Alternate Economic Proposal – Temporarily Disable Channeling

Kinship is part of the (open) Aavegotchi protocol. The Gotchiverse (a proprietary game / IP of PC), is merely using it to scale their channeling emissions. No issue in the proprietary game warrants to make a key element (Kinship) of the open protocol dependent on the proprietary game.

In fact, since H1, there has virtually been no progress on the virtual pet aspect of Aavegotchi. Some people came here (and are still here) for the virtual pet aspect. It’s called AaveGOTCHI afterall, not Clash of Aavecraft.

Aavegotchi started as a virtual pet. The Gotchiverse is trying to onboard gamers more interested in more traditional gameplay / MMORPG aspects. With Fake-Gotchis, we try to onboard and incorporate the artist community. For the longest time, development efforts have been geared towards increasing our target audience to a wider and wider net of people. That doesn’t mean we should abandon our roots. If petting is removed, I petition to rename the project, because in that case we’d no longer deserve to be called gotchis.

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Because if you don’t, the chance to do it later will come at a higher cost. Right now people aren’t doing it because they (so far correctly) assumed doing it later will come at a smaller cost, so not building is the logical choice atm. If you reverse this, people will start building / upgrading. Economics + FOMO is stronk motivatooooor.

I thought they weren’t doing it because they think farming is a bad plan if there’s a no risk option with other benefits and automation that lets you completely disconnect from the entire experience until one day you wake up and no-one rented your shwagotchis.

I also think you won’t achieve your main objective, you can’t expect the same volume in crafting after cutting the alchemica distribution. Sinks and inflation won’t be balanced

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You sound like you have to choose between either one. Sure, the low risk is a pro for channeling. But how does that relate to the decision of whether or not to invest in farming parcels? If people would consider farming parcels a worthwhile investment, they’d do it. Independent of whether they get some alch from channeling or not. More alch is more alch after all. If you give me a UBI IRL, I’d still start a business, if I think it’s worthwhile, because more money is more money.

The multi-bonding curve approach is just a clever way of trying to stimulate demand for farming by adding a FOMO aspect to buying farming equipment.

There are currently two main sources of Alchemica inflation – channeling and harvesting. Channeling requires a Gotchi, which can be gotten cheaply or for free on the lending market, a parcel, which costs roughly 50 GHST if you buy it today, and a minimum Lvl 1 Altar, which is free.

There are plenty of parcels to go around, which means that Channeling as a resource is not scarce, so the marginal price of the Alchemica derived from it is almost free. That’s why it’s been classified as a UBI.

Farming, on the other hand, is akin to mining cryptocurrency. You not only have to purchase the land, but also need to purchase harvesters and reservoirs (crypto miners) and upgrade them, if you want to extract your resources in a timely fashion. Lastly, the Alchemica in each parcel is limited, unlike Alchemica derived from Channeling which is virtually unlimited (we have allocated 25% of supply to Channeling over 30 years).

Now, if you are a clever player with limited resources, you will quickly realize that the influx of plentiful and “cheap” Alchemica being generated from AC is flooding the market, pushing out the more scarce and “costlier” Alchemica being generated from harvesting.

That is the reason why no matter how hard you stimulate farming or entice on the demand side, until we reduce emissions from channeling, it will have no noticeable effect.

I still believe that Channeling as a mechanic is very much needed in Aavegotchi, as without it we become a completely pay-to-play game, but at this point in our economy, the yield derived from it is depressing the farming market, which was intended to be the majority of Alchemica sinks until more arrive from social and gaming features.

I think it’s also worth exploring options for increasing the “time capital” required to generate Alchemica via channeling, but that will take time to develop and is currently out of the scope of this convo.

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Thank you for the elaborate response. It seems that you see channeling as the cause, and low investment in farming as the symptom. I consider channeling emissions neutral, and the inflationary nature of farming the cause for low investment in farming. Both of our assumptions probably play some part in it. Unfortunately, I see no way to evaluate, which of our assumptions has the greater weight on the issue.

Have you guys made a model of the issuance from harvesting based on the average altar level as well as the percentage of parcels that are being harvested? If so, it would be great if you could publish that. In particular it would be interesting to see a colormapped 2D plot where X is the average aaltar level, Y is the percentage of harvested parcels, and color is the issuance from haarvesting, with a neutral color (e.g. green in a hot colormap) representing the current channeling issuance for comparison. Data like that would really help everyone in seeing the issue more clearly. There would be way less arguing and opinions, if people can clearly see the hard facts right in front of them. If you don’t have such a model yet, maybe @jarrod or @gotchinomics could help. I’d do it, but I have an important deadline coming up in two weeks, so no time :frowning_face:

@letsgobankless recently put together this dashboard which shows the last 24hrs of channeling by Altar level.

https://haarvesting.herokuapp.com/

I agree that more visibility into the metrics will help raise awareness and possibly clarify the issue for everyone.

At this point I definitely cannot agree with that assumption. To return to the crypto mining analogy, imagine you are a crypto miner investing heavily into mining technology to maintain a competitive hashrate, while at the same time BTC is being airdropped to people trading BTC. In the latter case, a small amount could be sustainable and help raise awareness of the project, but too much would simply see people allocating fewer funds to infrastructure and more funds to wash trading.

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The total amount of Alchemical is very large
There is a total of 100,000,000,000 in FUD alone, which would be $234,598,000 if all were released at current prices
This is just FUD market cap

Our current ecology cannot support this volume. I think inflation will only get to a reasonable level unless we find greater value to carry

There is a Chinese proverb called “堵不如疏”

I agree that channeling alchemica is much cheaper then harvesting, and with our current set up the rational player should choose to maximize AC strategy opposed to farming.

However, I don’t believe that this is the issue, it is a symptom of our inflationary schedule and still being in the early days of token distribution.

If we disable channeling or limit to 1 day a week, then the only source of new alch would be from harvesters or purchasing on the open market. In theory this would seem like it would incentive actors to invest in their parcels to extract alchemica, and we may see a bump in the short term, however there is still the total supply albatross…Yes, in alch terms 1 alch=1 alch but when everything is liquid to Ghst or usdc then that is what it is ultimately priced in, so I would still know that $1 invested today, without significant $ inflows would probably be akin to $0.001 in the future/ fully diluted.

I get the rationale, prices are established at the margin, we halt emissions to find equilibrium with current demand, then slowly scale up. I just think it’s flawed. Ultimately the market will find equilibrium when supply is not restricted. We should look for a more market responsive price mechanism (bonding curve) for the long term.

Ultimately alch is too expensive right now…rational actors will continue to sell until price drops to equilibrium…these short term measures are akin to a “centrally planned” economy instead of a market based one.

Currently we don’t really have an economy, we have a loyalty rewards program where customers/ players are rewarded with “loyalty points” (alchemica) that can be used to purchase new items from PC… however these loyalty points are liquid and over priced.

In my opinion, one of the major flaws in crypto-economics is the belief that economies are primarily based on scarcity. Scarcity is important, but utility, value add, and free trade are the real pillars of an economy.

NFT displays, FAKE gotchis, and bouce gates are a great start. We now have an advertising mechanism but the creation still takes place outside of the verses.

I think the forge is interesting, but limited. Wearables, installations, etc. should be craft-able, composable, and destroy-able, but these receipts should be primarily composed of alchemica in verying quantities.

If we mapped alch/ combinations of alch to in game traits we could allow creators in the community to design and offer these wearables/ installations to the community for crafting.

For example we decide we want to create more vehicles (Aave boat). We have a mapping of alch to trait, color, size, etc. (more Kek it’s more purple, more Fud it’s faster…idk) whoever wants to submit a design can and then it becomes craft-able. The designs are offered to the market on a bonding curve…this will help with demand/ price discovery… (something missing from our current set up). A portion of the alch goes to PC, the DAO, and the creator… also can be resold in bazaar…

Even without being a wearable and effecting traits/ stats something similar to Minecraft of installations would be cool. Creators in our economy can design custom installations that others can craft (primary market) and re-sell in the bazaar (secondary market).

I do think we should move away from time limit offerings to bonding curve based, something where price responds to demand. I feel like that is something missing in our economy… we don’t have a pricing mechanism that responds to demand.

It’s early I know, and PC has done an incredible job thus far. I hope we move towards more of a market economy in the future. Truly harnessing the peer to peer, free market that is crypto.

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Perhaps a non-obvious issues is that PC actually innovates too quickly… the gamified token distribution system that is spillover collection & gotchi rentals are light years ahead of every other project…

I know the lore talks about the great battle and we want to keep the verse closer to gotchi, and now observers… but I think an incredible business development opportunity would be to allow other conforming NFT’s into the gotchi verse… for example something like luchadoors, or other on chain NFT character project.

We could have a cross community event where another community could enter the verse with their character NFT as a way to distribute their tokens to their community in a gamified way. Maybe they are only able to pick up their tokens, and they would rent a gotchi?

Even better, we do establish an interoperable standard crafting wearables and in-verse items. We allow any creator to design wearables/ items that can be worn by any confirming NFT (gotchis, luchadoors, raiders, etc)we put out a standard for wearables that other projects could adopt which require alch to compose. We encourage other projects to enter the verse and in order to collect alch and create new items… we release partner receipts… you need alch + “Xprojects token”.

Just some ideas…

Much lower alch prices may actually help the “game” develop… if they are “worth-less” then people will use them to play and build…they can be distributed in a biz dev capacity to other projects without the temptation to sell…

Let the market work, when the incentive to sell is gone… people will build.

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I like the simplicity of the approach but also would prefer Channeling less often (like maybe once a week - in the same way Synthetix do their weekly staking rewards - if you don’t remember to channel that week you lose it and the clock starts over - roughly 7 day epoch).

Maybe combine the modified base rate x7 days but only once a week would have us claiming more in one transaction but less than if we claimed every day.

This harms noone and at least reduces gas by 6/7s, and makes people a lot less stressed out, and gives less reason to rent out, which is less reason to dilute the market, which would probably support prices.

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Also concerned the Forge process is looking to add new token elements such as essence - surely we should be not introducing more tokens at this point and leveraging the ones we have already ie… Alchemica?

I am struggling to see how reducing or limiting channelling is going to be good for the Gotchiverse .

I accept there is an issue of higher outflows, than in game investment of Alchemica .

But using a sledge hammer to fix the problem is a questionable approach.

Personally I have invested heavily in the game.

My strategy has been to purchase land, set up L9 alters have scholars do my channeling paying them in USDC so they do not have to cash in their rewards .

In addition I have maxed out my parcels with L9 everything .

I reinvest all my rewards in building and channeling which I see as going hand in hand .

To build a L9 altar a player needs a spacious lot 24 gotchis and 4 varieties of L9 Harvesters L9 Reservoirs .

That is a lot of investment.

An area of weakness I see is that a player can’t use Alchemica to purchase the gotchi’s that they need to service L9 Altars (24 Gotchi’s x 800GHST = 19200GHST ) therefor they have to cash out and convert to GHST which is still in the ecosphere but doesn’t help the price of Alchemica.

If we could find a way around this issue it would be big help in retaining the value of Alchemica .

I have experienced a loss in the value of drop tickets from 10 ghst to 2 Ghst

My land holdings have been decimated particularly the boosted parcels.

Wearables have plummeted

Decoratives don’t hold value

If I keep getting Nerfed I will be less inclined to participate.

Mores sinks more utility give players a better reason to invest rather than sell.

I am now about to swap my weeks Alchemica rewards for GHST to invest in Gotchi’s as I need them when I purchase my next L9 Altar with Alchemica.

Also currently Gotchi’s are better store of value than anything else in the game at this point IMHO .

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Quick visualization to see the disparity between channeling & harvesting for each alch type. I will work on updating to include break down by alter & harvester levels, etc. This is aggregate daily emissions, does not exclude spillover.

https://dune.com/rancho/alchemica-emissions

Let me know what else you would like to see and I’ll work on putting it together.

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Awesome! Would be great to see the amount of Alchemica being spent in the Gotchiverse on Installations, Tiles, and Bounce gates as well.

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How difficult would it be to exclude spillover? Spillover is off for 166/168 hours, so we would ideally focus on that data to best understand current state.

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I should be able to update to net emissions (excluding spillover).

I’ll tinker this week and see if I can get something more useful out.

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updated with “net emissions”. Excludes spillover from harvesting & channeling - only alch that is going directly into player wallets

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