DeFi by Design EP#64: GameFi Liquidity & Scalability w Pangolin

Transcript

welcome to d5 by design where we talk all things blockchain and cryptocurrency while striving to educate empower and enrich it's your boy andy and welcome back to the defy slate youtube channel smash the like button on this video that really helps us out and sit back and enjoy the content thank you very much what's going on guys welcome to episode 64 of the d5 body design podcast and today we are just hanging out on a cool january 25th it's a tuesday and uh hanging out to talk about game fi on avalanche what's what's been blowing up in the avalanche ecosystem um you know just all things avalanche and game fight there it's been an exciting kind of

growth phase that we've seen over there it's they've really gone under under the radar if you will but there's a huge community there um that has just been absolutely growing so excited to talk today with some of the lead gents from pangolin decks ken and coop and of course here today with uh the og rob how you doing rob yeah yeah hanging out man uh back down in south florida so staying a bit warmer than i was up north and uh yeah yeah i'm uh i'm stoked you know there's there's tons of building happening and despite a lot of wreckage in the markets there's almost almost more motivation i think now than than ever to uh to put forth a solid product and rally some of the uh some of

the d gens out there so um yeah nfts and game five really haven't slowed down at all um you know d5 kind of receded a bit but other than that there's there's thriving parts of the ecosystem just just floating around everywhere um so yeah i'm stoked to talk to ken and coop about kind of all of the all of those uh those new new projects those those kind of emerging trends and narratives over on avalanche one of my favorites is chicken which i'm sure we'll we'll get into and yeah yeah kind of uh how that that game five revolution is combining nfts and d5 and and some of the uh the exciting outcomes of that um so yeah i'll go ahead and pass it

over to coop and let him introduce himself and we'll kick it off i guess my name is coop i'm digital marketing manager at pangolin decks and also involved in some game fight myself and been a huge nft fan for a long time so this is like a great great run we've had and i've really enjoyed seeing all the the new tech that they're bringing and also i think a key point i want to get across today is that these games really are a way to introduce d5 to people who don't even understand that they're doing d5 and then bring them deeper into the ecosystem so i think it's really exciting yeah guys uh this is ken i'm at pangolin

i'm the chief marketing officer i think everything you guys have said is super exciting i'm not gonna reiterate that but i think that what we're seeing is um that's really interesting to me is what's the relationship between a lot of these different types of projects right what we're starting to see form is some best practices or patterns around like the type of collaboration and partners that different types of projects need you know and so for example with pangolin being a dex why would a game project care or need to you know partner up with a with a dex like that well you know there's some really obvious benefits but then there's other ones as well it seems like the name of the game for innovation is not just about making your product better but it's about

making your partnerships better too yeah that that speaks to kind of the uh the the different facets that make up um a dao or like a web 3 company it's not just the utility or the profit generation of your product but it's also the well-being of your community and you know you can encompass partners and your discord and your twitter followers and all of those into your community um and yeah it's kind of a help me help you relationship there's lots of synergies involved across really every participant in the community and everyone is able to reap their awards so i think that's a great segue into

kind of uh what the uh kind of what you are doing with your partners uh like some of the some of the more recent partners that that y'all have uh started relationships with and uh kind of what what are uh the outcomes you know how are you uh really leveraging that that partnership to bring value to the community go ahead coop you want to give the first example maybe using one of the game five projects yeah so like you said there's a lot that goes into a dow's success but one primary aspect is being able to get a hold of the token easily and making sure that it there's not a huge barrier to entry to getting in on

that token and so we've recently launched just this week super farms to help do that essentially in the past we've had farms that rewarded png for providing liquidity and that definitely built up liquidity you had enough to do trades pretty smoothly for most pairs but there were always some pairs that lacked some liquidity they had a little bit high slippage so users couldn't just easily get whatever token they wanted for that project especially on the smaller projects you know if they don't have a huge user base providing that liquidity they struggle

and so that creates a barrier for users to enter the project with super farms pangolin can now help those projects further incentivize the farm so that um they can get deeper liquidity and i think it's especially useful for like up and coming gaming tokens that don't necessarily have that huge user base yet but do have a lot of activity and a lot of growth potential they can now offer their own token as an additional reward to the png farm so that they can just attract even more liquidity yeah so it's like giving people a key to play the game and a way to get more of that

games tokens in this example um to you know do more in the game so it's an accelerant that really benefits that you know startup game project in terms of rat more rapidly acquiring users and making sure that users are armed with what they need to play you know the game as it was designed and what we'll see in february is like making this product even better by allowing more tokens and allowing for projects to eventually do this manage this whole super farm opportunity on their own and so we've talked to a couple of game projects and i think like we hinted at they have tons of partnerships so like dragon crypto gaming came to us and said we have our own token and we can

incentivize with that but we also have like 10 other projects that we partner with and we have their tokens that we can use to incentivize so it's going to be a way to utilize partner tokens in an even i don't know more thorough way to incentivize and advertise those tokens at the same time like you might be farming dragon crypto gaming plus avax and so you're receiving dcau and avax rewards but they also can throw on their new partner project token which maybe is a totally new partner totally new project if they don't have a big name yet and they're able to kind of market themselves through this reward system and so you're earning this new token

that you're going to go learn about and dig into their community it's really a it's really a boost for protocols right it puts all the control in their hands design the reward system that you want to offer with pangolin and you can get it as creative as you want that's the coolest part about it to me is it takes any constraints off of them allows them to do whatever they want from what in in terms of rewards sorry andy yeah no i was just saying i mean this reminds me of when i was staking alpha tokens they they had like a launch pad where they would give you other tokens um you know as part of their launch pad to basically help distribute these new projects to uh alpha stickers and coop you kind of hit it right right on

the head is it makes these like you know more low-key projects you basically grow your community i think one of the easiest metrics to look at for projects is is the amount of token holders that they have um and yeah it makes you instantly interested in at least doing research about the project you know if you're if you're earning some of these uh you know for free effectively or you know by being a liquidity provider so it's definitely an interesting dynamic and i'm curious kind of what how it plays into some of the game five projects that you guys have worked with so i mean what are like what are some of their objectives um when it comes to you know acquiring users and distributing their tokens right are they interested

in um in getting people that want to play are they interested in getting deeper liquidity on their pairs or kind of all the above like like what are some of the objectives of these earlier stage game five projects that are you're trying to grow especially if it depends okay depends on the project but yeah okay sorry i just say it depends on the project right i'll give one example and i'm sure coop has a different example but like some projects are ready to launch right away right the game is ready you can play it now token game launch at the same time some don't so like for example heroes chained just launched their token but can't play the game for a while right and so for them their approach was very different it's an awareness play you know they're trying

to basically get on the minds of everybody and at some point i'm sure we'll pivot and do something a little differently with all of their marketing and promotion when the game is ready to flip people into uh actually coming and playing but right now it's just soften the beaches right we we're prepping uh in this phase in a very different way versus a game that is like hey let's go now we have everything we need to play you know yeah i think ken pretty much nailed it the the only thing is some projects really do at this stage just care about deep liquidity to make speculating on the token nice and easy and they're going to build up the the actual game users later but it's sort of

a marketing play and deep liquidity for traders yeah definitely um it's tough to it's tough to operate on the books in those early stage games when the liquidity is like you know 50k or 40k in the in the lp so um yeah kind of interesting is there any game five projects that are coming up on avalanche that you guys are particularly excited about um and you know i'm also curious how you guys kind of feel in general about about the developing nft ecosystem on avalanche compared to y'all's experience on other chains good question i think coop's probably better suited than i am

to answer the how does it compare on other chains because um i used to spend a lot of time on other chains but like since finding avalanche that is less true so and i know coop has done some exploration recently with certain game projects that aren't here now plan to be here but um gone across chain and you know investigated himself yeah it's hard to narrow down that answer is there so many coming like if you can peel back some of the layers of like what's happening now and look at what's going to be happening in the next six months it's crazy like i'm a part of fifa guild you guys know that and the goal is to build a big community around play and

gaming and it's just full of new projects all the time one that i'm really interested in that just came up today and i think we're gonna have a chat with them is asgard and it might also be midgard it's like asgard midgard themed and the thing that they're doing that's so interesting is that they are incorporating all of the other nfts that are like native to avalanche into the game and so because they're on chain assets they have the metadata built in they can just pull that in build in some computation around what all of those pieces of metadata mean and actually use it in their game and so today they released

or maybe maybe i just saw it today but there was a one of their characters riding a chicken as a mount so if you own a chicken nfte and you have you know your character and asgard you can actually benefit from your chicken by getting a speed boost to your travel and so that idea of like incorporating other nfts is an awesome one to me and the one thing another thing that i really liked is that they're trying to revive some of the older nfts that maybe lost love because they didn't have the right vision or something went wrong and incorporate them into the game as well so that those holders who have

stuck around for a while can gain some benefit and maybe revive that nft project so it seems like an amazing like ecosystem play you know they're going to make partnerships with all sorts of nfts and build up their own game through that and adding value to those nfts so that really comes to mind as something that i'm looking forward to how it compares to others to other markets i think avalanche is ahead on the game fi section like they've got a ton of tokenomics games like police and thief that we just had a super farm for all sorts of games like that and i don't see that happening as much on the other chains i participate in

a lot of other chains have some of the bigger names coming like star atlas on solana that gets a ton of attention because it's potentially a triple a game that could be really cool but it's farther out and like nobody's really playing games on solana right now in the same way that i see on avalanche that's my take i think uh that example you gave about the integration of chicken as a stat boost so it's what i was talking about in the opening you know this is a perfect example of like partners collaborating in a way that's like unlocking unique benefits that they couldn't do on their own right and and i expect you're gonna see

people copy paste the hell out of that trend and start doing that all over the place i mean if we fast forward even three months from now i bet that there's more projects doing something along those lines than we'll be able to keep track of and i think chicken really sets something in motion with changing the metadata of their nfts based on the weight and how much you've fed your chicken it unlocks a lot of doors for like optimizing making the game more long-term more upgrades available and i'm just looking forward to people playing with that more yeah perfect example is uh i think yesterday they launched um cns the chicken naming service

so first i think 30 egg it was you can go and claim your custom unique name to your chicken and update the metadata so on their leaderboard now you see your custom name not chicken number you know 5214. yeah it's awesome so there's got to be other uses for that i'm sure down the road that otherwise that's a lot of effort for for vanity change maybe not but you know the way that that project continues to surprise um with really smart integrations and and features i would expect that the naming surface plays a bigger role at some point i do i want to put like a caution out there that i i have this feeling

happened with d5 with like ohm forks basically om comes along innovates does this really cool thing and then everyone forks it and there's all these little spins on it and some of them are really healthy and good like maxi we love maxie i think it has great vision but then there's others that are just in it for the cash grab because everyone else has seen the success of home forks right and so i think you're going to have that pretty soon in the play to earn world people forking with maybe poor intentions and it's going to take some like time and a community for yourself to figure out which ones you should stick with and which ones are really just cash grabs yeah without a doubt i mean i don't know if this is true or not but i saw some

chatter late last week in the chicken discord over the police and thief game being a chicken fork and just blatantly you know copy pasting their project without doing much effort i don't know if that's true or not um i'm not as close to that project i know you guys are so have you has that come up is that true do you know hasn't come up for me i think it's i mean it's pretty different i think there's definitely some differences but i would not be surprised if we see it blatant chicken rip off soon yeah yeah especially on on other chains uh we could see kind of the

the chicken fork on i don't know polygon or solana and that be the uh like the stronghold on that chain when it comes to a play-to-earn game uh man why aren't we doing that let's go spin it up seriously i think there's some easy money but it's a little bit suspicious yeah yeah yeah and it's just something we've seen in the defy world with um you know like you said ohm forks and then now there were there was a bunch of them and then they just weren't sustainable and we've seen it in the d5 or excuse me the we saw it in the d5 world with ohm forks and now we've seen it in the nft world uh with like crypto punks and then there was gan punks and there

was mutant punks and there was all these different kinds of punks and they were just offshoots of the original and play to earn almost as the intersection of d5 and nfts you know it's almost inevitable that that we'll see those types of forks as well now in something like i i i'll push back a bit and and say that like uh if these forks aren't always a bad thing necessarily uniswap for example has you know their their code that's been built and adapted across so many different exchanges and it's become kind of the industry standard so we could see kind of these these novel ideas pioneer a new type of

game or a new type of system and then kind of these other forks start to tweak and adjust it into more of a niche use case um yeah and and it's interesting how how like i guess those different forks will kind of play a unique role and then we'll have these almost aggregator types of environments where you can combine the different nft use cases like you know more unique cases you know police riding chickens thieves stealing eggs and like all these kind of cross uh collaboration types of uh types of integration yeah i mean like let's be blunt like pangolin was a uniswap fork initially and now you're building on it and making

it unique and like i think it's not going to look like a uniswap fork after february 8th i'll say that and max e2 is like a great example of a fork that is really strong and like has added use cases and added values that make it valuable um so yeah i think it's the composability of it i think that's the difference of of those things right they're like taking um one on like products that worked really well for a very specific use case like in the own model it's bootstrapping liquidity right but that's not the end that's a means to an end and that's why many of them struggled i think um and then a different product for example

like auto compounding vaults and then you know tying those together and then adding some a different product um whatever else maxi's gonna do but i think they have a clear vision for you know an end state as opposed to just being focused on the means whereas a lot of those other people fail and and pangolin is doing the same right we're a v2 uni swap fork and you know the we look just like every other uniswap fork that's out there right no one's bothered to iterate on the all of the features that a trading platform should have and what you know a modern d5 set of tools should look like and and and you know like coop said without revealing too much that's gonna change coming up real soon here in

early february for pangolin i i think back to the game fi and what we're excited about i definitely failed to mention kravita do you guys have crabs now i just live vicariously through leo's crabs andy you were muted too yeah same no i i i i like one of the only ones that that we passed on yeah it's turned out to be awesome i think the high barrier of entry is a little scary right like i mean if if the economy of it tanks you're in trouble because you spent so much to get in but it's very um i don't know reliable it hasn't taken a hit in this bear market at all and i say bear market but like it's been a week

but it's it's both fun to get involved with your crabs there's a lot of deep strategy that goes into it like it's not a simple stake it and forget type thing there's a bunch of different ways that you can use your crabs to earn income and um and it's still really early you know they have like a full road map ahead of them and i think that's something that i i always look for in the games is like okay this is great we're staking we're you know heisting whatever we're doing but what's next and if there's not a next i think you're in trouble what i really like about that model so far

of just what they've released that we have seen and like you guys i i passed and shouldn't have but um the concept of that idol mining so like no matter what if you're actively playing fine you're somehow gaining rewards something else but like hey i'm not playing but my basically my capital is still working for me right yeah you put them in the tavern rent them out there's like there's just so many options and the breeding is really cool it's like you don't just don't just breed two random crabs that's not gonna work out great for you like you have to go research the breeding and i think there's humans love to like solve problems and and try to figure

things out and so giving them something to go dig into adds a lot of value yeah that it's funny i consumed a lot of content about that recently so that's that whole abc breeding strategy right yeah that yeah it's fascinating how much like how much detail and complexity there is in it i mean you nailed it when you talked about problem solving there yeah another comment you made that i'm curious i just had a thought about like so with kravita it's really easy to like not easy but like it's common i've heard this from a lot of people now at this point about like the rental economy versus owning um like i have not seen that yet come up for chicken have you guys no no

but it would make sense it would make sense on on any of these that um that as you say you can breed or you can like generate yield from yeah yeah that's what we had me thinking that in the first place so it's like who's going to come up with the first chicken rental business or fractionalizing isn't is that coming up i feel like that came up for chicken fractionalizing chickens i don't know given the floor prices it should yeah right i mean i think the floor is too low but i yeah i i guess for like the flick the rare and and whatnot ones that i could definitely see it i mean the floor price for the unique is avax right now yeah it's big so

the fractionalizing thing kind of brings me to a different topic if that's okay about like more pure art play and um owning a piece of something really big like a banksy and i know banksy just launched something with particle on avalanche did anyone here take a look at that did you see it i just saw that connor daley bought something um but i'm not i'm not sure what and i think that's an area where avalanche is a little weak like when i look at especially solana i i think of the um the cool art you know there's a lot of

projects there that are not focused on a game but they're instead focused on a cool art or a comic that that might continue and i i think that's an area of opportunity on avalanche still like making something that's pretty that's fun to look at and um yeah that's it yeah when i think of solana i think of the blockchain being down to be honest yes yeah i've been doing a lot of research i'm not a solana lover but they've got some cool games which is why i'm i'm checking it out but yeah definitely avalanche superior i think we reached a really important point though coop i mean i don't personally seek that style out that type i gravitate more towards like the utility

part of it but um i do see a lot of that it's a very obvious difference i also spend a lot of time in um algorand chats like spaces just i've been recently been learning a lot about elgo and they have the same kind of nft you know more artistic approach kind of thing then you see here an avalanche that's more about utility and gaming and you know so uh you're right there's not much opportunity for somebody to tap into all of the you know avalanche users that you know are art lovers you might say avax warriors is heading in that direction i know they have like a vision of being board ape yacht club which you know like cool cool art combined with a cool community and their art is

pretty cool it's i mean it's all like warrior based but like 4k resolution looks amazing yeah i was just about to say that the detail is incredible on the art they're putting out for those warriors i mean they produced an honorary one for pangolin and shared it some of the early work they did on it with us and it's just like mind-blowingly the mind-blown detail like the 4k version at least yeah i think um i think the art ones that are a bit more um subjective have higher potential in terms of like what they're actually worth in quotes whereas the utility ones they kind of people start to try to just like decide and design like cash

flow models for them and thus give them like some some some value based on the the utility of the cash flow whereas i mean you know you couldn't really tell anybody that an ape is worth what an ape is worth it's just you know so it's just it's got that ultra uh subjective kind of uh approach to to uh to deciding the value as a community i mean i think both are both both is probably the ideal scenario um in that situation kind of on that same note um one of the yeah coupe did you go ahead so i just wanted to add like you're so right because eminem doesn't buy a board ape because of the utility you know he bought it because it looked cool and

like subjectively he liked it so i think the potential there is really high yeah and the clout as well um also where i was getting there it's kind of a mix between both this i don't know if you guys have seen or been playing around at all with d5 kingdoms i know that they're coming over to avalanche in crystal ball um so i would love to kind of uh hear what you guys know about that kind of what what you're expecting there and if ping golan has any plans for for that yeah they've been on our so i'm a player already on harmony and helped actually i met them in person and miami and

helped get that conversation started and they've been in our top 20 in trading volume ever since they bridged often reaching top five so i think pangolin has the most liquidity for joule right now and we get a ton of trading volume on it so we have that for now i think in the future we might look at a super farm situation especially with crystal i think crystal is the their new token that will be specific to avalanche and i could see a scenario where they want to create a super farm and distribute that a little better to people who already hold joule um some of the things like right now

we're approaching the end of their airdrop period so they have that new token coming if you've been farming joule on pangolin for the last 30 days then you're eligible for that crystal air drop there's a bunch of other ways you can get it but farming on pangolin is one of them holding jewel on avalanche is another and what i've noticed most about the game is that it is a dex inside the game it is a dex and that's how they make pretty much all their money is through swaps but they treat it pretty differently like i don't see them as a pangolin competitor necessarily they route everything through joule and and don't really focus on pairs that

don't include joule so they just want to make it easy so that players can swap their in-game rewards for a bunch of other tokens using joule as that peg and so you do your quests and i'm actually stacking up a nice harmony bag right now because i go in and do my daily quests and then instead of swapping my rewards into jewel i just swap them straight into harmony because they have that great um kind of connection between jewel and harmony and one is the token so i found it to be really cool that i can just do my quest do my daily stuff and automatically be building up a

position in one with like very little effort and i think the initial investment was not as high as something like kravita it i think at the time it was like 300 to get your initial hero so it's a much more reasonable entry point and with all this like the users don't really know sometimes what all they're doing like they don't they've come to pangolin because it's like their avalanche home now and they're almost like they don't know how to use a dex even though they've been using a decks in the game this whole time it's just like wasn't explained to them in that way and i think there's a lot of power in that for like introducing new users to deeper defy projects like imagine they put

i don't know lending into their game and now everyone's able to explore lending without really feeling like they have to go learn about lending they just do it in the game in a really natural way and learn more thanks for another another another reason why everyone is such a good fit for that game uh um you've talked and shared with me on several occasions about you know how much network congestion can become a problem for that game uh and um so you know them bridging over here is one thing but you know them also focusing on a you know a defy kingdom subnet would would be a perfect solution for something like that big time they

absolutely need a subnet and i expect that they will launch with one are subnets like like roll-ups for avalanche i don't know if that's technically a good analogy but that's what it seems like to me like in in my head it's it's this a subnet a sub network its own instance of avalanche running on its own um that then reports back and and is validated on the main chains yeah conceptually but it's it's it's very different technologically speaking um subnets uh l2s um that are roll-up based over underneath that you're thinking of still have gas fees right for example um

and get to consensus uh differently uh well side like polygon does but i guess true lt's like uh arbitrary optimism inherit all of the esl one consensus so that's not true but anyway uh subnets are different there's no gas at all you pay no gas fees um if you want to experience what it will feel like just go check out that spaces demo that ava labs put together and where you go claim a name basically it's like a claiming a domain name equivalent but um you just sign and it's it's wonderful because like you have the same experience that you're used to and you know to transact and it pops up and you don't pay any fees and it's just

really really exciting to think about a future fast forward where all of these projects we're talking about have subnets and you're bouncing around with no friction no fees you know doing what you want to do i've heard i saw it in discord in the thief guild that kravita is planning to have theirs by the end of february so it's coming pretty quick so this is like a protocol specific like like you know so so each of these game five protocols will have their own subnet potentially but i i think you can combine two like you you're gonna say like how does the interoperability work then you you could put multiple protocols on one subnet and like each subnet has to have a certain number of

validators obviously to like make sure that everything's happening and valid but so i could see a scenario where a bunch of smaller projects group up and have a subnet for themselves you know in a way though coupe i'm sorry go ahead well i was going to ask the the games spin up their own validators to for the sake of securing the the game without any uh validator fees and that's what leads to you know no transaction costs the validators aren't aren't collecting any of that gas they have to so that's that's like i think one strategy is to be gasless i believe there's the potential to still

charge gas and and it doesn't have to be an avax is another interesting point but it would be that project's native token yeah and then so that's if they need to attract validators then they'll probably charge gas and you know that'll pay the validators if they have their own funds like i could see a defy kingdoms a crab at a having enough funds on their own to actually run the validators and then they don't need to charge gas so it's it's about attracting validators i think cool yeah that's awesome i uh i've been hearing quite a bit about them um but avalanche has really kind of gotten

gas fees down and hasn't really had the congestion issues that other chains have had it's been like super strong compared to other chains lately and i don't i've tweeted about this i'm not sure if devs actually did something or if there's just even less like network congestion but gas fees are like all-time low for me right now pay like nothing yeah i've been seeing if the labs announce um anything in terms of an update like they did the last time there was you know that big congestion and they basically i mean not literally this i think they don't call this but they basically patched it optimized what it was however somehow and we haven't had a problem since then

um and you know with this you know with the market being read for the last week pretty badly and all the sell-offs it's liquidations people been panic selling on a lot of other chains and you've seen you know them they're basically their network not be able to hold hold up to all of that activity whereas avax has done a fantastic job and really held its own it gives i don't know it's really reassuring i think for for the long-term potential of their tech like we always talk about it in a really theoretical manner but when you see real world exercises put a stress test on it and it passes especially with all these other l1's failing like that's super encouraging about the future of avalanche right i feel so good about it and like you see

all the tweets about this is the time to evaluate the tech and i feel like that's really true and if i were on solana more i'd be pretty worried because it's not holding up or even like phantom basically every chain has had some problems recently aside from avalanche yeah yeah polygon gas flight to like 800 or something solana's been down phantom has been spotty and buggy i guess another question on the subnets is are there any stuff that's live now kind of opening up throughput um is that a potential reason why avax fees have have nah yeah i don't know they they launched that spaces that ken was mentioning but

it's its own little project it's not like taking away a lot of the transactions from our our big main projects i think it was more of a way to just come up with a creative demonstration on what subnets will look like and feel like and and then start the conversation about the potential all the spectrum of all the different potential use cases for it but i don't get the impression it's like a permanent project that you know is we're gonna they're gonna build on and somehow add more utility to uh but you know nobody knows except david labs yeah do you i think you you had mentioned this briefly ken but do you know if the if this if the subnets in inherit the level of security that say

that avalanche chain has or kind of what's the security tradeoff yeah that's that's my understanding yeah they they run an evm that's all pretty much the same difference as the number of validators but because it's its own small project and not an entire network that shouldn't be a problem yeah and with the requirement we talked about earlier which is you're staking avax as a validator for that subnet but you're also staking um you know whatever the the minimum requirement is for your own native uh token for that project um so that's another difference between a subnet validator versus a main net

validator i like it because it's an it's a really good model you're incentivized you know to share risk so it's not just all of uh eva labs in the avalanche network taking on risk there right it's a good way to ensure that you won't see a lot of fishy behavior on subnets and start to get out i mean like i'm glad we landed on this topic because i think it's about to become super important sorry ken if i cut you off you got glitchy or something um oh no problem uh so

avalanche c chain has been great even on its own really nice but the main power of avalanche is the subnets like that it's going to be as if heath 2.0 was just always around and actually worked the way it was planned to and so like once we see this working i mean i think it's going to be clear that avalanche is a place to be yeah and what what are uh they and they might be subnet specific but what are some of the initial prerequisites to be a validator on on one of these subnets

um you know maybe i guess you could describe kind of the process to be a validator on the c chain uh and how that might look differently on one of these subnets ken might know more about that than i do i've never tried to be a validator myself but my understanding is that for the c chain it's pretty it's pretty like self-serve you know you can go to the the c chain wallet the avalanche native wallet and essentially set it up yourself is my understanding um and i i don't know how that's going to change when you need to be a validator for a specific pro project i think it's going to be more of like you

have to get in touch they have to say they're open to validators and then apply but i'm not 100 sure yeah i i think i have explored this a little bit i've actually uh set up and got a validator node running at home just for curio for for learning purposes uh when i was first introduced to avalanche so the great thing about um the way they've approached validators is that it has the lowest like technological hardware requirements um to run a node so you don't have to have a super computer right like you can run this on your desktop that's sitting in your house right now that you're using you just download the validator um software and you know there's some setup

and config required but there you go um obviously you have to stake a certain amount of x too but it's actually relatively yeah self-service pretty straightforward process i mean it requires some technical know-how and understanding but no no rocket science involved which is kind of important right like we want as many validators as possible yeah yeah which is uh surprising why other l1 and haven't made it a bit more transparent and easy to set up a validator because like you're saying you want as many as possible um yeah but the the barrier of enter entry on the technical side of things uh is quite

high on a lot of these l1s and for instance on mainnet the economic barrier to entry is 32 eth which is a bit a bit high as well so um it it's kind of surprising yeah that that chains haven't opened this uh up to the broad community to to run validators i think go ahead ken oh no i i was just about to say i think i don't know this for sure but i think one of the reasons that's the case though is all of this kind of comes back to your consensus mechanism right and how it's designed and some of these l ones i just can't easily flip that switch and make that

change to make it so anybody with a desktop at home can be a validator because you'd have to completely blow up your consensus mechanism and redesign it from scratch and part of that design like that whole choice just comes back to how well ava labs designed the idea behind avalanche and and they see it more from a business perspective than like a just pure tech perspective like everything they have done lines up with future use cases future understanding of what this chain is going to do and

ethereum just like you know they they didn't know what it was all gonna do at the time and so they didn't have the ability to make some of those decisions so i think ava labs has just studied what could be improved from prior networks and understood the future business case so that they could match everything up and like it's just looking good i think they're coming yeah about avalon studying it not just watching what's gone wrong with you know other ones that came before them but you have to remember like who think about the people that created avalanche and their background i mean goon has been studying this academically for

like 30 years right um the academic research and and hypotheses all around the fundamentals that drive this whole thing and what they came up with so like this has been uh and now basically a big giant experiment and analysis project that he spent his entire professional career on being able to create this product that drives us it's it's way beyond um just looking at like oh what did he do that didn't work and we'll make it make a little tweak like there's a significant more research and investment that's gone into that in my opinion okay so i just pulled up nansen ai which is like an analytics tool on chain analytics tool and i think

the reason we started even talking about validators is shown in this data the number one project by transactions over the last seven days is kravita with 1.6 million the next highest is trader joe with 782 000. so it's like over double the amount of transactions coming from this one game with approximately like 3 000 players so as game fi evolves like to me that's just a signal that games are transaction beasts and you see it with d5 kingdoms too and so like as game 5 evolves your your network is going to have to handle that like it's just not going to be able

to happen all on the same chain so for game 5 to succeed you got to look at which networks are built for that and i think it's avalanche yeah the subnets would be ideal yeah i was just going to follow up this i i don't have nansen up uh in front of me but where where's chicken fall in that list for transaction volume because uh they have 10 000 you know of those nfts not everyone is going to be active as a player but you know i would imagine comparable user base and curious to see like their transactions stacked up against kravita yeah you know i think they might be falling into unknown right now because i don't

see them on the first five pages and like that that just doesn't seem right from your point so a lot of another a problem with nansen is that they're still like building out the avalanche ecosystem so it's not all perfectly labeled so i don't see them and i think you're right like they've got to have a bunch of transactions i mean chicken chicken doesn't have that uh game that that crab adapter does yet you know if you will so it's probably why yeah you're right like krabido you have to if you want to maximize your benefits you have to do 12 transactions a day i think and with chicken like you could

theoretically just you know let your your staked egg turn into more feed over a longer period of time you don't necessarily have to interact with it the same way it's interesting it's very interesting um well gents thank you for coming on as as we kind of wrap up here the game for conversation what's coming on down the pipeline for pangolin what can our users get excited about our community and how can we get involved ken can i leave you to feed that alpha but i mean we have something big this week i don't know if we can say much yeah we can because well it's already like we've said it's like unofficially already out there and i'm not sure when you're planning on posting and

publishing this uh guys but uh the biggest announcement this week and then there's one that we had mentioned but i'll recap that as well uh coming in february but um we've been working behind the scenes for a while to um with terraform labs to bring ust uh stablecoin uh from tara to avalanche and you might say well why why are we doing that um because we um because we are looking at a multi-chain world that you know we know is going to be common we're in a day-to-day life from a defy user perspective and there's things that you know are interesting that might be attractive to people on terra

that avalanche users don't have access to currently and vice versa so the tldrs we're helping build that bridge with partnering with avalabs and with terra labs so we're going to be announcing the super farm tomorrow for ust and there's uh going to be a lot of atlanta rush rewards behind it uh in the form of avax uh terraform representative is also contributing uh ust rewards and then pangolin is obviously contributing png rewards so we're gonna have our first ever triple reward super farm uh coming this week it's me a very fat farm like it sounds lit

and we're in there yeah and then what we mentioned before uh february 8th mark your calendars guys it's penguin's birthday so uh we're turning one uh and so in in celebration of that we've got some some things planned uh we're we already mentioned a big ux upgrade to reflect a more advanced trading platform all around as opposed to the vanilla you know ux from a uni fork that everybody is is used to and so uh we'll want you guys to to you know check that out use it kick the tires tell us what you like don't like and also help get the word out um you know about uh all these changes at

the time so i think those are the answers to your question awesome yeah that sounds great um the the ui changes as well as the triple reward super form which is a stable form right because it's ust so there's no market exposure except for all the rewards that are coming in in avax png and luna i guess yeah yeah it's like essentially like free money for holding stables and it might be a good time for that yeah so thank you guys for coming on

thanks