Addressing the Comments and Concerns about Pixelcraft Finances and usage of DAI Collateral

[coderdan]

Introduction

For the last three years, the GHST bonding curve has served as an anchor of stability in the Aavegotchi ecosystem – financially, mentally, and even spiritually.

When we launched the DAI-backed GHST bonding curve in 2020, the future of MakerDAO and DAI was bright – a decentralized USD-pegged stablecoin run by a DAO. The parallels between MakerDAO and what we aimed to achieve with AavegotchiDAO were striking.

Fast forward to today, and the future for MakerDAO and DAI seems less certain than before. The inability of MakerDAO governance to lower the debt ceiling for GUSD, growing exposure to real-world assets (RWA) fraught with potential counterparty risk, and the clear signaling from MakerDAO leadership about planned depegging DAI from the USD raise deep questions about whether or not GHST, the governance token of Aavegotchi, should continue being tethered to an asset with such an uncertain future.

Last week, Pixelcraft Studios kicked off the conversation about whether or not AavegotchiDAO should vote to turn off the curve, which, as expected, led to some of the most intense discussion we’ve ever seen in our humble DAO.

The discussion centered on a few main flashpoints:

1. What will happen to GHST liquidity when the curve is turned off?
2. How will Aavegotchi assets, currently priced in GHST, be valued in a post-curve world?
3. What is the current state of Pixelcraft’s finances?
4. How should the DAI collateral in the curve be split?

Discussion on points #1 and #2 is currently happening in the AavegotchiDAO forums, so we want to use this post to address the latter two points – how the DAI collateral in the bonding curve (roughly $20M as of early February 2023) should be split, and what the current state of Pixelcraft Studios’ finances is.

Let’s jump in!

Part 1: Pixelcraft’s Finances

In the original DAO forum post about turning off the bonding curve, Pixelcraft Studios COO Gldnxross laid out his idea for what a possible split of the DAI collateral could look like: 20% earmarked for liquidity provision by AavegotchiDAO, 40% to AavegotchiDAO itself for the general treasury, and 40% to Pixelcraft Studios.

This proposal stirred up some long-standing and healthy discussion about the state of Pixelcraft Studios, so let’s address those now.

As founders, we are very active in the Aavegotchi community, attending twice-weekly meetings to answer questions, drop alpha, and enjoy the product that we are creating together. However, these casual hangouts generally do not delve into finances or long-term vision, two key areas that the community is especially interested in.

Transparency is a key value of the Web3 space, and we try our best to embody this value in our daily lives and the way we run our company. Of course, the Internet being the internet, as doxxed founders, putting any sort of private financial information online invites personal risk, so in the past we have erred on the side of caution with this sort of sensitive information.

However, there are certainly ways to give key insights into the metrics of Pixelcraft Studios without inviting excessive personal risk into our lives. That’s why starting with this post, we will do our best to be more transparent with the financial state of Pixelcraft Studios.

Going forward, you can expect a quarterly summary of the state of our finances published in the first month of every new quarter, including burn rate, liquid and illiquid assets, human resources, and any other significant information needed for a holistic assessment of the company.

While we welcome community feedback and discussion regarding burn rate and assets, we should emphasize that these disclosures are not an invitation for the community to comment on our hiring/firing practices or harass our staff for more specifics.

Finally, we’d like to note that the numbers below may surprise you. Some of you may consider the expenditures extremely high, while some of you may wonder how we can ship so much with such a tight budget.

We are extremely proud of the team we have assembled over the past three years, and the fact that Pixelcraft Studios is one of the few remaining crypto gaming studios in good financial standing after the catastrophic events of 2022 is a testament to our conservative, sensible approach.

With that said, let us get to the meat of this section – an overview of the state of Pixelcraft Studios!

Snapshot of Pixelcraft Studios

As of January 31, 2023

Payroll + Contracted services: ~265k USD

• 32 Full time Pixelcraftooors (as of January 31, 2023)

  • 3 Leadership
  • 3 Admin
  • 3 Specialists
  • 16 Developers
  • 4 Design/UX
  • 3 Community/Marketing

• 5 Contracted Services

  • 1 corporate secretary
  • 2 legal (general counsel & intellectual property)
  • 2 recruiting services

Monthly Recurring Software Services (Excluding AWS): ~10k USD

For security reasons, we cannot share the full list of internal services we use, as this would be an invitation for hackers to spoof these services and infiltrate our organization.

In general, these services can be broken down into a few main categories:

• Development / CI
• Blockchain Infrastructure
• Project Management
• Marketing
• Communications
• Design

The total fixed monthly recurring expenditures for services other than AWS was 12,735 SGD.

Amazon Web Services = 20,500 USD (December)

This service hosts the multi-region, multi-instance Gotchiverse. Its cost ebbs and flows but generally ranges from 20,000-30,000 USD, depending on activity in the Gotchiverse. December 2022 was the lowest month in a long time. We are actively working to reduce the AWS bill every month via various optimizations.

Marketing Expenses = ~15,000-30,000 USD per month

This covers all the marketing costs you would expect such as sponsorships, paid ads, videos, giveaways and support for IRL events and associated travel costs.

This is a modest budget relative to competitors in our industry, but Aavegotchi’s compelling story helps us earn more organic media than most.

Grand Total

As of December 2022, the monthly burn rate for Pixelcraft Studios was roughly 315k USD.

Other Major Expenses

• Recent payment of 2021 Singapore corporate taxes (~500k USD)
• Advance payment to Redis for 2022 services (75k USD)
• Cost of securing Aavegotchi intellectual property globally (well north of 100k USD)
• Cost of merchandise production, Verified Fakes, or Shopify
• Upcoming payment of 2022 Singapore corporate taxes (est. 200k USD)

Cash on hand

Liquid Assets (can be sold whenever necessary without significant slippage):

• Stablecoins: ~640K
• GHST: 3.8M

Semi-liquid assets (could be liquidated but with significant slippage)

• Alchemica Tokens: ~$600K
• GLTR (Unclaimed) ~62,000

Illiquid assets (difficult to liquidate)

• Various NFTs, both Aavegotchi and non-Aavegotchi: Priceless

OTC

As part of our strategy for ensuring that major crypto ecosystem players are aware of the potential change in GHST tokenomics, we are engaging our business development team to reach out to various participants and invite them to apply for GHST at a moderate discount for a lockup period of 6-12 months, in exchange for USDC.

We are planning to commit 1M of the GHST on our books, and welcome the AavegotchiDAO to also match us in this effort.

---

After seeing that breakdown, we hope that you have a much clearer picture of the internals of Pixelcraft Studios. We are happy to deliver more specifics about certain areas, as long as it does not violate our employees’ and founders’ right to personal privacy, or pose an OpSec risk to our team.

Now let us address the second main question posed by the DAO – how to split the DAI collateral, if the curve were to be closed.

Part 2: Splitting the DAI

Besides wanting to know the state of Pixelcraft’s finances, the other main questions raised by the DAO were – Why should Pixelcraft Studios receive 40% of the DAI funds being allocated, and what will they do with those funds?

Our answer: Although AavegotchiDAO is quickly coming into its own, we believe that Pixelcraft Studios can put this capital to work more efficiently and effectively than the DAO in its current state, with the goal of maximizing the potential for growth of Aavegotchi in 2023.

As to how we plan to use these funds, that can be broken down into seven distinct categories:

1. Ensuring relevant partners have sufficient working capital to maintain deep liquidity on CEXes partnering with Aavegotchi.
2. Increasing spending on outreach, tasteful marketing, and growth-oriented endeavors to ensure that our message is heard loud and clear in 2023.
3. Equipping our development and design teams with the staff and training they need to deliver on key roadmap items such as the Gotchiverse, Gotchi Guardians, and Gotchichain.
4. Derisking from potential stablecoin collapses by diversifying the DAI received into a variety of assets secured on Polygon, Ethereum, and Bitcoin chains, with a small percentage also stored offchain to pay for real-world expenses.
5. Starting an Aavegotchi builder’s program to incentivize talent to build on Aavegotchi and fast-tracking the IP licensing process.
6. Donating to registered charities that align with the shared vision and mission of the Aavegotchi community and Pixelcraft Studios.
7. Sponsoring and hosting IRL events to raise awareness of the Aavegotchi brand and form lasting connections with frens new and old in the meatspace.

Notably, here’s what we would NOT do:

1. Use the funds to give bonuses or unnecessary raises to Pixelcraft Studios founders or team members.
2. Spend the funds on frivolous, tasteless marketing that does not serve the Aavegotchi brand.
3. Spend the funds on any endeavor or product not directly related to Aavegotchi.

Aavegotchi is one of the strongest IPs in the entire crypto space, with a compelling backstory, adorable characters, and an energized community. Pixelcraft Studios is fully committed to telling the story of Aavegotchi and making these DeFi-backed crypto pets a household name in the future!

What if the DAO says no?

If the DAO rejects the proposal to turn off the curve for whatever reason, we are pleased to say that Pixelcraft Studios is in fine financial condition, and our roadmap plans would not be significantly affected by this decision.

All of the items published on our latest 2023 Roadmap, and also on previous roadmaps, are doable with our current treasury and burn rate, assuming that DAI does not experience the depeg we are worried about, and the market does not experience major black swans that massively wipe out all value in the crypto space.

If the DAO votes to turn off the curve but decides not to allocate funds to Pixelcraft Studios, that is also fine with us, but we would hope it has a solid plan on how to handle a post-curve GHST ecosystem.

Conclusion

We hope that this piece has given the community a broader understanding of how Pixelcraft Studios operates and our plan for any funds directed towards us in the event of the Curve closing.

We will continue to monitor the discussion and engage with community members in the DAO Forum and Discord.

Our current plan is to split the Curve proposal into two separate SigProps:

#1 Should the Curve be turned off?

1. Yes
2. No

#2 How should the DAI be allocated?

1. Original Proposal (20/40/40)
2. Another way (new proposal required)

If SigProp #1 passes but SigProp #2 Option B “Another way” wins, we will continue to engage with the DAO to come up with a more optimal solution for fund allocation.

If #1 does not pass, we will consider this matter closed for now and will re-visit in six months.

No matter the outcome, we will commit to the quarterly transparency reports mentioned above, published here on the DAO forum.

Thank you all for your constructive feedback, and we look forward to the discussion!

Stay spooky frens,
Pixelcraft Studios team

[TheGotchiFarmy]

Those clarifications are bringing great value regarding the split proposal. It will allow gotchigang to understand the expanse required in order to keep our project growing.

I also support the fact of having this proposal splitted in two different SigProps.

Pixelcraft Studios Team has my full support

[Egor]

Thank you for the transparency. I support the proposal to deactivate the Curve in its current form. Ideally, I would prefer to see it divided into two separate proposals: deactivating the Curve and allocating funds.

[kuwlness]

To second Egor, thank you for the transparency. This certainly helps add additional context to the current structure and run-rate for PC. Mark (Immaterial) has already made some great comments in the Discord, so I won’t reiterate any of those, but I do feel more measurable goals should be specified. There was mention of us currently having 1k-2k unique active wallets and PC would like to grow that by 10x. More specifics like this would be highly appreciated.

I’m a little confused by the need to capture 40% of the DAI from the Curve since it’s already been clarified that “our roadmap plans would not be significantly affected by this decision.” After the swap the DAO did last year, I think most of the community assumed that would provide 2-3 years of runway for PC.

And while we’re on the topic of transparency, can anyone from PC share tx information for the 50k DAI monthly buy back of GHST from the Curve that PC was supposed to be doing? That seems to have stopped quite a while ago with no mention from PC, which seems odd.

Also, I believe now may be a good time to open the discussion on Gotchi Guardians. Since PC is requesting 40% of the Curve, I would like the discuss a revenue split for PC and the DAO for Gotchi Guardians. There should be a minimum % to the DAO and/or RF for all future game & mini-game implementations built on top of the protocol.

[MikeyJay]

Just to second what others have already said, the transparency here is highly commendable, though not surprising given that PC’s actions have consistently backed up their commitment to being a community-driven game development studio. It is exceedingly rare that a private company shares this amount of detail regarding its financials with its employees - let alone a bunch of randos on the Internet.

On the whole, nothing at all about PC’s financials seems surprising at all to me - the ratios of salaries to other operating expenses seems in line with what I would expect to see in a software/services business. The salary costs do not look exorbitant compared to recent research I have personally done regarding industry averages. My only question had to do with liabilities (loans, etc), which Dan answered on Discord that PC has no substantial liabilities on its balance sheet.

The only other cash drain I could imagine that wouldn’t show up here would be any commitment the company has made to repay funds to an equity investor (founder or other) on a certain timeframe or as part of a revenue share, etc. I don’t imagine anything like that exists, but if it does it would be nice for PC to inform us of that.

The commitment to sharing quarterly updates is very much appreciated. Personally, I take PC at their word on these numbers, but one suggestion which might give the updates a bit more teeth would be to have PC’s CPA sign off on the veracity of the numbers with a quick note on their letterhead. Perhaps not necessary at this time, but something to consider in the future.

[DuckMoo]

In AGIP34 AavegotchiDAO <> Pixelcraft Studios 1.75M DAI Token Swap:
PC says: “Therefore, we propose a token swap between AavegotchiDAO and Pixelcraft Studios to ensure adequate fiat runway for several years of further development, no matter how bearish the market becomes.”

However, in the report PC gets only 600k stablecoins left, which means they could only keep shipping for six months at most before selling their $GHST. Is that one of the reasons that we have to vote the proposal in Feb?

I can’t see how PC is in fine financial condition if the Curve is not closed without selling $GHST.

[notorious_BTC]

Thank you for sharing the details of your expenses. I appreciate the transparency.

I second what @kuwlness is bringing to light.

Here are my concerns:

Grievances with the new roadmap

What I am mostly concerned about is the ambitious roadmap laid out for 2023. Pixelcraft is very good at creating hype-generating, ambitious yearly plans. But do they actually deliver on their promises?

For reminder, here is the epic year of plans for 2022. How many of these lofty goals were delivered?

And now we’re to fund 40% of the curve to pursue new avenues?

When I first read the roadmap for 2023, I felt that old familiar feeling of excitement. Oh wow, I thought! We’re going to get a game and 3d and omg our own chain! That rush of excitement was short-lived, however, as I then remembered all of the other shiny, exciting things promised and not delivered.

My fear is we’re being led down a road of broken promises. We all too easily forget the past when there’s a new shiny object dangling in front of us. What I am seeing from Pixelcraft is a track record of “when the going gets tough, let’s pivot and launch a new, massively-ambitious plan!”

Unfinished ambitions:

ARS. This idea never came to fruition.
Trait mappings for gotchis are still unfinished and a mess.
What utility do our wearables have? Do weapons even do anything?
What ever happened to mini games?
The gotchiverse ghost town. Right now this world is a vast expanse of nothing. What happened to the Grid? The great battle? Playable lickquidators? Heck, even the citadel isn’t finished.
Farming alchemica. There have been no concrete plans on how to sink alchemica. There hasn’t been a genuine use for these tokens released or planned.
Guild channeling and estates. What’s going on here?
After 18 months of waiting, we have a laggy MVP of an arena.
Aavegotchi UI v2. That was to be launched in September?

I am sure there are many other things I am missing.

What I would like more transparency on is how PC plans to deliver on the roadmaps, bibles, and plans of the past.

I ask the following: Why on earth are we focusing on making things 3d? And building a new game? Do you know how many hours that is going to take to even just convert our 300 something wearables into 3d models?

I also wasn’t aware people are begging for 3d. I was always under the impression that aavegotchi was retro pixel graphics and to be perfectly honest I was a bit confused why the gotchiverse itself was not done in pixel.

I think it’s an illusion to believe PC can multi-task and continue building all the aforementioned plans while ALSO building 3D and a new game. As we learned with NFT displays, CD revealed nearly all of their manpower was focused on FAKEs & NFTs over arena and PvP. How will this time be different?

What I really believe people are begging for and not getting is:
Plan for alchemica tokenomics.
A revenue model outside of asset dilution.
PvP experience in the the verse.
PvE in the verse. Questing. NPCs. Some kind of LIFE and experience where players actually feel like they’re in a game.

As a DAO, whenever we want funding to create something we must first propose what it is we wish to do. We then typically receive 50% of the funding up front. Upon delivery, we receive the full funding. I may be mistaken, but I believe the DAO delivery is 100%. No empty promises. Nothing funded and not delivered.

Now that we are moving to turn off the Curve, to what standard will PC be held accountable?

I know they have built and delivered so much from a protocol standpoint. I am not here to deny the tremendous amount of work that has been done. But from an actual playable game, we are still so far from even a beta version.

What are the plans for revenue other than “give us more money and trust us?”

[kill_er]

Why do I often diss many practices of PC? But the truth is I’m obsessed with aavegotchi and can’t help myself.
Definition is a complex issue, let us go back to the beginning.
What is cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency is a value exchange system built on the blockchain.
What is defi, defi is a financial system built on the blockchain.
So what is aavegotchi is about to come out, aavegotchi is a financial exploration game built on the blockchain.
Since the development of the blockchain, a large number of technologies and public chains have been born: DAO, oracles, cross-chains, defi, nfts and etc. When these technologies are coordinated and aggregated, a financial world based on the value network will eventually be born, and aavegotchi is the first to do It’s gotten to this point, and here’s why I’m addicted to it.
Such a financial game that aggregates all technologies cannot simply be called a game, but should be called a metaverse. The most important thing in the metaverse is the value system, and the universe built on the value system is the metaverse. If the metaverse only pursues 3D or VR, then many large-scale centralized online games built the metaverse ten years ago, but that is not the metaverse.

If we pursue 3D, VR or playability too much, maybe we are on the wrong path. What we should pursue is the gamification of financial innovation, or the teaching of financial innovation in the form of games, just like forge.

Going back to the question of whether or not I believe in the delivery capability of PC, I believe 100%. After all, aavegotchi was incubated by them. The road of financial exploration is full of twists and turns, and it is also full of innovations. Some may be wrong, but we will definitely reach it in the end.
In fact, the countless good ideas and small teams that emerged from DAO made it possible for aavegotchi, a small financial exploration game, to become a grand metaverse. But at this stage, I tend to believe in PC and let PC lead us to explore, but in the next stage I hope it will be DAO.

I don’t think we need to cling to the roadmap. In the blockchain world, the plan will never keep up with the changes. The problem of our project is how to attract more people, then let these people join DAO, and then let them explore and build this blockchain metaverse with us.

Outlook: Such a game metaverse built on the blockchain will be 10 times higher than the market value of any traditional game you know. Because you will not be able to distinguish between virtual and reality, because this is real finance.

[Jesse_gldnXross]

The screenshot you share for HNY2021 isn’t a Pixelcraft roadmap, at least two of the items on that list are goals we expected the DAO to work with us to deliver on. At the risk of getting off track, let’s take a quick look at what I mean:

• a full bodied pley to earn metaverse YES PC delivered. It may not be what you want, but its live with powerful bespoke architecture that we can build on for years to come.

• a complete decentralization of the aavegotchi protocol —- this obviously requires the DAO to step up. Checking the wiki reveals that the DAO was scheduled to hit metamorphosis at the end of 2021, around the time Dan wrote this optimistic message.

• a community-owned and governed DEX—- note this doesnt say a Pixelcraft owned and managed DEX. I’ve seen GAX cited as a miss multiple times this week but it was addressed on many calls and conversations in discord over the past year. The main point being that the DAO finding its legs was a prerequisite as its literally illegal for PC to ship a decentralized exchange. Not breaking news.

• countless DeFi integrations for GHST and Alchemica—- I suppose referring to more listings for GHST on places like Coinbase dont count because thats not DeFi, but it sure did happen in 2022. I know I thought the DAO would surely have spun up some games around Alchemica by now. Maybe this is the year. We’ve already stated that Gotchi Guardians will be making use of Alchemica.

• probably more we cant even fathom—- that is optimistic language alluding to more surprises and guess what… PC did deliver some. For example, an extremely popular art minting platform called FAKE gotchis. I think that falls into the “cant even fathom” category quite well.

To your points about wanting PvP and lore… one of those already exists, we were all just enjoying combat together a few days ago and will again soon. As for the lore and NPCs, that wasn’t something we heard a lot of feedback on til recently but I’m glad to confirm we’re over 6 months deep into developing it. We have an entire lore team contracted that has helped us develop a deep backstory to give foundation to the RPG elements of Aavegotchi. Look forward to the story revealing itself and meeting NPCs throughout 2023.

[notorious_BTC]

I appreciate the quick response to my post. I don’t believe this topic is off-track at all. It instead is a closer look into the deliveries of the company seeking 40% of the curve funds.

• I don’t think it’s only me who doesn’t see our empty gotchiverse as a full-bodied experience.

• Expectations on the DAO to step up is certainly a tricky one. A DAO simultaneously requires and rejects structure and organisation.

• Countless integrations of alchemica. This is really hollow and a massive pain point felt by all land owners. It’s now 13 months later from that announcement and we still don’t have any concrete sinks. We don’t even have any plans for sinks let alone actual sinking.

I get these things take time, sure, but we haven’t heard a peep on this. And you say the DAO should have made some sinks? With all due respect, the gotchiverse was PC’s flagship product and with it the four new tokens.

• I will agree FAKEs was successful. It is also worth mentioning it came at tremendous setback of dev time on the one thing 95% of us are truly waiting for and that is PvP.

I appreciate all the work PC has done and you guys have indeed delivered a lot of protocol-based features. I don’t believe though you’ve shipped everything as promised…not even close. There have been so many ideas started with no delivery. What about the game bible?

We needn’t go line by line and break down all the things not delivered. Instead, what is a better use of time in my opinion, is looking at your plans for delivering on the things already promised and envisioned. The roadmap launched at the new year bundled all previous projects and ideas into what felt like a footnote.

@Jesse_gldnXross

As for the lore and NPCs, that wasn’t something we heard a lot of feedback on til recently but I’m glad to confirm we’re over 6 months deep into developing it. We have an entire lore team contracted that has helped us develop a deep backstory to give foundation to the RPG elements of Aavegotchi. Look forward to the story revealing itself and meeting NPCs throughout 2023.

I’ve heard this mentioned before. Perhaps you guys are in a place where you can begin leaking some of this?

Other projects release a monthly dev update wherein they share things happening “under the hood.” I think hangouts are nice, but they don’t really provide clear updates around what’s going on.

[Jesse_gldnXross]

Okay I hear you and will reply to more but stepping outside but a quick response is needed on two points that stand out:

1. FAKEs detracting from Gotchiverse is the single biggest misunderstanding of the past year. I’ve heard this one before it is 100% not the case. We have multiple teams within PC and FAKEs did not overlap, steal dev bandwidth, or even budget from Gotchiverse’s REALM team.

2. We have the two founders of PC on weekly calls discussing gotchiverse updates literally every weekend and if you can’t attend in person, they are all recorded online. We also publish a monthly review newsletter so make sure to subscribe. That said, sure, appreciate the feedback and we can look into publishing more dev updates.

I’m going to gently suggest that, while its fine to use this important proposal as a time to give PC a performance review, it is also a time to zoom out to big picture goals and recognize this vote to derisk from DAI as an inflection point for Aavegotchi. We havent allcoated enough discussion to how the DAO can justify an make use of the other 60% of DAO funds. I hope that thread starts soon too because it is equally important.

[coderdan]

@notorious_BTC

My fear is we’re being led down a road of broken promises. We all too easily forget the past when there’s a new shiny object dangling in front of us. What I am seeing from Pixelcraft is a track record of “when the going gets tough, let’s pivot and launch a new, massively-ambitious plan!”

That is a wild mischaracterization of the latest roadmap.

Gotchichain is an idea that’s been in the works for at least half a year, probably more. We’ve hinted at it in multiple hangouts/DAO calls as the scaling solution desperately required for Aavegotchi to become a real gaming platform.

You can’t have a functional game when gas is spiking to 1000 gwei and everyone is complaining.

We are not dangling something shiny in the hopes that you look away. On the contrary, we are being upfront about the challenges that Aavegotchi faces and finding solutions.

The 2023 roadmap also refers back to the Gotchiverse and continues to expand on all of the items we want so much. Wearables do have utility already in the Aarena in terms of affecting stats, and we have been doing the prep work for multiple months now to include actual wearable abilities. Again, frequently mentioned in the hangouts.

@notorious_BTC

Aavegotchi UI v2. That was to be launched in September?

Aavegotchi V2 was unfortunately our biggest disappointment of the year. The dev leading V2 had a catastrophic incident where he broke his head and was hospitalized for a month. He continued to be paid during that time. After his recovery, his personality was completely changed and it was extremely hard to work with him. A few months went by before we discovered this, and we unfortunately had to let him go, as well as the PM that had been leading V2. I have been leading and working personally on V2 to clean up the code and get it moving, and the latest auction.aavegotchi.com site is built using the same code. The full V2 will be delivered and open-sourced very soon, once all of the Forge code is added, and a few final touches are made.

@notorious_BTC

Farming alchemica. There have been no concrete plans on how to sink alchemica. There hasn’t been a genuine use for these tokens released or planned.

This was actually planned for release in November, but another one of our devs leading this feature came down with an extremely rare case of Encephalitis and was hospitalized for an entire month. He is almost fully recovered now and is working on Alchemica deposits/withdraws, which will enable many of the planned gameplay sinks we have for Alchemica.

@notorious_BTC

ARS. This idea never came to fruition.

This is a technically difficult feature that we discussed multiple times with the community and never got a strong sense that it was particularly desired to be prioritized, so we focused instead on other complex features like Gotchiverse farming, Gotchi lending, etc.

If the DAO strongly desires this feature, we can look into adding it prioritizing it.

@notorious_BTC

What ever happened to mini games?

That’s a great question! After we held the Gotchi Jam, multiple teams had nice-looking MVPs built using Aavegotchis, but as time passed on these MVPs never materialized into actual games.

@notorious_BTC

I ask the following: Why on earth are we focusing on making things 3d? And building a new game? Do you know how many hours that is going to take to even just convert our 300 something wearables into 3d models?

We are being approached by metaverses quite often asking if Aavegotchis are compatible with 3D. Not having 3D-ready avatars for Aavegotchi is a big missed opportunity in our industry, so we believe it is a good investment to make in preparing Aavegotchis for 3D experiences, similar to what Cyberbrokerz recently did.

@notorious_BTC

I think it’s an illusion to believe PC can multi-task and continue building all the aforementioned plans while ALSO building 3D and a new game. As we learned with NFT displays, CD revealed nearly all of their manpower was focused on FAKEs & NFTs over arena and PvP. How will this time be different?

That’s completely false. What I’ve said on multiple occasions is that FAKE Gotchis barely took up any of our dev time. We hired another developer to work on the frontend, and the smart contracts took only a few dozen hours of work.

@notorious_BTC

What I really believe people are begging for and not getting is:
Plan for alchemica tokenomics.
A revenue model outside of asset dilution.
PvP experience in the the verse.
PvE in the verse. Questing. NPCs. Some kind of LIFE and experience where players actually feel like they’re in a game.

All of those are coming and are mentioned in the 2023 roadmap.

Finally, I would like to address a comment you made in the discord:

“24 months later and still waiting. The DAO, on the other hand, has a flawless record of delivery.”

From the perspective of Pixelcraft, this is, again, a wild mischaracterization of reality. The DAO has been around for several years now, with a huge treasury and a large pool of talent from which to draw. Yet the majority of its action has just been voting on proposals and then expecting Pixelcraft to do the implementation (which we gladly have).

It is only very recently that development activity has actually picked up. And even then, I would not be as brazen to characterize the delivery as “flawless”. The DTF overextended its budget, the Forge delivery has been delayed for over a month compared to the initial timeline, the ATF selection process was a mess, almost inviting a member of a globally sanctioned country onto a multisig that handles funds before we stepped in, and the list could go on.

The DAO in its current state is full of bickering and in-fighting, and builders such as yourself, Dr. Wagmi, Yanik, Bearded, and others are constantly accused of frontrunning or other suspicious behavior.

I am still bullish on the promise of a DAO-run gaming protocol, but to compare the DAO’s performance over the last three years compared to Pixelcraft, it is nowhere even close.

The DAO has a lot of work ahead of it if it wants to mature to the level of other DAOs executing in the space, such as MakerDAO (ignoring the recent red flags), AaveDAO, AragonDAO, etc.

This is no time to be self-congratulatory. AavegotchiDAO has plenty of potential to grow, but speaking honestly, if I were an impartial GHST holder, I would compare the track record of Pixelcraft with AavegotchiDAO and it would be a no-brainer to fund Pixelcraft with what they want.

Luckily, we have the best of both worlds, where liquidity, DAO, and Pixelcraft can all be funded, and we can compare the performance at the end of this year and see who executed the best.

[kill_er]

Put down the fight and trust the PC. The most productive company in the cryptocurrency circle. If you have seen other projects.
Just like Satoshi Nakamoto, he waited for Bitcoin to run stably for several years before slowly receding into the background. Give all power to the DAO now, and that’s when the disaster begins.

[stedari]

In the Forge team’s defense, we have been severely delayed by the V2 UI. It was repeatedly promised and then no access to the private github was given to start work until January - after our initial proposed deadline. And for the community to complain about a 6 week delay for such an ambitious project is pretty rich.

[CryptoGreen]

Curious to know your thoughts how you would like to see Dai money split up between Foundation, Liquidity, Pixelcraft and how can each of these entities improve moving forward. As for me, I think Liquidity should be much higher than 20%, perhaps 30% to bring more farmers and give them confidence that there are longterm liquidity that will last longer than a year.

My thought process about everything without knowing great detail of the history of aavegotchi is that Pixelcraft and Foundation both run things differently and have Pros and Cons. Pixelcraft ships a decent portion of what we have today but hasn’t done on a timely manner. Perhaps there been some badluck in some cases with some devs being hospitalized. However, I do think more transparency is needed moving forward from them. Having a Pixelcraft HR Breakdown is a start but not enough. I am thankful for them on trying harder but there still still lots of uncertainity from a gotchiverse asset holder. Main concern is what is pixelcraft top 3 or 5 priorities on their list, how much man power is devoted to each item, and what timeframe can we expect those 3 priorities so we can hold them somewhat responsible if it is past due. As for the foundation, it hasn’t executed on the levels Pixelcraft expects from them but it also has one thing that is quite strong and that is its transparency. Investors feel like they know what is gonna get passed and what changes will be made once a Core Proposal is passed. I feel if both groups improve on each other strengths we can move forward much more strongly as a group who is supporting each other , instead of pointing and blaming. I also think ghst asset holders do want Pixel Craft to have some money but 40% seems too much b/c they rather have more money for the Dao for Rarity Farming as that is the one thing over our history that has put money back to asset holders. My personal opinion is that I would like 30% to all three categories and 10% go back to parcel owners somehow b/c that rekt investors the most. More or less on the % if one of the entities give more details on how they would spend the money.

[Rikige]

Thank you for detailed post.

I am going to say one thing. From my experience, PC is lacking Project Managers big time. There needs to be at least couple of them at this point.

You will not get far in development, if you do not have somebody, that is managing the project.

The roadmap is lacking, there need to be timelines, dependencies, priorities… all of which Project managers should be handling.

Please consider hiring at least 2 project managers.

[Shah]

Aavegotchi is actually a gaming protocols asset but without much care and support for games (also known as mini-games). Here is what happened to them so far.

• Coyote the Devangelist left PC (Minigames and Aarcade platform Idea were abandoned by PC and these were some of the main reasons) and nobody was replaced for this important role!

• ATF Sigprop didn’t meet it’s quorum back then and it almost stopped the whole progress with minigames for a long time.

• ATF and Aarcade minigames were only granted from the DTF for 3.5K GHST in the whole past year! (Zygo’s game (the Gotchi Battler) grant application was declined recently. pretty sure the asked amount was less than 20K GHST in total)
  Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.

• ATF still has it’s 5K GHST Minigames event hosting compensation program for its developers in review since November 2022.

• I pushed the Arcade Idea and came up with a full working Lightpaper for the Aarcade Game hosting platform (4 months of work) But I got eventually accused and attacked by multiple groups and people because I told the DAO PM This project might need around 50K - 100K GHST for such huge and game changing project for the whole community that so many devs were also involved in it’s development team. (But in less than a month the whole DTF treasury got empty for simpler and less value generating projects)
  Building The Aarcade Game & Event Hosting Platform (ATF Project)

The DAO treasury should be used for expanding and building but Some people used their credits and trust to turn it into something more like a personal wallet and tried to attack any other group which have some great Ideas to build and needed funds.

[notorious_BTC]

On the topic of the FAKEs, I believe the misunderstanding comes from me asking directly last year if FAKEs/NFT Displays was consuming large amounts of dev bandwidth and it was confirmed by CD that it was in fact taking major dev resource. I am not sure if that was the case for the entire development of the side project, or he meant during the final push it consumed tremendous resource.

At the end of the day, it isn’t worth fighting point by point over things. Instead, it’s best to just look at the results.

I believe it’s worth differentiating between protocol and game.

From a protocol perspective, PC has done a brilliant job. The amount of innovation in the aavegotchi protocol is astounding. The protocol is where PC shines.

However, from a game development perspective, there is still so much left unfinished/abandoned/massively delayed. I understand things don’t always go according to plan and there are expected delays in crypto. That being said, we are still so far from the original vision. The arena is a barely working mvp with very few features.

Perhaps I am alone in this thinking, but it would have been my wish to have seen the 2023 roadmap announcement look something more like this: “we are going to laser focus this year on delivering on our original roadmap. We’re pouring all of our energy and resource into building the most badass arena and pvp experience. We even plan to onboard a game studio to balance the game and bring even more greatness to you guys.”

Successful businesses and projects are so because they do one thing and they do it well. I really had hoped the mission would have been to nail this one thing super well before jumping into new expansion.

Say it all you want, but there is just no way that all of these new ambitious undertakings will absolutely not delay or distract the core team in any way. People only have so much vital life energy to give.

---

I only bring all of this up as we are looking to remove the curve. As a DAO, whenever we want funding, there needs to be a very clear ask with budget and plan in place.

To request 40% of the curve is a massive ask. I believe we as a DAO (and original investors of that money) are entitled to a bit more of a plan than a concept graphic for the game.

How does PC plan to make this game profitable? How will it serve the asset holders? How will the game tie into the current BRS meta?

The way I see things is you guys are approaching your shareholders in hopes to secure more funding for future development of new things.

[kuwlness]

Well said fren. It’s often not easy to discuss these things, but you’ve done a great job of touching on all of the pain points. I fully agree from a protocol perspective, PC have been absolute rock stars. I’m not sure where the feedback loop comes full circle, though, and helps protocol assets. And as we’ve seen with open source software, others will copy what PC is doing. And being first to deliver hasn’t really won us any prizes or additional community members.

We’re so far from what was outlined in the original Gotchiverse roadmap, I’m not sure how anyone can say “we’ve delivered.” The game is barely an MVP. Practically nothing has been done to implement Traits or Wearables, nor we do have a clear picture of the long-term plan for installations. Sorry to say, it’s nothing more than ponzinomics right now – farm alchemica to build more things that farm alchemica. If this is what Nigel was hired to sell, I wish him good luck.

Until the Community is provided with a detailed and clear roadmap, I’d be inclined to give PC 5-10% of the DAI from the Curve. The rest of the funding will be delivered upon the completion of what was originally promised, which is the same policy we expect our community developers to adhere to.

[FreeBeer]

It looks like the DAO earns 0.3% of all the transactions done on the curve. Does anyone know how much this is per month on average?