Flight of the Navigator Update v15.
Dear Semi… as well as the entire Bitcrush community as a whole,
Before jumping in I want to address anyone reading this without proper context.
I speak a lot about our community, and how amazing they are. This entire post is my Stan letter to my community, who I’m constantly in awe of. It was sparked by a heartfelt letter from a community member on the progress of the project from his perspective. Whereas many community members would likely just dump and leave, this member took quite some time to leave a very thorough account of his thoughts, and I take that sentiment very seriously.
I would say for myself, in all my crypto experience, there’s only one project I’ve been a part of that I’ve felt that sort of attachment to. I’ve been in it for over a year now, and the project has been through massive ups and downs, failures, changes in roadmap, changes in core tech, and so on. Yet still I persevere and hodl on. Whether they ever will deliver on their goals is yet to be seen, however what keeps me on board is their understanding of the bigger picture, their long term goals, their transparency, and the fact that no matter what I’ve come to realize they do in fact have their community’s best interest at heart. Even through their failures they’ve always done what they could to be upfront and honest, and do what they can to make it right with the community and push forward.
I’ve always told myself when my project gets up and running, my goal would be to navigate this wild space with that same regard. This is the reason for the title of these updates. Defi is a vast ocean of unrest that is constantly changing, so all we can do is buckle and navigate these murky depths the best we can.
As I go through these, I’ll attempt to explain the thought process behind every decision made with each of these points, however I’m the first to admit when mistakes are made. This is of course subjective, but hopefully it’ll help the community to understand exactly why we make the decisions we do.
For those who haven’t yet read the original post, you can find it here:
So let's address the first, and what I consider our biggest issue to date. This is the delivery of Dice Invaders (and what I would consider the entire launch process as a whole).
This is a particularly low point for myself and the project. It’s something that happens in the space occasionally, and honestly with new projects in general. The whole point of launching Bitcrush was I had a working product; Dice Invaders. We had done a beta launch using a 3rd party crypto payment system and it worked well. We knew we needed a bit of optimization so it could scale, but other than that it was playable, worked well, and was fun. When we decided to transition into Defi for the Bitcrush launch, the project manager who oversaw the original version was onboard, and brought on new team of devs who were versed in web3 to transition the project. However, as we began the process of transition, it became clear that a bigger overhaul would be needed for scaling our hybrid solution. This became a very long and heated process as time went on, but got to the point where everything was working well on test net, aside from some minor tweaks needed due to a few playability issues. It finally got to the point where the team was just entirely too problematic, so we decided not to delay launch anymore and pull the trigger knowing there may be issues with Dice Invaders that could be worked on post launch, as long as we had Dragon Games implemented properly.
What ended up happening is as soon as we launched we realized most of what they had built would not fare well in the wild, and I immediately fired, and off-boarded the team. I perhaps should have done this sooner, but I had been working with the project manager since 2019, and I believed in him as he had always overcome problems and delivered previously. It was unfortunate, but quickly resolved. It should be noted this problematic team was responsible for Dice Invaders and the hybrid API that interacts with the smart contracts, but not the smart contracts themselves. This means funds are SAFU and we can refine and solve bugs as we go. I encourage all bugs to be reported to mods as every bug solved just makes Bitcrush stronger.
In the end, this where Dice Invaders stands. It works, and the wallet connect issue was fixed by our super rad front-end/smart contract dev. The game is just too damn slow right now. We know how to fix it, and it’s on the list, but right now our core focus is fixing their buggy API fully. Additionally, other tasks that have come up that have taken priority, such as our lottery which is almost ready (audits finished already), introducing a BUSD live wallet so we can get upward pressure on price every time there profit to distribute, and the super exciting announcement coming pretty ASAP. I know I don’t have to reiterate, but we are a long term project, and sometimes we need to shuffle things around to prioritize the most important items. Honestly I love Dice Invaders, it was the first game I ever developed and can’t wait to launch it. In the end however, provably fair games have a house edge of 1%, which is great for the player, however for the platform and the stakers, rolling out games that are more profitable for the house such as slots and lottery, and protocols that increase $CRUSH price, are more important in the short term. That being said I have 2 other provably fair games ready to be developed, more on that in a bit.
Most importantly is that we are on track with our team. As mentioned, once we really understood what happened with the last team we shut it down immediately, and went into problem solving mode. It sucks, but the good news is our core team is solid, and we are now working with an amazing game dev team as well. This game team has tons of experience with MMOs, NFT games, web games, and so on. They’ll not only be working on fixing Dice Invaders and creating our new provably fair games, but we’re working on something awesome right now. While development will always face hurdles, I’m much more confident in our teams now and moving forward will feel different than it did before. The morale of our team has greatly improved since moving on.
I’ll address the partner assessments first together, and then independently. Firstly I want to discuss how partnerships work in this space. I think it's important as I wasn’t aware before starting this project, but it makes sense now that I’m involved.
First, I imagine everyone here knows the difference between pools and farms, but for those who may not be quite sure I’ll elaborate a bit.
Pools involve staking a single asset, and will generally pay out in the guest token. Meaning for the examples listed, you would stake for instance $BABY, and earn $CRUSH.
Farms are a combination of two assets to provide liquidity, and then staked to receive rewards, generally the host token. Again for this example, staking a $CRUSH/USDT LP on BabySwap you would earn $BABY.
The way this works is a 2 way street. On one hand, the more liquidity your project has staked, the more stable the price is. This is also good because the reward is paid out not in $CRUSH, but in the hosting token. However, for the hosting site, to make this fair, they require a pool for their users to stake and earn your token. This is generally calculated as close to 1:1 as possible. For instance if they are putting up $10k for their tokens for the $CRUSH farm, they will require a $CRUSH pool to be funded with $10k worth of $CRUSH as well. This is true for every partnership we’ve had, and will have in the future.
Trading is a zero sum game. Meaning, if you’re profiting, someone else is losing. It’s kind of the same thing here. If the hosting site is going to be giving rewards for helping us gain liquidity, they want something in return. It’s one of the reasons we never officially went with PancakeSwap. When we launched and looked into it, they required $200K worth of tokens (this quote was months ago and could very well be different now). The point is, yes I would rather keep $CRUSH rewards in house only, but it’s just not realistic in the way DeFi is currently structured. Pools are required to launch farms. That’s just how the system works. Any good partnership should go both ways regardless.
Let me break them down by platform discussed.
KnightSwap- Totally agree 10 out of 10 partnership. I don’t know if you noticed however, they do in fact have a $CRUSH pool. Stake $KNIGHT earn $CRUSH. Again, that’s just how it works. I’ll also wrap Wizard into this partnership as it’s the same team. We definitely love both of these projects, so look for some big announcements involving both on the way. Lot’s of partnership projects together in the near future.
ApeSwap- Ape helped launched us and we’ll always be in their debt. Just a rad team and platform overall. Again when we launched, it was required they have a Gnana pool to earn $CRUSH. Unsure if it’s still there, but it was the same deal. As far as new announcements, they’ve just been waiting for us to iron out the kinks with our product, and rightfully so. They have something lined up for us over the holidays. Keep an eye out.
CroxSwap- I definitely disagree here, but I understand how you might feel like this from the outside. Sometimes a partner is strategic. These guys are super cool, great devs, always willing to lend a hand to help out, and execute quicker than other project I’ve encountered. I think they’re another slow burn project that has a bright future. Did you know they’re getting ready to launch a cross chain bridge? They’ll be instrumental in helping us bridge as we roll out our new secret project. I really like these guys.
BabySwap- Agree with you here. Great project. Again they require a $CRUSH pool to host our farms so again it’s a 2 way street. Every time we renew our farm monthly, they require new $CRUSH for their pool. This is consistent with every project.
Wizard- I covered them above but just mentioning them to remind you to get your CG NFT if you haven’t yet. You’ll kick yourself later if you don’t!
BlockMine- These guys are super new so let’s see how it goes. But they seem really great so I have high hopes. Again because they're smaller, they actually create much less sell pressure than a larger partner like Baby. But yeah super excited to be partners.
PearZap- I’ll come back to them.
Beefy- I mean Beefy is a no brainer. They don’t ask for anything that any other platform doesn’t ask for. Their community is massive, and honestly the $CRUSH going to boost the farm is much lower than some of our other partnerships. Super excited to be a part of Beefy!
The point is, that any new partnership will require $CRUSH, just like every partner in the past. It’s just how Defi works. That being said, we’re super close to primarily ending our inflationary period. When I developed the tokenomics, I was aiming for all $CRUSH to be mined in about 8 months. Theres approx 2M more $CRUSH to mine in our staking pool which should last about 2 more months. That’s it. After that, the only way to get new $CRUSH will be Play 2 Earn (10M allocated total, although this will be a very slow burn and will require wagering to earn), being staked in our Staking Pool 2.0 and earning $CRUSH from game rewards, or just buying it. Additionally, this month we will be announcing our massive new use case for $CRUSH that we anticipate will be very bullish. Along with this announcement we’ll be updating everyone about what to expect with a deflationary $CRUSH and so on.
Finally let’s discuss the input on marketing. We definitely agree this is a very important matter. Moon and I are constantly discussing new campaigns and ways to grow the project.
There are 2 categories to discuss here; acquisition, and retention.
Retention is essentially keeping the community happy, by running contests, give aways, and doing everything we can to keep everyone updated while expanding the project. While we have been having a lot of sells lately, every decision I make is based on how I can reward our holders, and ensuring sellers get rekt. It’s why I don’t like to announce new products, as people will take advantage of the news to pump and dump. That being said, I think I could be more interactive with the community as a whole, and try to be more consistent with these updates. I try, but mainly my focus is getting product out as it’s the most effective way to increase price and therefore keep morality high. I’ll continue to work on making these updates more consistent however.
Acquisition is much more difficult, and one we need to be careful about.
Here’s why-
I told you I’d come back to Pearzap. It really sucks watching those guys go down the way they did. One of the things that happened is they spent too much on a marketing push, that didn't create enough traction. Having spent years as a business owner in the real world, I’ve seen this time and time again. Nothing will tank a project faster than ineffective marketing campaigns. Right now crypto marketing funds just charge a stupid amount (some require over $250k), and there’s no guarantees. Did you know the PearZap team were previously a crypto marketing firm? Yeah, they knew exactly what they were doing and it still didn’t work. That sucks. The amount of scams and greed out there is wild. Additionally, DeFi users have product fatigue. How many ads for new projects do you see daily that you ignore? A lot. It’s difficult to reach new users via ads. People are very focused on making quick a quick buck, or being part of the next big thing, yet very ad promises to be the next big thing. We’re in a difficult time marketing in Defi. That being said we constantly have ads on several different platforms, in an attempt to target the users that are best for us. We’re constantly A/B testing ads, placements, and platforms. Right now the most effective method of marketing is word of mouth, influencers, and new partners. We’ve engaged some influencers to test them out. As mentioned in the post, we’re seeking out the mid-tier influencers as it seems to be the best engagement for the price. You should be seeing an influencer post about Bitcrush any day, as he was meant to publish 2 days ago but got held up. We’re moving with very careful intention here. Just like ads, some influencers both on Twitter and Youtube just don’t deliver. However, we have youtube influencers, twitter influencers, and more we engage and work with. As we test and find solid avenues that convert, we will absolutely increase the budget to these channels However we won’t do a scatter shot approach and hope something sticks. It’s dangerous in this space, so it’s about treading carefully.
I want to wrap it up here as I can go on and on, but I also don’t want to give too much away. If there are any takeaways, it this:
Every decision we make is how to make Bitcrush the biggest and best platform ever. I’ve been around since before the last bull run, and I intend to make sure Bitcrush lasts until well beyond the next few bull runs. This is why we make moves deliberately, and carefully. It’s why I have no problem pulling something down for maintenance, or testing our an influencer before dumping funds into something untested. We won’t allow ourselves to get into a TreasureKey scenario by rolling out something we don’t understand. We won’t get into a PearZap situation where trying to expand rapidly causes our downfall. We have too much planned that is currently in process. Our updated roadmap is rolling out soon, and we have tons of games slotted, and much much more.
I understand that right now things feel dire. Trust me, no one feels it more than I do. That being said I’m so excited for where we’re heading, and I really think everyone in our community will be too. Now that we’re finally getting issues resolved, we’re gearing up for expansion, our team is expanding, and things are in motion.
Look, I understand it’s DeFi and there’s a ton of opportunity out there. Every day projects pump and dump. If you have to go I’ll never hold it against you. I just want to reassure everyone that this project is just now finally starting to take its first breaths. In the end, no project is ever guaranteed success, all we can do is come together to navigate the unknown future and ride it to potential new heights. I hope that this can be one of your long term projects, and that the transparency that I attempt to have with the community can help inspire confidence to just hang in there.
Again, to all my amazing community, I’m your biggest Stan, and everything I do is with you in mind.
We’re all in this together, so let’s;
