A critic of the Gotchi Maall as a distribution model of NFTs

Ideas
1

I call the “shop model” a distribution model that has 1) first come first served element and 2) fixed price tag for items in the shop. I am criticizing this model in the context of limited and highly demanded items. I will mostly talk about the “shop” to replace the “Gotchi Maall”, but please note that haunts have essentially the same model.

I will talk a lot about “flippers”, I call flippers typically a person that is only interested in short term gains and doesn’t care about the project’s success in the long term. Some people flipping on the bazaar are real flippers, while others are actual players that are just taking an opportunity because it’s there, both are fine to me. However, I believe we should always look for make this behaviour more risky as it unhealthy for the game overall.

  1. The problem: drawbacks of the shop model in the context of highly demanded and limited NFTs:

a) Feels unfair. I don’t say the shop is unfair, but it has luck and/or speed element to it that seems unfair. This game of “who is the fastest wins” is not a fun game to play in the long run. We should improve the shop to allow for more people to have a chance to participate, and for the distribution to feel more fair.

b) Skews the market. By putting a price on the wearables in the shop, the team impacts the price of all existing wearables on the market. Neither the team nor the DAO should have the responsibility or the capability to influence market price of NFTs in such a way. Only the market, therefore the players, should be responsible for price discovery.

c) It is not sustainable. How do we decide of the price of the next items in the shop ? Do we keep the same GHST amount ? What if GHST price moves 50% ? Do we use the 30 days moving average of all wearables of each rarity to price new items in the same category ? The price will never be right. Either price is too high and NFTs will remain undistributed, or the price is too high and the NFTs will sold instantly and then be flipped.

d) Incentivize short term trading of NFTs: fixed price + fixed supply + hype = flipping. Given the current hype, putting a price tag on a limited item essentially puts a price floor. There is almost no risk to buy in the primary market (gotchi maall) to then sell for the secondary market (bazaar). We should find ways to make it riskier for flippers to do business.

e) It is wasting money to the DAO. The demand impacts the price of NFTs only on the secondary market (bazaar), not in the primary market (gotchi maall/haunts) because the price is fixed. The moment the shop was sold out, NFTs were selling at 2x or more the price of the shop. That means that the treasury is missing on 50% of the value from that demand, and that players are missing on 50% of their potential rewards. The worst part is, this money is now is the hand of flippers, which then dump GHST on the market.

I think it is obvious that we need the shop model to be able to adapt to the demand. We could increase supply with demand, but then NFTs are not limited/collectible anymore. I strongly believe valuable NFTs are key to our success, because “number go up” is the best way to bring attention to the project (cryptopunks), and it’s a powerful engagement factor if players can have a chance to win them (powerball/loto). I am aware that we need affordable NFTs for user adoption, I’ve written a post about unlimited edition gotchis if you are interested. I’ll discuss how to improve the distribution model based on the weaknesses listed above, without increasing the supply for NFTs.

  1. Potential solution: Auction house model

This is one of the best way to deal with high demand for limited or unique items, that is why it’s so common for art. I believe this model would already be better than the one we have given the problems I highlighted in 1. However I won’t extend on this distribution model as I don’t think it fits the game narrative.

  1. Potential solution: The raffle model

Yes the raffle. But imagine a separate raffle where tickets are sold for GHST and not FRENS.

a) seems fair: everyone has two days to participate, no problem to send a transaction, everyone get the same chance to win per ticket.

b) The market decide the price. The price of the NFTs can be derived from the amount of ticket spend in the raffle.

c) Is sustainable. The team/DAO does not need to put a price tag for items. If demand is high, then the chance of getting NFTs are low and the price is high. If demand is low, chance to win NFTs is high and the price is low.

d) Makes it riskier for flippers. There is no “price floor” to buy the items at. Flippers have the same odds as everyone on the primary market (raffle). Because the demand is already somehow “priced in” it is not guarantee they can make profit from selling the items on the baazaar.

e) All the value from the demand is concentraded into the treasury. If demand is high, it will bring more money in the treasury, more money to develop the game, more money for the players.

This model is great imo because it has endless scalability, gives everyone a fair chance,is more aligned with the interest of the DAO, remains strong whatever the demand. Also, it adds new layer to the game because there are risks of items being cheaper on the secondary market (bazaar) than in the primary market (shop/raffle).

I don’t see any real problems from the raffle model, except that participants are not guaranteed to get any items, and cannot choose how many items to purchase. However, this is already happening with the current shop model because some people were not able to participate.

There is another discussion about what items should be in the shop. I personally think that the most powerful/demanded items in the game should not be purchasable in any kind of primary market, like it’s the case for the Gotchi Maall currently. But that is another discussion, so please try to restrain from discussing this here. Thanks for reading frens. I am curious to know if you agree with the problems outlined and what solution you have in mind to solve them.

8 Likes
2

First of all thanks for the lengthy thoughtpiece. Glad to see that there are people thinking just as deeply as we are about the game mechanics!

Currently items are distributed via two mechanisms: Raffle Model and FCFS model.

The Raffle is essentially lossless and is probably the fairest system of NFT distribution that has ever been created. No one is getting rekt because they are not spending GHST to purchase tickets, they’re just staking the GHST to earn FRENS, which they choose how to spend.

The FCFS model is more like the “wholesale” model where we price the items at a reasonable price and then let the market discover the “true” price. You describe it as flipping, but to me it seems like normal market activity. Also, you may not be aware but AavegotchiDAO takes a 1% cut of all sales in the Baazaar, so the more “flipping” there is, the richer AavegotchiDAO gets.

We are also interested in exploring an Auction house model, as a potential third options for very high-value NFTs (such as 1/1 wearables, if they were to be created). However, this seems like a luxury option given that most of our dev time is being spent preparing the AavegotchiDAO governance structure and the Realm/minigames.

I see how this could be an issue, but like I explained earlier the AavegotchiDAO is receiving a healthy cut of all sales. We could potentially add on a 0.5% fee of sales that could go directly to Player Rewards as well, if there is interest.

Thanks for your analysis and looking forward to see some healthy discussion on this topic!

9 Likes
3

The FCFS model is more like the “wholesale” model where we price the items at a reasonable price and then let the market discover the “true” price. You describe it as flipping, but to me it seems like normal market activity.

What is the reasoning behind the FCFS model for the Maal ? I don’t understand why we would want a “wholesale” model when the wearables are nothing like wholesale items. Wholesale makes sense when the pricing of an item is somehow objective and supply/demand is predictable, which is not the case of wearables in the Maal. I don’t see any parallel in the real world where highly demanded and scarce items are successfully distributed using the “wholesale model.”

Sure flipping is a “normal” market activity, but I don’t think it should be, or at least we should do more to prevent it. Flipping when there is almost no risk involved is a purely parasitic activity that brings no value exept for the flippers. See scalpers of PS5, players pay more and sellers earn less than they should have, only scalpers win.

the AavegotchiDAO is receiving a healthy cut of all sales. We could potentially add on a 0.5% fee of sales that could go directly to Player Rewards as well

The Aavegotchi DAO receives a healthy cut of sales, and I support the additional 0.5% fee to support the rarity rewards. But there is simply no way that these small fees on the Baazaar would ever mitigate the value going straight to the hands of flippers instead of going in the DAO or the hands of the players directly.

7 Likes
4

The FCFS model is interesting as a first step to build that game. Easy to build and deploy, brings engagement during the drop party. It also shares the opportunity and risks of market discovery with players/flippers/arbitragers. But i agree it is not perfect.

To put things into perspective, here is a graph showing how the lowest baazaar listings compare to maall drop prices (wearable ID on the x axis, on the y axis price change. Godlikes estimated resale at 50k for the sake of simplicity)

image
image874×417 7.58 KB

It shows that many weables are reselling at a nice premium. 18 out of 65 even show a 4 digits APR (over 108% in 38 days), while 12 are reselling for less (worst case: -32%).

The maall drops sold for a total of 2,102,500 GHST.
If it all got sold at current cheapest baazaar price, it would have sold for 4,666,425 GHST.
Although that approach is not perfect, i think we can pretty much agree the current model is making some players rich (which is very cool btw), but is missing about half of the value it creates.

I like your idea of the raffle in which tickets can only be bought with GHST, but I imagine some people may find it harder to engage in buying things they are not sure to get (yeah, the baazaar wil still be there so it might work after all). I think i have a preference for the dutch auction model, harder to implement but could be pretty fun

4 Likes
5

One key difference between the two models is that some people are actually spending GHST to buy tickets and getting rekt when they don’t win, whereas with a FCFS drop you don’t lose anything (except for the opportunity to get the item).

4 Likes
6

Yeah, raffles are great, I agree! And it’s fair that people with a considerable amount of GHST staked, get rewarded, which is statistically what will happen in raffles. So far, so good. But but but, what we are trying to find is a way for the little guys in the ecosystem to share the excitement as well as have access to fair priced wearables IMHO. That’s why the maall was there, and since it was hijacked by scripts and bad actors, we need to find a similar but safer way. That means that raffles are not going anywhere, but we need something to complement that model.

4 Likes
7

Of course, this isn’t really true for new entrants into the game, right? As someone mentioned on Discord, raffles and wearable drops are when we hope to see new people joining the ecosystem. If a new user finds out about Aavegotchi a day or two before a raffle, they may not want to put thousands of dollars into GHST to stake and get FRENS. they’re much more likely to just buy some tickets on the baazaar, and then if they don’t win anything they feel rekt.

Is the bigger concern that we need to give out rewards for staking to help maintain the price of GHST?

1 Like