In this AMA, we will be joined by MetaDerby founder, MetaMike. We’ll 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.
Dave| Avalaunch
Hello and welcome everyone to the MetaDerby AMA brought to you by Avalaunch. I have to say this is a project I’ve been excited about for some time. Today’s guest is someone I’ve had the pleasure of spending IRL time with and I’m psyched to have @misutelegram here with us today, one of the co-founders of this promising project. Welcome, how are you?
Misu| MetaDerby
Hi, I’m good, thank you for having me
Dave| Avalaunch
Good to have you. Let’s get into it and thanks for being with us today. Can we start with a brief introduction about yourself pls? How did you get involved in crypto?
Misu| MetaDerby
Hi, I am Meta Mike, a founder of Metaderby. I have been in the crypto space since 2017 and have invested at the seed round level, advised or co-founded numerous projects. Last year, I dove into the NFT space and naturally that led into gamefi and p2e games.
I got in to the crypto through a personal friend who was way earlier in the space, and at the time was quite a big trader and investor. We would always meet to talk about crypto for a couple years before I got into it fully and financially.
Dave| Avalaunch
What is MetaDerby and how did the concept come about? What market need does it meet?
Misu| MetaDerby
Metaderby is the first Free to Play to Earn horse racing metaverse being built on Avalanche. Players will able to claim a horse NFT for free to start their gameplay journey with us. There will be multiple aspects of the game for different types of players to enjoy. From racing, to breeding, to NFT land ownership and race result prediction and spectating.
The concept for Metaderby and game play logic was the idea of my co-founder Karm. Karm is an avid gamer and played multiple p2e games and even started his own guild, before coming up with the concept. Previous to joining Metaderby team, Karm was the tech lead of binance.US and has been a software developer at other major tech firms before that. I got involved at the start when we were putting the team together, and we managed to setup a great team and also work with a great strategic advisor and incubator.
The Horse racing industry is a huge industry that most people have no idea about, unless it is actually something that you are interested in. Globally it is a roughly 112 billion dollar annual industry. We are lowering the barrier to entry for people to try and play a horse racing game, and spread this ancient past time to the masses.
Dave| Avalaunch
Unlike many other NFT and Play to earn games available, MetaDerby’s idea of completing some early tasks to receive a free horse NFT stands out. Can you tell us what these tasks are, how long it takes to complete them, and most of all why did you implement this strategy?
Misu| MetaDerby
So we wanted to create a free to play game and lower the barrier to entry so that everyone could try and enjoy a p2e game. So what we are going to offer to all users is, if they sign up on our site, and compete some social media tasks, they will be able to get a free horse in game to start racing with.
Some of the tasks are just going to be some social media tasks, like like and follow, tweet, join our discord etc. So it won’t take users long at all to complete.
Dave| Avalaunch
Got it. I think lowering the cost of entry to zero is a coup. Many games have become prohibitively expensive in part due to their success.
Appreciate the model — As a traditional horse racing game, MetaDerby implements the most famous horses in American history, but of course this goes beyond with many more classes. Can you expand on the horse characteristics and how these aim with the overall vision of the game?
Misu| MetaDerby
So we are trying to give an authentic experience to the player. Horse racing in the real world is already such an intricate and robust ecosystem. We didn’t have to make too many changes to it and try to mimic real life.
Just like in real life there are different classes of horses when racing. Lower classes race against each other and as they win races and run better times, they get promoted in class.
Each horse also has stats which will affect the outcome, its bloodline, speed and stamina, etc. As you racing the horse in game and train it. You will earn points which you can allocate to boost these stats.
Dave| Avalaunch
It is a longstanding, rich with history, industry, pastime and passion. You’re taking a very big act to the blockchain. As with many games built on the Web3, MetaDerby is no different. Can you tell us why the concept of NFTs and the metaverse were married together to produce this game?
Misu| MetaDerby
With the advent of blockchain and NFTs, users that play any sorts of games will be able to manage and control their own game assets. This is a huge step forward, and I believe that in the future, most multiplayer online games will have some aspect of blockchain integrated into it.
The metaverse will eventually become an immersive virtual experience. And the horse racing industry is so robust with so many different eceonomies going on, as I said earlier, we want to give our players an authentic gaming experience. So not only are there horse races, there will be a whole economy around the breeding and trading of Horse NFTs. The most widely participated aspect of horse racing in real life is the spectating and predicting of race results, so this will also be a big part of the game. And lastly we want players to be able to be part of the creator eceonomy, and thus we are offering NFT lands for sale for players to create and earn with.
Dave| Avalaunch
I’m going to sell mint julebs on my land. 😀 How do you envision the MetaDerby metaverse? Which elements do you think will give it a competitive edge over the other metaverses?
Misu| MetaDerby
The way I envision the metaderby metaverse is that there will be the daily grind of races. where users are trying to improve and rank up their horses in order to be the best performers so that they are invited to weekly tournaments.
We really want to have players enjoy playing the game and this game having that social element to it, where players will race, play and even wager with their friends. We want to add in the entertainment aspect to it so that players can enjoy it together. So they enter races, participate in a tournament, perhaps watch a big Tournament / Sponsored Cup event coupled with a live concert all in our metaverse.
And in the future, we don’t want to restrict ourselves to only horse racing. It will start as a horse racing metaverse, but we plan to expand it further and include various other types of games too.
Dave| Avalaunch
Really appreciate these thoughtful answers.
MetaDerby seems to operate under a dual-token system: DBY and HOOF. Why was it important to have this and how does the utility of these tokens differ from one another?
Misu| MetaDerby
We felt having the dual token model was the best system because it allows us to manage our token economy. $DBY or Derby Token is our governance token, which will be finite and tied to the success of the game. And $HOOF token is our in-game currency that is used for most aspects of the game. HOOF will be used to pay out daily rewards to users and we also implement various burning mechanisms to help to keep the inflation down.
By having this dual token model, it also allows us in the future to expand the metaverse further. We can forge partnerships with other game developers by inviting them into our Metaderby ecosystem, and having them use DBY as their governance token too, while issuing their own in-game token, all while creating within the Metaderby metaverse.
Dave| Avalaunch
And, to procure the land where i can open my mint juleb stand, I will need DBY.
How soon after the token launch will staking become available? Can you briefly tell us about the staking tier system and how the staking mechanism works?
Misu| MetaDerby
Yes, to buy our NFT land, you will need DBY our governance token. Land ownership makes you a stakeholder in our metaverse
So upon the completion of the IDO and the token LP created with Trader Joe. We will have token staking farms also, we have not announced the details of that publicly yet though.
Dave| Avalaunch
Gotcha. We’ll keep our specs peeled for that announcement.
Besides the DeFi staking model, you also have a referral system that crypto-gamers can enjoy. How do you plan to reach the traditional players not already involved in crypto gaming?
Misu| MetaDerby
Yes, we plan to have a referral system for guilds which will incentivize them to on-board their players/scholars to play our game. Our focus primarily though, are the casual gamers who are playing this game because they enjoy it and for fun. Of course we also do realize the importance of partnering with guilds and guild play, but we don’t want our game to turn into something that people are just here to farm.
The full details of our guild referraly system will be released in the future. It will not be included at the immediately release of the game and will come slightly after.
Yes, to buy our NFT land, you will need DBY our governance token. Land ownership makes you a stakeholder in our metaverse
So upon the completion of the IDO and the token LP created with Trader Joe. We will have token staking farms also, we have not announced the details of that publicly yet though.
Dave| Avalaunch
One of the milestones on the current roadmap include the weekly tournaments and the breeding event. What are they and how do they work from a player perspective?
Misu| MetaDerby
So we want also want users to play our game who aren’t in the crypto space. We are building a mobile app, and for the non-crypto users, we want to make t so that they can sign up for an account, and we will create the wallet for them in-game. So they will be playing our game, and hopefully, not even have to realize that they are playing a ‘blockchain’ game
Dave| Avalaunch
This is a good point as well. That adoption thing. Free to earn will definitely give you a head start. This is a plus.
Misu| MetaDerby
From a player perspective, there will be daily races that are ongoing 24/7. You will have to participate in races as part of daily tasks to recieve an extra daily task reward. We will invite the top horses to participate in weekly tournaments where the prize pool will be paid in DBY token.
Users will also be able to breed between male and female horses. They will create a new offsping horse NFT. Fees will need to be paid in HOOF and DBY tokens by each party. There will be cool down timers on the breeding as well as it gets progressively more expensive to breed a horse, there will be a counter of how many times an NFT is bred and also a max cap.. Offsping horse NFTs have the chance to be of better quality and stats than their parent NFTs.
Dave| Avalaunch
This is impressive. Intricate and thought through.
You’ve been quite successful at making connections and partnering with some big players in both the Avalanche ecosystem as well as gameFi space. What values adding-partners will you be targeting next and why?
Misu| MetaDerby
When we attended the Avalanche Summit, it was great event to meet everyone in person. And when we were there, we announced our successful seed round raise.
I did manage to network with a lot of people and talk to them about Metaderby, everyone I spoke to was interested to invest, but unfortunately, we had no allocation left in the round. There were some big names who were interested.
But for direct next steps, of course we also want to partner with some centralized exchanges. In a p2e game, it is so important to be able to provide liquidity to the players. Whilst DEXs are great, the liqjuidity is usually not as great. So we want to be able to offer that to our playes.
Dave| Avalaunch
I’m sure no one here will complain about your centralized exchange plans. 😀And, our final question before we move on to the Twitter portion of the program — What are you most excited about when you think of MetaDerby and why?
Misu| MetaDerby
Like I said earlier, the traditional horse racing ecosystem is already so robust. We are excited to bring that experience to players, but also expand upon it and create a whole virtual experience with other game plays and entertainment aspects. So while we are a horse racing game, we don’t want to be limited to just horse racing in the future within our DerbyVerse.
Dave| Avalaunch
Well played Sir. You have the captured our appreciation on the first leg of your Avalaunch AMA journey.
Twitter Questions
From @daredevil2706
What type of races will be there? will there be any tournaments in-game that owners can do?
Misu| MetaDerby
So there will be daily races which are on-going 24/7. Horse owners can race by joining our matching system. The matching system will put you against horses of a similar class only. There are classes 1 through 5. With 1 being the top. And yes there will be tournaments which are invitational. We will invite the top performers weekly to take part in it.
In the future when we build out the metaverse and have the land sales, users will even be able to create their own race tracks if they wish. They can arrange and host races and set prizepools and earn from that.
From @moonboy_jack9
Is your gameplay can be easily understood by all kinds of players especially fwor those who are relatively new into crypto or just starting out?
Misu| MetaDerby
Yes, the game play is very simple. I am not sure if you had any chances to view some of our demo videos that were posted to our social media. But all a user has to do is click the horse that they own, and then press race. If they do not own a horse, there will be buttons leading you to either claim your free horse or to buy a horse.
Dave| Avalaunch
Moonboy Jack needs to DYOR a little more because those demos are fire.
From @Maiphuong32
Many Play-to-Earn projects struggle with the token inflation problem. Is there a way for MetaDerby to solve that problem?
Misu| MetaDerby
Yes, token inflation is a big problem in p2e games. with rampant and uncontrollable breeding to the farming of reward tokens. Luckily we are launching our game at this point of the game-fi industry. We were lucky to be able to see what the successful projects did well and where their pain points were.
So we do have various burning mechanisms to control our token inflation. All users will have to pay a race joining fee to enter a race, and from that pool, we cut a small percentage to burn. When breeding is done, there are fees to be paid and a portion of that will be burned. Our NFT market place will also have a small commission which a portion will also be used to burn and lastly for our prediction lottery, it is a rolling prize pool and a percentage of that will be burned. For the NFT token inflation, we also implemented cool down timers on breeding as well as maximum amount of times each NFT can be used to breed as well as increasing breeding fees each time the same NFT is used to breed. So it won’t make sense to use the same Horse to breed to the max limit, unless it is a horse of superior quality. And also the offspring horse NFTs will have timers on when they “grow up” to be able to participate in races and breeding.
From @quyencao3200
Which will be more important to win the race, strength and speed of the steeds, or player skills?
Misu| MetaDerby
So each horse has different stats, and just because you have the horse with the best stats on the track, does not mean you will always win the race. We have implemented a large luck factor that will contribute to the results. The luck factor is random number generated. The way it works for example is like top speed, a horses stats if its a good horse, there will be a range for top max speed to lowest speed, the luck factor will determine where on that range of top speed your horse will run during that race.
From @AdcDavidtai1999
Your project looks unique and different ! How would you introduce Metaderby to “NON CRYPTO” people in order to make the project grow in the long-term.
Misu| MetaDerby
We also want to target non-crypto players and that is one of our focuses. We are making the game free to play and also eventually making it so that users won’t even need to set up their own wallet, and it will be tied to their game account.
To us who are in this space, setting up a wallet is simple enough. But to a non-crypto person who knows nothing of this space, setting up a wallet, private a public keys and then network settings to make sure you’re on the right chain with metamask etc. These are all too complicated and barriers of entry for them. So we want to simplify it down as much as we can and make it as easy to play as other mobile app games.
Dave| Avalaunch
Thanks for all this info. Again, it’s impressive what you all have developed over time with this. It’s one of the more mature games we’ve encountered to date.
Telegram Questions
From @Caryn_Rader
Are you afraid some day there will be another project with more innovative technology can replace your project ?
Misu| MetaDerby
This is the nature of the tech and crypto space. Our team needs to remain agile and flexible to be able to adapt to new technologies or situations. Sometimes some of the questions I answer about plans for the future, get changed by the time that future comes, because we’ve had to adapt to the new realities in the eco-system.
From @KayleenCoburn1996
Marketing is a central element for every project, so that everyone knows the potential that a project can bring is vital to achieve the goals set. What is your strategy to attract new users and Investor to your platform and keep them long term.
Misu| MetaDerby
We have multiple marketing campaigns on-going. Some within the crypto communites and guilds via AMAs in telegram and discord and social media. Other media is targetting the legacy tech market and maybe people who aren’t in the crypto space but interested in tech and games.
I spoke about how we want everyone to be able to play our game and be as inclusive as possible, so we have to target people outside of the crypto space also. And to keep them long term, we need to make the game fun and also provide value for players to be able to earn for participating in our eco-system.
From @Orenjineko02
What is your opinion about current market condition?
Because when we launch a project in bad market, they will spread many FUDs. How DBY team counter it?
Misu| MetaDerby
The current market conditions for crypto overall are not too bad. Most recently, we have seen a small pullback in the game-fi space, I think something that contributes to this is maybe the fatigue of farming games repetitively. I highlighted earlier that these games, most importantly, need to be fun to play. So that should be the primary driving factor for people to play it.
From @preciouswoody
Do you guys feel satisfied by seeing your progresses and achievements till now, when you look back to the day when you have started this project?
Misu| MetaDerby
Yes, we are very satisfied, but also know there was room for imporvement. Since we started work on this project, we have built a demo version and our beta is launching at the end of this month.
We had a successful seed round raise and were able to announce it while we were at Avalanche Summit in Barcelona meeting many of our investors and partners, like Ava Launch!
We had a successful NFT mint for our Derby Tickets, the public mint sold out in seconds and we are the top volume collection for the last 7 days on Kalao.
And finally we also recently won the community vote for the Dorahacks Avalanche Asia Summit with over 6500 votes.
I would like to know why team decided to create project within the NFT? How much potential do you see in the future for the NFT?
Misu| MetaDerby
Our team seems blockchain and NFTs as the future of gaming. Not just crypto game-fi, but all gaming.
Before when smart phones were initially released, there were mobile game apps and that was a new concept for people. But today, that is the norm.
Blockchain and NFTs allow users to have governance over their own assets, hold them securely and trade them as they want. Imagine all the multiplayer online games you have played from legacy gaming, don’t you wish you were able to freely trade your inventory that you worked so hard to procure?
Also, blockchain can make things like competitions provably fair and also record the results for everyone to see and not be tampered with.
Dave| Avalaunch
Thank you @misuTelegram
You’ve been a great guest and it was pleasure to have you and hearing more about Metaderby.
Very much look forward to our sale and your forthcoming launch.
Misu| MetaDerby
Thank you for having me here today.
Everyone please follow our social media for the latest updates, we have the IDO coming up soon with our awesome partners AVAlaunch and the latest updates on that will be from our twitter, discord and telegram groups
