Introduction
--This will be an abridged, edited version of the conversation not a word for word transcript--
Thank you all for joining us. We have Lum up as a co-host, he'll help moderate the discussion. We've had a very clear sign that we will mint out soon. I'm really stoked for having this partnership with the one and only Blockchain Brown. I appreciate him for being super transparent, we did not just reach out and said "Hey, we're going to pay you this and you'll have to post about us." No, we actually collaborated, saw what was best for community and actually vibed with each other before putting out our plans to mint out. We're definitely a great fit, love you all from the Blockchain Brown notification gang, thank you for joining us. Welcome to Panda Paradise, we're working on our staking contract, we're working on our game, we hope you stay for the art, the community and that's as much as I can ask for. All these sleepless nights have been worth it because finally we'll be able to acquire all the NFTs that we want for our DAO and finally distribute the $BAMBOO token we've been working really hard on.
-PandaGenesis
https://soundcloud.com/panda-paradise/panda-paradise-ama2-recap?si=fecde55ccc924e928f9f2bcdd94371fe
Question 1: What's your background? How did you get started in Crypto?
PandaGenesis: So everyone has this one story. Mine is pretty like... haha, I don't want to be insensitive to certain people. In 2016 I was working odd jobs here and there online. A lot of the payment options were in Bitcoin, during that time maybe $100-200 per btc. I was editing videos, making photoshop collages, flyer editing, and people were paying me in bitcoin. So getting to the amount, over 2-3 years working in that space being paid as a freelancer, I made about 800 bitcoin haha. But then I had car bills, rent, oh my god..
Lum: Wow.
PandaGenesis:
Yeah, so as a 22-23 year old with no money I had to sell to get liquidity and pay my bills, so here I am, I didn't hold [Laughs]. Of course if I had a crystal ball, things would be different, but I don't think it would be much different, I've always been interested since I heard about NFTs. That all started a long path to entrepreneurship, trading, holding crypto and stocks.
Right before this NFT project I was able to turn about $35,000 on Robinhood into $1.2mil on an option call, through a bitcoin related stock. I don't know if you guys follow any of these reddit posts, but some guy called that this stock Newegg would squeeze, and it went from $9 to like $95 in a short period. So what happens when you have option calls on something like that, you're going to make amazing amounts of money, 1000% plus, maybe 5000%. So I aped into one of his calls, this stock called SPRT, it was going to merge and become a bitcoin mining company with low carbon emission. I got in around $6 and geeze that thing just pumped to $52-$65 and that's when I made my exit.
So, even before all that, the first NFT I ever purchased. I was really active in the Pokémon community and that's how I met Steve Aoki. Through the Facebook group Pokémon World they were able to offer, a special whitelist let's say, to mint and meet Steve Aoki at his mansion. We did a box break, and I wanted 1st Edition Charizard real bad, but of course those boxes are really expensive so the next best thing was Base Set, and I had 10 packs in his box break and that's why he invited me out to his house. We were able to connect and learn more about each other, and we started talking about NFTs. He came out with his first collection on Nifty Gateway, these little furry looking guys running and dancing to music. At that time OpenSea wasn't very popular yet, so I paid $9000 for one of his NFTs. I thought "Hey this is really cool, this is the future"
Question 3: Tell me about the team. How many developers do you have? What's the size of the whole team now?
PandaGenesis: Besides the 8 mods, 2 admins, here is the the core team.
1. PandaGenesis
2. Beautiful Wife (who sometimes talks on his account!)
3. Frontend Dev (HVJ)
4. Backend Dev (FAI)
5. Artist (SilentPls)
About the artist, he's really good. He was hand selected from a few to see if they could copy my style. 7 years before this project began, I started his own clothing brand called Transcend. Our logo was a super panda, literally a panda with a cape. This is how we learned to market them through local sales at universities and county fairs, and the expertise to find quality garments and prints.
About the developers. I was scouring NFT discords for a developer chat, which I found at Pudgy Penguins. Honesty was key, because in this space people may rug you over a McNugget. Luckily I can audit some of the code myself, double-checking where transfers and withdrawal of funds go. We're lucky to have a solidity dev that is trustworthy and really excited to bring the staking mechanism live for us. His goal is to be thorough in order to avoid all the exploits and liquidity rugs that plague the space.
PANDAVERSE GAME QUESTIONS
Question 4: Last time we spoke we talked about how the game is Maple-story inspired, and also will have an idle game mode, but the promotional material looks more active than that. Tell me more about the game in development.
There will be a ton of game modes. Players will be able to go to the area to idle farm if they want, or if they're feeling bored they can boss-raid or enter the PVP mode. Players will be able to switch between their melee and ranged weapons and more class-specific skills are planned for development. There is a Medium article that goes into more detail about what class a panda will fall under depending on their randomized stats.
>75 Strength: Brawler
>75 Intelligence: Alchemist
>75 Speed: Rogue
>75 Luck: Marksman
Hybrid combinations are possible if multiple stats are above 75.
Question 5: So the weapon trait that we cannot see is tied primarily the game, right? Do you picture a system where we would separate the weapon from the Panda or are they permanently bound?
PandaGenesis: Yes. For that first weapon it will be bound as a starter weapon. However, players can acquire more weapons with progression. This is also in case pandas were assigned weapons that do not make sense for their class and stats.
Question 9: Do you have plans for cross-chain compatibility?
PandaGenesis: Yes, we're definitely going to look into Layer 2s. Of course, it's going to take time to bridge either way, but at least the fees will be acceptable. For gaming I've seen Polygon or ImmutableX be okay. That will require a bit more hiring out because right now our game developers are just Unity guys, not blockchain. We'll have to hire another developer that's in both worlds basically.
DAO QUESTIONS
Question 2: Where did the idea of the DAO come from? Was it the collaboration with Steve Aoki?
I understood that Bluechip NFTs were out of reach for many people, such as 1-2 ETH for a Pudgy Penguin. This also caused me to realize that NFTs were not just JPEGs, but tickets into a community. While my friends in an NFT alpha group were talking about how to buy fractional pieces of an Ether Rock, I noticed that the liquidity on the shares was way higher than the value of the rocks themselves, which were $2-3 million dollars each. After fractionalization, the tokens can have a separate, unique value from the basis of the marketcap's NFT.
Question 6: What's the general overview for how the DAO will be structured and operated?
PandaGenesis: Right now we see the standard where admins submit proposals through Snapshot. So far we've tried weighted, quadratic and single vote. Currently we favor weighted vote because it allows balancing your vote between multiple options depending on how many pandas owned. Of course, time is of the essence when ETH prices spike and floor prices drop, so sometimes the team has to act really fast and the vote cannot be left up too long. For major decisions we will have the vote be at least 24 hours.
Question 7: Do you envision the DAO as like a hedge-fund structure or investing firm in anyway? I know you've said that $BAMBOO is *not* a security. In the spirit of bringing value to the panda holders, how do you picture the role of the DAO?
PandaGenesis: We're rewarding the early adopters of the first drop with our $BAMBOO tokens. Of course this will be for a fixed amount of time, not infinite. The way these fractionalized vaults work: if somebody wants to buy out the liquidity at any given time, all the funds would be redistributed to whomever holds the tokens. If we're going the "hedge-fund" route, we will continue to grow our vault and see where the value goes. By then we'll be able to have our own listing on CoinmarketCap & CoinGecko and be traded daily. That would be the best case scenario.
Essentially what we're doing is a reverse IDO. So all these shitcoins listed on DEXs, they came from somewhere. People will speculate and ape in, expecting the price to go up, right? So we're reversing that: we're creating our NFT that slowly distributes the rewards to the holders, with a set cap. We also have burning mechanics where once the tokens are utilized, they are burnt. Overtime I believe as we acquire more Bluechip NFTs for the "hedge-fund" per se — but legally I don't think we'll be classified as a hedge fund if we're just holding a bunch of NFTs — we're speculating that these bluechips will grow in value. And because the tokens are a fractional piece of the vault, who's to say the value of the token won't grow as well?
Question 8: So what have been the first few DAO proposals so far? Any for charity?
PandaGenesis: Right, even before we reached 50% mint. We donated a few thousand dollars to the WWF Panda Conservation Fund. That was really good. There are a lot of charities that do not accept ETH yet, that are panda based. So we might have to find runner-ups that save wildlife in general. And we want everything to be as transparent as possible on the blockchain. Last time, when I donated to the WWF I had to use my personal card and I was worried while livestreaming it hoping someone didn't see my credit card number [Laughs]. We'll definitely take in suggestions, if someone does find a charity that allows crypto deposits, we'll go towards those. We'll put out the best choices and the people can vote through the DAO.
Question 13: from Winner Winner -- About the fractionalized DAO system, how would it work for raffles/giveaways for those who never win these contests?
PandaGenesis: Initially we didn't plan to reward NFTs to our community so the best way we're giving back to the community is the daily airdrop. The raffles and giveaways will be what the DAO votes on, such as if there were a big boost in secondary sales in OpenSea. The team would always allocate a portion back to the community as a reward for holding and participating.
For example if 10 ETH were available to reward to the community, the community would vote on whether we had 10 winners of 1 ETH each, or 100 winners of 0.1 ETH each. It'll be something like that.
Question 18: When you have looked into these other DAOs, the bluechips like CyberKongz, what did you like and what didn't you like about their projects?
PandaGenesis: Great question. So originally I was really against staking. I didn't know what it would mean. But for Kongz, I don't think you need to stake them to receive the bananas, what happened there was that it was pre-built into their contract. They didn't need any sidechains or anything like that. As a new and upcoming project we have to have the ability to pivot. So after looking at all these token-generating NFTs, we decided that staking is a route we wanted to go, because we saw how crucial it was to remove all the listings on OpenSea, establish a strong community of holders, and bring eyes to the floor price.
Besides that, we also want enough volumes through secondary sales so we can acquire more bluechips as we go. That's why we have the 10% royalty, which is the standard for DAOs (MutantCats, HeadDAO, Halloweenbears, etc). It's really good that we're affordable at this price, and I don't believe we will see this floor price for much longer. Because once the staking mechanism comes out, people will FOMO in and try to grab as many pandas as they can.
Getting back to your question, I really did like just being able to passively collect. However, CyberKongz have a different utilization case for $BANANAs, they're not trying to acquire more and more bluechips NFTs for their vault. Since they've established their role as a bluechip, the amount of liquidity provided is available through a bunch of whales.
While I hope we have good interest from whales, we wouldn't want too many whales diluting our project because they could swing and monopolize votes. If we have a good amount of holders vs amount of NFTs available that will show we have a well-balanced DAO and we won't have rigged elections.
BAMBOO QUESTIONS
Question 11: So we will need to stake our pandas on ETH mainnet to earn $BAMBOO, right?
PandaGenesis: Right, so you stake your panda then the $BAMBOO will accumulate, and it will cost gas to withdraw. That's the standard we've seen. Hopefully if we do figure out a better chain to do that then that will be the alternative, but for now from my testing with HeadDAO and MutantCats that's the way it works. Also, staking will remove and delist your NFT from OpenSea. That's why we'll see a violent push on the floor if there's no supply available.
Question 14: About $BAMBOO, initially it will be a conversion from $BANANA, right?
PandaGenesis: Right that was the idea initially, but as I learned more about what fractionalizing actually does we're going to be creating our own liquidity pool of our fractionalized vault. The $BANANAs will just be a cherry on top. The daily profit we earn from the bananas will be equally distributed along with the already default amount pandas get from staking.
Question 15: What will the airdrop system be like?
PandaGenesis: Our airdrop will be based on the total value of the fractionalized vault. Once we decide on the full tokenomics and the full marketcap based on a set timeframe, like 10 years or so. We're going to distribute 100 tokens per regular minted pandas, 108 per genesis panda. Every day for the next 10 years. We'll have burning mechanism through the game, merchandise, tipping your friends/community members in the discord. It'll be a very interactive way of using the token.
Question 21: Will we be able to use bamboo to buy merch directly?
PandaGenesis: Yes, that is one of the plans. Of course we will have to find an off-chain solution, because if you were burning gas to do the transaction it doesn't make any sense. We're going to work on side-chaining or in-game/in-website way to transfer the tokens to avoid burning too much gas to acquire merchandise.
MISCELLANEOUS
Question 10: General chat discussion on 10% Royalty.
PandaGenesis: This was something the community voted on after we saw how fast projects like MutantCats and HeadDAO were able to purchase their really big bluechip NFTs. Originally we wanted just to be an art project, that would have been the best right. But, since we wanted to become a fractionalized-DAO-type project, right before mint, we didn't have time to update the frontend so the website still reflects that original 3% royalty. However we already voted on the snapshot to raise the royalty to 10% and so far the community has been holding. Noone's really dumping the floor because our royalty is high. Everyone's holding/waiting on the staking to be live. So, thank you all for being patient because it is a lot to ask. As we mint out and staking comes out, you can see what that does to the floor price on OpenSea.
Question 12: from Blueghost/tokesandtrades
Discussion on his discord battle system. PandaGenesis was excited to hear about it and encouraged more ideas like this because he sees this as a community first project. A lot of the community has already stepped forward, such as a musician who made a song for Panda Paradise.
Question 16: Is there any additional advantage for holding multiple pandas? Like the divinity role in Discord? Is there more to it?
PandaGenesis: Yes. They will receive a boost in the $BAMBOO token they receive. Originally we said they will get a share of the OpenSea royalties, but from what I've seen, anyone who hardcoded that into their smart contract became delisted from OpenSea right away. So, what we'll have to do is convert it into $BAMBOO liquidity. Anyone who is a divinity holder will get bonus bamboo, regardless if they are genesis or regular pandas. 5% royalty of secondary sales will be converted to $BAMBOO and distributed to them monthly.
Question 17: bkkrypto comes on to speak as a supporter from the first day of mint thanking the whole team and PandaGenesis, despite the technical troubles in the beginning.
PandaGenesis: No problem man. We do everything here for you, for the community. I'm just honored that everyone stuck around here for so long. We did have some issues where people were mad we didn't sell out in one day. I took it as a character building exercise. Sure, I'm bummed in this space if you don't sell out the first day it could be considered a weak project. But consider all the people that have aped into something without doing their research and unfortunately get rugged — hopefully you guys do not think I would do anything like that to you. Because, of course, I'm comfortable with having my face and my name out there. This is not just a cash grab where I'm looking to take your hard earned ethereum or anything like that. We make efforts to be transparent, you can see what we have in our vault, you will be able to see what's in our treasury soon, once I register the ENS. We really work to put the community first.
Question 19: What other physical products will be available? Any figurines?
PandaGenesis: We do have a base 3d model made. The idea of modeling and printing a bunch of attributes will be hard. But if holders do want a custom figurine, we will be able to do it. We just haven't finalized what all the costs and logistics would be.
We do want to release high-quality stuff. What I think we can do is have enough traits mass produced so the price can go down. So basically when you get your base panda you can have a build-your-own Gundam kind of toy. All the layers could be interchangeable per se and stick to the figurine. That's something I conceptualized, but we will see if that is possible.
Besides really good upcoming merch, we're going to focus heavily on customized items. Right now what we see is that if you own a Pudgy Penguin you ca only buy their logo merch. But since panda owners have full intellectual property rights, they are free to order stuff from other vendors. Panda Paradise will provide a portal to access them, too. There are sooo many physical product ideas we could do: phone cases, wallets, t-shirts, even coffee mugs.
Question 20: Any perks for Panda Commanders and Panda Calvary holders?
PandaGenesis: Yeah, definitely. We don't want to leave them in the dark. We're going to come out with a list of perks for those and the DAO will vote on what is suitable so no one feels they're getting the short end of the stick. Whether you have 1 panda or 18 pandas we don't want to make you feel discriminated because you don't own as many. In my eyes, I love every panda and every panda holder equally.
Question 22: Low-gas-mint method
PandaGenesis: Regarding that method, when we saw gas spiking due to the Shiba Inu hype and their Shiboshi NFTS, so much gas was being burned we were seeing 300 gwei prices multiple nights in a row. When it finally died down, we decided to self-mint some pandas so we'd have a randomized bunch in our own wallet, available to airdrop. Of course, some people may complain "Hey I wanted a fresh panda" but for the most part the community has been welcome to the idea. Because after all, if someone is paying more in gas than the mint-cost of the panda, it doesn't make any sense. We were happy to provide a solution and it really gave us the boost we needed. Thank you to the community for letting us use this alternative solution, and we hope you guys appreciated it.
Extra Notes:
As soon as COVID clears up across the continents, PandaGenesis wouldn't mind visiting places all over the world as a Panda Paradise tour with locations decided by the DAO.
If there's enough interest and a big enough following, we could potentially book Steve Aoki to spin at one of our events.
Final words from PandaGenesis:
I would just like to thank all the people that joined us here today, from wherever you heard about us. I am really blessed you took a look at our project. And if you've already invested by minting, I really really appreciate it.