Liquidity Incentives, Gooeys, Dogechain, Social AI; Our Foray into 2023.

It’s a mouthful, and not something you might find yourself easily saying after a night out — but in what might be the first light of a Crypto Spring, Dogira’s 2023 has a lot going on.

Among with sharing some updates on our most in-demand news (Gooeys), we’ve seen a heavy focus of questions on two main topics as of late; one being us being a recipient of a development grant from Dogechain, with the second being our suddenly inflated treasury in thanks to our $imgnAI holdings; and of course, what our relationship is (if any) on that front.

Firstly though, a quick housekeeping update on our liquidity incentives and staking farms — if you’re currently staked in, please read the below; our current pools’ rewards will be expiring soon!

$Dogira / $GOO Liquidity Incentives & Staking

Dogira Finance launched over a year ago, and our respective staking contracts have emitted tens of thousands worth of rewards; across major bluechip tokens such as Ethereum and Chainlink, alongside partner tokens such as Hanzo, and ApeSwap’s Banana.

While Dogira Finance will still remain fully active (and our team will endevour to continue incentivising $Dogira and $GOO holders through this platform), we’ll be targeting a number of changes to our single-staking, and liquidity mining rewards once the current emissions cycle comes to an end.

Currently, our $Dogira & $Dogira/$MATIC LP pools are set to expire across blocks 39,000,000, and 40,000,000. As some of you might have already noted, Block 39,000,000 has already passed! As indicated on our staking portal, these pools are now highlighted as being finished.

Please ensure you harvest your rewards — as noted on all of our pool pages, all of our staking pools are pre-loaded, rather than being capable of minting new supply. This means that once these rewards expire and are withdrawn, you will be unable to harvest any outstanding reward tokens. N.B: Only pending rewards will be affected by a pool expiring. You will always be able to withdraw your deposited tokens, and any compounded tokens.

Liquidity Incentives & Staking: Moving Forward

As noted in the latter part of 2022, we made the move to reduce emissions both on our single-staking pools, and our LP Staking initiatives.

While doubtlessly aided by brutal market conditions, our observations showed that a heavy amount of emitted $Dogira rewards were typically used to add to the ongoing sell pressure; essentially creating a liquidity drain.

Aided by our partners at ApeSwap, we replaced these emissions with Treasury Bills, allowing users to take advantage of an effective high emission rate in discounted tokens, while permanently contributing to our available liquidity.

Removing dependence from rented liquidity pairs played a massive role in Dogira building out an excellent liquidity backing throughout the latter half of 2022; with us currently sitting at an LP backing of approximately 30% of our market cap, across three chains.

For comparison, tokens in full range liquidity pairs without incentivized liquidity would typically back 5–10% of their token LP; causing far more slippage on trades, alongside far more violent pull-backs after token sells. This accounts for the vast majority of tokens currently operating in the DeFi space.

By contrast, Dogira currently holds over 2x the liquidity backing of tokens that are currently trading between $5m and $10m market cap — and we’re not looking to stop there.

We’re delighted to announce that we’ll once again be partnering with ApeSwap for a new round of $Dogira Treasury Bills, coupled with moving our existing QuickSwap LP over to QuickSwap’s concentrated liquidity pools — allowing for both a better spread for traders, and their more advanced IL & Range management tools for stakers.

Liquidity building is a slow process, but one which we’re continually making progress at — and punching well above our weight with. Liquidity backing is what forms the solid bedrock which we can grow upon, given rain or shine for the overall market.

Ethereum, and Arbitrage

While in the world of liquidity, one place we need to shine a light on is our presence on Ethereum’s mainnet; where around 10% of our liquidity resides.

Our presence on Ethereum has unfortunately resulted in close to zero growth over the past year; with our Uniswap pool typically only serving as providing a short-term arbitrage opportunity for traders.

Given that arbitrage via Ethereum requires profits to cover gas fees for bridging to Polygon (alongside bridging fees via Multichain), typically any arbitrage trades taking place would be relatively heavy — and result in noteable sell pressure on either our Polygon, or Dogechain pools. Often times this would be used to wipe out any would-be moves up from the relative performance of our LP pairings of $DOGE or $MATIC when compared to $ETH.

The $Dogira token on Ethereum’s mainnet provides no utility, save for a “point of access” for those looking to speculate purely on price performance; and given the market’s overall momentum over the past 12 months, this pairing has not served in anyone’s interests.

During $Dogira’s move upwards following a bridge to Dogechain, we saw our heaviest Ethereum activity — as traders quickly sought to arbitrage the move up against the ongoing momentum.

While arbitrage in itself is an important tool across the DeFi space, there is extremely little benefit in a low liquidity pool being available purely for that purpose; the high costs coupled with high risks in waiting times often results in overly-heavy trades, to support a chain which we have no utility planned for in the near future.

With Polygon and Dogechain serving as our current main hubs for utility and development, we will be opting to remove our Ethereum liquidity and re-deploy this in to our existing Polygon pools on Friday the 17th of February, 2023.

Coupled with this move, due to the lack of automated arbitrage services across the relatively low Dogechain protocol, our team will be reserving time to explore building our own in-house arbitrage tools to better align our Polygon and Dogechain liquidity pools.

With our own arbitraging tools, we can ensure that our own services prioritize maintaining, and healthily growing liquidity on both chains — with any profits from these services being split between adding to liquidity pools, burning $Dogira tokens, and funding Dogira’s development treasury.

While the above tooling would serve to alleviate the issues seen via our liquidity pool on Ethereum’s mainnet, the aforementioned gas and bridging costs would unfortunately still result in heavily negative price action against the $Dogira token itself. As such, we have opted to ensure that we can develop this tooling to focus on our low-gas/high-speed EVMs of choice in order to best support our liquidity bases.

The $Dogira token will still be supported for bridging through Ethereum via Multichain as normal.

Dogira’s Consult Arm & Treasury Funding

While the crypto winter saw gains made across both development and liquidity ratios for Dogira, our shielding against the realities of the market downfall could never be bullet-proof.

Following our personnel restructure to focus on long-term support of our core on-chain & game development asset roles, we made the decision to extend our consult/contracting services in order to ensure that we could fund our treasury for any extended market downturns.

Given Dogira’s experience across multiple fields, along with a high rate of trust among crypto-focused projects, we thankfully were quick to secure contracts which enabled us to ensure that our Studio funding remained in the black throughout the pull-backs we’ve seen this cycle.

While operating these services required us to divert our limited internal resources towards other ecosystem projects on a contracting basis, this allowed Dogira to avoid any worst-case scenarios; such as needing to close down operations entirely.

We fully understand the frustration shared by our community in our own internal development slowing down as a result of our team needing to stretch our available development time to accomodate for additional parties; but with the alternative being a looming shutdown, the difficult decision to place our long-term security ahead of short-term development goals ensured that Dogira Studios’ well-being could be firmly assured.

Our $imgnAI Position

One of the many benefits of our consult/contracting work was in getting to work with some amazing projects across the crypto space — one of them being ImgnAI, who recently made waves with a flurry of virally spread AI Art Software.

Moving from the norms of paid-and-private AI Art tools, ImgnAI instead focused towards flipping that narrative into turning AI Art into a social tool — and quickly found their software becoming a mainstay within major crypto communities.

Prior to ImgnAI’s launch, a public pre-sale was held, during which Dogira picked up approximately 1% of the available supply at a cost of 750 USDC. Following one of the most successful token launches in the space, our $750 share in ImgnAI quickly ballooned to over $300,000 in value.

We’ve been asked several times both by our community, and members of the ImgnAI community if we have any immediate intentions for these tokens — such as market selling them.

The answer is no, we do not.

In having the chance to work alongside studios bringing their projects to life, our goals and targets remain aligned on the long-term future in what both of our projects can achieve in working together; and selling off such a large stake in another project’s token supply would be extremely counter-intuitive to the relationships that we seek to build.

Coupled with this, we would find it extremely remiss of Dogira to effectively sell such a large portion of tokens during any project’s first parabolic leap forward. These periods almost always end with a re-trace, and often times leave early communities facing their first period of disarray as their respective teams continue to place their focus on growing said community, and building their product stack forward.

The reputation of our team is as important as our ability to build — and destroying that reputation for what essentially would amount to a quick buck would do no favours either to ourselves, the community that has joined us, or to either our partners or their respective communities.

Any decisions being made as regards to our $imgnAI position will be made with clear communication between ourselves and the ImgnAI team, and will be made with the well-being of both communities in mind.

Projects within the crypto sphere need to work alongside one another to grow — and during a bear market, it is absolutely paramount. We’ve already seen several projects (and traders) attempt to cannibalize newly launched tokens in order to essentially shift liquidity back to their own communities — and we’re yet to see it end in anything but disaster, either through poor trading, or through the long-term toxicity that forms around the individuals and projects engaging in these tactics.

Our team will continue to stand by the projects and communities which we associate ourselves with — and we look forward to standing alongside eachother as we continue to build our respective ecosystems.

Gooeys: The Great Re-awakening

Gooeys’ first expansion has in short, been in development for much longer than anticipated. It’d be remiss to place this solely at the feet of our resourcing spread though — with one of the larger concerns in place being our long-term design and vision for Gooeys as a whole.

We previously touched on how Gooeys was intended as a smaller one-off experience; a tune which quickly changed as we began to fall in love with the our slime-themed world.

In seeking to expand our own infrastructure to accomodate and grow our player base, our first Discovery expansion quickly shifted towards developing out our own Web3 -> Web2 backend & API, coupled with re-designing our main client to accomodate for a range of platforms; such as Android, and OSX.

Moving on from this then, there’s the greater need for long-term mechanical design around Gooeys; namely, creating a long-term balance structure which both rewards our more experienced cabal of players, while also ensuring that new players aren’t thrust into a game world which would see them swiftly diced up by the existing player base.

To accomodate this, much of our work has been placed towards a “v2” of the Gooeys stat system. In short, the near-exponentially increasing stats of hp/atk/spd/def leaves a lot to be desired — both in terms of variety and in use, given that the current use-case is to simply combine all stats for our basic questing system.

In terms of variety, there’s a huge amount to consider. Originally, we had intended on an add-on stat system which allowed for the addition of profession-based stats. For example, Gooeys may gain points in lumberjacking or stonemasonry as they began moving towards building their own huts or houses, or may have instead decided to spec fully into tailoring or smithing in the hopes of equipping adventurers on their way. Or, simply set up shop as a fisher or fruit farmer to ensure all Gooeys can quest on full stomachs.

These stats were intended to serve as a soft replacement for the current genetic/inherited stats, with many professions tailored towards then providing a buff to those genetic stats — such as health, attack etc.

The most major issue here however was that with the exponential gains seen across the original starting stats, balancing things like accessories or clothing to work both as being worthwhile for players speccing into those areas, coupled with providing worthwhile boosts to Gooeys which have a massive spread in their own stats becomes almost impossible to design around.

With that, we begun fully redesigning the Gooeys stat system; with the intent of swapping the current genetic stats into a single “Scouting” stat based towards basic questing, and implementing a new scale for the original hp/atk/spd/def stats.

While these stats will retain a level of genetic boosting, our larger goal is to allow for the majority of Gooey growth to instead be rewarded through play — such as with experience and stat gains from questing, or through consumables such as fruit, or other player-created items.

Coupled with this, we wanted to look at the more interesting side of genetic inheritance — and in giving Gooeys specific abilities or types based off their cosmetics. Body types should come with their own unique advantages and disadvantages; such as a mechagoo being more hardy when it comes to blunt impact in battle, or a spellfire Gooey being more versed in magic-based actions than one lacking those natural traits.

As you can imagine, this level of redesign is no small feat — nor is planning out the more expansive features that we want to ensure are available to make use of these new stat systems.

One of our greatest flaws with Gooeys was in treating it originally as a strict business deliverable, rather than a creative endevour — it resulted in us launching far too early (with the original Gooeys having zero utility ready, and requiring a re-deploy following our own internal code reviews), later compounded by a hard delivery date on an expansion which was marred by us needing to entirely restructure how we work — which itself was later up-ended by a need to redesign many of the core systems that were in place.

This approach was unfair both to ourselves, and to our players — giving us release windows that couldn’t possibly be met if we were to build Gooeys to our given design goals, and giving our players a constantly shifting release schedule; further added to by needing to divert our resources elsewhere as required.

Our current plans for Gooeys are set towards rolling out our new backend infrastructure, and our new UI/Client builds. Once these tasks are completed (ETA: Soon(tm)), we will be shifting back towards a product-first philosophy; maintaining internal release targets, but only releasing public launch dates once we’ve completed (and are satisfied with) all features contained within any given expansion patch.

With this, we hope to be able to focus on providing quality content, rather than chasing our tails with release dates — and ensuring that we can deliver the most accurate news possible to our community.

Dogechain: Our New Frontier

Last but certainly not least — as many of you already know, Dogira has had the honour of being selected as one of Dogechain’s grantees, providing us with additional funding towards building out our Dogechain offerings.

To date, Dogira has remained solely on Polygon as far as our utility and GameFi offerings stretch — a decision made in mid-2021, which allowed us to take full advantage of the low-gas, high-speed environment that Polygon had tailored their EVM’s offerings around.

With Dogechain being built using Polygon Edge, and of course with Dogira originally being spun up as a response to the lack of support for a smart contract layer on Dogecoin, Dogechain became an immediate and natural fit for both our team, and our community.

Being met with official support from the Dogechain team allows us to safely begin allocating resources towards building out unique offerings across a brand new EVM, which of course is greatly strengtened by it’s adoption of $DOGE for use as a de-facto gas token.

Dogechain has already received immense support across the industry, with massive names such as Ankr and QuickSwap giving their product backing to the new venture — and with Dogira already playing home to one of the highest liquidity pairs listed on QuickSwap’s Dogechain deployment, we’ve found ourselves well-equipped to set ourselves up as a mainstay on what’s already becoming one of the fastest growing EVMs to have hit the market.

Currently, we’re working closely with a select Oracle partner (details to later be revealed), with the goals of being able to utilize their VRF systems in order to deploy our own GameFi ecosystem on Dogechain. Our main goal of course, being to bring a multiversal Gooeys to Dogechain; allowing for a fresh experience for brand new players looking to take their first steps into GameFi, while breathing new life into the overall game world with bridged/shared SocialFi features.

Way more details coming on this soon — stay tuned!

Moving Forward in Comfort

Within a difficult bear market, Dogira has secured the resourcing necessary to ensure that we can continue building out our offerings, and paying focus towards delivering on-chain utility with an emphasis on quality-first development.

A rapid need towards restructuring helped us to bolster our treasury, and assist us in forging relationships with incredible new projects — with which we’re confident in growing alongside.

While 2023 may certainly bring more choppy movements across the crypto industry, the work we’ve put in during the bear market helps us to ensure that we’ll be more than capable of weathering any storm that may come our way.

Now, with all of that said — let’s get back to building!