Table of Contents -
Introduction — KlayCity: The Playbook for NFT/ Success
The Playbook for Success
1) Centralized Start for a Decentralized Future: Competent Core Team Spearheading “the Business Initiatives”
2) From Rarity to Community: Building Strong Economic Incentives to Join
3) Present to Future: Ambitious and Credible Roadmap and Narratives
Conclusion: Hallmarks of Success
Appendix1: Playbook for Users
Appendix2: Airdrops and Whitelist Guarantees
Disclaimer
Introduction — KlayCity: The Playbook for NFT/ Success
In less than 3 months since its launch in February 2022, KlayCity, a metaverse LandFi project with its own tokens and NFTs, has had a streak of success. It closed its first NFT minting, completed the token launch for both $ORB and $LAY, and announced a series of partnerships to hint at what’s to come next. As the first of its kind, a “LandFi” genre, KlayCity is paving the way by combining nuances of different web3 components such as tokenomics, NFTs, and culture. In this article, we will look at how successful projects like Yuga Labs, DeFi Kingdoms bootstrapped a new community and added value to this emerging metaverse space. We will then look at how KlayCity is tackling the same challenge.
The Playbook for Success
The buzzwords such as Web3, NFTs, and metaverse have swarmed the mainstream media, investing and gaming industries as well as crypto communities for a couple of years now. The novel idea of these new words like metaverse is hardly agreed upon yet. However, there are hundreds of new initiatives around the globe daily exploring how to implement these concepts. From these experiments, a few common playbooks seem to have emerged amongst the successful projects that grabbed both the attention and value in this ultra-fast market. The obvious patterns that emerge from most of the successful metaverse and NFT projects are 1) to have central members or teams that spearhead business initiatives, 2) to build strong economic incentives to join the projects early on, 3) to have a viable long-term vision and roadmap that inspire and capture the imagination of the market.
1) Centralized Start for a Decentralized Future: Competent Core Team Spearheading “the Business Initiatives”
The blockchain-enabled decentralization has always taken the center stage of public discourse for governance in crypto and metaverse. However, if you peel the avatar pictures on Twitter, you can almost always find a group of entrepreneurs behind successful projects whether it’s in the form of a corporate, a team, or a DAO. This might seem contradictory at first, but almost all entrepreneurial endeavors necessary for a successful project like setting up a vision, recruiting talents, making business decisions, developing an application/game, all require critical decision makings led by leaders especially in the early stage of projects.
Yuga Labs is a team behind numerous successful NFT projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (BAYC and MAYC), that took the market by storm when it acquired the IPs of Crypto Punks and Meebits. It then raised one of the biggest equity investment rounds for an NFT project at a $4bn valuation early this year. The two founders of Yuga Labs, Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow, were the visionaries that saw the untapped opportunities in the burgeoning NFT space. With their early success of BAYC minting, they wasted no time and kept building. The core team kept surprising the market and user community by delivering on their promises and making bold business moves that always seemed two steps ahead of the market consensus at the time.
https://twitter.com/crispylines/status/1503786460914331649
“We want to be a Web3 lifestyle company,” — Wylie Aronow, Yuga Labs Founder
What KlayCity team has shown from the business standpoint has been nothing short of spectacular. The core team consisting of savvy deal makers and developers saw the opportunities in loosely explored idea of NFT lands. The team conceptualized the LandFi idea which will have a connection to the real world geography and endless possibilities with the metaverse world. The well plugged KlayCity team has raised investments from coveted names like Naver Z, Friends Games, Krust, Animoca Brands, OKX Block Dream Ventures to name a few. The team has been making headlines by leveraging all resources to materialize synergy through partnerships with other promising projects.
2) From Rarity to Community: Building Strong Economic Incentives to Join
The archetypical tokenomics for successful projects is to supply a small, limited batch of NFT/token at first to boost the value per unit. Then as the community expands and demand rises, the team would provide a bigger batch of supply to lower the barrier-to-entry for larger audience. Albeit not perfect, this tried-and-true approach has many benefits. The success of the early participants turns those early community members into the most loyal biggest supporters and marketers at the very early stage which is critical for a project to survive. These early users post tweet and write articles about the project and even boast about their early success with their participation in the project. The team can test the market and stay nimble with only limited supply on the market before the project scales.
DeFi Kingdoms has NFTs called “Heroes” in the game. The Heroes have many attributes from their looks to their stats. Heroes can be minted only by synthesizing two existing Heroes aside from the 2,000 Generation-0 Heroes that were minted at launch in 2021 as a one-time event. Thanks to their absolute scarcity along with other in-game attribute buffs, Gen-0 Heroes rose incredibly in value and are traded at multiple times higher than other generations of Heroes minted afterward. This helped turn holders of these Gen-0 Heroes into the strongest supporters of the project and recruit a loyal community for DeFi Kingdoms. As the number of users increased, users summoned more generations of heroes which are larger in quantity and cheaper in unit value. This scaling in hero NFTs smoothened the barrier-to-entry for new light users.
https://twitter.com/Samichpunch/status/1457362608361672709
KlayCity had its first 1,000 [SH1] Districts minted back in February 2022. With much more Districts to be minted or “explored” in the future, the first batch at the limited amount of just 1,000 Districts has proved to be very successful investments for the early participants. The low minting costs at 500 KLAY ($600 at $1.2 per KLAY at that time) turned out to be very profitable as the price went up to more than a hundred times. These high-value District holders will likely turn into the most active players and opinion leaders in the KlayCity user community, helping the project grow as their interests are aligned with the project.
As the user base grows in KlayCity, users will compare the minting costs and market prices of Districts and decide whether to explore new ones if the district price stays high. This will then result into additional district supply. As the users can mint new supply, barrier-to-entry for new users to acquire Districts to join the gameplay will be smoothened like DeFi Kingdoms.
3) Present to Future: Ambitious and Credible Roadmap and Narratives
In crypto, many projects often go to the market with Minimum Viable Product or MVP, if they have any products at all. With only minimal products on the market at first, teams publicly set out their roadmap for the future to communicate what their early products will blossom into. The challenging part is to set an ambitious and inspiring goal while earning trust from the market that the project will be able to deliver successfully. Once this credibility is earned, the project unlocks a loyal investor and user base that will be the biggest ally for the team and ride their success together.
Around the time of their token launch called $APE coin, Yuga Labs released a video trailer of their MMORPG called “Otherside”. Their now-leaked pitch deck states their plan to develop a full-scale interoperable gaming metaverse dubbed “metaRPG”. With Yuga Labs’ track record of delivering numerous launches of NFTs valued at billions, exciting business partnerships, surprising IP acquisitions in scale, the market values the $APE at over $3 billion dollars in market cap at the time of writing.
Since the start of the project, DeFi Kingdoms has been considered to have one of the most ambitious roadmaps that encompasses over DeFi, Gaming, NFTs over multiple Layer-1 chains. As the team kept delivering each milestone set out on their ambitious roadmap, the market and users started to acknowledge that the team is dedicated to and capable of meeting more challenging milestones. The recent launch of DFK Mainnet on Avalanche is such an example of challenging milestone delivered by the team. The market and users reacted to the positive development as the price of $JEWEL rose over 200% from $4 to over $11 during the launch period.
KlayCity has an extensive roadmap with many more features around their MVP game. Introducing the new gameplay features such as scavenging for $ORB token and exploring new Districts is the most imminent ones. Scavenging and exploring features will evolve the eco-system into a complex economy. Different ways to add value to Districts other than just holding is being explored by the team as well. The team is developing features around the District NFTs so that users can decorate or improve their districts. Self-claimed as first of its genre LandFi, there will be many novel ideas to be implemented for KlayCity and the project will earn the market’s trust as they keep delivering on their promises.
Conclusion: Hallmarks of Success
Most successful NFT/ crypto gaming projects seem to have common playbooks in building a loyal community for their projects. They 1) start with a visionary group of founders that spearheads business challenges, 2) put in place well-designed incentives that reward the early users to bootstrap the project, 3) sets an ambitious roadmap that gains credibility over time. Surprisingly enough, the more you look at the successes, the more obvious it seems that it’s less about the new ideas than it is about the executing and delivering those ideas. KlayCity shows an early sign of such hallmarks.
Written by SungPil Huh, Head of Investment at Trinito, and contribution from Eric Yoo, Co-Founder at Trinito.
Appendix 1: Playbook for Users
As the KlayCity team is hard at work, the new building blocks for gameplay are being introduced. The newest features to be introduced are Scavenging (April 13–12:00 GMT) and Exploring (April 20–12:00 GMT). Scavenging is a feature where users can burn $LAY for $ORB yield. Exploring is a feature that lets users burn their $LAY and $ORB for minting new Districts. The introduction of Scavenging and Exploring will complete the early-stage gameplay cycle from the first 1,000 Districts to minting new Districts using $LAY and $ORB based on users’ decisions. An overview of user gameplay flows is as below:
Appendix 2: Airdrops and Whitelist Guarantees
We believe the team is doing its best to acquire new users (not only District holders but also $ORB holders) by providing airdrop and whitelist opportunities for other products. Benefits for the KlayCity community so far are as below.
Disclaimer
This is not investment advice and for informational purposes only. You should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. Trinito holds positions in $ORB, $LAY, and District NFTs.
