Sumer is the earliest civilization that invented consumer loans. Zumer will be the protocol to reinvent the NFT lending market. Find out how they are going to do so in our highlights of the AMA between @ZumerProtocol & @CRE8RDAO 👇

Team

Who is @moonsman_sy?

🔹 SY Chan is the CEO
🔹 Originally from Hong Kong. Currently based in Taiwan
🔹 Background in investment banking and venture capital
🔹 Got an MBA from @MITSloan

🔹 Is a hardcore gamer 🎮
🔹 Spent 2-3 years in crypto startups. An early investor in @AaveAave and @compoundfinance
🔹 Favourite NFT project is @AzukiOfficial

Team

🔹 Most of his team is based in the US
🔹 Has a flat organization even though he’s the CEO
🔹 Have four co-founders

🔹 One of his co-founders, @timevalueofart, used to be a professor in history and art. He is their spokesperson and helps them to connect with different creative communities in the US
🔹 His other 2 co-founders are talented devs who have contributed to other DeFi protocols

Any VC backers?

🔹 @OVioHQ is one of their early investors
🔹 Draper invested in them
🔹 Got into @binance’s incubation program
🔹 Got a grant from @0xPolygon
🔹 VC investors account for 5% of their tokenomics

What is Zumer?

🔹 It’s a liquidity protocol that allows #NFT owners to use their NFTs as collaterals to borrow a loan against their holdings

🔹 Offers buy now, pay later (#BNPL) options for NFTs
🔸 Happens on the app
🔸 Different payment methods are offered to NFT buyers
🔸 The protocol will lend users the funds to purchase the NFT upfront. The user will then pay back the loan over 6 - 12 months

Why would somebody use NFT loans?

🔹 Have done a lot of customer interviews. A lot of people wanted such a product 👍
🔹 E.g., people do not want to sell their @BoredApeYC. They want to improve their capital efficiency with the liquidity they get from collateralizing their NFT

🔹 This injects more liquidity into the NFT market
🔹 Reminds him of the 2018 crypto winter — no new liquidity entered the space. This eventually led to the creation of #DeFi
🔹 For US investors, using NFTs to borrow loans does not trigger a tax event. This ⬆️ liquidity

Origin story

🔹 Last year, Mike was working on an NFT project called Free the Mouse DAO, a Mickey Mouse-related IP NFT
🔹 The Mickey Mouse IP will be in the public domain in 1-2 years’ time
🔹 Mike hired him as a token economist

🔹 After a few months, they realized that there are no liquidity protocols for NFTs
🔹 Started Zumer to address this problem

Why are they called Zumer?

🔹 It’s based on Sumer, one of the earliest civilizations that invented consumer loans
🔹 Decided on Zumer because Z is the mirror image of S
🔹 It also sounds like Zoomer, which refers to the new generation

Relationship between Zumer and @LabsSumeria 

🔹 Sumeria Labs is the operating entity that’s owned by the 4 co-founders
🔹 They are going to build different tools to support the ecosystem, including an NFT wallet that allows the NFT owners to access different sources of liquidity

Their Unique Value Proposition

🔹 There are 3 types of protocols:
🔸 Peer-to-peer model matching lenders to borrowers
🔸 Pooled models aggregate capital from different lenders into a pool
🔸 Their model, which is based on banking models from the real world

For lenders

🔹 Stake your NFT into their lending pool. In return, you will get an NFT certificate pointing to the NFT you deposited
🔹 Borrowers can borrow up to a certain percentage of the value of the NFT. They are able to select the duration of the loan as well

🔹 Each month, they have to pay back a certain percentage of the loan. They have to pay back the entire loan by the end of the term. Otherwise, the protocol will liquidate their NFTs

🔹 The percentage of interest depends on the risk level of the project
🔹 Blue chip projects have a lower interest rate as their price volatility is lower

🔹 Have another product for high-risk lenders who want to take on default risks and price volatility
🔹 When NFTs are liquidated, sometimes there might be losses. These losses are absorbed by high-risk lenders

For borrowers

🔹 There are 3 risk tiers:
🔸 Low risk: 60% of Loan to Value (LTV)
🔸 Medium risk: 50% of LTV
🔸 High risk: 40% of LTV

🔹 Examples of medium-risk projects include @doodles and @BoredApeYC
🔹 Examples of high-risk projects include @moonbirds and @AzukiOfficial

🔹 LTV is determined by the past 6 months of price volatility:
🔸 Low risk: single-digit price volatility
🔸 Medium risk: Between 10 - 15% price volatility
🔸 High risk: Greater than 15% price volatility

🔹 Initially, the different tiers will be selected by the team. Eventually, it will be handed over to the #DAO

LP Pool

🔹 Users can stake to earn income from the protocol
🔹 At first, it will only support #Ethereum. Subsequently, they will support Polygon

What are some NFTs that will be popular with their protocol?

🔹 Bored Apes and crypto gaming projects
🔹 Instead of renting from gaming guilds, scholars can use their buy now, pay later function to acquire gaming assets first and pay back the loan later 👍

Do they support 1 of 1 NFTs?

🔹 They are looking at it. It requires a different pricing model
🔹 For NFT collectibles, they are working with a price oracle called @DIAdata_org

🔹 DIA has just developed decentralized NFT price feeds
🔹 For 1 of 1 NFTs, they are not able to use a decentralized method. They would need a hybrid model for pricing

Price Oracle

🔹 Working with DIA
🔹 Have talked to @chainlink. Waiting for Chainlink to decentralize their products
🔹 DIA’s oracle gets its price feeds from @LooksRare, @opensea, and a few other smaller marketplaces

How do liquidations work?

🔹 They only have 1 criteria — failure to pay back your interest and your principal
🔹 The protocol will take over the NFT from the smart contract and put it up on their marketplace to start an auction

🔹 The highest bidder will get the NFT after the auction period of 2-3 days
🔹 Their target audience is bargain buyers looking for defaulted NFTs
🔹 Initially, auctions will be settled in $ETH. Will be expanding it to other currencies and chains

How do they prevent price manipulation?

🔹 When they spoke to different oracle providers, these providers also thought of different live scenarios to prevent manipulation
🔹 They take the longer-term moving average instead of the spot price

🔹 This causes a price delay to prevent a forced liquidation scenario
🔹 During the liquidation process, they allow a grace period for NFT owners to redeem their NFTs

Zumer Insurance

🔹 A product that is provided for borrowers to extend the grace period
🔹 Insurance costs 1-2% of the loan values. It extends the grace period for another 24 hours

Names for their community members?

🔹 Community members are called Zumerians
🔹 Currently working on the DAO design
🔹 Will be dropping their protocol NFTs, with each NFT having different roles and benefits 👀

Decentralization plans

🔹 Working towards a #DAO
🔹 Need to implement community education as their risk model is different from existing #DeFi protocols
🔹 Created a new role called the underwriter to assess the price volatility risk

🔹 In the future, token holders will decide the interest rate of the protocols. However, it requires a lot of investor education
🔹 Have just set up their Discord and Telegram
🔹 Will have a soft launch in September

Security

🔹 Their smart contracts are being reviewed by @CertiK. It will be done by early September
🔹 Looking for a second auditor
🔹 Will be launching a bug bounty program at some point 🐛

Tokenomics

🔹 It is in the pipeline and it depends on the market conditions
🔹 Earliest would be in Q4 this year
🔹 Join their Discord and give them feedback on their UX. Users might get an airdrop 👀 

🔹 Will be using $ZUMER as the ticker symbol
🔹 Adopting a @CurveFinance-like model:
🔸 Stake to get voting tokens
🔸 Voting tokens have voting rights to help decide the interest rates, which NFT projects to work with

Roadmap

🔹 Soft launch in Sep
🔹 Launching their protocol NFTs in Sep/Oct
🔹 The full launch of the protocol and the token in Q4 this year
🔹 Expanding into Polygon and other chains early next year
🔹 Your staked positions will be denoted as NFTs instead of fungible tokens

Multi-chain plans

🔹 Currently talking to @avalancheavax
🔹 Happy to talk to anyone who’s building their own #Metaverse ecosystem
🔹 Will be starting with #EVM-compatible chains first

How can people get involved?

🔹 Join their Discord and Telegram
🔹 They are looking for early supporters to provide feedback on their products
🔹 Open to discuss partnerships and hiring as well

Links:

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3VzEPio3b4

Thanks to @EthFugu for hosting the AMA

Links:

Substack post: https://thereadingape.substack.com/p/zumer-ama-with-cre8r-dao?sd=pf

Zumer AMA with CRE8R DAO

In ep #4 of Humans of Crypto #TextCast, we're going to share the human stories behind @eli5_defi. Eli5 is a #DeFi educational account with a very refreshing take - to simplify and explain DeFi using visuals.

Let's take a look at their stories 👇

👉 Background

• Team of 2: Blockhead @0xBlock_Head & Osim
@minnymousegirl
• B works in the energy sector and has a small business in his hometown
• O is currently working in the crypto industry and she used to be ex TradFi in BB banks

• B's boss introduced him to crypto in mid-2017
• Made it trading ICO during the 2017 bull run
• Left crypto for a while to set up his own business before coming back in 2019
• O was in China, trading in 2017
• Lost access to her account and stopped
• Resumed in 2019

👉 What's one misconception people have of you?

• B: Not many know his true identity, prefers anon status. That's the image he wants to maintain
• O: People think that she is cool & popular but actually she's the biggest nerd in town 🤓

👉 Definition of success

• B: Success is relative. Not about being freaking rich (though it'll be nice) but to see improvements daily 
• Gives himself a 10/10 right now

• O: Success means to be among the top in her chosen field
• Still not there yet but improving every day

👉 Spending free time

• B: Spends most of his free time with his family, esp his 3 kids
• Loves travelling and playing video games

• O: Loves learning new things. Wide interest ranging from finance, crypto, data and performing arts

👉 Origins of Eli5 DeFi

• They met in O's Discord
• O has her meme account on Instagram (under Bakchoomie) with lots of followers
• Eli5 started as a repository for questions on Discord but evolved to become an education powerhouse

👉 What is Eli5 DeFi trying to achieve?

• Many educational crypto threads are too hard to understand
• Eli5 tries to cover the basics and make it easier to digest using visuals
• In the future, they will go deeper into topics but explained in a simple way

👉 Workflow

• Starts brainstorming topics, collecting resources and finalizing the title
• Took about 1 week to create 1 visual guide
• Will discuss and seek feedback from friends
• Hardest part is researching and collecting materials, and designing

• Have a topics pipeline but will shift to include trending topics as they come
• Since they just started out, they are more reactionary to what people find interesting
• In the future, they will steer discussions into under-covered topics

👉 Target audience

• Newcomers to crypto or any projects wanting to reach a bigger audience with a simple/friendlier approach
• A lot of projects have great potential but communicate their protocol in a boring and long whitepaper

👉 Strategies for growing their social media account

• So far growing organically 
• Building good relationships with other influential crypto figures
• Most importantly, creating high-quality content

👉 Other projects

DAO experience
• B: His first DAO is @Wonderland_fi and was an active member there
• The ASCII-style Cheshire Cat landing page was made by him
• First impression of DAOs - they need proper organisation and are not as strict as corporate

• Main difference between DAO and real-world work is that the latter has strict due diligence to members of their organisation
• They will do background checks
• The inclusivity of DAOs is good but can be dangerous if there are bad actors

👉 Importance of resume in the Web3 world

• Having some credentials is a positive point
• Not as important as delivering results or showing results
• So far none has asked them for their resumes before

👉 Best and Worst DAO experiences

• B: Becoming part of a movement or an early supporter is addictive
• This is regardless of whether the product is actually a success or not
• Having invested time and money, one cannot be objective due to sunk cost fallacy

👉 How to improve the DAO experience?

• B: Many things, like the voting system, organisation, management, background checks for core members and streamlining the decision-making process

👉 Most controversial thoughts on crypto

• B: Crypto might not be around once we have better tech but the concepts/philosophy will remain
• O: The currency aspect of crypto is too overhyped

👉 Alpha for readers

• B: Eli5 is designing a novel approach in tokenomics to solve governance and emission model
• O: Arbitrage with TradFi!

👉 One mistake made in crypto

• B: Always have an exit plan and a plan B with regards to a project, no matter how much you love it
• O: There are many here - buying shitcoin on impulse, leveraging, bias on leveraging, not hedging risk, buying jpeg NFTs

👉 Tried anything new recently?

• B: His real-life work is mundane and crypto is already giving him lots of new experiences 
• O: Very open to new experiences 
• Tried out a potential new career path but didn't really work out

👉 What's one thing that you know that most people don't?

• B: "Ape first think later" is actually a good strategy
• O: How to be a good loser

👉 An idol in the crypto space?

• Founder of $BTC, Satoshi Nakamoto

👉 Anyone they want to give a shout-out to?

• Marco Manoppo @blocknomy 
• StorganManley @Storgan_ManleyX
• Both are ex-TradFi and very smart
• Not to forget meme queen Osim @minnymousegirl 

That's it! This had been a lot of fun for us and we hope to do more of this #TextCast. DM us if:

1) You're an interesting human being in the web3/crypto space with an amazing story to share 
2) You know someone interesting in the space with a story that begs to be shared

Link to Substack article:

https://thereadingape.substack.com/p/humans-of-crypto-4-interview-with

Humans of Crypto #4: Eli5 DeFi

SEO myths come in 2 forms:

🔹 Clear myths that have never been right
🔹 Outdated SEO tactics

Find out more about SEO in this episode of Buying Online Businesses with host @jarydkrause and guest @Kevin_Indig 👇 

Background

🔹 SEO director at @Shopify
🔹 Creator of @thegrowthmemo newsletter and the host of the Tech Bound Podcast
🔹 Before Shopify, he ran SEO and content at @G2dotcom and @Atlassian

Myths about SEO

🔹 SEO is a reverse-engineered discipline. Google does not want anybody to game their algorithm
🔹 Different boxes of myths:
🔸 Clear myths that have never been right
🔸 Outdated SEO tactics

🔹 A few years ago, there was a trend where people created infographics and had other people link to them. This does not work anymore
🔹 Emailing different sites and asking them to include your link in their articles no longer works

🔹 The whole area of SEO hyperlinks not mattering anymore is a myth
🔹 @Google taking care of spammy/bad backlinks for you is a myth
🔹 Important to be critical of things you hear. Have to test things out and re-evaluate them yourself

Are Backlinks still important?

🔹 Backlinks are still very valuable
🔹 Buying backlinks is against Google’s guidelines. If you are caught, Google will penalize you
🔹 Many companies pay for backlinks and it still works

🔹 If you buy backlinks, make sure that:
🔸 They appear as natural as possible
🔸 They are from relevant sites

🔹 Buying backlinks from a quality site still works
🔹 Getting backlinks too quickly is unnatural. Google will view it as a red flag
🔹 Assess your competitors and see what they are doing

What can help get a Backlink?

🔹 Some sites (such as Shopify and Atlassian) have such strong brands that they do not get many organic links
🔹 They could still drive organic links with good content marketing

🔹 Collect statistics about your area/niche. Other bloggers/journalists might look for hard data for their articles
🔹 Provide unique data or data visualizations by combining different data pools together

SEO Principles

🔹 Everyone’s always asking for the latest tactics
🔹 However, the principles are more important:
🔸 1st principle: Build your own corpus of experience — Test things out and learn

🔸 Possible to do testing as a one-person army. It does not have to be complex (e.g. making a change, seeing what happens, reverting the change, and seeing whether it goes back to baseline)

🔸 2nd principle: Adopt a Bayesian mindset — Building knowledge on top of the knowledge you already have
🔸 3rd principle: Execute quickly and execute well

🔹 A mistake that companies and people do is to roll out one large thing after 6 months instead of rolling out something every week
🔹 The Pareto rule provides another perspective. Often, a few blog articles/landing pages bring in the most dollars

Content structure

🔹 Have to understand the intent that people are expressing when they search for certain keywords
🔹 Does not make sense to optimize for one keyword. Blog articles/landing pages can rank for thousands of keywords

🔹 Optimize towards user intention and decide the optimal structure from there
🔹 Examples:
🔸 If the intent is best business tips, it will be structured as a listicle

🔸 If it is about “Why did the stock market go down?”, it would consist of paragraphs with qualitative explanations
🔸 For certain user intent, Google just shows a video as that’s the best way to answer

Would he suggest having different types of formats?

🔹 His recommendation is to play around with it
🔹 2-3 years ago, long-form content outperformed short-form content
🔹 Now he sees short-form articles ranking for some juicy keywords

🔹 Duplicate content/keyword cannibalization has completely changed
🔹 Google has 3 types of user intent:
🔸 Dominant intent
🔸 Common intent
🔸 Minor intent

🔹 A piece of content that addresses the 3 different types of user intent for a single keyword can rank with content for the same keyword

On AI content

🔹 Skeptical and doubtful about AI content
🔹 There are some ways to create good enough AI content that gets ranked
🔹 If you are an eCommerce site with many categories, the writing of product descriptions could be outsourced to AI

🔹 Seeing good long-form content written by AI
🔹 Tested AI content at Shopify. Still need an editor to make edits before it is publishable

🔹 Google will develop an understanding of things that AI can and cannot answer well:
🔸 For “shallow” questions, Google can answer the question themselves

🔸 Difficult for AI to comprehend questions that require forward-thinking (e.g. will there be a recession?). They have all the information but AI does not have an understanding of how these factors would play together

Links:

Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXojOD_Q4ME

Thanks to @jarydkrause for this episode

Links:

Substack post: https://thereadingape.substack.com/p/buying-online-businesses-seo-myths

Buying Online Business: Kevin Indig

One of the most innovative #NFT projects, @TheSaudisNFT, had an AMA to talk more about the crates opening event. There are rumors that the crates will open up to a new cheetah NFT collection plus a new token launch!

Let's find out if it's true in our highlights of the AMA 👇

👉 Mission of The Saudis

• To raise the bar of what an NFT project can do 
• Will do what they can to bring value to Saudis holders 
• 'North Star' metric is to increase the network effect of the project
• Goal is to increase the no of unique holders

• Ultimately, The Saudis is not just a typical PFP project
• More items will be added in the near future that can be purchased with oil
• Will work towards increasing the utility of the NFT
• Had to be careful not to dilute existing collection

👉 What's in the crate?

• Cannot confirm nor deny the crates will be about cheetahs
• The crate does contain a new exotic pet NFT collection
• Will have a royalty tax for each crate to be used to buy Saudis floor to burn
• Coming out in 2-3 weeks from now

👉 Crate upgrades

• Similar to loot boxes, each with its own chance of getting a rare NFT
• Diamond crates have the highest chance, but it's not guaranteed
• Upgrade is a one-time thing and can't be upgraded again
• Will have a dashboard upgrade to filter crates & oil 

👉 Artwork

• All the 3D assets, bazaar, animation and artwork are done by @SaudiPicasso
• Had worked with the Saudis team before for more than 1 decade

👉 Post crate opening
• Oil rig stays with the soul-bound token (SBT) and will keep pumping oil

👉 Fair launch of the new collection

• Kept diamond crates upgrading to one per wallet to avoid anyone hoarding all of it
• Merchant in the bazaar will open until supply runs out
• People will have to decide if they want to upgrade now or accumulate oil for better crates

👉 Oil token

• Will launch an ERC-20 token and collaborate with some #DeFi people for this 
• Details will be released in the next few weeks, post-crate opening
• Token will have utility, likely related to upgrading attributes of The Saudis

• Many NFT collections have tokens but had no real utility
• The Saudis are doing it differently and this token will be a core part of the ecosystem
• Holding the Saudi will enable access to the token
• Oil collected will allow one to claim it and eventually trade on a DEX

👉 Merch/collectible store

• Gives Saudis holders royalty rights on using their NFTs for physical products
• Imagine turning the Saudis NFTs into a physical toy, then earning royalty from each sale
• Collaborating with a large collectible toy manufacturer

👉 Physical event

• Will be holding an exclusive event in early 2023 for Saudis holders
• Collaborating with artists/influencers for this
• More updates towards the end of 2022

👉 Oil production rates

• Current all the same but have plans to change it
• Will be based on rarity ranking and the number of Saudis held in a wallet
• Updates will come next week

👉 Team

• Team members mostly have startup backgrounds and understood the importance of speed and execution 
• Will collab with more people but are highly selective to bring more value to Saudis holders
• Intends to market outside of the crypto world to grow

• They are the first to do live-action content with @roberto_saudi
• Planned the content and filmed it weekly
• Wanted some passive content too, like how BAYC is featured in music videos

https://twitter.com/roberto_saudi/status/1562176862138376193

👉 Diamond contracts by @mudgen

• Saudis used diamond contracts as it represents the right level of modularization, making them easily scalable
• Team comes from a tech/engineer background
• Have the ambition to build a world-class org hence wanted a scalable architecture

• Diamond contract is flexible enough to add a new ERC standard to the existing one - future-friendly
• Not many use this because it's fairly complex
• People are not aware of these too, as it's commonly outsourced to external dev

• The team is going to release a series of videos to teach people how to create diamond contracts (perhaps @mudgen can aid in this?)
• Will be out in a month
• Want to be at the forefront of adopting the best tech and promoting it to the rest of the community 

That's it! 

Here's a shoutout to all the Saudis friends. You might miss the AMA, so our highlights might help you save some time.

@Kriptofoxes
@Barefoo97515191 
@maxbiddin 
@TschetterGaus 
@kmaxphoto
@Ing_Sagittarius 
@SonnieNFT
@ObeyMr_1400 
@Hasbulla_NFT



The link to the actual Twitter Spaces is here:

https://twitter.com/TheSaudisNFT/status/1562152822145261569

For a long-form version of this thread, read our Substack article here:

https://thereadingape.substack.com/p/saudis-ama-whats-in-the-crate-sheikh?sd=pf

We've made a few threads on The Saudis as well, here's one of them:

https://twitter.com/The_ReadingApe/status/1547977720251854856

👇 This one below is an AMA to talk about what The Saudis is all about

Here's another one:

https://twitter.com/The_ReadingApe/status/1549786310084214790

👇 This one deals specifically with the Soul-bound tokens attached to each Saudis

Today we're very excited to share a protocol that will disrupt the lottery gaming industry by introducing fairness, transparency and provable randomness. This is exactly what crypto is for!

Read the highlights of the AMA between @CRE8RDAO and @DropBilli 👇

🔸 Team

• Founding team has 5 people
• Worked together on past startups, one of which was a telecom business 10 years ago
• Exited that by selling to larger telecom companies
• Has an advisory board of industry experts, including the prominent gaming attorney David Klein

• Team is doxxed, but is anon to the public
• VCs backing them has strict due diligence 
• Murray has a software dev background, and Pygmy is in marketing
• The others consist of a hyper connector, a business developer and a lawyer

“The superpowers of our team is making sure that none of the founders is the brightest person in the room so we’re able to find people who are world leaders in certain fields to make sure they are the people advising us.”

- Murray

👉 What is the #1 worry?

• Others might copy their ideas so that they had to execute quickly and manage the release of ideas strategically
• Also worries about the availability of solidity devs - might have to pay higher prices for their services


🔸 What is BilliDrop?

• A tri-token ecosystem with a collection of products built around the idea that lotteries suck and they can do better
• Offers a fairer, more transparent way with incentives 
• Disrupting as a source of value comes naturally to the founders

👉 Origin Story

• Murray's experience with the gaming industry is that they are very unfair and opaque
• One of the main problems is that they deal with pseudo-random numbers in the draw, which is not acceptable in gambling
• He learnt of on-chain VRF from @chainlink 

“We were talking about how annoying lotteries are and they’re not very fair. If you did it on-chain, it will be fair, transparent and verifiable. They could go back through that log and repeat how the process was run so they could verify that too.”

- Murray


• During a Thanksgiving pool party, the founders and their friends are just chatting about this
• The next day, some of the people at the party called them up and said here's the money, let's do it

👉 Why the name BilliDrop?
• Aims to have a 1 billion prize pot (Billi)

👉 How does BilliDrop earn its revenue?

• Liquidity pool management - managed by @pangolindex and the amount generated is enough to cover the overhead
• The Drop - this is the sweepstake with a 10% admin fee charged per entry ticket

👉 Which blockchain will BilliDrop be built on?

• NFTs and the liquidity pool will be on #ETH
• The Drop (sweepstake) will be on @0xPolygon due to the lower gas fees
• The tickets to enter The Drop can be on different networks using different tokens. These can be bridged over

👉 Ethical concerns

• Lottery winners go into bankruptcy within 3 years of winning
• Team is in talks with outfits to give financial advice to winners so that they can do more good than bad
• Ultimately how others use their money is none of their business 

“Marketing is a superpower and you are convincing people to change their behaviour and to take action to do something. Throughout my career, I’ve had to ask myself, am I using the power for good or am I using the power for evil?”

- Pygmy


👉 Launching during the bear market

• Not a big concern 
• They are on track with their plans 
• Gambling is not that affected adversely by bad economic times
• Some aspects of the industry might even seen an improvement 

🔸 NFT

• The Herd collections are ERC-721 with 40k NFTs in 3 different tranches
• 1st tranche of 10k are the Nannies (female goats)
• 2nd tranche of 20k are the Kids 
• 3rd tranche of 10k are the Bucks (male goats)

This post 👇 shows the artwork and style of the collection. The first tranche of 10k (nannies) has 3D sculptured bodies with ram heads. Comes with baked-in multiplier.

https://twitter.com/DropBilli/status/1553372302615642113

Here's another post showing the differences between the NFTs from the 3 different tranches:

https://twitter.com/DropBilli/status/1552683298559754244

👉 What are multipliers?

• Increases odds of winning in The Drop
• Buying 10 tickets with a multiplier of 2.5x will get you 25 entries to the draw
• Highest is 5x but will have to earn this by playing a staking game called Goat Farm

👉 Breeding

• With a nanny and a buck NFT, one can breed kid goats
• This is needed to play the p2p game
• Ranking of the NFTs matter - higher rank means shorter breeding time and higher rarity of kid goats
• 2 different NFT holders can collaborate to breed

🔸 P2P Gaming

• Two games will be released by the end of 2022: Goat Arena & Goat Karting
• Goat Arena is a skill-based competitive fighting game like Street Fighter & Mortal Kombat
• Overseen by one of the founders of Call of Duty
• Will be using the NFTs to fight

• Comes with a leaderboard to show who is leading, and includes all the stats and data
• Goat Kart is more like a racing game similar to Mario Kart
• To play, one needs the kid goat NFTs that can only be bred with a nanny and a buck

🔸 Staking

• Staking the goat produces $CHEESE, an ERC-20 token
• $CHEESE can be staked to produce $GRASS
• $GRASS can be used to upgrade goats to increase their multiplier 
• All these will be tied in with the P2P gaming
• Games can be wagered on too

👉 Tri-token system

• Refers to the NFTs, $CHEESE & $GRASS
• You burn $GRASS, upgrade the goat NFT to produce more $CHEESE, which you can stake to earn more $GRASS, creating a positive feedback cycle
• The tri-token system is managed by @pangolindex 

🔸 The Drop

• A sweepstake-like game with the prize amount known but with an unknown draw date 
• Draw will occur when the prize is filled
• E.g. For a $1M draw, as soon as 1M worth of tickets are committed, a winner will be selected using @chainlink's VRF

• Frequency of The Drop depends on the ticket sales
• Once ticket sales hit the prize pot amount, there'll be a draw
• Should take a shorter and shorter time to fill the prize pot, until it hits 1 draw per day
• When that happens, the prize pot will be raised

👉 How The Drop works

• Buy a ticket at $1.10 but each ticket correlates to 1 USDC and this enters the prize pot
• If you hold an NFT with a multiplier, your tickets get multiplied
• Max odds of winning is capped ~ 15 to 20% so that it's fairer

• Once the prize pot is filled, the draw begins
• Using VRF, a random wallet entering the draw will win the entire prize pot
• WIll have a definite winner in each draw
• Prize can be claimed immediately and can be directed to another wallet 

🔸 Community

• Members are called goats
• Currently, there are little goats and VIG (very important goats)
• Open community - anyone can contribute and do work
• The more engagement you have in the community, the more opportunity to get whitelisted

• No governance at this point but might be implemented in the future
• Being in the community has the adv of being able to participate in future test drops
• These are of smaller prize amounts ($5k, $10k) to prep for the audit and test out before the public draw

🔸 Marketing/Business Strategies

• Initial core market is for crypto natives, but to grow will need to cater to the mass audience
• In talks with people doing on-ramp to make it easier for non-natives to get into
• Will try out different strategies to see what sticks

• If they supply tech to existing gaming companies, their branding might not matter much
• Important to have a big marketing budget to raise awareness for The Drop
• Will collaborate with existing communities to do cross-pollination

• Their way of doing business is not to compete with people if they don't have to
• In a highly regulated market, they will work with people who already had the approval to operate, rather than compete with them
• Will do geofencing if needed

“Why must we compete? We can disrupt an industry without having to kill all of the existing players. Just change them from the inside.”

- Murray

🔸 Security

• Will be audited, details to be announced
• Will have test drops internally with smaller prize money within the community
• All these will have stats and data to be sent over to audits before the public drop
• Does not have bug bounties but is open to them

That's it! Here's a link to the actual 2.5 hours long AMA hosted by @AdeptCamp from @CRE8RDAO: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej1Lvh1StRo

Here's the Substack post:

https://thereadingape.substack.com/p/cre8r-dao-ama-with-billidrop

Here's an obligatory tag to the marines 👇This post shows an interesting use case of @chainlink's VRF.

@ChainLinkGod
@TheLinkMarine1
@LtColLinkarski 
@Crypto___Oracle
@nullpackets

BilliDrop AMA with CRE8R DAO

Esports is projected to be one of the fastest-growing sectors. Guess who is bringing esports into the #Metaverse? 

In this @zima_red ep, @AndrewSteinwold interviewed @KevinBeauregard, Founder of @AtmosXYZ, to find out more. Read all about it 👇

👉 Who is Kevin?

• Got into crypto in 2013 with a background in software engineering and entrepreneurship 
• Avid hockey player
• Was the CTO of @GoCoin, a project started in the summer of 2013


• Personally experienced the collapse of Mt Gox
• Was at a crypto festival when Mt Gox collapsed and everything turned bearish overnight

"And overnight, all the trust is gone. What little trust there was anyways was gone."

• After GoCoin & burning out, he went around different startups before building @aux_labs during the ICO era
• It is an auction tech/price discovery tool for ICOs
• Realised people just wanted tokens to moon
• Pivoted too early into the NFT marketplace too

• Also worked at @bloqinc and was also one of the lead engineers at @VesperFi

👉Building Atmos
• Wanted to marry sports & blockchain
• Wanted to build a fantasy basketball game using NFTs back in 2018/2019

• Realized that the challenge to mainstream adoption of esports is that people need to understand the rules of each game
• Starting Atmos for #Metaverse-native sports

👉What games are designed first?

• Designed a world which is Exo suit-based
• First game is a racing game using Exo suit in 3D
• Atmos is the name of the planet, set about 500 years in the future
• Mining colony uses Exo-suits to race competitively in space

👉What can one do in the Atmos universe?

• Explorable open world
• Focus to deliver competitive titles, layered with additional interactivity and utility 
• 3 game loops currently: mining, fabricating (crafting) & racing
• Mining resources are used to craft #NFTs

👉 Exo Suit

• Wearable vehicles with at least 31 unique swappable parts
• These parts have a performance impact. Not a pay-to-win

“You're not going to catch Lewis Hamilton driving a Honda Civic, right? And if he was driving a Honda Civic, he’d still probably be faster than most of us driving any other car that you put us in.”

https://twitter.com/AtmosXYZ/status/1539729977121198080


👉 Mining/Fabricating

• Similar to yield farming with 20-30 fungible resources -  have to decide which resources to farm
• Players don't know what resources a given plot of land has
• Resources can be combined to form composites that end up on your suit

• You can ask someone with a higher skill level to fabricate
• Will have a marketplace to facilitate the fabrication process

👉Prizes for winning races

• Prizes in native tokens or resource tokens
• Also depends on race and tier
• Race betting is not possible currently

👉World building

•Iterative approach to build the Atmos world
• Producing an 8-issue comic series to be released over the summer
• Emergent storytelling - what users do in the game impacts the storyline in the comics

👉 Gameplay

• Gamplay will not be on $ETH
• Initial drops, however, will be done on $ETH
• Still evaluating which chain gameplay will be on
• Stolen a good portion of views from traditional sports markets


👉On Metaverse-native sports

• Hockey was unwatchable on TV until HD TVs were introduced
• Likewise, NFTs created opportunities for people to have ownership of assets
• Having ability to switch to cockpit/helmet view made it more immersive for fans

• Metaverse-native sports will help people understand what it is about and capture their interest

👉 People bearish on Web3 gaming

• Important for builders to recognise problems and not dismiss them
• Impossible to prevent people from extracting value from blockchain games 

👉 Web3 gaming going mainstream

• Traditional gamers have been let down by promises by game companies, hence they hate promises
• Web3 and crypto participants love promises
• Both perspectives are wrong to some extent

• Web3 projects have to deliver compelling gameplay to bridge the huge gap with trad games
• Blockchain games are built iteratively, which is uncomfortable for trad gamers used to concrete launches

👉 Fav NFT

• His Murakami Drip Clone

👉 Last thoughts

• Future of crypto is multi-chain
• Getting rid of scammers/spammers will improve the space
• Will see a surge in NFT adoption
• Thinks that people will create more micro-communities 

Link to podcast:

https://anchor.fm/andrew-steinwold/episodes/Kevin-Beauregard---Atmos-Bringing-Sports-Into-The-Metaverse---Zima-Red-ep-125-e1jir1l

Link to Substack article:

https://thereadingape.substack.com/p/zima-red-ep-125-kevin-beauregard