Aavegotchi Community Update #19

Aavegotchi pivots to a launch on Matic and massive rarity farming rewards revealed!

Hey frens, what a wild start to 2021! The price of Ether skyrocketed to more than $1000, and network fees reached as high as 500 gwei, causing a traffic jam on Ethereum the likes of which we haven’t seen since…well, actually just three months ago.

Ethereum faces a serious scaling issue, especially for blockchain games like Aavegotchi that require frequent interactions. Our original plan was to launch on Mainnet then add Matic-native features shortly after, but extreme congestion has led the Aavegotchi community to the wise decision to launch directly onto Matic.

More details about the new launch plan below, as well as all the latest information on Rarity Farming, and a new initiative to take Aavegotchi global!

This week’s updates include:

• New Matic Launch Details

• 500K+ GHST Rarity Farming rewards pool details

• Aavegotchi Shop wearables & traits revealed

• Aambassadors Program launches with Korea and Vietnam

• Aagent Missions completed! Exclusive wearables confirmed

• Aavegotchi launches on Substack

• Aaround the block: Cointelegraph

New Matic Launch Details

The first Haunt of Portals was scheduled to arrive on Ethereum mainnet January 4th, bringing the potential for summoning 10,000 randomly generated Aavegotchis. The core team, Pixelcraft Studios, was completely on target with contracts ready to deploy. Multiple audits came in with positive feedback in the days leading up to the launch including a technical review from Quantstamp and an initial report from Certik.

It. was. go. time.

But alas, Ethereum spent the day under extreme network congestion that increased transaction costs to historic levels. The team and wider community were all glued to analytics closely monitoring ethgasstation.info for emerging trends. It felt akin to being a weather watcher looking for any sign of storms clearing out. But unlike a simple storm cell, these high fees are often more like an entire monsoon season and can easily last for weeks or longer.

That’s why the decision was ultimately made to not only delay the launch for a few hours or days, but to take a step back and use this reality as an opportunity to further future-proof Aavegotchi.

Matic Network is a leading NFT and blockchain gaming side-chain that is fully compatible with Ethereum EVM. For these reasons we’ve been simultaneously preparing for a Matic deployment over the past few months. It’s only a minor adjustment for Aavegotchi to launch directly on Matic and in doing so, transaction costs are eliminated, settlements are instant, and the potential for viral growth increases.

Recent advancements in gasless transactions known as “meta-transactions” means one is able to continue using MetaMask as a primary wallet and hardly feel the difference from established Ethereum user habits. There are lots of exciting new blockchain games and products releasing on Matic right now. Arkane, for example, is also soon launching an NFT marketplace that will serve as a fiat gateway and make digital collecting as intuitive as ever.

We are optimistic that the conversion from Ethereum Mainnet to Matic will go smoothly, and are thus preparing to announce a launch date in early Q1. Stay tuned for the updated roadmap!

In the meantime, in the next blog post we’ll release a full overview covering exactly how Aavegotchi will work on Matic, including GHST token, Staking, Wearable Vouchers, and of course Portals and Gotchis!

Rarity Farming Rewards Top 500k GHST

Over the holiday weekend, we published a detailed release of rarity farming rewards and structure. If you missed it, make sure to read it here in full to find the elegant positive feedback loops of GHST tokenomics on full display.

The first Haunt will have 10,000 Portals, with each Portal selling for 100 GHST. That amounts to a base of revenue of 1,000,000 GHST, of which 33% will be burned forever. Of the remaining 670,000 GHST, 400,000 will be redistributed back to Aavegotchi owners as rewards during our first season of Rarity Farming.

In addition, 40% of all GHST earned from wearables, consumables and other game items are also redirected to the rewards pool. This easily puts the total rewards at well over 500,000 GHST.

Rarity Farming incentivizes those who not just buy portals but also open them, summon Aavegotchis, interact with them daily and seek the best matching wearables. With transaction costs eliminated on Matic, rarity farming will be more competitive than ever, and we can’t wait to kick off the season!

Expect Season 1 to begin a few short weeks after the release of Haunt 1.

Aavegotchi Shop wearables & traits revealed

Over 100 Aavegotchi wearable items are now detailed at the updated Wiki Wearables page.

These wearables will be among the earliest ready for release in the Aavegotchi Shop page. The list also details items from the first three raffles, the OKex deposits contest, and Santa Hats charity drive.

Not only can you enjoy the variety of designs, but you can also get the lowdown on rarity and each item’s trait modifying stats (affecting energy, aggressiveness, spookiness and brain size). These are going to be critical to affecting your future Aavegotchi’s rarity scores so make sure to bookmark the Wiki!

Aavegotchi Aambassador Program launches

We’re excited to share that Aambassadors for both Korea and Vietnam regions have joined the team. Aambassadors are leaders in their communities and Aavegotchi experts ready to introduce the game to new audiences.

Find @sungjae in Aavegotchi Korea and @cRekt in the Aavegotchi Vietnam Telegram groups respectively.

Brush up on your Vietnamese with Saigon Trade Coin covering Rarity Farming rewards or boost your Korean while reading Bloomingbit Korea on Aavegotchi’s Matic integration.

We are also looking for Aambassadors to represent Aavegotchi in French, Russian, German, and other markets, so if you’re interested, please fill out this Typeform and we’ll contact you!

Aagent Missions Completed, Over 200 Graduates!

All 12 Missions in the Discord have now been closed as scheduled. This was an incredibly successful program that rewarded the most active community members with chances to earn badges and level up. The Elite level 12 Aagents have graduated and will be receiving a full and exclusive wearables set that includes an Aagent fedora, earpiece, shirt, glasses, and even a pistol.

Minted to order, around 200 hard-working graduates will be donning this exclusive set!

Although Missions are closed, we’re planning even more new and exciting initiatives to keep growing the #GotchiGang!

Aavegotchi Launches on Substack

We’ve long been jealous of other projects using Substack to publish their weekly updates, so in 2021 one of our first priorities was to set up a Substack for Aavegotchi!

Introducing Gotchi Gram, the official email newsletter of Aavegotchi.

If you’re more comfortable reading our updates here on Medium, then you don’t have to do anything, but if you’d prefer to have the latest updates arrive directly in your inbox, then head over to https://aavegotchi.substack.com and subscribe now! It’s totally free.

Aaround the Block

Cagyjan covers 300k USD value in rewards pool! 

Cointelegraph covers Aavegotchi launch delay
https://cointelegraph.com/news/insane-eth-fees-delay-launch-of-aavegotchi-nft-game

That’s it for this week’s Community Update! Stay tuned for our updated Roadmap and full details about the move to Matic.

Stay spooky frens!
Aavegotchi Team