Onward…
Hey Pod family, I feel like it’s been so long since I had the pleasure of writing one of these for you. It’s honestly one of my favorite parts of working on this project, I get to spew information about everything that we are working on, and you all keep telling me you enjoy reading it. Why? I Haven’t quite figured it out yet, but it’s fun for me so I won’t ask questions.
We have some good news, some bad news, some updates and everything in between. OK;LG.
Lets recap shall we?
I will start this off by giving an elevator pitch to any new prospective Pod People that are lurking in the shadows and not familiar with the project. I’m sure you’re asking yourself — “Damn, that art for this random article is pretty slick? Oh wow that’s a nice logo too, what's up with all of this?”. This next part is for you.
What is Pod People? Pod people is a NFT project that integrates a sustainable GameFi economy by using it to build a self-sufficient digital society, all aboard the Mothership. The Mothership is home to the Pods, these are our NFTs and they are your personal property on the Mothership. The Pods are far more than that though, they are your ownership stake in this society, in this mission, and in the Mothership.
The Pods are our babies. The artwork is all handmade for every single one of the 10,000 Pods. It sounds crazy we know, but we have had 6 artists working on this for 6 months. The art is broken down into 21 sectors, each sector brings its own distinct aesthetic on board. We promise that everyone can find a Pod that they will be happy to call their own.
Upon the Pods, we will be building a digital infrastructure to make the Mothership entirely self sustaining. At first, we are bootstrapping this economy with what is known as a “Tri-Token System”. In Pod People, this system is comprised of (you guessed it) 3 tokens. Token #1 and the most important one, is the Pod NFTs. Token #2 is $POD, this is our primary token and one we have called the “Function Token”. $POD will be used to interact with everything we build, and it is also the token you will be rewarded with for your time and effort. Token #3 is $CLONE, this is the first utility token, and its primary use case is to upgrade your Pod.
A key thing to remember is that this Tri-Token system is only the beginning — this is just phase 1 for us. At this moment — nothing about phase 2 has been leaked but this will come before you know it. Keep reading and you will see what I mean ;).
Genesis mint: 3,000 Pods from 9 sectors at a price of 1.5 $AVAX.
Where are we today?
As it stands right now, we are ready to mint the Pods, fire up the economy and get this show on the road. Unfortunately, the AVAX NFT market is not ready for us just yet. Yes, this is me saying we are pushing back the mint date from April 19th. We are sad too, as we are ready to go and eagerly wanting to get this project out to the world. The other tough news to drop is that we are not giving a new mint date at this time, as the market environment is in an unstable situation. We are continually monitoring with our partners at Kalao.io, and we can’t predict when the environment will be more engaged. Once we see the analytics we want to see, we are going for it. We are ready.
Now that the bad news is out of the way, I will load you up with happy thoughts, so you forget all about a pushed back mint date.
First and foremost, lets dive into the development and where we stand in this regard. Initially when we planned out our launch process, we thought we were going to release our NFTs and the economy at separate times. However, we are in a position to launch nearly 100% of Phase 1, on day 1. Yes, everything in our gitbook/whitepaper that is associated with phase 1 is ready to go. Of course, there will be a bit of time between deploying the contracts as we want to make sure everything goes smooth, but when we lift off, we are doing it swiftly.
Just to recap what Phase 1 entails: Step #1 is launching the 3,000 Genesis Pods. Upon launching these, we will be watching how quick mint completes. Upon completion, we will begin step #2 which is the process of wiring up the entire economy. This includes Pod staking, the $POD distribution mechanism as well as ensuring the front end is running seamlessly for these functions. Once this is set up, we will allow you to Dock your Pod in to the Mothership in preparation for the start of $POD mining. Once this is fired up, we will immediately shift to deploying the $CLONE contract as step #3. This process should be very similar to step #2 and the time between #2 and #3 should be minimal.
The one thing I keep getting asked about is “wen website”, and I know you might be tired of me saying this… but it is coming soooooon. We posted some sneak peaks in the Discord over the last week, so please do go check those out as it looks really really great. Why is it taking so long? Well, we keep refining and making changes because we are picky about our art and design, it’s both our greatest asset and our biggest pitfall. This tied with the fact that we have decided to not launch the front end until it is ready and armed with the Web3 mumbo jumbo it needs to be fully functioning. From this point forward I am going to be careful about giving out dates, but having our website up is at the top of my priority list. One thing we are super excited about though? We got a killer domain. “www.PodPeople.space”. Gives me chills just thinking about typing that into the search bar and coming to a bright, beautiful and inviting home page that makes you NEED to know more.
Partnerships — updates — and whatever else I find to talk about
Due to the extra time before launch, we have been refining our math and processes as well as making more and more frens in the Avalanche ecosystem. We have made some super key partnerships with arguably some of the best projects in Avalanche. Not only are we proud of being involved in this upper echelon but, we are also so so so excited to get working with these great teams to bring fun, new and innovative ideas to Avalanche and the greater Web3 space.
We have been in discussions with our frens at Metropius and my god… this team? this project? I mean its seriously mouth watering stuff that they are doing. Award winning animation, an artistic style that we are in love with, great people, and on Avalanche? They stole my heart immediately. Such an honor to work with these folks and we cant wait to see where we go together.
As for a partner that needs no introduction. We have been chatting with the guys over at Kalao for some time now and we even had the pleasure of hanging out a bit in Barcelona. Great people and an even greater platform and, one that we are excited to integrate with down the line.
Last but certainly not least, our pals at Heroes of NFT have been a great group to talk with. We sat down with them and had a great discussion about their metaverse and everything that is made possible within it. Although we can’t release what we have been working on… it’s so cool. This partnership is something we hope to carry on for a very long time as our teams align very closely in our vision for the future of Web3.
Partnerships are great, but let’s talk ‘Pod People’ shall we?
Maybe you have heard us talk about this, maybe you haven't but we made some tweaks to the economy to address very valid critiques about GameFi tokenomics from the biggest names in Avalanche. See those tweets below, and I encourage you to read the thread they are quoting, as well as the comments. So much great info from the brightest minds around and we get to have it for FREE, what a great ecosystem to call home.
To sum it up as short as I can: GameFi economies are broken. The process up until recently has been the same — you get rewarded with a token over time that is destined to dump in value. There are a couple key points in that sentence that I want to break down.
First is the term “over time”, Luigi presents this in a brilliant way in his thread but to put it simply, in what economy are you given value simply by giving up time without creating value with that time? I'm no economist so I don't have an answer for it either, but it sure makes a ton of sense. Economies are backed by the exchange of value, either in an asset that has value or by work that equates to value. Any way you cut it, it’s an exchange of value.
Secondly, many GameFi economies use tokens to “provide value” to the user, however, this “value” is nothing more than an LP pair that gets ravaged from being the revolving door of value extraction in a hyper inflationary environment. The simple design of these economies results in a dump in price from their inception, or in other words, it’s literally programmed.
As you can see we did some reading and some thinking and we decided to implement our solution immediately. The logic behind making this change is simple — those concerns with GameFi are undoubtedly valid, and our previous economy design was going to be part of the problem and not part of the solution. We think that's a poor way to do business, so we went into overdrive and now here we are today with a fix we are proud of.
Introducing: Virtual Proof of Work or vPOW.
The idea was simple, how do we create a dynamic emissions schedule that is based on the amount of work and not just the amount of time passed? It sounds complicated but in reality, the change was quite simple to implement.
If you have read our gitbook then you should know that in order to earn $POD, you need to Dock your Pod to the Mothership. In our previous design, this was all you had to do to be rewarded with $POD. In other terms, we were giving you value based only on the amount of time passed (BAD, as previously stated). The amount of $POD that you earned was based on the amount of Power your Pod was bringing to the Mothership, which is still true, but we twisted it into a more positive direction.
Now to earn the maximum amount of $POD, the people who are also Docked have to assist the Mothership in achieving nominal power levels. What does this mean? Over time, the Mothership will need more and more power brought to its grid to mine $POD at full capacity. If nominal power levels are not maintained, the amount of $POD that is mined drops drastically, thus lowering the earnings for EVERYONE on board.
Let me give an example: We are 4 weeks into the economy being launched, there are 3,000 Pods in circulation, and everyone is Docked and earning some $POD. At this point let’s say the Mothership needs 4500 power brought to its grid in order to mine $POD at full capacity. This means if all 3k Pods were docked, they must have an average power level of 1.5 to keep power nominal. Do we think all 3k Pods are going to be docked at once? No, we are not naïve. In reality we are looking at a situation where 1,500 Pods are docked and they need an average power level of 3 in order to keep the Mothership at 100%. This dynamic makes things reallllllly interesting because guess what? The next week, the Mothership may need 4800 power to mine at 100%, meaning we need more people docked or we need more power from the current dockers.
Now the entire Pod People community must work together to keep the Mothership happy and full of power, otherwise we all earn less $POD. This is going to be fun.
Updates to our gitbook to reflect these changes will come when they are ready. Please read this section over again to really understand it and think through a variety of scenarios. If you have questions, you all know where to find me, please ping me in Discord with any questions and I plan to go into voice chat to talk more about this at some point soon.
One last bit — my fingers are sore
In a recent AMA, someone presented a great question about the communal fund that we have talked very little about. It has been in the back of our mind because we have always said it will be a bucket of assets like $POD and $CLONE that we use for community things. But then we got to thinking…
We decided this portion of the $POD emissions should be used for a bigger purpose, and we are pumped to announce that the communal fund will be used to provide outside communities in the greater Avalanche ecosystem the opportunity to take part in our economy. Read that again, but slower.
Let’s give a specific example: Say we want to allow the Chikn community to come aboard the Mothership. Chikn holders would stake their Coq into our docking contract and begin earning $POD without diluting the Pod holder’s emissions. Neat innit? Even better, by coming aboard the Mothership they too can upgrade their Chikn to earn more $POD. The best part? Using $CLONE is not mandatory; we could allow them to upgrade using $EGG. This means the Mothership earns $EGG in return for $POD while also offering cross community utility to anyone on Avalanche. The secret sauce? When this portion of $POD emissions are not being used for communal utility, they are being 100% burned.
The details on how we will set up these cross-community events are still to be hashed out by the team, but our options are endless. We can make 2-week events, we can allow projects to have permanent access, we can pretty much do anything. Again, this is going to be fun
Thank you ❤
You all have been supportive and patient with us from the start, and we can not thank you enough. I have said it before and I will say it again, these decisions are always made for the benefit of the community.
Please jump into the Discord, follow us on Twitter and give our whitepaper a good read. We are building something special here and these little hiccups will soon be forgotten.
All links: https://t.co/oz6srEnRRn
Cheers
