The Dawn of NOVA

In our previous article, we talked through the nitty-gritty details on establishing Nova DAO (and our supporting Studio Nova), and opted to keep the focus on covering all the important prior bookends.

Today, we’re going to be putting focus on what we’re building at Studio Nova, how we’ll be building it, and how Nova DAO will benefit from those creations. We’ll also be chatting about Nova DAO’s more symbiotic relationship with its community and constituents — and we’ll lastly be tackling all questions submitted via our DAO Telegram Community.

Sit down and buckle up, it’s finally time to start showcasing!

Gooeys: MetaVice

We’ve already spoken at length about how there were certain things we could not do under our old structure; and this is one of them. Currently in production, and due for presentation to Nova DAO, MetaVice will be the second entry in the Gooeys franchise.

MetaVice is an expansion on the quickfire formula that launched Gooeys Classic; quick game loops, easily understood mechanics, user-defined risk/reward, and an inviting UI/UX to keep the onboarding process as pain-free as possible.

MetaVice takes us to a Gooey-inhabited space station, far away from the realities of the Gooeys in the fruit filled trenches. These well-to-do dimensional travelers instead focus their time towards what’s truly important: bright lights, good company, the cast of a die, and turning luck into an art.

Gooeys (that’s you — the players) can partake in multiple mini-games (both social and solo) — wagering to play, or providing liquidity to reap the house rewards.

We’re building MetaVice multi-chain compatible from the get-go. I mean, multidimensional Gooeys — wouldn’t make sense to have them stuck in one place! MetaVice will natively support the gas token of any chains we launch on for both wagering on games, or for liquidity providers looking for returns from real yield. And of course... MetaVice will support any Nova or Gooey related tokens where applicable.

MetaVice: Launch & Community Supports

For our initial launch, MetaVice will be going live first on Dogechain, and will be supporting the wDoge gas token. Following our official Gooeys Dogetribe launch, Dogechain’s respective $GOO token will be fully supported both for wagers, and for stakers across all games. We might even have some rewards in store for early supporters of the platform! 👀

With our launch on Dogechain, we’re also targeting a unique proposition to go alongside it. Community chains — simply put — live or die by their collective communities. In supporting such a new community-centric chain, we’d find ourselves running amiss if we weren’t directly supporting the communities that are already working hard to bring value to Dogechain.

As such, we’ll be seeking to set aside a percentage of all protocol fees (generated on MetaVice Dogechain), and using this to automatically buy and burn community tokens that have made their homes on Dogechain. Via these protocol fees, we can make a direct contribution (from REAL yield!) back to those communities working hard to establish themselves on such a new chain — and all MetaVice players in turn will know that they’re lending a helping hand to their own communities by taking part in our brand new one.

MetaVice will be launching on Dogechain in Q4 2023, with other chain releases to be discussed following the launch period. If you or your Dogechain community want to take part in the buy-and-burn protocol share, please get in touch with a member of the Nova Council over on the Nova DAO Telegram. Note that we require all participating tokens to hold a valid audit, and an LP Lock.

Gooeys: Dogetribe

Next up to bat — while originally scheduled for Q4, we’ve opted to push out our Dogetribe release to Q1 2024 in order to focus our attention on first launching our MetaVice platform. We want to ensure that with MetaVice in full swing on Dogechain prior to our Dogetribe release, there’ll always be a use-case for Dogetribe’s native token — rather than running into the economic (tokenomic?) mistake of having lots of faucets, but no sinks.

So, with the formalities out of the way — let’s talk Dogetribe!

Dogetribe is an entirely standalone title coming from Studio Nova, and feeds heavily into the community-centric field that Dogechain thrives in. Dogetribe is our in-development online strategy game where you battle for land and resources across a tile-based map with your tribal allies. Every Doge-themed Gooey has the ability to join or form a tribe, either teaming up with existing communities or creating brand new ones.

Like all things neolithic though, ambition can be a dangerous game when it comes to expanding too fast. Tribes will suffer penalties for stacking themselves too large — and while there’s power in numbers, there’s also a lot of hungry mouths to feed. And hey, managing an empire isn’t exactly easy when the tech is limited to stone tablets and “who can make the biggest fire”.

However, that’s where the decentralized spirit of tribal communities arrives in to play. Tribes can ally with one-another, with the promises of free and unimpeded passage — however, when it comes to matters of the battlefield, handshake agreements and mercenary roamers are all part of the game.

Dogetribe: Running your Tribe

So you’re looking to lead your own tribe into the wilderness? There’s certainly perks — your loyal subjects coughing up some tax from their earnings into your treasury, for a start.

Dogetribe is separated into multiple map tiles — and outside of one neutral starter zone, everything else is up for grabs. Gooeys can take any map tile, allowing you to lay down your early industry; bringing in all-important resources to assist you in expanding further, or building up defenses to assist you in repelling from any would-be invaders.

Owning land is a lucrative business — namely, owning that main road through your settlement. Gooeys who are unaffiliated with, or not allied with your tribe will have much longer travel times through areas you own. Turns out wading through the weeds on the outskirts isn’t quite as quick as that nice flat-ground path. Of course, the smart (or time-conscious) Gooey might just cough up a sum to ensure their speedy passage.

Naturally, there’s running costs too. Big strong walls are nice, but not having hungry mouths at the gates of the Keep is even nicer. While individual tribes won’t (or shouldn’t) get gargantuan in size, farmland and living quarters will be needed to make sure you’ve got a healthy batch of troops ready to face any challenges that may come their way.

Planning out all the above is simple when you’ve got manageable numbers. But the costs do begin to scale in a pretty unfair and steep fashion if you look to bite off more than you can chew — instead of hoarding land and resources, it might suit the wise ruler better to forge relations with some agreeable neighbors. Or alternatively, do as the Kings of old — and let nepotism take your empire to dizzying new heights.

(Just don’t come complaining to us if your Son starts hatching plots against you. We’ve all played Crusader Kings, we know how this goes.)

Dogetribe: To Arms

“The pen is mightier than the sword” makes a good quote and all, but likely wasn’t ever said by anyone who had a sword held to their throat at the time.

Honeymoon periods fade, Gooeys get greedy, and sometimes we just get those Viking urges every now and then. In the end, sometimes the peace must be broken — and Dogetribe allows you to send your Gooeys straight into the trenches.

Any settled land can have Gooeys permanently stationed there. A good call, given the proximity to food and warm straw beds generally ensures some happy tax payers. However, best hope you invested in those walls — because barbarians at the gates is a better sight than barbarians poking in your open window.

Battles can be waged between two tribes (or one tribe and one sorry individual who thought his land was free). Battles can be scheduled by just one lone Gooey turning up at the gates, at which point a 2 hour period will be given for attackers of the same tribe to assemble. (So, it goes without saying — those allied travel rights might come in very important).

Every warring Gooey can either take their own provisions, or be granted access to them by their Tribe Leader. And no, you don’t just get “a weaker warrior” without provisioning them — your Gooey just won’t go if there’s not food involved. They’re pretty hungry creatures.

Each Gooey’s individual stats will count towards the battle, as will the defenses of the area they’re warring for. Remember those walls? Expensive investment, but pretty worthwhile when the King of Dogeland comes knocking without an invite.

And, well, here comes the tough part — battles do not come without consequences. The losing side may not only lose their resources, but Gooeys aren’t guaranteed a safe return either. Losses can be suffered by either side, even in the event of a stalemate. Not only can Gooeys fall, but your infrastructure might need repairing too — whether you’ve just found yourself in possession of a pre-owned plot of land, or if you’ve managed to quell your unwanted guests.

Well-fortified areas can certainly take a much harder battering than an unattended farmland without giving up an inch of their territory — not to mention, it isn’t cheap to try and scale the Keep of a Baron from a provisioning perspective either. However, a bloodthirsty enough enemy might well see it fit to just send wave after wave of Gooeys until your walls eventually topple. Crazy the things Gooeys did for fun before the invention of space-bound gaming plazas.

Dogetribe: Opening the Gates

Dogetribe is currently planned for Q1 2024, and will allow unlimited minting of in-game Gooeys at a nominal fee. This fee is currently planned to be in the range of 100–200 wDoge per Gooey, with a set portion of each purchase going directly to Auto-LP for our native Dogetribe token. This LP will be initially funded with a grant made available to us by the Dogechain Team.

Once launched, MetaVice will be updated to support both staking and wagers with our native Dogetribe token.

Similar to Gooeys Classic, we’re currently targeting a Unity release build for Dogetribe, with emphasis on a mobile-ready client. Note that this may be subject to change, following a review of our Web-based MetaVice release, and feedback received on it.

While Dogetribe is currently planned for Q1 2024, we’re anticipating in advance that this may get moved back pending the success of MetaVice; i.e: in the event where we find MetaVice has been very successful in attracting new users to Dogechain, or is in receipt of a large volume of players on other to-be-supported chains, Studio Nova may make the decision to extend further support/development towards MetaVice — and with the reality of development resources not being infinite, this may push out Dogetribe to a slightly later release.

Now, don’t get us wrong — we’re not trying to throw a downer on any parades long before they’ve kicked off. But it’s extremely important for us as a Studio, and as members of the Nova Council to ensure expectations are being set correctly; while we’re extremely excited to reach the launch day for Dogetribe (and we hope you are too!), catapulting off a successful MetaVice launch and expansion will only further increase the amount of players and community members that will join us for Dogetribe, and other Gooeys titles coming down the line. For us, ensuring we prioritize our work correctly to focus on the growth of the Nova DAO and Gooeys community is of the utmost importance, even if it means needing to reallocate some resourcing mid-stream.

We’ll be sharing much more news and previews on Dogetribe as we get closer to 2024 — for now, fire up your multi-dimensional portal and start looking forward to a night at the tables with your slime-themed friends! Make sure you’re following the Gooeys Twitter, where we’ll be unveiling more about both Dogetribe and MetaVice over the upcoming weeks and months!

Nova DAO: Growth

Let’s be fair and frank — Nova DAO is a fresh slate, and is growing from the grassroots up. So, how do we grow a brand new community from these grounds?

While Studio Nova hopes to accelerate this with genuine yield growth and utility for our DAO, there’s a heavy reality to be accepted when it comes to just about any cryptoasset; word of mouth typically trumps all.

If you’re reading this, then congratulations — part of that responsibility also falls on you. There is no one single person who is tasked with growing a DAO; it’s a shared responsibility that falls on absolutely everyone within a DAO. It’s in the very name — your tokens are your ownership over the DAO. Decisions are shared, as are responsibilities.

Now, in saying that — Studio Nova will take every opportunity to promote Nova DAO wherever possible. It’s a given that we want as large a community as possible interacting with, and hopefully enjoying our products. If you want to simply support that side, it’s easy — interact with our tweets, share our content.

If you want to do more, there’s an infinite amount of ways you can help — from creating your own content on platforms like Medium and YouTube, or even just reply-guying on Twitter/X to let people know what Nova is all about. Literally everything helps; the snowball effect can’t start unless someone’s actually throwing the snowballs.

Nova DAO Rewards & Incentives

Don’t worry, we’re not tone-deaf enough to talk about taking on responsibilities without talking about the rewards too.

Under the structure of Nova DAO, we’re much more free in how we can operate user rewards. For one — we at Studio Nova and across the Nova Council strongly believe that alongside real yield, one of the biggest narratives moving forward in the crypto spaces is actual revenue/profit share across DAO constituents.

The crypto space right now is purely speculative — everything solely comes down to a token price, which is usually fed by a narrative of “who’s the marginal buyer”. In our own opinions, we strongly believe that the maturation of the crypto space will also come down to following what works in the TradFi space; such as earnings calls, and what would be akin to a dividend towards DAO constituents.

Currently, an “earnings call” in the crypto space would transcript similarly to “okay well we got rugged twice this week, but the community is great”. We strongly believe a shift in that narrative is coming; memecoins and purely speculative tokens will always be a thing, but that many users in the crypto space want to see a reason to hold their tokens outside of “pray it goes up and dump when it does”.

We believe that similar to what would be blue chip corporations, there must be a reason to hold tokens outside of pure speculation — and that reason must be something more than emission-based staking or reflections. It needs real yield, for real rewards.

Auto-LP & Treasury Growth

While we strongly believe that Studio Nova will be the highest contributor of protocol fees to Nova DAO overall, the $NOVA Token’s auto-tax of 3% set to split between the Nova DAO Treasury and Auto-LP ensures that there’s always a fully decentralized yield available to all Nova DAO participants.

Nova DAO’s LP, and all ETH received from this token tax entirely belongs to the DAO Treasury. This means that spend is fully dictated by the DAO; and this could range from running an ETH Validator to receive yield over time, or even just purchasing NFTs off the market to hold. Beyond that, the DAO Treasury could opt to fund liquidity on an exchange, or purchase listing/marketing options where viable.

In short; every single member of Nova DAO has a say in how the Treasury funds get spent, on whatever they want to spend them on — and every token trade from the market grows that treasury even more.

Everyone’s responsible for the decisions that are made by their DAO — if you’re the type to pick up tokens and ignore them entirely until there’s either a euphoric or depression-stage price move, then you’re in the wrong project. Grow and support your community — decentralized organizations are one of the few crypto space projects that can truly flourish for everyone involved, and that success is based solely on what you put into it.

At Studio Nova, we’ll without a doubt be putting in our share of that work.

Q&A

With thanks to everyone for the questions they’ve submitted via the Nova DAO Telegram. If you have any burning questions for Studio Nova or the Nova Council, please head over to @nova on Telegram, and let us know!

Q: Why Ethereum?

Currently, the vast majority of bridges to high-speed/low-gas chains offer little to no security; with recent issues such as Multichain’s exploit further adding to the doubts of a future where these bridges can continue to be relevant.

However, with more recent advents such as Chainlink’s CCIP, and Polygon’s zkEVM bridging moving to fully on-chain and provable solutions, we strongly believe that the day will come where we can safely allow $NOVA to become a multichain token.

Currently though, the highest security network is Ethereum — along with having the highest amount of volume, and the highest amount of liquidity. This affords Nova DAO the safest possible platform to grow on, while also allowing for cross-chain rewards or incentives via Snapshot. For example; in the hypothetical event of an airdrop for a game that we may launch on zkEVM or Arbitrum, we can average out multiple snapshots of Ethereum wallet holders and simply airdrop their rewards, or make them available via claimable contract based on those snapshot balances.

Q: Any strategic relationship with imgnAI?

No, there is no strategic relationship between Nova DAO and imgnAI.

Nova DAO holds 1% of the imgnAI supply, with DAO Consensus voting to ensure that this supply cannot be sold at a rate higher than 1 ETH per day, unless any other terms are agreed-upon (or an OTC offer is accepted) directly with the imgnAI team.

The imgnAI team are building what we believe to be an incredible product, with similar ambitions towards offering true value to their community through cutting-edge consumer facing products.

While there is no strategic relationship in place, there are without a doubt friendly relations between our respective teams and communities, which we hope will continue to be fostered.

Q: Marketing push contingent on passing any specific milestones?

Any marketing pushes would need to be proposed to, and ratified by Nova DAO. Currently we believe that our strongest assets are in development, and showcasing the quality of products that we can build through Studio Nova.

Studio Nova may elect to individually run marketing campaigns for new products that are released — but as we’ve mentioned before, quality of build often spreads more through word of mouth than anything else.

It’s also worth remembering that the market at this moment in time is seeing liquidity exit the space, rather than new faces enter; which can cause most advertising campaigns to be incredibly ineffective, especially with products in a “coming soon” stage.

As an example towards this; Studio Nova did purchase a small amount of ads via Etherscan along with our token listing update. While Etherscan is an extremely popular platform for all Ethereum users, the reality is that without new liquidity entering the space, word-of-mouth marketing tends to prove far more effective than any paid campaigns. Of course, this won’t be the case forever — and in time, Nova DAO may arrive at a junction where launching these campaigns could prove extremely viable.

Q: Why is there a time limit on converting tokens?

Firstly, our token bridge/conversion contracts are centralized. This is in order to ensure that tx’s can be manually verified before any tokens are emitted. This process would not be sustainable forever; and as such, a hard limit was placed on conversion times, as voted by DAO consensus.

Following this, additional limits were put in place to prevent against any arbitrage between the $Dogira and $NOVA tokens — distinctly drawing the line under these being entirely separate tokens with no relationship following the launch of $NOVA itself. The conversion service is as such only available for tokens that were held by users before the launch date of our bridging/conversion service.

It’s important to note that as the Dogira Community now operate via community-provided LP, it introduces a risk of token price manipulation; and any such negative pricing effect to occur after a manipulation period could cause floods of users attempting to arbitrage via any open conversion made available via $NOVA.

After a period of three months has passed from the date of our bridging/conversion services going live, these contracts will permanently disable — burning any remaining tokens at either side of the bridge. We have also ensured that conversions are not a two-way process, to further add notice to the fact that these are not related, or ecosystem-sharing tokens.

The Road Ahead

As you can tell, we’ve got a lot in store for everyone at Nova DAO — and we’re extremely eager to get everything rolled out.

While Studio Nova will continue in the dev trenches, the Nova Council remain at-hand to keep our community engaged, and growing throughout.

Remember as we noted above though — Studio Nova and the Nova Council will be giving 100% to Nova DAO, but for a successful DAO to flourish, that effort is needed from the entire community. And as that community grows, that responsibility gets spread and shared among more and more individuals and DAO constituents, all holding their own motivations towards the overall success of Nova DAO.

It’s a long road from the starting point of a brand new cycle, under a brand new community — but it’s a road that’s absolutely worth traveling.

If you’re not doing so already, make sure you’re following us on our socials (listed below), and making your home within the community — we’ve a lot to do, but the collectiveness of a community acting in unison makes it every bit more achievable.

Until next time, let’s hit the grind!

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Telegram: Nova
Discord: https://discord.gg/NovaDAO
Home: https://novadao.io