we hosted an amazing AMA with Crypto War on the 3rd of January
And here we will put some of the best questions:
Q1. Can you please introduce yourself and your team to our community ?
My name is Tri Ton, Co-CEO of CryptoWar xBlade project. I’m a serial entrepreneur with background in private equity. I currently based in Austin, Texas, USA. The CryptoWar xBlade is a spin-off started from a DeFi project named XBN that a group of my friends in Vietnam who are tech-base coders and investors initiated back in November 2020.
The team now has about 20 members in a group of diverse and complemented backgrounds: coding, venture capital, digital media, and business operation. We just grow our team from just a handful of pirate bandit part-time freelance members of 5-6 people to a full fleet ready-to-fight working 24/7 in just the past 2 months. That shows how fast we are growing behind the scene right now. The core team knows each other personally and have worked together for 10+ years over various ups and downs in multinational firms as well as high growth startups across Vietnam, Singapore, and the US.
I pick out a slide about our team in our pitch deck here for the community to see:
We treat community members as team in a broader sense as well. We’ll all on this ship together.
Q2. Can you briefly tell us about your project ( Crypto War ) ?
So we have been very much into DeFi technology in 2020 and the first half of 2021. In mid of 2021, realizing the implications that NFTs can revolutionize gaming into a field where gamers can play and make a living from their investments and efforts, we developed our first game, CryptoWar xBlade, that aims to be our core product for GameFi space.
We emerge ourselves into Metaverse developments and are working day and night to create new features into CryptoWar so that Cryptowar can be an intersection of gaming, virtual social, and finance. Then we realized that in fact GameFi and DeFi is actually very closely linked, so our expertise in DeFi actually plays well into our development of CryptoWar.
Ultimately, CryptoWar strives to become a sustainable gaming ecosystem that brings enjoyment and roads to wealth creation for everyone. Players mint heroes, collect weapons, fight monsters, fight other players in the game to collect xBlade, which is a native currency of the game. xBlade can then be either cashed out for real money or further upgraded in-game items for more powerful heroes and weapons in order to collect more rewards in the future.
This is a big picture view on our aim for the future (Mission), what we stand for (Values), and how we structure the deal to do it (Tokenomics):
Q3. In terms of technology and finance, what will make CryptoWar project different than other GameFi projects that are abundant recent months?
Technology wise, we build this game 100% on-chain, so it’s completely transparent and secure. The downside of this is every time a gamer do something in the game (i.e. any in-game activity or transaction), the gamer then actually interacts with the blockchain (we are on BSC at this moment) and thus has to pay some gas fee. At first this is not big of a deal. But when we have more gamers and the game becomes more complex that require gamers to interact more in-game, and suddenly BNB surged in the past 2 months from ~$400/BNB to $650/BNB, this becomes quite expensive for gamers.
To cope with this, we implement 2 things: (1) We compensate the gamers $0.80 per P2E fighting transaction that the gamers lose the fight (losing the fight means you don’t get token reward). So this offset transaction costs quite a bit. And (2) We will bridge our game into other chains such as ThunderCore, Polygon, AVAX, etc where the TPS (transactions per second) and fee are much lowers. In the near future our game should be able to played across 5-6 different chains.
From the finance side, we think that what make CryptoWar different is we try to build a balance game in various aspects: the game itself should both create enjoyment for gamers to play and provide them an opportunity to make money. We want to build a game that may take longer time for gamers to break-even, but we can assure this one thing: there will be no inflationary pressure and gamers don’t have to worry about game collapsing. Our mindset is to 250x the value of xBlade is more important than go into the beaten path of creating a weakly designed game, collect gamers by advertising and provide unsustainable ROI to be competitive – and then blow up after 3 months.
Q4. Please tell us about the goal you want to achieve in this year ?
Right now we are focus on building a strong PvP core game play, shifting P2E into its rightful place of introductory and tutorial into the game. Now we only have the P2E feature, so everyone who look into our project judge it by how the P2E performs. In fact P2E is a very very tiny part of the game we are building. I estimate the significance of P2E is less than 5% of total value of CryptoWar xBlade by the end of 2022.
This phase of building a strong PvP core game play already started from Aug 2021 and will probably last till May, 2022. We have 3 milestones on this phase:
- Milestone 1 – P2E: Heroes battling Monsters.
- Milestone 2 – PvP: Heroes battling other Heroes.
- Milestone 3 – Market: Lending / Staking Heroes.
We completed Milestone 1 and is on the way to release PvP by Jan 4th 2022, which is the start of Milestone 2. Like when we release PvP, it’s not we achieve milestone 2. No it’s just the start. After we release the PvP feature, we’ll build a lot of things on top of it, with various game plays, various way that gamers communicate and interact with each others. PvP on itself is a vast space that we can add a lot of features to make our game more enjoyable in the future.
Lastly, we know that getting into GameFi can be expensive. So we are also developing a Free-To-Play mode and building features so that people can lend and stake heroes as well. Right now we have 200 gamers and about 60K in-game transactions. I think by the end of 2022 we should have thousands of gamers and probably crossing over 1M in-game transactions.
You can see some of our tractions here for this year:
Q5. What are the project’s plan for the longer future, in 2023 and beyond?
After we have a solid PvP plaing mode, we’ll evolve our game into an ecosystem by elevating it with 2 dimensions (1) building social aspect of the game and (2) build personalization features so that the gamers can make money by being an NFT collectors. It looks like this:
- Milestone 1 – Building a Gameplay Relationship System:
- Clan System: Clan societies & benefits.
- Relationship System: Family partners, war rivals, etc.
- Milestone 2 – Tournaments:
- Ranking system & leaderboard.
- Milestone 3 – Campaign Gameplay with Lore:
- Defeating Big Bosses.
- Solving CryptoWar’s world mysteries & collect rare collectible items.
- Milestone 4 – Personalize Hero NFT.
- Milestone 5 – Building NFT Collection with Unique & High-Art Heroes, Weapons, and other in-game items.
Let’s stop here and explain this for a second. There are many games in the market right now advertising that the game is NFT-based and people can make money by owning NFT in-game items. However that’s not the case if the community and the spread of that game is not wide and deep. Like okay you have a rare hero. Cool. But you go to OpenSea and noone plays that game and wants your hero, your rare hero doesn’t have any market value.
So the first step is to build the market first and then build the collection second. In order to build the market, we need to develop a game society where gamers and traders and enthusiasts can make clans, become gaming partners, sharing ideas, joining a tourney together or defeating boss monsters together. We will focus on build that first.
When we start to build craftmanship around in-game items and make it unique. It’s like a personal realization dream of gamers. Things you can do in-game that you can’t do in real life. This is a big motivation for us. Because reality can be very harsh, and with game you can become someone else, escape from the hash reality you have to face everyday. Then you have a cool, rare hero, and you have a market for that hero. Then now we’re talking.
Currently there are in-game items like rare weapon that have been sold for $3K. We the dev team don’t even know both of sellers and buyers, these are true authentic transactions. So yes, NFT collection in our game does have value. But we want to unlock the route so that that $3K transaction can be $30K or $300K in the future, then it’s in our Phase 2, we hope that we can have this phase done by May 2023.
The last phase is going into metaverse where we have enough resources to build a 3D game world and becoming a platform, engaging content creators everywhere to create in-game stories and items for CryptoWar’s metaverse.
You can find more here:
https://wiki.cryptowar.network/roadmap
And here is our big picture view:
And here we will put best questions from our members and Crypto War fans:
Q1 P2E games are blowing up in the cryptocurrency space with great potential. A significant issue for many of the currently offered P2E games is just that they are being created as blockchain games, not great games where blockchain is just one element. How’s “Xblade” different?
I think we have 2 approaches here from game publishers perspective:
(1) Big companies with established game making engine such as Blizzard or EA Sports will be making game in which NFTs and Blockchain being just one element.
(2) Small companies without an established game making engine such as us (we are consider an “indie game maker”) will more likely to have the smart contract portion of the game heavier than the off-chain portion of the game.
One of the key elements in structure the game so that either we go 100% on-chain or some part of it on-chain and some part of it off-chain is how we think about the architecture of the code itself. And what vulnerabilities it will present if we go for a dual approach comparing to if we just go for on-chain only.
For example:
If we go on-chain only, then the transparency and the security is way better than you go on-chain/off-chain approach. Let say you have a hero fight another hero. And it’s on-chain, now your hero win or lose everything is traceable and the code is verifiable on-chain. It’s fair for both parties.
Now let say you have hero and when you fight with another hero, that fight get transferred into a black-box off-chain somewhere and nobody sees those code, nor can verified how it is executed. How can you know for sure your hero fight results is completely fair? Or do you afraid the black-box favor one player vs another (let say an insider)? How can we know for sure the dev don’t hack the system itself and award some superior winning rate to some subset of heroes?
Another example is:
Let say on-chain it a price level for the reward of the token. That price level is X. Let say xBlade = $1.
Off-chain, theoretically, token price must also be equal to on-chain price, so off-chain xBlade is also = $1.
Then in theory there is no arbitraging opportunity there. But from our team observation, there are a lot of hacks happen on GameFi space is because when the other team design this on-chain/off-chain architecture they have some lags in real time for price from the Oracle to adjust. Which will cause tiny price discrepancies,
Let say on-chain xBlade = $1.
Off-chain xBlade = $0.9850.
Now we have an arbitrage opportunity where hackers can run flash loan and long off-chain xBlade meanwhile simultaneously long on-chain xBlade. And this create vulnerability and unstability for the system.
So to compare between benefits and costs between structural design, we opt to go 100% on-chain first at this moment. It depends a lot on transaction fee in the future, how many chains we run simultaneously, how strong we are internally in the future, then we’ll see if we want to go on-chain/off-chain or keep 100% on-chain.
Q2 Whale dumps are extremely frustrating, especially so soon after a new launch, and can seriously harm a project. Please provide some details on
@xbladecryptowar
Anti-Whale Mechanism. How trustworthy is it, and how well will it safeguard investors?
This is the xBlade price chart. The 2 spikes you see caused by one single whale that buy 2,000,000 (2% of total supply) on Nov 20th, and dump all of it at once on Dec 10th.
So first of all, we have some experience fighting with whale, not only from this project but also from other projects that we worked on in the past. We lost some battles. Got hacked, got played around by bots, got dumped, got some scars on our faces.
Secondly, you’ll see that even with those 2 spikes, we still manage to have a very healthy chart and overall on the upward trend. That is because this time, we actually effectively prevent bots and whale-arbitrage.
We are not anti-whale. And we are not 100% anti-bots. In fact we developed DeFi bots ourselves that arbitraging around to make profit for us.
What we mean is we create a mechanism in xBlade where it’s impossible for bots and whales to arbitrage, like buy and sell simultaneously to make a quick profit. But we welcome whale to come in, hodl, and to the moon with us.
We do this by measuring total floating supply on the market very tightly and constantly monitor to see if there are risk of large token being offered into the market at once. It’s case by case but we will cope with those situation as when it comes.
Secondly, we have the 10% sales tax mechanism. This is to prevent bots. Because when bots come into our token and buy-sell simultaneously, suddenly they see that when they sales they pay 10% tax into our reward pools and voila, they actually lose money on their arbitraging.
That’s why on xBlade you’ll still see bot transactions and whale transactions. But whales in our yard are mostly long-term whales. And bots don’t do much.
One more important thing is, the best thing a whale can do is only to spark a panic. Unless the dev want to rug pull a project. Or unless the tokenomics are design very imprudently: for example – you private sales too much to large VCs or wealthy investors and suddenly these party own like 30%-40%+ of the project and when the lockup is expired, and they sales, then moment of truth happens: token get collapsed.
But if you design your tokenomics smartly, the best thing whale can do is to start a panic and in order for the token price to collapse the other holders need to FUD and sell-along.
When 2% of total supply being dump at once. We see almost no sell-along orders from our community. And people actually catch the dip. Price bounce back quite fine right after that.
Anyway – we:
(1) Have sales tax mechanism.
(2) Continuously bond and make sure our community don’t panic when things like whale dumping happen. They dont sell because they believe. They’re smart too and make their own decision.
(3) Design tokenomics extremely decentralized and as far as I know noone can really single handedly collapse our price.
(4) Continuously monitor the market and see if we have this risk coming. In real-time.
Q3 CryptowarxBlade is NFT gaming. Since the majority of NFTs end up with little or no value, it is difficult to survive liquidity because people do not regularly trade them in pairs, so it is difficult to liquidate NFTs. Can you tell me how xBlade planned to solve this big problem?
NFTs don’t guarantee anything to be valuable. Similar to art, when you pain a painting, it doesn’t mean you can sell that painting for $1M or whatever price. In fact NFTs behave very similar to fine-art market: the top 1% will go for extremely high price and there will be thousands of NFTs, or art, that are completely worthless and have no buyers.
Why? Because NFT is technology, it’s just one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is value and price, value and price is the market, it’s another side of the coin. Technology itself can’t determine the market. The market comprised by buyers and sellers determine the value of the NFTs, or art.
That’s why in order for our in-game NFTs to have value in the future, we spend our effort in building the gaming community, token holder community, first. Essentially, we create the market first. That’s the key to bring value to our in-game NFTs.
Q4 I read that they own a referral system with the opportunity to earn 1% for every new user. My question is, will this percentage be able to increase in the future? Besides this 1% reward, are there any other benefits to this referral system?
Yes this might be the case, right now it’s 1% but it might increase. We will make decision about it in the future. The 1% is only for the Bond buying though:
https://bond.cryptowar.network/#/
We sold out our 180-Day xBlade Staking Bond, and we’re almost sold out on our 45-Day xBlade/BUSD Bond.
In here if you go into the game and referral people to buy Heroes, then you get 10% bonus on the hero minted ($25) and your friend when they mint the hero get 7% discount, $17.50.
So that’s another referral we have.
Q5 As a newbie who is just about to start playing a blockchain game for the first time, how do I get started on [$XBLADE]? How easy would it be for me on the platform and is there a way I can get any assistance of any form from experienced gamers already on the platform?
First of all, please join the 2 Telegram groups that Marwa ❤️ have been posting. We have a combined of about 15K members there and they have played the game before and willing to share experience to any new comers.
Second, please take time to read Wiki. It’s been written carefully throughout all aspect of the game so you can learn about the game and navigate in-game effectively:
https://wiki.cryptowar.network/
Third, please check our Medium. We have 2 parts series of introduction into CryptoWar as follow:
Part 1:
https://medium.com/@xbladecryptowar/how-to-get-started-with-cryptowar-d31d182226f4
Part 2:
https://medium.com/@xbladecryptowar/how-to-play-cryptowar-like-a-pro-5e8592c13590
Forth, you can also google and search out some other content from other groups and also in youtube, there have been some video made about how to play CryptoWar.
Q6 Which market are you focusing on? How do you rate the Vietnam market? Do you have any plans to develop in the Vietnam market?
- We are focusing on Southeast Asia: Vietnam, The Phillippines, Thailand, to name a few. Nigeria and other countries in Africa also have a present on us. Turkey too. Mainly we go after our target audience: 18-35 year-old. $500+ in monthly earning. Urban living. Office working class. Intellectual: know how to navigate in crypto market and want to make some side income.
- Vietnam is a very potential market. One of the top country in adoption crypto right now in the whole world.
- We have major plan to expand and marketing our project to the crypto community in Vietnam. We’re well connected there.
Q7 Regarding the characters and the allocation they have of fire, earth, air and water, can the user choose which component he wants or is the allocation random?
- The allocation is complete random. But you can trade them into the market if you mint out a character that belongs to the elements you don’t want to have.
- Conversely, if you only go after Fire for example, you can also go to the market and buy other Fire heroes there to make your hero collection all Fire instead of having to mint randomly trying to get Fire hero.
Q8 CRYPTOWAR recently introduced some changes within your battle mode. Could you tell us what were the main changes you made in this aspect? What new features did you add to your battle mode?
- We are introducing PvP and this mark an important transformation of our game from a purely P2E game to become a PvP Game.
- P2E will be only like 5% of our game in the future, mainly serve as introductory tutorial mode in the future for gamers to familiarize themselves when they navigate in our system.
- PvP will unlock potential earnings for players: Player can win unlimitedly when playing PvP, it requires skill: people need to think about how to combine heroes and weapon, how to challenge and accept a challenge from other players, and it requires investment as well: stronger weapon will certainly have an advantage – but not definitive, deciding advantage because in the game there are other factors affect the results of a fight as well.
- You can find more about PvP mode that will be released here:
https://cryptowar.feedy.app/changelog/
Q9 Cryptowar will become the Metaverse ecosystem in multi chains. How many chains will you support? how many chains you currently support?
- Yes we will support multi-chain. We’re in talk with some chains right now. Some of them have a very relevant user base in Eastern part of Asia that is extremely relevant to us. We think when we migrate to this chain it will have a meaningful boost in term of both our user base and our price.
- We certainly want to go 5-6 chains: Polygon, Avax, ThunderCore, Metis, etc.
- Our strategy is not to try advertising so that non-crypto users get into crypto and play our game. Our plan is to extensively reach out to chains that already exist and expand our users base from those chains.
- I see you come from Quarashi, I like that project a lot, shout out to Quarashians, Alex, and $QUA (please check them out people!)
Q10 Gamers in CryptoWar are empowered with weapon elements such as: Fire, Earth, Lightning, Water. Can you elaborate on these factors? How do they affect the game? Can players upgrade these elements and how do they affect winning?
- Essentially you want to match your hero element with the element of the weapon. It creates a boost for your hero when your hero fight with monsters or fight with other hero in the system.
- Elements are dominating each other in a circle: Water > Fire > Earth > Lighting
- Thus if you have Fire, you want to minimize your fights against Water heroes/monsters, but want to maximize your fights against Earth heroes/monsters.
- At the current moment we don’t have feature to upgrade the elements within heroes. But this is in our development dashboard in the future.
- Possibly when we have heroes merging into each other, then the Type-2 Heroes might have 2 elements simultaneously. This will make the game more challenging to build and to play because we will have to make sure everything in the game is balanced and noone has a dominating power to other players/gamers.
And this was the end of our AMA with Crypto War.
📍About Crypto War 💫
– Website
– Telegram Group
– Twitter
– Discord
– Contract address
– Buy $xBLADE on PancakeSwap or CryptoWar Bond
– Coingecko
– Coinmarketcap
– Coinbase