Alpaca Finance - Alpies sale on ETH 10/28 2pm UTC
@AlpacaFinance
Read our recap of our AMA about Alpies with Club721: https://medium.com/alpaca-finance/club721-x-alpaca-finance-ama-recap-174bd72151d1… #NFTs #NFT #NFTGaming #DeFi #BSC #Binance #PlayToEarn #playtoearngame #NFTGame #nftgames #BinanceSmartChain #BNB
CLUB721 x Alpaca Finance AMA Recap
Below is the transcript from the AMA session with Club721 and our Head of Strategy Samsara on October 17th, 2021.
[Host]: Hello everyone,
Welcome to another episode of Club721 AMA on Discord. This is Ming. I will be the host tonight. Thank you so much for tuning in today.
This is our fourth time doing an AMA on Discord. The project for today is Alpies by Alpaca Finance. Alpaca Finance is the largest lending protocol within the crypto world that allows leveraged yield farming.
Alpaca is also a pioneer in the NFT space, having released the first NFT animated short story series in early 2021. Unlike other NFT projects that mainly create NFT collectibles, Alpaca Finance focuses on creating NFTs with utility, such as POAPs, certificate NFTs, and now NFTs incorporated in P2E gaming and DeFi.
Alpaca’s new Alpies NFT collection is a series of 10,000 exclusive NFTs, that not only offer utility within Alpaca’s existing financial platform, but will also serve as presale allocation tickets and heroes within Alpaca’s upcoming P2E game. Alpies will be sold on two chains, ETH and BSC. The first 5000 will be sold on BSC this upcoming Tuesday, 10/19 22h (GMT+8). The next 5000 will then be sold on ETH at 10/27 22h (GMT+8).
We are very honored tonight to have Samsara, Head of Strategy and Marketing at Alpaca Finance.
Without further ado, let’s welcome Mr. Samsara.
Q1:
First of all, please tell us about Alpaca Finance and introduce yourself!
A1:
Sure, I’m Samsara, the Head of Strategy and Marketing at Alpaca Finance, which is the largest lending protocol within crypto that allows leveraged yield farming. With over $1 billion USD in TVL and more than 50,000 active users, Alpaca is one of the top blue-chip projects existing on Binance Smart Chain, and top 30 within all of cross-chain DeFi. We’re also consistently ranked by Dapp.com as having one of the highest daily volumes in capital flow through our protocol, often competing with Uniswap and Aave for the number one spot, and ahead of many famous protocols like PancakeSwap, 1Inch, etc.
Q2:
As a Defi protocol, what made you want to get involved with NFTs?
A2:
Actually, even though our main business is DeFi, Alpaca is a pioneer in the NFT space. Early in 2021, we released the first NFT animated short story series, setting up the Alpaca lore for our metaverse, and have since published four episodes. This was before Stoner Cats or anything else like that. Since then, Alpaca Finance launched over 50 NFT campaigns to tens of thousands of users, with a recent NFT campaign generating over 15,000 mints. You can view our campaigns at https://galaxy.eco/alpacafinance.
Our approach to NFTs is unique as well. Unlike other NFT projects that mainly create NFT collectibles, Alpaca focuses on creating NFTs with utility, such as POAPs, certificate NFTs, and now NFTs incorporated in play-to-earn gaming and DeFi. Our new Alpies NFT collection is a series of 10,000 exclusive NFTs that not only offer utility within Alpaca’s existing massive financial platform, but will also serve as presale allocation tickets and heroes within Alpaca’s upcoming play-to-earn game. You can learn more about Alpies and view the full utility list at alpies.alpacafinance.org .
Q3:
What benefits will Alpie owners receive?
A3:
Quite a few. First, our art is pretty famous so we have a large fan base who want the Alpies just to use them as profile pictures. Here are a few examples. These are from our Dauntless collection which are the “dark” Alpies. There is also a Dreamers collection which has Alpies with features that are more on the “side of justice.”
The value of these isn’t just limited to the art though. Here is the list of utilities:
- Presale allocation of future game project token
- 50% higher max leverage on Alpaca Finance
- Future NFT airdrops/giveaways
- Beta access to game
- Higher game stats
- Exclusive free game items
- High-quality NFT Breeding
- Access to exclusive Illamanati Discord
- Exclusive access to Alpaca physical merch
Q4:
So, these Alpies will function in a play-to-earn game? The value of these isn’t just limited to the art.
A4:
That’s right. We’ve been working on a play-to-earn game since earlier this year, since before Axies and play-to-earn blew up. We’re now moving out of the game design phase and into the development phase. I know a lot of new NFT projects claim to be planning a game. However, I’ve heard many people say that in reality, those projects will likely end up with a 2D Pacman or nothing at all. I can sympathize with that. The problem is most of the current NFT projects have no track record, no background, and no resources. That’s why you have rug pulls or NFT projects that don’t fulfill their roadmaps. That’s where Alpaca is different.
Unlike projects coming out of nowhere, we have an established brand and user base, and our background is finance. We already have a billion-dollar active platform and are known to be a respectable and trustworthy team. So, if we say we’re building something, you can trust we’ll keep our promise, because that’s how we’ve been known to operate for a long time now.
Q5:
When will Alpies go on sale?
A5:
Alpies will be sold in two parts, on ETH and BSC. The first 5000 will be sold on BSC this upcoming Tuesday, 10/19 22h (GMT+8). The next 5000 will then be sold on ETH at 10/28 22h (GMT+8).
Q6:
What other projects or partnerships are Alpaca working with?
A6:
Like PancakeSwap, we have over 24 smaller partnerships with projects that use Alpaca. We call them Grazing Range programs. So, we have already a very extensive network on BSC that we’re in talks with. And in terms of how we can create partnerships and deliver value to our users, one interesting thing is obviously the NFT marketplaces, right? I think the NFT marketplace space on BSC is still very early, which is one reason that we decided to launch both on BSC and ETH, to make it so our NFTs can bridge between both sides.
In terms of what we’re doing and in partnerships, we’re in talks with Binance and crypto marketplaces. Besides for PancakeSwap, we are planning to list there as well and try to kind of develop as many partnerships as we can to give benefits to ALPACA holders and to Alpie holders.
Q7:
What do you think is the best opportunity in the NFT world in the coming three months?
A7:
So, I think NFTs are still actually in the early phase, even though it really is one of the most popular segments within blockchain with the general populace outside the blockchain, right? Like typically, if you talk to someone, they might not understand the fire. Even they may not have heard of Ethereum, but they will have heard of NFTs. It might be your grandfather that you talked about. But, we’re still at the stage where a lot of these people have heard of it, but they haven’t necessarily participated.
And I know that Coinbase, for example, and some of these larger companies are really creating on-ramps for users to get into NFTs. In Coinbase’s case, it’s an NFT marketplace. So, I think there’s still a lot of growth within the NFT segment. However, I think that over time, we’re going to see that the value is going to start moving away from collectibles and more into NFTs that actually provide utility.
So NFTs itself is not really just JEPGs. NFT is a technology. It essentially is a type of ownership over digital assets. And that’s really what blockchain is. It’s ownership over digital assets. That’s where the value comes from. Blockchain is really, I think, growing because people are realizing the value of the digital world and of these assets that you didn’t have any way to really own them and invest in them.
And now we’re seeing with Covid, everyone’s just kind of sitting around at home and participating more and more ingaming and various digital activities that actually being able to own these assets is extremely valuable. And blockchain is a more secure way of owning these assets, right? They’re non-fungible. So, if you’re the owner, you can prove that. And you’ll be the only owner. So that’s the underlying value of NFTS, but I think the technology aspect hasn’t really been utilized by most participants in the NFT space yet.
Most of the collections that are really famous collections for the most part are still being used mainly as profile pictures. And they haven’t really, at least yet, delivered on further utility beyond that. But I think we’re seeing the NFT space get more competitive now. And there seem to be dozens of projects launching every day. And we’re going to see that the ones that really get traction over time are the ones that can provide utility beyond just cool looking profile pictures, that can allow their NFTs to participate in gaming or participate in finance or participate in some of the other big things going on in blockchain.
So, for me, that’s the most interesting space that NFTs are going to move into over the coming year. And that’s been our direction. Since we launched earlier this year, we wanted to try to create not just cool NFTs, but ones that are going to have utility and are going to be able to onboard users into participating in finance as well and participating in gaming, which is obviously one of the other massively growing segments in the industry.
For me. It’s that, I think just adding more depth to the NFTs and creating legitimate use cases where people owning them aren’t just going to be looking at the picture in their wallet.
[Host]: Yeah, thank you for your opinion. I also believe that as technology is dominating the world, most people recently have been joining NFTs and personally myself as well, and many people haven’t realized the utilities. Almost most people think of it as a JPEG. A lot of people think that we are crazy dropping huge tons of money on just JPEGs, but a lot haven’t noticed the utility behind these JPEGs and all those projects. I believe that NFTs will become a huge thing in the future.
Q8:
How will the project and Alpies survive during a bear market? Are NFTs going to crash like an avalanche? Or do you think NFTs will have even more opportunities when a bear market comes?
A8:
Yeah, so that’s a good question. Coming from a financial background, I think I can say that in the bear market, everything is going to drop, right? That means it’s very difficult for an asset to do well. People like to hold gold in traditional finance during a bear market, but I don’t think even Bitcoin, which we call digital gold, is going to go up during a bear market, right? That’s obviously not the case.
So, what assets will survive and have the lowest relative loss will tend to be the assets that have strong fundamentals. So I think DeFi companies and exchanges that still have ongoing revenue streams coming in are going to do best, and more speculative assets will have the highest volatility, the highest risk. Potentially, someone can argue that NFT collectibles are in that speculative space. But, I think,as a segment, it still has substantial growth in it, right?
The bear market for people like me who have been in crypto for a while isn’t that scary because we just see this like a phase, and we’ve had a number of cycles with bear markets already. And what tends to happen is price goes up, price goes down a little bit, price goes up a little bit more, then it goes down a little bit. It’s a cycle. Bear markets are not really scary as long as you can survive through it.
I think the biggest challenge is having enough capital, having enough users already to be in a strong enough position so that if a bear market hits, we’re not going to have any issue surviving. We have a $1 billion platform. Our revenues are very strong, even compared to other DeFi platforms that are much larger on Ethereum, like Compound and Aave.
For us, if a bear market comestomorrow, it’s not going to change our development schedule in terms of building out the Alpies’ utilities and building out the game. In fact, we might even be better off because we have that base to be able to survive it very comfortably.
For anyone that’s actually familiar with Alpaca Finance and leveraged farming, they’ll know that in terms of yield farming platforms, Alpaca is one of the only platforms that you can actually participate and be in a profitable situation during a bear market. One of the issues with yield farming is if you’re holding a crypto asset and doing yield farming, you might be earning 50% APY or 100% APY, but that’s over a year, right? And typically, within the bear market, you might see a 30% to 50% drop in a day.
So, your APY is already down and you’re not going to be able to cover that drop. And if the bear market lasts long, you could lose 90% or more of the value of the assets, right? That’s why users on a lot of these other farming platforms are probably not going to be profitable. And as a result, a lot of people might leave. The projects will lose their metrics and TVL and users.
In the case of Alpaca, because we have leverage, you can actually yield farm while you’re shorting assets. So, in the bear market, if you think assets are going to go down in price rather than up, you can actually yield farm while betting that the assets are going to go down in price. And if they go down, you’re going to earn income on that drop instead of losing it. So, we’re very well positioned in terms of our products strategy to not only survive the bear market, but to actually do better than other projects because our products are some of the only ones that allow users to keep earning income during a bear market.
Q9:
What will Alpies look like? Like, is the style similar with your profile?
A9:
We have over 200 features. There’s quite a lot of diversity in terms of how the Alpies look, and we posted a number of them, both on our website and also on our Twitter. We tend to post one or two sneak peeks a day. You can take a look to see quite a variety of features there and in there are a lot of different styles.
The alpaca collection that we’re selling on BSC is more of an edgy type of style. It’s more like the dark characters. So, you have stuff like demon horns and vampire fangs and things like that. And then the Alpies are that we’re going sell on Ethereum is going to be the Dreamers collection. You’re going to have more of lighter features, lighter colors, more of a holy aura or those kinds of things. A big theme, obviously, with the Alpies and the upcoming game, is going to be light versus dark morality. That’s going to really play a part in how people will play the Alpies within the game.
Each collection has five different hidden classes at the moment. You could say, I don’t want to call it good or evil necessarily, but you can call it light versus dark.
The five dark classes are on the BSC Dauntless collection, and the five light ones are on the other collection. Those classes are going to play very differently. If you’ve ever played a game that has this sort of morality aspect to it, you can do good things or you can do bad things. There can be various tradeoffs between choosing one side or the other. There’s quite a lot of diversity in the characters, and you’re welcome to see what we’ve posted so far. And we’re going to keep posting examples of the Alpies.
[Host]: I think it was a very smart idea to have BSC and ETH have a different aura.
Q10:
There have been quite a number of members asking why Ethereum was chosen as a second chain to launch?
A10:
I think the main decision for that was just based around strategy for how to do the sale.
In our case, we want to make sure we do have a good sale, right? And we already have a lot of users on BSC. But our platform is not yet on Ethereum. So we figured the natural demand is going to start on BSC. As a result of that, it just made sense to have the first launch on BSC where we expect it to do well with our current existing users. In other words, we have enough of a community right now where even if we don’t bring in new people from the NFT space on Ethereum that we will still have a pretty good sale just based on our current community.
Obviously, for many of you that are familiar with NFTs, you’ll know the space is much more developed on Ethereum. There’s way more trading volume on NFT projects and NFT users on Ethereum. As a result of that, we also wanted to make sure we didn’t miss out on those users, and to give them an opportunity to own Alpies as well, and really bring in these new users into Alpaca Finance’s world and platform. And ideally, also get them over time more accustomed to actually using our financial products. That’s why, for us, it made the most sense, in order to have the best result, to split between BSC and Ethereum. And to do the BSC sale first, because it seems like an easier sale.
And then, for the Ethereum sale, we’re going to focus on working with top influencers and bringing in a new user base. And that will be much easier after the BSC sale. When the BSC sale closes, we’ll have a floor price. We can use that floor price to really make people feel more confident on Ethereum because they know that half the Alpies already been sold not long ago on BSC near that price.
Q11:
I would like to ask, there will be quite a time gap between the launch of the NFT and the launch of the game. And in the NFT world, this gap will be lodged dramatically. So how would you keep this project attractive in the market? Will there be any celebrity be involved during the process to create hype? Thank you.
A11:
We’re working with quite a lot of influencers from different regions. BSC is really more of an Asian-focused network. Most of the users are from various regions in Asia. For the BSC side, we have a lot of partners that are top influencers in regions like Japan, Korea, China, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc. As for celebrities, it depends how you define that haha. I don’t think we have any rappers on board yet under the BSC side, but we’re definitely going to try to do our best with public relations on the Ethereum side, which is more conducive to working with celebrities and stuff like that.
Right now, we’re mainly focused on working with top influencers within the NFT space, ideally, or at least within the regions where most users know them. But yeah, it’s something we’re definitely considering in terms of how to keep up the hype and how to keep the community engaged over these few months. And before the game comes out, some things we might do is maybe do some giveaways or some airdrops during that time or some unique events for all these holders, ask them for their opinions on what they’d like to see in the game. And really try to work on that engagement organically.
But as you said, also try to work with influencers and people, celebrities ideally to constantly bring in new interest to it. Yeah, we’re pretty optimistic. We’ll have layers of strategies in place and definitely not going to let interest drop off during that time.
Q16:
You talk about speaking with a lot of peers and projects. Do you see any collaboration forging in the next few months?
A16:
Yeah, for sure, just like clubs like club721, we definitely would like to keep collaborating and figure out partnerships any way we can. Do like a win-win situation and add value to members of both communities. In terms of NFT projects, we’re already looking at reaching out to some of the more established, respectable projects to see how we can do cross collaborations and provide value to both communities.
I think the most natural one is obviously gaming. We actually have quite a few partners in the game space already, blockchain gaming projects that are already working with Alpaca Finance. Polychain Monsters is a good size one on BSC. The game is similar to Axie Infinity, which already has a very large community. I think they have over a hundred twenty thousand Twitter followers. Monsta Finance, CryptoBlades, Binamon are some other ones. So we’re already working with these projects and partnering with them will help build a strong foundation for our game.
Q17:
The first question is, can you introduce something about the economics of the game? The second is you have separate systems. I’d like to know that, if you can access the game with three Alpies, if I have two Dauntless and one Dreamer, can I access it?
So, do I have to access with three Alpies on the same blockchain? Or is the Dauntless and Dreamers totally independent systems?
A17:
Happy to answer that. I’ll answer the second question first. So there are going to be five classes on each of the Dauntless and the Dreamers, respectively. And you’ll be able to play, as you said, three Alpies as a team of heroes, a bit similar to how Axies works. You’ll be able to choose three classes arbitrarily of any specific type based on your ideal play style. Every class is going to have a different play style, different things they can do within a combat system. Thus, based on how you want to play, you’ll be able to choose your play style.
In terms of if all three of your Alpies being from one collection, you’ll be able to use any combination of Alpies to play the game. There’s going to be a bridge between BSC and Ethereum. So you’ll be able to bring all your BSC Alpies to Ethereum to sell them on OpenSea if you want. Or you’ll be able to bring your Ethereum Alpies to BSC to participate in the Alpaca Finance platform.
Q19:
I guess this last question would be good for a closer. I just wanted to know like two years down the road, what is the dream for Alpaca Finance? And I understand that you guys will be very successful in the BSC space for DeFi lending. I am myself invested in it, but I want to know going forward. Like I understand NFT is all this that you’re building, but what is your ultimate goal? Maybe you could share a little bit inside, like within the next 2 years, your roadmap. What really do you want to achieve? Just want to know something from your thoughts.
A19:
Yeah, actually, rather than answer that, I think the best answer I can give you is that later tonight, we’re going to be publishing an update to our roadmap. That’s going to include a review of the initial high-level goals that we set for our platform all the way back from March. We’re also going to be going over our new high-level strategic goals of what we want to do with Alpies and what we want to do with Alpaca Finance and the game and bring it all together. Right now, I would say, if you just follow our Twitter or our Telegram or Discord, that’s something that we will be posting in detail later tonight. And you can just have a read of the roadmap updated article. Then, if you have any questions about it or any ideas or suggestions, you’re free to join our socials and discuss it there with us.
[Host]: It seems our AMA is ending. Thank you so much for being here with us today. It was a very informative AMA and I hope that you had fun. I hope that our members get something from today. Thank you so much.
Yeah, thanks for having me. I definitely had a lot of fun here, a lot of very active and interesting users with some good questions. Would love to come back some time in the future. Thanks, everyone.
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