Flight of the Navigator Update v18

“$NICE” “sale” “bro”…

It’s important for me to preface this by saying the project is still moving forward, so the following does not affect the status of Bitcrush or the Invaderverse.

That being said, this sale was a disaster. We’re pulling the plug Asap to put it out of it’s misery. Disaster is putting it lightly. This was a complete dumpster fire. You know me well enough to know I’ll own up to any issues that arise. And this is without a doubt one of the biggest L’s we’ve taken so far.

I think a post-mortem is necessary in cases like this, so we can analyze what happened, make changes, and move forward so it does not happen again. Please understand that these are not excuses, and we acknowledge the failure of this sale lies solely with us as a team.

Let’s dig in to some issues…

For one the market sucks. That being said, some projects do well, and some don’t right now. Some are utter disasters like ours was. I did talk to someone from a large partner project today who did say that an Animoca brand just ran an IDO with them and they barely hit their goal. Animoca is one of the biggest backers in GameFi, and the fact they had trouble is telling. Still, they had success, and our sale was a joke. This doesn’t make up for anything.

Another issue was our whitelist didn’t convert. We can blame the Call Groups and Amas for sending bots, and so on, but we went so far as to manually gather addresses from people who showed interest in chat, and those still didn’t convert. Additionally we know people who use those same groups to raise funds successfully, so again we can’t really place blame here.

In my opinion I think we had 2 main contributing factors. I’ve already spoken to the team about this, but here they are.

1. Too little too late- We have been busting our ass working to grow the community these last few weeks in preparation for the sale. But it just wasn't enough time and effort given to build a solid core foundation we could rely on to launch.
2. Contract FUD- Due to our pivot to BSC for the raise, we weren’t ready to launch our audited FTM bridge yet, and so the minting function remains. While I think we’ve earned the trust of our community with the launch of $CRUSH and renouncing the token when it was time, we hoped this good will would transfer. Unfortunately it did not. While we had our audit posted on Pinksale, their independent audits listed big warnings on our sale page. We contacted their auditors and updated them on the situation, sent them our audits, and they said they understood, but unfortunately made no changes to the warning. TBH If there was a project I hadn’t been involved with, and they had this warning, I would 100% skip it as well. We do believe this to be a big reason for the disparity between interested parties and actual contributors.

For those curious, here is explanation from our CTO as to why the minting function is currently still in the contract:

Bridging and fair distribution, I’ll elaborate on this.

Bridging because NICE has a home in all chains and no chain is considered the main chain so as our community swaps between chains we are removing that token effectively from the originator chain and minting it on the receiver. We also want to give the opportunity to you guys to make money on playing the arbitrage which the market will help balance out pricing across chains.

Fair distribution, although this sounds counter intuitive I would like you to check the modifier on the mint function. It’s called onlyMinters we are allowing 2 types of contracts to be minters,Bridge and MasterChef (which were redubbing GalacticChef) for pool/farm rewards, keep an eye out for this as we’re launching it soon after sale ends, P2E also is considered a Chef, our chefs have the max emission set and will control the emissions and we guarantee that as we grow and expand to other chains the emissions will dilute accordingly. At this point owner is part of these minters as we're still building, once our bridges and chefs are deployed and set, we’ll proceed to remove ourselves as minters and renounce ownership. We also want to be transparent about who is a Minter so we added an event called “MinterEdit” so we know who is added/removed as a minter and when.

In the end, here is the big take-away…

So F*cking What?

Honestly if you can’t take failure you shouldn’t be in business, own a project, or really set out to accomplish lofty goals. Does failure sting? Yes. Is it embarrassing? F*ck yes. Does it change anything? Yeah actually it does. It helps you understand what isn’t working. It’s a reminder that our work is just getting started and it’s never going to be easy. It’s a slap in the face and a wake up call. That’s not a bad thing.

So here’s what’s next. We’re doing this shit oldschool. Shutting the sale down Asap. On Tuesday or Wednesday we will be getting our farms back from audit. There may be a few days of revisions so don’t FUD, but we’re shooting for mid-next week. Once that happens we will be adding liquidity, and launching $NICE, along with our pools/farms, as well as partner pools/farms that we’re setting up now (TBA).

Starting this week we will begin whitelisting for our Emperor NFT minting in a few weeks. To avoid whitelist bots and people taking up pointless whitelist space, we will be requiring a deposit to whitelist. This is an oldschool tactic from the last bullrun that allows us to gauge actual interest. The deposit will be applied to the sale, and if you don’t get into the minting, you will be refunded. There’s only 75 Emperors for sale, so we only want interested parties. Our marketing team is ready to begin pushing the NFT minting which will take place in about a month, and this will involve giveaways, lottery, gamified social growth etc. This will always bring in bots unfortunately, but the current state of Defi makes that impossible to avoid at this point. This increased engagement is invaluable for marketing efforts, as well as PR releases, influencer engagement, and more. Additionally, we’ll slowly begin releasing some sneak peaks of the game next week, and that will increase over time.

The point is, this energy we’ve had over the last few weeks needs to continue indefinitely. Any marketing efforts will ultimately bring in bots and scams, but our goal moving forward is to continue to build the community organically and develop a solid foundation. As always, any constructive ideas are always appreciated.

Normally I would close with a “Crush It” graphic but it doesn’t feel appropriate today.

Instead, I’ll just say it’s time to get back to basics and back on track.