbitrage” and how does the Platypus withdrawal fee mechanism combat this behavior?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    In TradFi, Arbitrage describes the act of buying a security in one market and simultaneously selling it in another market at a higher price

    In DeFi, it also means that, but the definition is widely extended to all operations that generate profit for the arbitrer

    So withdrawal arbitrage in our protocol is basically a set of operations [deposit (given coverage is under 100%), swap then withdraw] taking advantage of the protocol’s design to generate profits for the arbitrer

    This extracts economic value from the system

    Many protocols have suffered from exploits like this

    If you add flash loan to the equation, then you can really drain a pool

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    I’m not sure there’s been a flash loan protocol that hasn’t been exploited.

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    When designing platypus, we wanted to make sure that economic value is retained in the system and redistributed to liquidity providers.

    That is why we have implemented a withdrawal fee, making withdrawal arbitrage unfeasible.

    We even found a way of performing a deposit arbitrage ! So we had to implement a deposit fee

    Rest assured, these fees are very very very low and will not affect the use of the protocol

    You probably won’t even notice

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    The proverbial staking/unstaking fee for arbitrageurs. Very smart.

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    In my opinion any new protocol implementation needs a competent research team running mathematical analysis and simulations. It is not enough to have good devs. We have the chance to count with some really smart researchers

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Moving onto security for a moment as you mentioned exploits before — we all know that everything is going to be audited by a proven 3rd party but….Seeing as how audits aren’t a “silver bullet,” how do you see them and their place in the development process? 2021 has been littered with high-profile DeFi exploits and hacks. As a smart contract developer, have there been any key takeaways for you with respect to your own process or code?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Security is indeed our biggest concern in Platypus

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    R&D is showing up more and more in the budgets of DeFi projects. it is just prudent and needs to be ongoing. I think too often people think of these contracts as “set it and forget it.” But please proceed re: security. Just couldn’t help myself here.

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    I think security should be any DeFi protocol biggest concern.

    As DeFi gets more and more sophisticated, hackers get better at exploiting protocols

    Coding smart contracts is nothing like coding a JavaScript/web application. Anyone who has worked in my development team knows I can be quite unfriendly if my directives are not respected.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Are they in fact getting better? I just thought there’s more money locked ergo more people chasing it. So the research of security is a discipline unto itself. Yesterday’s attack vector doesn’t equal what’s coming tomorrow. Hadn’t considered the evolution of hackers.

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Hackers are getting better.

    But so are we (DeFi builders and audit firms in preventing attacks)

    For platypus we have very strict directives when it comes to our smart contracts.

    We aim for 100% test coverage in our core smart contracts.
    We use state-of-the-art security tools.
    We don’t let our ego get in the way. I personally ask every new collaborator to go and tell me how code can be improved.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    That’s good stuff. Seems like a layered approach and of course the absence of ego goes a long way

    So let us have a final question before we can move on to the Twitter portion of the program — on a higher level — What lies ahead for Platypus? Where do you see your efforts being focused in the next 3–6 months?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    We have a lot on our plate.

    We want to expand to other DeFi verticals, provide a fun and gamified experience for our users, develop partnerships with other teams in the ecosystem….

    Things move fast in the cryptosphere, so I don’t really want to be too precise about these things, we want to maintain some flexibility as well

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    This is the evolution of the AMM. I hope it gets implemented everywhere but it’s forever a moving target. I think roadmaps are overrated in crypto; should be renamed “guidelines.”

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Yeah, guidelines are better

    I expect the smart contract team to deploy many contracts in the following months

    I expect to serve users and our community

    Twitter Questions

    @totominhchi How can developers & technical people contribute to Platypus and how do you make plan to get them involved?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    I’m looking for talent on the smart contract side.
    If you’re a smart contract developer with experience in DeFi, please get in touch with me.

    We will be open sourcing our code in the following weeks

    Whitehat hackers are very welcome to make suggestions on our code (up to 100k$ rewards). As I said before, ego is a killer.

    @AkihisaMori45 asks — What achievements of Platypus do you feel are most important for your long-term plans?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    We’re very pleased we got huge support from big names like Three Arrow Capital and Defiance in our private round, in a total of $3.3M.

    The high interest exhibited by these strong names of the crypto industry speaks volumes on the relevance of Platypus for the crypto space and DeFi.

    It’s also worth mentioning that the $10M LP pool cap of our alpha mainnet was filled within 15 mins, that was totally out of our expectations and I’d like to thank everyone who supported us all along.

    @AndyToshi_cryp — How do you view other projects in the Avalanche ecosystem, is there a project that you see as a competitor or that you respect?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    I honestly respect every DeFi builder our there.
    It’s a very stressful job that requires a broad set of skills. While we make investors and supporters rich, we’re doing the hard stuff.

    But honestly, I think that there are great native projects on Avalanche

    They have great teams and I can say working with some of them has been a pleasure so far

    I can name a few: Benqi, Colony, Traderjoe, Pangolin, Yield Yak

    @IvaniWu01— what is the single biggest factor Platypus in removing impermanent loss risk for liquidity providers?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Impermanent loss is the result of using invariant curve’s (Uniswap, Curve). In these systems, you need to provide liquidity in pairs…. When you provide liquidity, you’re basically guaranteed that the product of the amount of 2 assets you provided will stay the same.

    Liquidity provision in Platypus is single-sided, removing impermanent loss risk. Of course there are others risks that come with this paradigm shift, but impermanent loss is not one of them.

    @Nirund14— Does Platypus platform have future plans to go crosschain or do you think there is enough activity on Avalanche to sustain?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Our objective is to become the dominant stableswap on Avalanche.

    We don’t have plans to go cross-chain for the moment. We actually believe this is not the right strategy!

    And… we really think Avalanche is superior to other blockchains out there and we are quite happy to be an Avalanche native project.

    Special thanks to the Avalanche foundation and Avalabs, you guys are the real Rockstar’s here.

    Usually AMA’s are well prepared in advance. This one was quite improvised so I hope it wasn’t too hard to follow for everyone.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    At this juncture, I’d like to pass the mic to @shahi297 and he’ll take over from here. This has been an enlightening experience and super informative. Our community, understandably, likes unlocked tokens and I can’t blame them but I think they will be very happy there is vesting for this project. It’s a game changer. Very much look forward to it and being a part of your journey.

    Lovish Shahi | Avalaunch

    Thanks Dave.

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Thanks to Dave and Lovish for handling the AMA as well!

    Lovish Shahi | Avalaunch

    This was so far one of the best n most interesting AMAs we had so far.

    This was really something Deep Dive.

    Hope we can have some nice questions from community to add to this.

    Telegram Questions

    Hai Trieu | HUNTER GEM🏕️

    Currently, NFT is very hot, do you think you will apply NFT technology to your products in the future?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Yes, we’re currently working with a very special team on the Avalanche ecosystem to bring a very special experience on Platypus. Don’t want to spoil too much though.

    Blog Tran Thanh

    How did you come up with the idea to create the “PLATYPUS” platform? Why did you choose the name? Does it have a special meaning and is there a story behind this name?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    The original idea comes from research done by Mr.DuckBill where he envisions a paradigm shift for several DeFi verticals.

    Platypus is a very special kind of animal, it lays eggs although it is a mammal, it is semi-aquatic.

    We though it was the perfect animal to name a special (and a bit weird) protocol.

    MoonGems

    What are the steps to become a part of your community, and start getting revenues? Where do we buy, where do we sign up? This looks like an amazing project!

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Thanks!
    Well, first of all I’d recommend following our social networks (in particular twitter where we are the most active)

    @Platypusdefi @MrDuckbill @MrBeaverTail

    To become a supporter of the project, you can:
    – Deposit your stables into Platypus pool’s to farm $PTP token
    – Stake your PTP to generate vePTP and participate in governance (while boosting your yield!).

    Also, keep in mind that stableswap is only the beginning. We want to expand to other verticals and add new features so make sure to stay tuned to our socials.

    Lotenna

    For Platypus being the first Stable Swap on Avalanche Network

    Is your token swap program based on any existing platforms out there or did you have to build from scratch since you’re the first stablecoin swap on Avalanche Network?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    We built Platypus from scratch, but we learned from the mistakes of other protocols and we’re are quite aware of the current innovations happening in DeFi till today.

    We decided to build Platypus on Avalanche because we think it is truly the next generation blockchain the world needs: instant finality, decentralization, low fees, superior consensus mechanism…

    We hope that more and more innovative and novel protocols will decide to build on Avalanche!

    Marjerlin Buitrago

    How does the community intervene in the construction of PLATYPUS? In other words, do you take into account the “feedbacks and demands” of the community as you continue to innovate your project?

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    We want to have a “Community first” approach. Open Finance (or DeFi) is all about that.

    We did a testnet campaign with 1500 people testing and giving feedback. Also, we encourage everyone from the community to give feedback.

    Our backlog is huge so please be patient as we are working long hours to improve our solution!

    So far, we’re quite happy with the response from the community.

    We hope to grow Platypus into a self-governing community of well educated participants.

    Again, if you want to stay in touch and participate in our community, join our TG channel and follow us on social media:

    @MrBeaverTail @MrDuckbill @Platypusdefi

    Lovish Shahi | Avalaunch

    I guess we are done with the community questions here

    Thanks @MrBeaverTail for sharing such insightful tech deep dive with our wonderful community. Really appreciate you being here.

    Mr. BeaverTail | Platypus

    Allright guys, that is all for me.

    Thank you for being here. Hope to see you soon on the cryptosphere.

  • Platypus AMA #1 — Project Overview with Mr.DuckBill, Founder (Recap)

    Platypus AMA #1 — Project Overview with Mr.DuckBill, Founder (Recap)

    On 12/10/2021 at 06:00 p.m. (PST), an AMA session was held on Avalaunch with special guest Mr.DuckBill, Founder, Platypus. Below we present to you an excerpt from AMA with questions and answers.


    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Hello and welcome to another AMA brought to you by the good folks here at Avalaunch. Today, we are fortunate to have none other than @MrDuckbill here to talk about Platypus Finance and offer us a glimpse on what’s coming to DeFi. How are you doing?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    My pleasure to be here to introduce Platypus to everyone! And thanks for the invite! 😊

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Good to have you for sure as this is a heavily anticipated project. Without further ado, let’s get into it

    To begin with, please give us a little bit of background about yourself. What did your education and career look like before joining DeFi?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    Sure! In the past I was like everyone, a university graduate that was confused about my future career. My first job was in a TradFi company as a small potato, handling boring and trivial tasks. After a few years, in 2017, I witnessed the ICO boom and got more and more interested in the crypto industry, and finally I have quitted my TradFi job and worked in a CEX in 2018. I have been working there since then, learnt a lot of crypto stuff, and finally left the company to create Platypus this year

    And speaking of Platypus, it is also interesting because it was a modified version of my master thesis. Back when I first entered the crypto industry, I decided to further enhance my knowledge in crypto, so I applied for a master program in one of my local universities where they have courses specifically in cryptography and blockchain. And in the final semester I had to write a thesis. Then I decided, why not try to devise a new DeFi protocol? That’s how the very first version of Platypus was being created.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    That’s a good story. From feeling the dread of a regular job to making your thesis your work today. Pretty inspired stuff I have to say. Prototypes aside, how did the idea of building a Stableswap on Avalanche come about? What is your unique value proposition?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    I had the idea for creating a single-sided AMM back in 2019 when I first learnt about Uniswap. When I was writing my thesis, I was further diving into how to create a single-sided AMM. At first I wanted to make it for general trading purposes, but eventually it became a Stableswap because it is easier in terms of risk management.

    As an OG of Avalanche, I have been observing the ecosystem since day 1 after mainnet launch. Surprisingly, Avalanche lacks a good quality, native stableswap DEX with deep liquidity. And it also must be native because only by this it can support more native projects like algo-stablecoins and synthetic assets to access the liquidity they need.

    Lastly, at the very core of our philosophy, the most unique value proposition Platypus have, is to bring innovation to the Avalanche ecosystem. Many projects so far are just forks from Ethereum. We want to show to the world that Avalanche is a great blockchain that can foster new innovation as well on its own. Stableswap is just the beginning for Platypus, we have many innovations ahead that we haven’t revealed yet.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Thorough and big ups for the Day 1 of mainnet AVAX person. That’s a straight up OG.

    To build Platypus into a new generation single-sided Stableswap is definitely a challenge. Can you talk to us about what some of these challenges were and how you overcame them?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    While I have the idea and some rough protocol design, it was hard to get people to believe in me and follow me to join the project. Luckily I got the support from the Avalanche Foundation to offer me the X-grant, and also met Mr.Beavertail and Mr.Otterfoot and they trusted me from day one.

    These are two most important things for a project to go from concept to early-stage, namely initial support from investors, and a small but passionate team. 🔥

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Duckbill, Beavertail and Otterfoot are indeed a trio to trust. The Avalanche Foundation knew this. Congrats on that by the way, the support from them is quite a stamp of credibility.

    How does the experience of each of the team members add up to help build the ecosystem and community needed for such a strong market ingression?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    Our team is definitely all rock-star! Mr.Beavertail, our smart contract lead, is an experienced engineer and worked on blockchain development since 2015. Mr.Otterfoot, our marketing lead, is a serial entrepreneur and worked in crypto media before. We also have a superb advisory board which will be revealed soon. 😉

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    You are rock stars for sure so let’s talk security — With DeFi being such a target for hackers, what security measures has Platypus taken to ensure the safety of the community?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    We have two auditors, Hacken and Omnisica, where the first audit was completed and the second audit is close to completion. So far, nothing major has been found.

    We have also analyzed our system in vigorous mathematical proofs, and even self-identified a possible attack, called withdrawal arbitrage, and proposed the solution ourselves to mitigate this attack. You can find all these in our technical yellow paper. Besides, we are also running economics simulations to ensure the system is at least robust with certain given assumptions.

    Lastly, we are currently running on the mainnet for alpha launch, where we have kept the TVL in the system to 10 million. It is important because it can let our system to be battled-tested in the real world while keeping the risk exposure manageable. The last thing we want is to have 1 billion injected into the system, then we are hacked, and everyone gets screwed up.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Yeah I saw your alpha launch got to 10M TVL in about 15 minutes. Maybe more than a “few” understand. 😃 So, how does Platypus fit in the current landscape of DeFi? What solutions does Platypus provide over its competitors?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    First of all, we are definitely a stableswap DEX, and we believe that stableswap is an essential building block of any DeFi ecosystem.

    Let’s list some examples of why stableswap is important:

    1, We know that native USDT and USDC are coming to Avalanche. They are going to create different representations (or addresses) of the same pegged token compared to the Avalanche Bridge token. You need a place to swap between these assets

    2. Native algo-stablecoins, like TSD, AVAI and H2O, need a stableswap DEX to provide liquidity, support their price peg as well as allow people to trade

    And why Platypus, but not our competitors? First of all, Platypus is single-sided, so when you try to farm on Platypus, our UI / UX is much simpler than others. Many DeFi new joiners tend to farm on stables first, so easy on-boarding is very important for stableswap.

    Secondly, because we are innovative, and dedicated to Avalanche. Other native projects are just forks with no innovation, and outsiders are fence sitters: they are not here to help to grow the Avalanche ecosystem. We are the only stableswap DEX that fulfills BOTH criteria.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    Yup. That all adds up. The amount of love Avalanche is being shown is impressive and this ranks high. Saving us from fragmentation which is becoming epidemic in crypto. Can you tell us about the utility of the Platypus token? What will token holders vs non-token holders be able to access on the platform?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    Well, PTP token is USELESS….

    Except for generating vePTP

    So if you have read our previous medium article, vePTP stands for voting escrowed PTP. You cannot buy vePTP from the market, the only way to get it is to stake your PTP, and wait for vePTP to be generated as time goes by. In essence, vePTP is equal to time.

    I personally really love this idea, because it provides an easy way for us to differentiate who are the long term supporters and who are not. Some alpha leak here — we will play a lot of tricks on vePTP in the future, so make sure you stake your PTP now to get as much as vePTP as possible!

    As for the use of vePTP token, first of all it will allow you to increase your liquidity mining yield. We have divided our liquidity mining pool into base pool and boosting pool, where only vePTP token holders are eligible for emission in the boosting pool. Besides, vePTP will also be used for voting in the future, expect you can see something like Curve — so you can use vePTP to change the emission allocation for different tokens. Lastly, just like all typical DeFi protocols, vePTP will allow you to share the revenue generated by the protocol.

    But rest assured, even if you are not staking PTP, you can still enjoy the liquidity mining reward from our base pool.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    A pretty complex problem with an elegant solution and clear cut rewards. Well engineered. Having glanced at the roadmap there seems to be few massive milestones on the way. Can you discuss with us just very briefly what these are, and what are the key developments token holders should look forward to?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    Well, we have achieved a lot of amazing milestones already! First, we got the Avalanche X-grant back in July, then we secured a 3M private round led by 3ac and DeFiance. We launched our alpha mainnet a few weeks ago and 10M was filled in 15 min. The system is still live and kicking as of today. And of course now, we are going to do our IDO on Avalaunch and launch our token soon.

    Going forward, we have many things keeping behind the scenes and under development. One key development that our token holders should look forward to is definitely our beta launch! The beta launch will remove the cap limit as well as kick start liquidity mining. And hopefully, it is coming (real) soon!

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    That’s some of the smartest funding in the business. Congratulations on that.

    What would you say excites you most about Platypus, is there a particular feature or milestone that you’re excited about and looking forward to?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    We intentionally keep our roadmap secret. If we have disclosed everything from day one, although we can make people excited about the project, but going forward all they will be asking is “wen-wen-wen” on when our roadmap will be delivered 😂

    We want the community to “evolve” with us, we hope that every time when we drop something new, the community will be surprised by our innovation and regenerate the hype for the project. It is our marketing tactic, we don’t know if it works or not, but we hope it will.

    What excites me the most about Platypus is, we are a super innovative team. Stableswap is just the beginning for us, and I am sure that our upcoming roadmap will bring innovation to Avalanche, and redefine how DeFi works beyond Ethereum.

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    We certainly know what “wen” is like. To date, you’ve made a lot of headway and I’m sure it will continue in good stead. Before we move on to the Twitter portion of the program — are there any last points you wish to discuss or share with the Avalaunch community?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    Being an Avalanche OG, I can just sit here and enjoy the success of AVAX. But ever since I have been working on Platypus, I found that the fulfillment and joyfulness for BUIDL is much larger than merely investing or farming. If you have the ability, come and build together. We will build the future of France together, here on Avalanche. 🚀

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    For sure. Good stuff. The future of France has never looked brighter 😀

    Twitter Questions

    @suryadi_uci
    Platypus looks one of the most professional teams on Avalanche and I wonder what can we expect in the near future from Platypus except Stable swap? It’s obvious that your plan is way more than just being a stable swap platform. Can you give us some hint about future plans?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    Thank you for your kind word! In fact we intentionally want to keep our roadmap secret, because we want to community to “evolve” together with us

    Yes, very soon after IDO we are going for beta launch, where we will remove the cap limit and start liquidity mining. And afterwards we are targeting to have a big release in January, where we will bring some innovation that you have never seen in any other blockchain. (Hints: it is about gamification)

    @MiMiCybe
    who asks “I read Platypus website, I came across the term “LIQUIDITY Fragmentation, Can you explain a little about the Functions and how “Liquidity Fragmentation” works?”

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    Liquidity fragmentation means that liquidity is locked in separated pool, which reduce the capital efficiency as a whole. Imagine you have two pools USDT-USDC and USDT-DAI, the USDT in the two pools cannot be shared with each other which creates the “fragmentation”

    If the liquidity can be shared, the capital utilization will be more efficient, and the protocol can provide lower slippage with the same amount of capital

    Capital efficiency is a focal point in our system design, and we will have more innovation in this regard to be revealed in the future

    @Ray230521 was not satisfied asking one question so he has three — What’s your long-term plan? What will #platypus look like in the future? How will #platypus ensure the sustainability of the project and its added value for the community?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    To make the project long-term sustainable, we have a long roadmap (we are already fully packed for at least 6 months), and we hope that as these initiatives reveal it will help regenerate the hype of the project

    Again, vePTP is a very important design in our system. So if you want to enjoy the value add for our future releases, make sure you acquire them ASAP!

    As for the future of Platypus, we believe that Avalanche will become a frictionless financial system that is open to anyone, and Platypus will become a backbone of this ecosystem. We will facilitate the swap of many different stablecoins, custodian or algorithmic, as well as pegged synthetic assets. May be even easy fiat on-ramp and off-ramp with central bank digital currencies.

    In short, we have many great plans for Platypus, and we are also firm believer of Avalanche’s long term success. There is definitely a bright future ahead of us 😜

    @andre_shifu why @Platypusdefi choose to build on avalanche network? and could you guaranteed your dapps is safe because all of your team are anonymous?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    Yes 😂 I choose to build on Avalanche because I am an Avalanche OG, and I love the Avalanche ecosystem.

    Avalanche has the most solid technical foundation among all blockchain platforms. We have high hopes for Platypus and we want to make sure we are built on a platform that works best for the long term.

    Anonymous founders are becoming increasingly popular in the DeFi space. We could have used our real world identity to launch the project, but we found that staying anonymous is even cooler. Anonymous founders have peculiar charisma for their idiosyncrasy and coherence for the underlying philosophy of cryptocurrencies and blockchain — decentralized, censorship-resistant, and privacy-by-default.

    Oh, don’t worry about whether we will rug. We won’t. Being backed by 3ac and Defiance, launching IDO on Avalaunch, we have way much to lose if we rug instead of deliver. The upside for delivering is 100x, or even 1000x compared to rug. Just don’t worry about it.

    @elif611_ How does $PTP attempt to address and mitigate temporary losses in LP pools?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    Nice question! Not sure how you define “temporary losses” though.

    One way to think about this is that there are “temporary losses” in one of the tokens in the pool, say, the coverage ratio of USDT.e becomes 0.8 so there are less assets compared to liabilities for that particular token. In this case, we are using the “fractional reserve system” assumption in modern banking — not all LPs will withdraw their liquidity all at once. So as long as the distribution of the LPs are even enough, the system should always hold enough cash to prepare for withdrawals.

    The second way to think about this is, will these “temporary losses” become “permanent”? The answer is NO. If one token becomes under-covered (i.e. coverage ratio < 1), it will always make another token over-covered (i.e. coverage ratio >1). In technical terms, the pool as a whole will always be SOLVENT. Token level insolvency is transient, and trust for the system will remain intact as long as the pool level insolvency is maintained.

    That being said, we have provided options for users to “withdraw in other tokens” (i.e. the over-covered token) if they are holding an under-covered token. So in any situation you should be able to withdraw your LP token without problems.

    Telegram Questions

    Kim Asuna

    Do you have any plans to attract non-crypto investors to #your project Because it is the success of a project to get more investors who are still not in the crypto world. What are the plans to increase awareness around your in non-crypto space?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    Yes we want to bring mass adoption with Platypus. Being a Stableswap DEX, we are able to attract many new users to DeFi that are risk adverse. Platypus simple and intuitive UX is going to help a lot in this regard.

    Besides, we have a rock-star marketing team that are actively working in local penetrations in many countries. We will continue to work on this regard to spread awareness via localization.

    Thiện MONEY

    Do you have any plan to expand your project in other chains like Polygon , polkadot in the future?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    Hard to say for very distinct future, but definitely not in the coming 1–2 years. Platypus is born in, and for Avalanche. Staying in Avalanche also help us to stay focused and maintain a loyal community. It is the optimal strategy for us.

    Marjerlin Buitrago

    How did you come up with the idea to create the “PLATYPUS” platform? Why did you choose the name? Does it have a special meaning and is there a story behind this name?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    There is a reason behind for sure! You will understand it as we reveal more of our roadmap 😆

    And besides, Platypus is cute! And it is exotic animal along with Pangolin, Yak, Axalots, etc.

    ChiếnVu

    Can you briefly describe your PARTNERSHIP so far and upcoming partnerships?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    We are already working with many AVAX blue-chip projects like Traderjoe, Yield Yak, Benqi and Colony.

    And up-coming we are going to work with native stablcoin projects as well, like Teddy Cash, OrcaDAO, Defrost, etc. 😉

    Aurona0🛡️🛡️

    What are the plans to educate and raise awareness and adoption among the community to make more people understand about the project easily?

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    We know that our yellow paper is hard to understand! That’s why we have been writing many ELI5 articles in medium to educate our users

    While our system design may seem complex if you look at the yellow paper, but when you look at the UX it is quite simple. So all the complex design from the backend is because we want to make the system easier to use for our users in the frontend 😀

    Follow our social media and read our blogpost, this will help you to understand the project better for sure 😘

    Dave Donnenfeld | Avalaunch

    You’ve done it! Successfully run the gauntlet for us here today. Very much appreciated. The Avalaunch community is happy to have you and I personally would like to say thanks. This was super informative and we would look forward to hosting your IDO in a few short day. Thank you @MrDuckbill

    Mr.Duckbill | Platypus

    Thank you! Grateful to be hear and introduce Platypus to everyone ☺️

  • Platypus AMA #2— Technical Deep Dive with Mr.BeaverTail, Smart Contract Lead

    Join us in the Avalaunch Telegram group for the second AMA with the Platypus team.

    We will be joined by Platypus Smart Contract Lead, Mr.BeaverTail, where we will be covering the most technical aspects of the project.

    In addition to Avalaunch’s questions, we will be giving the community two opportunities to ask theirs, and we will be rewarding the 10 selected questions with $25 USDT each, for a total of $250 in prizes

    Date & Time

    AMA Contest Rules

    To be eligible to have your question selected, you must:

    🐦 Follow: Avalaunch & Platypus

    ✈️ Join: Avalaunch Telegram & Platypus

    ♻️ Retweet: Tweet & Tag 3 Friends

    There will be two ways to submit questions:

    1. Commenting on the Twitter post announcing this AMA
    2. Live during the AMA

    Shortly before the AMA, we will select the 5 best questions from the Twitter thread and those will be asked during the session.

    During the AMA, we will open up the chat for community questions. The 5 best questions will be selected by the guest for answering.

    If your Twitter or community question was chosen, you will be contacted to receive your prize.