ICYMI: League of Ancients Yield Farming AMA — Recap & Winners
The incident during our Yield Farming launch has definitely raised a lot of interesting questions from our LOAders. Thankfully, these issues were resolved quickly by our tech team, and to ensure that our community is fully in the loop with the latest developments, we’ve decided to put our Product Development Lead, Sir Ken, into the hot seat to answer the queries and concerns of the community.
In case you missed it, here’s a recap of all the questions and answers to the session.
Date: 7th June 2022 (Tuesday)
Time: 12pm UTC
Platform: League of Ancients’ Official Discord
Host: Alejandra (LOA Community Lead)
Guests: Sir Ken (LOA Product Development Lead)
Why did your Yield Farming launch go wrong even though the audit was submitted?
There was nothing wrong with the audit. The cause of these issues were mainly due to our reward calculation function that resulted in very small reward distribution values (close to 0). These reward distribution values are determined by the total amount staked, in which we did not anticipate the overwhelming response of tokens staked when we went live. During our internal testing, the amount of tokens was much smaller.
It seems like the contracts were not tested enough and this issue could have been avoided. Will the team be looking to do a testnet bounty program or sorts for the experienced investors in upcoming launches?
Yes. A testnet bounty program is in the works for upcoming phases of our marketplace. The mechanics and candidate selection process is still in discussion, so stay tuned for the official announcement.
Yield farming is a difficult practice that puts both borrowers and lenders at danger of financial loss. Users are at a greater risk of temporary loss and price slippage when markets are volatile. How will you ensure that yield farming remains sustainable?
Our main focus right now is the LOA-BUSD liquidity pool. We’re working on bringing in new investors and community members to stake in this pool to improve liquidity. The higher the liquidity for LOA-BUSD, the lower the price impact on $LOA, hence stabilising the token value.
The community also contributes to a part of a project’s success. How does the $LOA team plan to improve on engagement and communication to the community and investors?
Rest assured that our moderators are regularly prepped by the core team with necessary info to assist the community with any queries. The Investor Relations team is also consistently engaging with partners and providing them with updates and progress on the project.
However, there is still much to improve from the LOA team. We will be working on our communication and engagement with the community by introducing more events where the community can be part of the development of the project. Such as testnet bounties etc.
What strategies does the team have in place to overcome bearish market conditions and ensure that milestones can be completed according to timeline? Although we are halfway through our milestones, the current market condition is unpredictable. Which means it could still maintain its bearish state in the coming months. Other projects tend to delay things which, in a way, declines investors’ confidence.
Our development will not be hindered, as we have allocated a specific budget for each milestone and product that we’re going to release. However the launch dates on the roadmap will have to be adjusted accordingly.
With the recent lesson we’ve learned in our yield farming launch, the team wants to ensure that every aspect of the product is ready before we officially release it to the public. We want to launch a product that will instill confidence in our users and make a good impact on the project, even if it means adjusting or even delaying the roadmap.
Will we be able to see daily updates of the current circulating supply? We know that CMC is not updated and verified for the $LOA token.
Yes, we are currently working on that. We might be using Coingecko’s platform as our reference for the circulating supply display, as it is one of the most accurate ones available in the market. It will be reflected in our Treasury Pool once we launch the next phase of the marketplace, so do stay tuned to our patch notes.
Why is there such a large percentage of withdrawal tax? Sites like Biswap or PCS offer 0% for staking just a couple of days compared to 181 days on your main site. With that said, staking looks extremely unattractive. Can this be explained and will there be any bonuses for stakers during this half year period?
The fees are to encourage long-term holders, so that people don’t just dump our tokens after a small profit. In the meantime, the team is in talks to organise events and campaigns that will reward long-term holders in the future.
If there were only bugs found in Yield Farming, why do you need to create a new smart contract in order to fix the bugs?
The initial issues identified were on the front end UI, hence the visual bugs as we updated on our socials. However, as we dive deeper after fixing these bugs, we discovered that the reward calculation in the smart contract was the main cause. Since the initial contract has been deployed, we needed to re-deploy a new one to resolve the calculation issue.
Is there a limit to the quantity of total $LOA staked to maintain higher APR? As long as the tokens are staked, will it gain throughout the period even if you stake it for years?
There are no limits in staking amounts. We do not have a compounding function in both our farms, however we introduced the LOA single staking pool so that users are able to compound their harvested rewards in this pool to increase their gains.
Feels like we should’ve protested the re-purposing of the term “staking” from being a reward for work in a consensus mechanism, with risk of losing collateral, into this current “just lock it off market to receive more coins risk-free.” It’s staking except it doesn’t actually do anything — your position is not “at stake”, and it provides no benefit to the system, technical or otherwise, perhaps besides the financial benefit for existing holders of less liquid sellers.
How does LOA solve this problem?
Honestly, I do not think that this is an issue. People will stake and lock their tokens because they believe in the project and they’re willing to support it long-term. This will actually have a positive impact on the token price. Having more TVL means an increase in liquidity in our pool ($LOA-BUSD), which will reduce the price impact and volatility of the token.
It’s also easier to attract new investors to join in, they prioritise the token value and price at first glance. If the token price and value is healthy, investors will feel more confident in investing on our project.
As the liquidity APR goes down, is it possible that the amount of APR is going to go to zero? Will the stakers reduce the amount of gains? How do you manage or balance the situation and bring us a healthy farm?
No, the APR will never go to zero, as long as the token value is maintained and there are rewards constantly being added into the smart contract. However, there is a chance that your current rewards will be reduced in the future due to the increase of liquidity, but that is expected for all yield farming protocols. Having high liquidity in our farms will generally increase the token value in the long-run, benefiting those who have staked early or who are currently staking in the Liquidity Pool.
Will the game run in an off-chain or on-chain server? With all the problems in the yield farming launch, it shows that the dev team isn’t experienced with smart contracts, and I am worried that the same disaster will occur if it were to run on an on-chain server.
The game itself will run on an off-chain server. Everything else on-chain related to Web 3.0 will happen in our NFT Marketplace .
Will the 60-day duration for capsule staking be adjusted if there’s a delay in the marketplace? We would like to have some capsules unlocked for the alpha or beta release.
Yes, there will be necessary adjustments done that will ensure the staking period is adjusted based on alpha/beta launch (depending on which version the NFT Skin will make its appearance in the game).
According to the current roadmap, we have a short period of time to yield farm before we start collecting our tokens to stake and unlock capsules. Since there’s no info on how many tokens we can earn by staking NFTs or playing in the Alpha/Beta version, there’s a risk that once the game releases there will be a small amount of people to engage in NFT matches due to the staking requirements to unlock skins. Does the team have a plan for that?
Staking NFTs is similar to yield farming, we cannot determine how much hash power will reward you with how many tokens. It depends on the number of NFTs being staked. For the staking requirements, we do have a back-up plan that will follow the release of the game to ensure that people are ready with their unlocked NFT skins to use in-game.
NFT Staking is similar to yield farming — we cannot determine the rewards based solely off hash power as it depends on the number of NFTs being staked at the time as well. As for staking requirements, we do have a back-up plan to ensure that everyone is ready and equipped with NFTs for NFT matches following the official game release.
Sir Ken, where do you see LOA in after the bear market? Would like to know your perspective.
I still see LOA thriving in a bear market, due to the fact that we have the right fundamentals and we’re based on a game that is played by 300 million players all around the world. People love to play and win games even though they’re not earning anything from it. Growth and impact will grow especially when our game officially launches.
Is it possible to earn more LOA tokens by just staking a small amount? I’m a beginner and I hope you can share some of your thoughts.
This is dependent on the share you hold in the pool among the rest of the stakers. If your share is relatively small, then the rewards you earn from staking will be smaller. However, don’t be discouraged! Since you’re an early investor, give it time and eventually the tokens you have earned will also grow in value as LOA completes its milestones. It will be worth a lot more in the future than it is now.
With less than a month left in Q2, will the team be able to deliver the remaining features of the NFT marketplace? (MP, NFT Staking, Fusion etc)
The team is already working on the next phase of the marketplace. There are many external conditions that are out of our control, hence we have adjusted the timeline to cater for such conditions (audits, market conditions, unexpected bugs etc). Delays are inevitable sometimes, as we want to ensure that the product is ready as well as announcing it along with better market conditions to maximise the impact for all our stakeholders.
Is NFT Staking the same as token staking? Where there are daily allocated tokens to be released as staking rewards.
Yes. As you can see in our tokenomics, 8% of tokens are allocated specifically for NFT staking. This pool of 80 million tokens will be distributed daily in the form of rewards to stakers. Just like yield farming, whoever mints their capsules and stakes their skins early will definitely get a higher APR from that 8% that’s being released.
I find that many game projects have promised to deliver many things, but they don’t turn out to be what they’ve set out to be. As an investor, my concern is that there hasn’t been any solid proof of work on the game development side. Will you be looking to update the community more often on this matter?
The reason why we haven’t been showing much game dev as of now is because we were more focused on Yield Farming and all the other marketplace features. But when we move on to the next phase of the project, we’ll definitely be updating the community more often on game dev progress.
In fact, we’re going to have a very exciting announcement coming soon. Our game development lead — Gavin will be live streaming in Discord on a biweekly basis, sharing game updates and progress with the community. It’s going to be exciting, as there will be sneak peeks of footage and in-game assets — maybe even a live demo of some gameplay!
We’ll also be happy to take questions, so think of it as an AMA with a screen sharing session. If biweekly isn’t enough and you guys are hungry for more, we can definitely look into scaling it into a faster, more exciting pace. Just reach out to us in Discord and let us know.
Will there be a display of the specific withdrawal fees required for stakers in the next UI/UX update?
Yes, that will be coming in the next patch update. In the future, you will be able to see the exact amount of withdrawal fees required according to how many days you’ve staked in our farms.
What will happen to Yield Farming after 5 years when the allocated tokens have been depleted? Will it be removed or are there any other plans in place?
Eventually, the pool will definitely run out. But this is also the reason why we have a treasury pool, where there is an option for us to introduce secondary tokens or even governance in the future. Governance will allow stakeholders to vote and propose to allocate the treasury funds into Yield Farming rewards for example.
Rest assured, there are many alternatives we have in place to maintain and encourage the staking feature in our ecosystem.
What are your plans to maintain or even raise the price of $LOA?
To do so, we have to encourage holders to keep our tokens for the utilities, hence we’re already working on the next few phases of the marketplace features. As mentioned earlier we are also going to update the community more often on the game development side of things, especially nearer to the Alpha test. Marketing also plays a huge role in bringing our project to new audiences and introducing them to buyers who would be willing to invest in our LOA.
Any plans for a scholarship program?
Yes, we are currently in talks with many reputable guilds to partner with for a specific scholarship program. Our partnerships team can answer this question in detail closer to the release of the program.
This has been one of the most exciting and engaging AMAs we’ve had so far — even Sir Ken was impressed by the interesting questions raised during the session!
We hope we’ve managed to answer your questions and help assuage some of your fears. We’re definitely looking forward to communicating with you more, so we’ll see you guys in Discord very soon.
Don’t forget to follow our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to get the latest updates and see what goes on behind the scenes of making a high quality NFT 5v5 MOBA game on the blockchain.
AMA Contest Winners
Of course, the moment everyone’s been waiting for. The 10 lucky winners who were chosen to win 200 $LOA each!
And the winners are *drumroll*:
- CristinaJatoba#4534
- Investcrypto#4704
- FRESTMon#5383
- blackma301198#5152
- sssssf#3237
- Xenothious#0870
- slapsoul#9741
- Private#5120
- Andy (UK) — AnDAO (GAME/DE-FI)#8164
- Zy (ZoSHY)#8050
Congratulations and thank you for all these great questions! If you’re one of the winners, remember to check your email and Discord DMs to claim your prizes!
If you would like to find out more about League of Ancients, visit our website at www.leagueofancients.com, and join our Discord at https://discord.gg/loa
