Dogira : Restructuring for a build-focused Bear Market
Dogira has always been a development-focused token — in the space of just over a year, we’ve launched a massive array of products that have helped us add legitimate value and innovation into the crypto space. From our first foray into staking pools and on-chain pricing tools, to our in-house NFT Kit, all the way up to launching our first fully on-chain game; and that’s not including our ventures outside of the cryptosphere, in funding and publishing our first free-to-play mobile title.
And of course, our development hasn’t stopped there — right now, we’re developing our first major expansion for Gooeys, which makes use of even more in-house tools developed under Dogira; such as our new Web3->Web2 API & Query Caching system.
Throughout this time, we also connected and collaborated with some incredible teams — getting to work directly with high-caliber teams such as Chainlink, QuickSwap, ApeSwap, Rubic, and the Blockchain Gaming Alliance to name but a few.
When I joined Dogira as a contributor in early 2021, later onboarding as a Dev and eventually moving to Project Lead/Director, at no point would I have believed you if you had told me that we’d accomplish all of this in such a short space of time. We set out to revamp ourselves as a utility-focused studio, and I believe we accomplished that with flying colors.
One difficult reality we’ve had to face during this time though, is that the market acts very independently of progress and development — and while the wider markets both in TradFi and Crypto have been bearish for around a year now, a harsh truth for Dogira and many other upstart projects is that we entered our bear market in May of 2021, and have not yet emerged from it.
Coupled with this, the Dogira treasury has never been funded with any Dogira tokens. Save for our Gooeys NFT sale, our primary revenue sources were in developer contracting/consult work (which created an added side-effect of taking away from time that would otherwise have been spent on Dogira), coupled with Director’s Loans granted from myself to Dogira LTD.
The Director’s Loans from myself allowed us to continue operating as a fuller team, along with allowing us to fund various marketing endeavors, and allowing us to attain both our KYC and full audit status from our respective partners. Unfortunately, even with this full KYC/Audit status coupled with over $20k USD in marketing budget spent in a relatively short timeframe, it’s become obvious that we’re fighting against an incredibly bearish overall market sentiment; and with this, it’s clear that both the funding and time being spent towards tertiary activities will exhaust itself long before we see sentiment start to pivot.
With Director’s Loans granted from myself to Dogira having entered substantial territories, it would be dangerous both for myself, and for Dogira LTD to continue this line of credit. As a note, these debts do not incur any interest, nor do they have any set repayment timeframe — and I do not intend on starting or discussing any repayment schedule until the company has begun to turn over a sustainable treasury profit.
Bear markets can be brutal — and I’m sure anyone holding any tokens or crypto at all right now would agree with that. We’ve continued to build as though it’s any other market, but from a tactical perspective we need to face the reality of the market structures we’re finding ourselves within, in order to start making headway towards how we may fare when finally a pivot point arrives.
Even during my tenure as Dogecoin’s core developer, bearish market sentiments often got the better of us; the deployment of Dogecoin’s 1.6 update (developed to mitigate against multipool abuse) to date remains one of the largest Dogecoin core developments to date — but the resulting market response at the time was to move from $30M Market cap to $35M, and it shortly fell back below $30M to put in a lower low. It was easy at the time to blame ourselves for not doing more or delivering faster, but given enough hindsight we saw that the market itself simply had intentions that didn’t align with ours at the time.
Eventually, we saw Dogecoin recover and go on to become one of the biggest coins in the space — and I believe that with our continued work towards Dogira and the product stack we’ve all come to know and love, the same successes can again be achieved. But similar to our Doge developer origins, success often comes with sacrifice along the road.
Dogira’s critical infrastructures for Development and Live Services will remain active, and funded by myself in full. This will mean that the core team will encompass only myself (remaining as Project Lead/Development), and Mari (Art/Design) as full-time staff members. Elijah (Press/Marketing), Caroline (Management/Planning), and Skyler (Community Lead) will unfortunately be parting ways with us from their respective staffed roles at the end of this month (October 2022).
Elijah, Caroline, and Skyler all contributed greatly to Dogira in its current form, to which both myself, and the greater community all owe them a great debt of gratitude. Coupled with their service to date, all three have additionally agreed to maintain community/volunteer roles within Dogira — but we would ask our wider community to respect the fact that these are volunteer roles, with no set hours or expectations accompanying them.
The donation of time from any of our community members towards Dogira is a gift, and doubly so for those who previously held fully staffed roles — without placing the expectations on any volunteer to place their donated time above other real-life commitments or responsibilities.
Jupiter Lighthouse remains in development on Humaniquarium under Dogira’s publishing agreement, with a set revenue share model in place. Following the initial launch of Humaniquarium, there are no additional costs in place from Dogira’s side — barring minor server / infrastructure costs where relevant.
In terms of restructuring, all official responsibilities fielded by our extended team such as operating our socials, and partner outreach/relations will be delegated to myself. Along with this it’s expected that we’ll be ramping down on content that lies outside of the development sphere, such as our bi-weekly AMAs, and Gooeys Lore chapters.
Development will remain our top priority — with the fact being that this restructuring is being based around increasing that development time overall, by assigning lower priorities to non-critical mainstays such as our AMAs. Now more than ever, product design and development output reigns supreme; and while our tertiary content will doubtlessly be missed, it’s through making these difficult decisions today that we hope to emerge from the bear market far stronger than we went in.
While we get things restructured and ramp back into dev mode, we’re tentatively estimating a November release for Gooeys’ Discovery expansion — with an exact date to follow in the near future. Moving forward, we expect far more streamlined and reliable release target timeframes with our windback on tertiary activities.
Lastly, it’s worth now taking a brief look at the overview of Dogira’s wider strategy in moving towards profitability. While the Dogira token could hit 10x valuations tomorrow, it’s worth noting that this would not change our current treasury.
Dogira’s Treasury tokens are intended to empower growth and expansion of our ecosystem, but not in directly funding it. As noted prior, our treasury has never been funded by any Dogira/GOO sells; and as it stands currently, this will remain unchanged.
Our current development on Gooeys and its upcoming Discovery expansion sets towards adding small fees to transactions — as an example, a new upcoming feature may charge a small amount of MATIC per tx, added on in a similar fashion to gas fees. This MATIC would then be split between automated buy/burn routines on Dogira/GOO (or any future ecosystem tokens), and in funding our team treasury wallet; allowing for more sustainable price economics on our wider platforms, along with funding our team’s continued development and expansions.
Coupled with this, in-house systems for buying/selling Gooeys, GooeyFruit or other tokens can apply the same strategy in MATIC fees on-use, allowing us to continue the encouragement of positive price movements across our tokens while simultaneously funding Dogira’s continued operations.
Our vision of the wider P2E landscape is in one where developers simply set the wheels in motion on decentralized economies and their respective communities, and benefit from platform fees accepting native tokens such as ETH/MATIC, rather than in adding centralisation through heavy team-token ownership, or sell pressure. Gooeys is set to solidify our stance in this regard, with GOO tokens never being distributed either to our treasury, or to any team members via vesting.
The decentralized economy is the true power of on-chain gaming — and while it does make for an uphill battle in self-funding, it allows players to truly have ownership over the platforms which they engage with — and incentivizes developers to continue expanding on their platforms with engaging content.
Moving forward from here, Dogira has always placed emphasis on community-level marketing and organic engagement; and again, now more than ever we need our community to contribute to efforts in spreading the word on everything we’ve built, and continue to build.
Dogira’s bear market from May 2021 was in my opinion, marked by a slowdown of new holders — the true value we build is in new community members finding what we’re creating, and joining our community. From our side, we’re going to continue creating — and hopefully make the job of finding interested new onlookers a lot easier as our products grow and mature.
It’s always worth remembering that it’s building and persevering through the difficult times that allow for the good times to arrive back on our shores. When it comes to crypto as a whole, tell someone you picked up Bitcoin at $5k or ETH at $200 and often times, people will just sneer “you got lucky”.
Nobody felt they were getting lucky when we were picking up any project’s tokens (or BTC itself) during any bear market. It felt miserable — and was normally accompanied by another drop shortly after. To write off someone’s perseverance, work, and belief in what we’re building as “luck” could not be more short-sighted; the reality is that bear markets, and getting through the pain they inflict are the catalysts for everyone who found success in our industry.
As always, our team and community are available on our Discord, and our Telegram channels linked below for discussion on the above. For us, it’s time to get our heads back down for development — and build the platform on which we’ll ride out the storm.
Eoghan Hayes, Dogira/Gooeys Project Lead
@rootpew
Dogira Twitter: @DogiraOfficial
Dogira Telegram: https://t.me/DogiraToken
Gooeys Twitter: @GooeysP2E
Gooeys Telegram: https://t.me/GooeysP2E
Dogira/Gooeys Discord: https://discord.dogira.net
