The next in the series of Vulkania AMAs post-launch of the Vulkania Crypto League was amazing. We enjoyed presenting all the engaging features of the game and answer the community’s excellent questions.
A video recording of the AMA can be found here.
We have also provided the transcript of the AMA below for those that were not able to attend the live event.
Be sure to join us for our next AMA with our Vulkania Crypto League Round 1 sponsor, Brewlabs.
| S1 00:01 | Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Vulkania AMA, the first in the series. To introduce, we have Nicolas, our CEO of Vulkania, and myself, Trevor, head of business management. We’re very happy that you all have joined us here today. |
| S1 00:32 | Today, we’re going to be covering the game mechanics of the Vulkania Crypto League, how the League generally benefits our holders and our listed partners, some of which are obvious benefits and others are kind of built into the core competencies of our business, as well as a partnership announcement at the end of the AMA. And so, to jump into it, let’s get into the League. The Vulkania Crypto League is an interactive management-style game that uses the performance of the various projects in your “team” to generate points to climb a leaderboard. Right? And so, that’s the objective of the game, is to be top of the leaderboard or at least in the top area. To do that, you use different boosts at different times, you need to be thinking about market sentiment, and of course, that requires regular engagement on the site, all of which translates into higher scores in an attempt to climb that leaderboard against other players that are playing in an attempt to win VLK tokens and potentially our partners’ and sponsors’ tokens as well. |
| S1 01:48 | The Vulkania Crypto League was built directly into our existing application. It is a unique portion of our site because we understand that not everyone was coming to Vulkania just for the Crypto League, which honestly, we would love if they did, but we already have a strong following of people that come here just for the data. Right? They’re used to seeing all this useful information in one spot rather than going through multiple sites. And so, we wanted to ensure that the Crypto League was integrated but not too much in your face. Right? And so, it is its own section of the site. We have placed up a couple of ads because we do want to encourage people to play the Crypto League because there’s lots of benefits aside from the obvious benefit of earning rewards. And so, it’s its own unique portion of the site here, as seen in the menu. And the game is available to everybody. Right? You don’t have to own VLK tokens to play. You don’t need to have an account on Vulkania or have your project listed on Vulkania to play. Anyone can log in with their connected wallet and play, and we’ll get into that right now. |
| S1 03:12 | So actually, let’s get into the actual sign-up process and the game mechanics itself. And so, to log in, you have to have a BEP20-compatible wallet. And so that’s Trust Wallet, MetaMask, Binance Smart Chain wallet, very common and popular wallets. And you come and visit the vulkania.io/league address or just io and then visit us here in the menu. And it’s real simple. Here, I’m on desktop, obviously, and I have my MetaMask, and so I’m just going to Connect wallet. Now, I’m already logged into MetaMask, so it’s going to automatically log me into Vulkania once I click this button. But if you’re not already logged in, it’ll ask you for your security. Right? And so whether or not that’s biometrics if you’re on mobile or if it’s type in your password on MetaMask, you’ll get that typical prompt to connect. Now again, here, I’m already signed into MetaMask, so it’s just going to think for a moment and connect. Now, when it connects for the very first time, it’s not doing anything other than reading your wallet contents. You don’t need to sign a transaction in which you are spending any gas. You don’t need to authorize any transaction or contract in which you’re saying, “Hey, this app can make purchases on my behalf,” like how you can on PancakeSwap and things like that. It is a read-only connection. It is the exact same level of security that if you were to give out your public address, right, your normal address that you use to get paid, and I was to look it up on the Explorer. It’s that exact same level. So while a lot of people are wary of connecting their wallets, the level of connection here is very secure simply because there’s actually nothing that it’s doing other than reading your wallet contents, specifically VLK token balance. |
| S1 05:15 | Now, like I said, you do not need to have VLK to play. In fact, you see here, now that I’m logged in, I’m a Basic player with zero VLK. I’m ready to go. I can start playing right now. However, there are many benefits to holding VLK in the wallet that you connect, and we’ll get into that in a bit. And that’s called player tiers. There’s some interesting bonuses that go on with that. But here, now that I’m registered, we can see here the basic steps to play, and we also have a nifty FAQ here if you wanted to dive a little bit deeper into any of these subjects that I’m going to cover. But for the most part, what you’re going to want to do is register. Here, we have our very first round that’s going to start in 10 days, and I can register, and then we have Round 2, Round 3, Round 4, Round 5. You can register for multiple rounds at once. The benefit of that is simply that you get it done and over with. Right? You don’t have to remember. The downside of that is, well, you might forget. Right? I mean, May 2nd is quite a– what’s the word I’m looking for? Man, I’m drawing a blank. Quite the timeline between now and then, so you might forget, and you might not get the most points. Because I got to say, when I was doing beta testing with everybody else for this, if you’re not coming in daily or maybe, even, every other day, it’s going to be really hard for you to get to the top of the leaderboard. Right? Active management of your bonuses and boosts is critical, and we’ll get into that in detail here in a moment. |
| S1 06:59 | But let’s go ahead and register. So here, by default, I’m given four projects automatically, and actually, I got a pretty good draw, to be honest. And then I get to pick my fifth. So I can’t change these out the gate. I can change them with special boosts once I’m playing the game, but just right out of the gate, when I first register, I get four projects automatically selected for me, and I get to pick my fifth. And so, you get to pick from all of the listed tokens on vulkania.io. And so, we’ll go ahead and pick Brewlabs, for example, and we’ll click Register now. So now, here is my team. I have established my team, and this is the team that I’m going to be playing with once the round starts. And again, the round starts in about 10 days from now. Also, as a Basic player, I’m given some basic bonuses just automatically. Again, you don’t have to hold VLK to play, and these boosts are critical in how you’re going to climb the leaderboard. A well-timed boost can be a make-or-break moment. I’ve been in like the 60th spot, and I played a really good boost at just the right time, and all of a sudden, I’m in the top 10. And so the balancing of this game is very well done, as long as you are actively managing your team. |
| S1 08:31 | And how do you manage your team? Well, it’s all based on these stats at the bottom. These stats on the bottom produce points, and that is what you see here in the upper area, this upper-left corner. Every hour, these projects will produce a certain number of points that are added to the project’s total as well, and then all of the projects are totaled up for your team total. Right? And then that number is what puts you on the leaderboard. So each individual project gives you points, and then each individual project then calculates towards your total points. How are points calculated? Well, they are a one-for-one for percentages. So for here, we have 2.1%. So I get 2.1 points there, 7.9 points there, and 100 points there, and so this would almost be 110 points for the hour. And it repeats every hour. It recalculates. Okay. What is the change now on this hour? And then it gives you another round of points. So every hour, it’s giving you another chunk of points. So when you play boosts also matters. An important thing to note: negative percentages, they do not count against you. You will never lose points. Now, this negative 50 here, that’s going to be zero points. It doesn’t give me anything, but it does not take away 50 points. |
| S1 10:08 | So what are these different icons, and what do they mean? Well, here we see the eyeball, meaning total amount of visits. So what is the change in dashboard visits? So if I go back to our dashboard list, that is the change in 24-hour visits here. So how many people are coming and visiting the dashboard? This is a really important one because it’s one that you can influence, and we’ll get into that here momentarily. Let me go back so I can show you the remaining icons. The dollar sign is the percentage price change. Right? So how much is the price changing for the day? And then lastly, the arrows are transactions. What is the amount of transactions in quantity going on on the blockchain? And so that kind of shows activity and health of the project. And all of these are based into our proprietary calculation of ranking. Right? The Vulkania score. And it considers visits, holder gains over 24 hours, and the total number of holders, very similar to what we’re calculating here. |
| S1 11:26 | Now the boosts. There are several different types of boost. Now, the legend over here is very helpful. And so, you have price point boost, and you have the visit boost, and you have transaction boosts, and you have switch a token for a random one. So let’s say I didn’t like one of my project selections that was given to me randomly at the beginning. I can use this boost, and I can swap one of my projects. Now, this is true only once the game has started. Right now, we’re still in a waiting period, so I can’t do it for you live at this moment. But the switch token for a random one is a very useful one, especially if you just don’t get a draw that you’re happy with. The multiple by two is a huge one, and it does exactly what it sounds like. For a 24-hour period, whatever points that project makes, it’s a 2X. And so there’s huge bonuses to that, obviously, that I don’t think I even need to explain, just simply because if you could time something well with that boost, you’re going to smash on the leaderboard. Remove boost in use. So you can’t have more than one boost active on a project. And hey, sometimes something’s just not going your way. Right? And so, let’s say I put a price boost on this project here, and it’s just not working for me today. And so I say, “Screw it, I’m going to remove it,” and then I’m going to put a visit boost on there because that one’s doing great. And then lastly, switch a token for one of your choice, which is exactly the same as the random one, except rather than randomly giving you a new token, you get to go and pick it. |
| S1 13:12 | Now, do note that some of these boosts are only available for tiered players beyond Basic. So that is one of the benefits there. Tiered players get different types of boosts. Additionally, they get more boosts per day. And every boost has a percentage, so 25, 50%, or a 75% increase, and so that would be 1.25X, 1.5X, and 1.75X. Now, back to the tiers. Those are somewhat important, but not overly so. You would be surprised how many Basic accounts made it to top positions in our beta testing because of the way that the game is balanced. And in fact, if I jump over there to our testing site, you can see that we have a Basic account in the 4th spot. Right? Zero VLK in the wallet, and they’re standing to win the 600 VLK. Here again, we have another Basic in the 14th spot. So yes, while it is more likely that Golds are going to be more active because they get more boosts, and the same thing with Silvers and Bronze, this is not a pay-to-win game. Right? The balancing is such that if you are active and you make the appropriate calls, you can still place quite well on these leaderboards. |
| S1 14:48 | Here’s another example of a way to get additional boosts, and this is available to everybody. If you need extra boosts, you can visit your dashboards every day and claim an extra boost. So here, let’s go ahead and visit Rhythm, and it says, “Hey, you visited that one,” and it gives me that confirmation. And actually, if I just go ahead and fire all these off – visit, visit, and visit – it says, “Hey, you visited.” Great. Visited, great, and xFUND visited, great. Now, when I refresh the page, I can claim a new boost, and boom, I just got a 50% price point boost. And I can do this every single day. In addition, I get my normal boost in a countdown. It’s telling me, hey, in about 3 hours, 45 minutes, I’m going to get another round of boosts based on being a Bronze player. And of course, a Bronze player gets a certain number of boosts a day, Silver and Gold get a different number, and Basic get a different number. So being higher tiers means more boosts and the opportunity to participate in a lottery, which we will get to here very shortly. And again, same similar thing as visiting every day. Well, you can tweet every day. And once you tweet, you will be asked to validate the tweet, and then you can claim your boost. |
| S1 16:21 | So this is what it looks like to manage a team. Let’s say here, I wanted to go with Rhythm, and I said– let’s see. Here’s a perfect example: 150% increase in visits today. Well, I need more boosts out of this guy, so here’s a 75% increase to my visit points. Well, I’m definitely going to apply that to Rhythm. I’m going to activate my boost, and boom. Now, for the next 24 hours, I’m going to be getting a 1.75% increase to the number of visits, and that’s going to add to my total points for Rhythm and then my total points for the leaderboard. Now, I’ll be the first one to admit I have not been actively managing this team. I’m just using it for demo, and you can see, catastrophically, I am at the bottom of the leaderboard. And so, even though I’m not a Basic player and I do get some bonuses, because I am not actively managing this, I am losing. And so that is something really important to convey, that we developed the balancing of this game such that even if people want to spam wallet connections of Basic accounts, there’s very little benefit unless they are actively managing their team. And I got to admit, actively managing your team every single day, if not multiple times a day, is mighty tedious. Because we were beta testing, or in fact, in our Alpha testing, multiple team members were running multiple accounts, and we were all saying, “Man, this is a pain in the butt to run multiple accounts.” So the balancing is such that it works out well, and it is not a pay-to-win type of game. But I must admit it does improve your odds if you have additional VLK tokens in your wallet. |
| S1 18:27 | If we go down, we can see another couple of cool stats here. So of course, our bonus history. So as I use additional bonuses, it’ll begin to stack as a table. Here, we see a day-by-day breakdown of how my points are being generated. And so here, we see on the 22nd, visits was the biggest bring in for me. Price, not so much. The market is pretty red right now, but hey, that’s life. And transactions was kind of in the middle. Same thing again on the 23rd. And then we have today. And then here, we have by-the-project breakdown. So we see that, hey, some projects, they’re just not bringing in that price points too much, but they do great on visits and transactions and the like. A couple of projects, I guess they got in the green for a couple of hours in the day, and so hey, we got a couple of points. Because again, remember, points never are negative, so if the price is negative for the day, you’re not going to be losing any points. It can only count for you, never against you. |
| S1 19:35 | I think that covers the basic game mechanics in how to manage your team and how to acquire boosts in general. There’s going to be a lot of strategy that goes in on this. You’re going to learn a lot as you play, just simply because sometimes, what you think is an obvious selection just isn’t going to work out. But I do want to encourage you with one very important aspect: that you do have influence over your points. Now, let’s say if you are a whale, obviously you could influence the price. Right? But that comes with some nasty risk-benefit analysis that I doubt anyone would want to do because if you’re risking $10,000 on an investment just to pump the price 10% and get your 10 points on the League, that doesn’t make any sense. So the price movement really does need to be organic. Same thing with transactions. Unless you want to sit there and you want to burn a whole bunch of gas creating a bunch of false transactions, you’re not really going to be able to manipulate the transactions too much. But you want to know one thing that you most certainly can influence? The dashboard visits. |
| S1 20:53 | Let’s go take a look at our main dashboard page. And here, we could find a small-scale one, or not a small-scale one but one with nice stats. And by nice, I mean something that can be influenced somewhat easily. For example, here’s GoCrypto Token. They’ve had eight visits today. Well, if I go and visit them, well, now they have nine visits. But I also could share this URL. I could go and take this URL, and I could put it into Telegram or Twitter or Reddit or 4chan or anywhere else that I deem necessary to generate more traffic for them. Right? And I say, “Hey, come check out GoCrypto because of reasons.” Right? And whatever that reason is, that’s up to you to discover. Right? There’s a bit of discovery that has to happen there, where we even see this person has GoCrypto, and you need to kind of figure out, “Well, why is GoCrypto interesting?” And that’s part of the fun of the research of it. But if you can generate additional interest and you can generate additional traffic to their dashboard, well, you’re going to pump that metric. Right? And if you pump that metric, that’s going to directly affect your score in the Crypto League. And that’s huge, right? So that is something that you have a direct influence over. By putting in just about 10 minutes of your time, you can influence your score. And as you saw on the leaderboard, I mean, some of these rewards can get up it. Right? And these are just the testing rewards. Right? And we’re dealing with 16,000 VLK for the launch, and that’s not even counting any of our sponsors’ tokens. |
| S1 22:49 | So I think that about covers the game mechanics and how you can influence things. The only other way that you can influence things is by the tiers. And again, here is our FAQs. You can always visit it by clicking the How to Play button, and it’ll take you directly to FAQs. And we’ve covered all of the basics here as far as registering, here as far as points are calculated, and of course, bonuses and how they are generated. Now, one thing that we haven’t gone into really big detail, though I have touched on many, many times, are tiers. Tiers, you have to have a certain number of VLK to get the bonus. Again, in Basic, that’s 0 to 249 VLK. So you do not have to have VLK to play, and you get these bonuses here. Now, as soon as you have 250 VLK in your wallet that’s connected, you get an additional bonus and access to a lottery, the Bronze prize spot pool. Same thing with Silver. You get extra bonuses and that 2X multiplier, as well as being a participant in the Silver spot prize lottery. And then lastly, 5,000 VLK for Gold tier, same exact thing. You get more bonuses, you get the multiplier, and you get the boost remover, but you are also included in the Gold prize spot lottery. And so Bronze, Silver, and Gold all have their own lottery pools in increasing size. Right? Obviously, Gold has the largest amount of VLK for the lottery, and Bronze has the smallest. Basic has none. Basic does not have a lottery. |
| S1 24:41 | Now, the lottery is important because honestly, sometimes you just lose. Even if you are strategizing perfectly, sometimes the market just does not cooperate. And so everybody, Bronze, Silver, and Gold tiers, everybody in those tiers, still gets an opportunity to win. It’s essentially a lottery. Right? It has nothing to do with your leaderboard position. You can win the lottery and win the leaderboard position or one or the other. They are not related to one another, but they are both rewards. And now, that obviously provides some incentive to hold VLK tokens. Right? If you hold VLK tokens, you have a greater chance of actually being in the lottery as opposed to Basic, which has absolutely zero chance and you have to place on the leaderboard. So with all of that said, I think I’ve kind of covered all the basics of the game, the mechanics, as well as where you can find some additional information, and of course, tiers, which leads me into the benefits. Right? I wanted to discuss a little bit of the benefits to not only our holders but our listed partners on our site, some of which are obvious and some of which not so much. |
| S1 26:14 | So for holders, obviously, having a new asset like the Crypto League, it’s very easily pumpable, there’s lots of fun involved, and all of those are beneficial things to equip our community and newcomers to go out and share. Right? And all of that is obviously beneficial to VLK as a whole. At the end of the day, we provide data in a nice, clean, elegant, succinct way. And so the more traffic that’s coming to the site, the better off we’re going to be. That’s a primary source of revenue for us. And so, the more traffic we get, the better off the token is in general. Additionally, these tiers are not locked, but you can’t just sign up for the Vulkania Crypto League at a Gold tier and then sell your tokens. Every time you log in, the connection is rechecked, and your balance is rechecked. So if you drop below a certain number of tokens, we’ll drop you in tiers. Let’s say I was a Gold when I signed up, and then I only have 5,001 tokens, for example. And I signed up, and I was a Gold tier, and then I had to sell half. Well, then I’m going to be bumped down to the Silver round. And so, your tier does not remain constant. You have to keep that number of tokens in. And so, while the tokens are not specifically locked, we don’t do anything with your wallet. Again, it’s a read-only access. You have full control of your wallet and how you use your VLK token. So they’re not locked, but if you love the game and you like the boosts, you’re not going to remove those tokens, right, because you want to continue playing. |
| S1 28:09 | And so, in this way, it removes VLK tokens from the market without being constrictive. Right? And that’s a big part of crypto in general, is not being restrictive. It’s your money. You decide how you want to use it. We’re simply incentivizing people to hold on to them. Right? And that’s a benefit for everybody. If we have 100 Gold members, well, that’s half a million VLK that is essentially “off market.” That’s not going to be part of the “circulating supply.” Well, it is, technically. No one’s selling it. Right? They don’t want to sell it. They want to play the game. And so that’s a really important factor of this, in that it removes supply, essentially. Additionally, we have plenty of ideas for how to burn VLK using this game, and I can’t get into too many details just yet, but that most certainly is in the table, where this game has just launched, and we have a lot of fantastic ideas for it in the future. So just bear with us there, but there are a lot of wonderful ideas currently on the idea board in terms of how to actually get rid, like actively burn VLK through this game. |
| S1 29:31 | And let’s get into some of the benefits for our partners. Right? Every project that’s listed on Vulkania or, I’ll say this, the majority of the projects listed on Vulkania, we have an open relationship with them. Right? It is a partnership. We didn’t just add their contract and say, “Here’s your dashboard.” We contact these projects. We get the cross-promotional opportunities for both of our projects in the works. They get an admin. Right? Someone from their team is actively an administrator for their dashboards. While we provide the infrastructure for them, we are building that relationship with them. We don’t want to just list every single project and just be another DEXTool. A big part of our competitive edge is that the vast majority of these projects we have a relationship with. Right? And we can leverage each other’s strengths and sometimes weaknesses to produce great results and also put different projects together. |
| S1 30:37 | And so, by being listed on Vulkania, you are automatically included in the Vulkania Crypto League. There’s no charge to our listed projects. Automatically, you are included in the League. And this provides exposure because, as you saw, when I registered a brand new account, four of those projects were selected for me. Well, if I don’t know any of those four projects and I want to help pump their numbers, I’m probably going to go learn at least a little bit about them. Even if I don’t want to learn even the littlest thing about them to help pump my own Vulkania League score, I’ll at least want to visit their dashboard, and I’m being branded. Right? I’m made aware of a coin that I didn’t even know exists. When was the last time you went to CoinMarketCap and visited page 10? How many of those coins do you recognize? And how many times has CoinMarketCap put one of those page 10 points right in front of your face? Right? And so that’s a big promotional opportunity. That’s a big exposure opportunity because once you’re past a certain number of the, quite frankly, inferior way that CoinMarketCap ranks projects, you’re on page 20 of Google search results. Nobody goes that far down the rabbit hole unless they’re really bored or lost. Everyone is just kind of in the first couple of dozens of results. Right? And so that’s a huge opportunity for exposure, especially when we have thousands of players. And so, all of those thousands of players have a chance to be exposed to the project’s brand. Projects that they would have never known about. |
| S1 32:28 | I think that kind of covers the basics of what I wanted to discuss. I think that’s it for all the information we wanted to cover. So one final piece of information was the partnership announcement. Well, for the Vulkania Crypto League, every single round can have a sponsor. So just like when you think of any sporting event, the sporting event has commercials, and it’s sponsored by Nike and all those good things. Well, Vulkania Crypto League also has a sponsor. And to be a sponsor, one, you have to be listed on Vulkania, and you have to provide a certain amount of your own project’s token to be provided in the prize pool. And so that is the only cost associated to our projects, if they wanted to sponsor, because remember, I said that our projects do not have to pay anything to be involved in the Crypto League, and that is a true statement. But if our projects want to sponsor a round, they need to pay some of their own tokens, and their tokens will be included in the prize pool. |
| S1 33:47 | And so, I wanted to announce, our very first round partner and sponsor is going to be Brewlabs. Brewlabs is a fantastic project. We’ve been talking with them, and in fact, they’ve been listed for quite some time. We’ve been talking with them about a couple of great ideas that they’ve had, and we can’t speak more highly of them. So we definitely encourage everyone to go check those out, and they’re going to be all over the place once the League starts. Everything League related is going to be sponsored by Brewlabs, and so we’re going to make sure that we show you exactly how many Brewlabs tokens is going to be available for the prize pool in addition to the 16,000 VLK to win. And this is all for the very first round that we are launching here in the next 10 days, so we highly encourage everybody to go ahead and register. Invite your friends. It’s free to register. All you need is a crypto wallet. And so, with that, we’re going. |
