Nova April ‘24 Round-up
Meow’dy folks! It’s been a while since our last post, so we reckon it’s time to comprehensively update the community on the latest happenings here at Nova DAO. Truth is, we’ve been so busy working away at a number of things that at times it is difficult to provide a substantial update on the entire estate here at Nova DAO.
Our aim is to publish these updates monthly/bi-monthly, as things are now really kicking into high gear. We hope that they will provide current information on all things Nova, and on our upcoming plans. Without further ado, let’s jump straight into it!
Team Expansion
This month saw the onboarding of Nova DAO’s first full-time contributor, arfonzo (hey — that’s me! 👋🐱). I’ve stepped into the dual-role of Community Lead and Operations Lead. This provides a dedicated point of contact/management for the community and external parties (partnerships, marketing, et cetera), as well as operational oversight and management to keep our busy hands on track and focused. The goal is to release some of the day-to-day management and organisational pressure from Studio Nova, so they can focus on the product and development side of things.
We’re absolutely thrilled to be in a position to expand the team, providing dedicated resources where sorely needed to ensure Nova DAO can continue its plans for world domination. This ensures the right person is focused on the right tasks, leveraging their experience and expertise to benefit the DAO.
Sidequestin’
One of the keywords this past quarter has definitely been sidequests. At times where opportunities have arisen, we have undertaken initiatives to bring value to the DAO and community by taking on non-game related development. This could be infrastructure for expansion cross-chain (Polygon Bridge), revenue-generating opportunities ($IMGNAI staking), or even highly innovative solutions to fill a need ($USDO our $DOGE-backed stablecoin). All initiatives were ratified via governance votes by the DAO.
Currently we are on the cusp of completing three exciting sidequests, all unique in nature, but each one bringing benefits to the Nova DAO community:
$USDO
Development on our $DOGE-backed stablecoin for DogeChain is well underway. Read the WhitePaper and our Medium article. View the $USDO ratification governance vote.
$USDO is an innovative hyper-collateralised stablecoin which will fill a need in the DogeChain ecosystem by providing a dollar-pegged token for users and projects to rely on. The solution is modular and as such, $USDO could be deployed on any chain with any backing token. A fee is distributed to the heartbeat services, which means Nova DAO will receive fees for maintaining the $USDO infrastructure.
Having completed testing and upgrades last month, we are working through the final stages of deploying a public-facing website for staking, minting and burning. This allows $USDO to grow (staking $DOGE to mint more $USDO), while providing a place for the public to arbitrage (burning) to help maintain its dollar peg.
We hope to complete the $USDO website in the upcoming weeks.
Polygon Bridge
You’ve shouted, and we’ve listened! It’s coming home. View the Polygon Bridge ratification governance vote.
In recent months, many in the community have voiced their preference for a less cost prohibitive way to transact with $NOVA, as Ethereum’s gas fees can be expensive for smaller transactions. As such, we have been working with the marvellous folks over at Polygon to bring $NOVA cross-chain to Polygon PoS! We will be using Polygon’s own native bridge for this; history has shown Polygon’s bridge to be the safest and best route to go cross-chain between Ethereum mainnet and Polygon PoS.
Note that availability on Ethereum will continue as-is, and users will also be able to buy/sell $NOVA on Polygon, and bridge between the two chains.
It took a little while longer than expected as the Polygon Security Team wanted to ensure top-notch security for their bridge, which is never a bad thing. We have now got their approvals and deployed the contract code. Currently, there’s a few final tidbits to implement around cross-chain price stability.
The tokenomics for $NOVA on Polygon remain exactly the same as on Ethereum. That is to say, the 2% tax to DAO Treasury and 1% tax to Auto-LP are also in effect on Polygon, allowing our Treasury and PoS LP to grow over time as users buy and sell the token on Polygon.
We expect that the Polygon Bridge implementation will be completed in the upcoming days.
ImgnAI Staking
You recently voted to stake half of the Nova DAO Treasury’s $IMGNAI holdings into their upcoming revenue sharing platform! Implementation of this proposal is currently on hold, pending ImgnAI’s staking platform going live, which should be any day now. View the ImgnAI Staking ratification governance vote.
We’re excited about putting our Treasury assets to work, earning real yield in Ethereum. It will enable Nova DAO to increase our Treasury funds, while supporting ImgnAI’s growing ecosystem. It’s a win-win for both projects!
Once their platform is live, we will stake half of our $IMGNAI. In the future we may consider staking the remaining portion, which would need to be ratified via governance vote.
Phew! It feels at times like we’ve been on one sidequest after another, and often in parallel. We understand that this can feel like we’ve forgotten our core GameFi focus, but rest assured that this is absolutely not the case. We remain committed to our roadmap plans for game releases, and they continue to evolve.
These sidequests provide revenue to the Nova DAO Treasury so we can maintain operations, while increasing our reputation and goodwill in the industry. They reinforce Nova DAO as legitimate contributors to the ecosystems we align with.
Cypher: Striking While the Iron’s Hot 🔥
One of our surprise releases is a limited-edition NFT profile picture series called Cypher, coming soon to Base. As usual, our Studio Nova Lead Artist Mari has done an amazing job bringing to life these NFTs and we’re super excited about their release! Cypher will be our first foray onto Base chain, and we hope it will pave the way for future product releases on Base.
Cypher will be available in two rounds: whitelist and public minting. To make the whitelist, we will be looking for high-quality humans on farcaster and Base. As a thanks to our community and ecosystem, $NOVA holders and DeFi Girls holders may also qualify if they meet the whitelist requirements.
The public mint will follow after that for a limited time. After this period, minting will no longer be possible, ensuring their scarcity. But wait there’s more — these ain’t your grandma’s ordinary NFTs! Similar to DeFi Girls, Cypher will entitle holders to yield farming rewards simply by having them in their wallet. No fuss, no LPs, no staking required: all you have to do is hold and enjoy them.
If this sounds interesting to you, join the /cypher channel on farcaster and keep your eyes peeled for whitelist details and further news!
GameFi: Returning to Our Roots
With the above sidequests nearing successful completion, we are finally in a position to change gears and continue work on the Gooeys franchise. Nova DAO looks forward to returning to our core focus of GameFi development. We’ve been busy on this front: strategising, designing mechanics and modifying plans, to ensure our products are fun, achieve success and attain maximum outreach.
After discussions with the Nova Council, Studio Nova have agreed to provide work-in-progress concept artwork, designs, and other content ongoing so that the community can be appraised of progress and feedback to us as the titles develop.
We’re hyped about what’s coming, and we will be able to share more with the community in due course!
Marketing
Nova DAO’s marketing strategy has shifted in recent months, with the current approach being far more hands-on in many ways. With our social media intern Ciefa at the helm, we’re able to dedicate more focus to networking, outreach and activity on X/Twitter as well as Farcaster. Ciefa’s work to date has been impressive, with great metric improvements to show for his efforts. If you see us on socials, be sure to interact and engage with us!
We will be looking to ratify a governance vote in the near future for this quarter’s marketing budget (amount to be confirmed). This budget will enable us to engage with reputable KOLs and other marketing spends to reach new audiences and brand awareness in the coming months. We will be aligning marketing spend with product releases to maximize impact and effectiveness.
Another project spearheaded by Ciefa will be regular market reports. We aim to condense valuable ecosystem news, intelligence and information into an easy to digest report to spread awareness and provide marketing for Nova. We are seeking input on form and content from the community, so if you have any suggestions please get in touch on Farcaster or Telegram!
Conclusion
As you can probably tell, we have kept our paws very busy here at Nova! We recognise that it’s been a while since our last Medium post, however we hope this has been useful for everyone to catch up with all our plans. Now that we have a dedicated Community Lead, we aim to provide these comprehensive updates on a more regular basis.
Thanks for being part of this grand adventure Novanauts! The next few months will be very exciting, and we can’t wait to share more with you as we progress on all fronts!
X / Twitter: 0xNovaDAO
Telegram: Nova
Warpcast: Nova
Discord: https://discord.gg/NovaDAO
Home: https://novadao.io
