Welcome to Recap AMA IgniteCrypto & RealityCards #AMASeries
On 03 Oct 2022, Ignite Crypto and RealityCards together to host an Ask me Anything (AMA) chat with the community. The following is a summary of the content of the entire AMA.
Admin: Today, we are honored to invite Mr.Daniel Chilvers — CEO RealityCards, to attend our AMA event in the program held at the IgniteCrypto community.
Hopefully, Daniel will bring us a lot of information about RealityCards projects, roadmaps and future plans to everyone.
Part 1: Introduction RealityCards and Guests. Some general questions about the RealityCards.
OP: Question 1: What is Reality Cards? Can you tell everyone why you created the Reality Cards ?
Mr.Daniel Chilvers:
Great starting point. Reality Cards is the world’s first NFT-based prediction market. What really sets us apart from other projects is what we are calling the “rent bidding” mechanism which I’ll touch on in a sec.
In terms of how it started. A part of the inspiration came from Augur.net — which was the first global decentralised prediction market on Ethereum.
Reality Cards was created by Andrew Stanger, who had been following the various Eth Prediction markets ever since the Augur ICO, but was disappointed by their low liquidity. He started exploring other mechanics and looked at different economic models that Ethereum had made possible.
As part of his research he looked at Harberger Tax and how it was used with NFTs in a project called “This artwork is always on sale”, this was a unique project where a piece of art is literally “always on sale”, this is using harberger taxation which was the direct inspiration for Reality Cards
OP: Question 2 : I find your model very new compared to the current NFT betting market, so how does the system work?
What will the participating users need and what actions will be taken?
Mr.Daniel Chilvers:
-So I mentioned the “rent-bidding” mechanism in the last answer, this is really what sets Reality Cards apart from other prediction markets out there. I’ll need to expand a little on that.
-To take part in our events a user will need to have a crypto wallet (typically Metamask) installed, unlocked, and set to the Polygon network. Additionally the user must own some MATIC (to pay gas fees), and some USDC to deposit.
-To explain how it works we will use an example:
Lets use Gavin and Vitalik, I’m sure we’ve heard of them 😜.
Lets say they both want to take part in a prediction event “Will MetaMask launch a token by December 31st, 2022?”
Gavin thinks they will, so instead of simply placing a bet that MetaMask will launch a token, Gavin will own the “Metamask will launch a token” NFT.
The longer Gavin owns the NFT, the higher his winnings will be in the case his prediction is correct.
Now, there is only a single NFT associated with each outcome. So only one person can own it at each time. Therefore if Gavin owns the “Metamask will launch a token” NFT he would be the only person in the world to do so. Pretty unique right?
The takeaway here is that these outcomes can be owned outright, they can only be rented. At any time, are owned by whoever is willing to pay the highest rental price.
That being said, if Gavin is currently renting the NFT, someone… maybe Vitalik, can take it off him at any time by paying a higher rental price (which is at least 10% over what Gavin is currently paying). This is where the “always on sale” mechanic comes from.
The rental payments they make create the prize pot for the event on which the users are wagering. In the above example the daily rental payment from everyone owning the “Metamask will launch a token NFT” and “Metamask won’t launch a token” outcomes are all combined into that same winning pot.
-To avoid having to pay manually every day, Reality Cards allows used to make a deposit to cover future rental payments, Any unused deposits can be withdrawn at any time.
As time passes, rent will gradually be taken out of your deposit balance (if you are the owner).
-Now. If somebody does end up renting the outcome that you owned, that doesn’t mean you lost a chance at owning a part of the outcome. The way Reality Cards rewards those who chose the correct outcome is by splitting the total pot to every user who held the winning outcome card, regardless of when they owned it.
Each users share of the total pot is determined by how long they owned the winning card.
OP: Question 3: Come on, let’s talk about the technical points of the project
On what platform are RealityCards’ NFTs currently being built?
Mr.Daniel Chilvers: So for the technical stuff. We originally started Reality Cards on Eth mainnet, however as with many projects a couple of years ago the gas fees were hurting too much. So we looked at side chains, the first that came to mind and we used for a long time was xDai (now Gnosis). However we had some issues here and there, the community we’re too happy with how things were running so we decided to make a move to Polygon as this was the most requested chain from our users.
Polygon made a lot of sense for us, it has a high number of dApps supported there, in addition to having a large amount of TVL, I think around $1.35B USD, which at the time of transition was nearly $8B USD.
These two factors went hand in hand and gave immediate value to our users.
By supporting a large number of dApps, it’s much easier to Reality Card winners to spend their winnings in-ecosystem. Additionally, with a higher TVL it was much more likely that users already had funds on the chain, eliminating the need to transfer assets.
Another thing to note is that, one of the many dApps that supports Polygon is OpenSea, this allows users to stay within the same ecosystem after winning on Reality Cards. They can sell or auction their NFT on the open market without having to bridge or transfer out-of-network. (although this is certainly possible, if you want to).
OP: So in the future do you guys plan to work on other networks? Besides, how does the payment structure or ways to proceed can create an event to participate in renting NFT?
Mr.Daniel Chilvers
-Certainly we are always keeping an eye out for other networks. We haven’t ruled out the possibility of running across multiple networks simultaneously although until we see larger volumes that adds problems with liquidity and arbitrage between them.
-Right now we are pretty happy on Polygon. But as we’ve run on Polygon using ERC20 tokens as our main currency. We also ran on xDai using the DAI native token as our currency. We already have all the contracts ready to move to pretty much any chain. Maybe even on to mainnet…
-One of the thing we have in the works, all our contracts are meta-transaction compliant. So once we turn that on, it shouldn’t really matter what chain you are connected to. You can just sign the transaction on wallet and the relayer will handle the rest.
-So anybody can take part in the events. They only need USDC and Matic on the Polygon network. Right now we are going to be running more curated events where we think the community have more of an interest. But over time we are migrating control over to the token holders. Eventually holding our token will be the key to creating your own events, or voting on which events you want approved. Ultimately we want to move all the control over and become a DAO.
I’m sure we’ll cover more about that later, as I assume there’ll be plenty of token questions.
OP: Question 4: After 2 years of launching, what memorable numbers have you achieved so far? Will your development strategy in the near future change to match reality? such as Web3 or metaverse
Mr.Daniel Chilvers:
Nice question.
-When we founded the company in Q1 of 2020, our goal was to create the world first NFT prediction market where real-world events could be turned into collectibles. This dream came true for us during the Alpha phase of Reality Cards. Released to a small group of whitelisted users in Q3 of 2020, the initial version of Reality Cards gave users a look into the potential of our company.
-Since then, we’ve reached a series of milestones.
- Successfully launched the MVP (minimum viable product)
- Game theory proved to be intuitive, fun and logical.
- First real money prizes were won
- First events started and finished
-While our company was very pleased with the results of the Alpha, we know that improvements must be made in order to achieve the vision that we had when we began the journey. We took feedback from the Alpha users, made a series of adjustments, and prepared to release the Beta version of Reality Cards in Q3 2021.
-The Beta proved to be a bit success, as we saw a lot of growth throughout this phase of our company.
- 10,000+ event participations in the last year
- 80+ unique events successfully completed
- $400,000+ USDC win across all events
- 400+ NFTs won
One of the larger reasons for the success of the Reality Cards Beta was the introduction of a series of new features. These concepts drastically improved our user experience and made out company more accessible than ever before.
- Running several events simultaneously from a shared deposit, as opposed to just one at a time
- Adding support for over 75 wallets through WalletConnect as well as popular wallets like Metamask, Block wallet and Coinbase wallet.
- Releasing larger events with 40+ Cards at a time
- Unveiling a new format where the top 10 users on the winning leaderboard receive an NFT
- Introducing a 1 of 1 NFT that is awarded to the top user on the winning leaderboard.
We hope to keep on expanding these features and improving by listening to the community advice in line with how we have been doing so far.
OP: Question 5: Recently, you have introduced the Cards.io brand to everyone. So can you tell us about it?
Mr.Daniel Chilvers : Certainly. Cards.io is the umbrella term for all our products that will be offered by the company formerly known as Reality Cards, this is what we are now calling the team that created these products. This will include Reality Cards, Launch Cards (which is our own custom token launchpad) and any future products 🙊 that incorporate the rent-bidding mechanism that is the basis of Reality Cards.
With this change, all of the Cards.io products will be living under one domain with the shared contracts. These contracts will allow you to navigate through all of the Cards.io website with one account and deposit, meaning that you will not need to switch accounts or make separate deposits when playing multiple Cards.io products. We feel that this creates the most simple and enjoyable Cards.io experience!
Another thing to note is that, Reality Cards will also be releasing our very own CARDS token in the near future!
Releasing a token has always been a goal of ours, and we are excited to finally see this vision become a reality.
OP: Bringing it all into focus under the Cards.io brand or as we call it AllInOne, what benefits will it bring to users? Besides, how is your CARDS Token issuance process now?
Mr.Daniel Chilvers: The CARDS token will be a governance token that improves all of our products, empowers our community, and supports our long-term vision.
Essentially the CARDS token will allow active members of the community own a stake in Cards.io and become a part of our family.
So, a question you might have is “How to I get my hands on one of these tokens?”
There will be a total of 10M CARDS tokens, there will be an initial sale to a whitelist of users before the general public can purchase them. Getting a spot on the whitelist is simple if you’ve played the Reality Cards Beta, as all those users will be able to participate in the pre-sale.
IF, you did not play the Reality Cards Beta, you can still join the whitelist for our token sale. Various contests and opportunities will be announced on the Reality Cards Discord and Twitter pages, so be sure to follow us on these platforms for important updates about the token and the whitelist.
Part 2: Twitter on Questions
OP: Question 1:Can you tell us some of the use-cases of the tokens in your platform? What are the uses of these tokens in your platform and in the market? What are the benefits when buying and holding your tokens for a long period of time?
Mr.Daniel Chilvers: The CARDS token will be a governance token that improves all of our products, empowers our community, and supports out longer term vision. Essentially the CARDS token will allow active members of our community to own a stake in Cards.io and become part of the family.
A quick example of how this empowers the community would be that CARDS token holders will be able to help curate and decide which prediction markets we run on Reality Cards and for how long for. With the end game being that they run the whole company as a DAO.
There are some other side benefits. Like when you partake in events on Reality Cards you are also earning a small amount of CARDS tokens over time. If you hold a certain amount of tokens already you can boost these rewards.
OP: Question 2:Launching projects in a bull run is much more profitable than during the bear cycle. In a bear run where most of the projects fail and sometimes go into oblivion, how will it stand the test of time? What strategies does the @RealityCards project employ to mitigate possible losses?
Mr.Daniel Chilvers:hmm… Launching in a Bull run is certainly easier as there is generally more money flowing around. Although it can have harsh consequences when that run is over as you’ve suddenly ended up way over-valued. As long as the bear market isn’t actively crashing then it isn’t too bad to launch. Especially if launching a utility token it can give your token time to stabilise and establish a great use-case without flooding it full of holders just waiting to flip.
Reality Cards has already stood quite the test of time. We started over 2 years ago when we were in a bear market, we saw through the bull run but didn’t just cash grab and spin up the token until we decided we had a genuine use case. We feel like now we have been working on it long enough, we have polished up the protocol and we have everything ready and lined up. Now we are ready to launch the token, it wasn’t decided purely by market conditions.
OP: Question 3:Can you explain in more detail about “@RealityCards”? Is this launchpad specific to GameFi projects only or is it across multiple sectors? How can you minimise costs and other common issues that most launch pads experience? And what makes your launch pad different?
Mr.Daniel Chilvers: Ahh, this is about Launch Cards, our upcoming Launchpad. We will of course be selling the CARDS token on our own Launchpad.
Right now we haven’t specifically targeted one sector, so yes it will be across multiple sectors.
We do think that it makes logical sense that we are a Polygon project so our primary target projects would be on the Polygon network also, but this doesn’t have to be exclusive.
We will be using the rent-bidding mechanism. Which means the longer you rent the NFT for, the more tokens you are earning. This is an entirely new mechanic for a launchpad. We believe that this mechanism should help find an early price prediction. Think of it like taking the mechanics of a Dutch auction (where the price is constantly decreasing) but with ours you don’t need to wait for the price to fall. You can bid at your own price and earn the tokens over time.
Also, because the tokens are being earned over time, there isn’t the crazy rush to secure them all at the start, so gas wars shouldn’t be an issue for us.
OP: Question 4:Can you tell us some of the remarkable ways to earn more #CARD in your platform? What are the benefits of buying your tokens especially now that we are in a bear market? What are the advantages of holding #CARD for a long time?
Mr.Daniel Chilvers: Probably the easiest way to earn the CARDS token (aside from purchasing on LaunchCards.io) would be taking part in the events on RealityCards. When you rent one of our NFTs we will be awarding users tokens the longer they rent it for. So not only are you getting the NFT at the end of the event, if you make the correct prediction you get a share of the prize pot, but ALSO you are earning CARDS tokens the whole time.
I’d say that buying in a bear market makes a lot of sense if you think we’re near the bottom. Bull markets offer over-inflated prices. Regardless, if you’re earning CARDS tokens by taking part in making predictions then although you might not think they have value now, when the Bull market does come (and it will) then you’ll be happy.
Holding the CARDS tokens will give governance over the protocol, helping make decision on how we grow, what products or features we launch next. There is a more immediate benefit in that holders of the token can boost the rewards they are earning when taking part in Reality Cards.
So, earn tokens by taking part, holding tokens means earning more tokens. Repeat. Simples
OP: Question 5:What is your revenue model? In which ways do you generate revenue/profit? So many projects just like to speak about the “long term vision and mission” but what are your short term objectives? What are you focusing on right now?
Mr.Daniel Chilvers: The revenue model will vary by the product we are talking about.
Reality Cards the prediction market will eventually be taking a small percentage of the prize pot for each event, this is to help maintain and keep everything running. If you take a look at some of our competitors like Polymarket, they aren’t having any problems in this area! But we want to offer more than they do, as well as adding a different mechanism we have added the NFTs and the other features we have been talking about.
Launch Cards is slightly more straightforward, we will be vetting the tokens we launch on the platform and to use the platform projects will have to either pay a fee, or grant us some tokens.
Right now however the focus is on getting the CARDS token distributed in the right way. We are doing final testing on the LaunchCards website (as we will sell the token there). We have Reality Cards up and ready, we have just been finishing off a UX overhaul of it (to be unveiled next week). After that we will be focusing on the next products.
Part 3: Live Question
OP: Question 1: Truly, you’ve done AMA in many telegram groups, so what next, what other way will you make your project more popular?
https://t.me/IgniteCrypto/921787
Mr.Daniel Chilvers:
-I haven’t yet done many AMA’s, this is one of my first. But I do have many more booked in over the coming days/weeks.
-Building Reality Cards was primarily a technical challenge, we initially hired developers — not marketers. We wanted to make sure that firstly the game theory was sound and that technically it was feasible. It’s only now that we have that hard work done we are looking into the marketing. So I will be doing more AMAs and we will be spreading the work more widely. So this is the start of the marketing really.
-How to make the project more popular:
-We have been working closely with many other projects on technical aspects and in our Beta phase, projects like Balancer Labs, RocketPool, GoodGHosting, Float.capital and Polygon Studios to name a few. We will now be expanding these partnerships to more of a marketing front. There are other partnerships we have been working on but I’m not able to share some of the details just yet.
-We also will be making a presence at more physical events around the world. Last weekend we had the team at conferences in Australia. This week I’m flying Devcon Bogota where we are sponsoring the DAIvinity party along with MakerDAO and Oasis.app. Those will be followed up by appearances at EthLisbon and Token2049 in London.
OP: Question 2: Can you list 1–3 killer features of your Project that makes it ahead of its competitors? What is the competitive advantage your platform has that you feel most confident about?
https://t.me/IgniteCrypto/921926
Mr.Daniel Chilvers:
1 — We took a prediction market and Gamified it. You can compete with others taking the NFT off each other to earn time owned and a greater share in the Prize Pot. We have already seen in the Beta tests that several users were still renting an outcome in the prediction market was certain to lose, they weren’t renting it for the prize money, they were simply renting to earn the NFT at the end.
2 — NFTs, At the end of the prediction event the NFT is given to the person that owned it the longest. This is the original NFT that was minted at the start, through this you can see the record of who bid, at what price, and when. This means you truly owned you prediction. There is now a record on chain, that you can show friends or anybody else, that you put your money where your mouth was and owned your prediction.
3 — The ‘rent-bidding’ mechanism itself and how we apply it to various products. This offered more of a gamified prediction market. However with Launch Cards we think it’ll offer a whole new mechanic that avoids a lot of the downsides you’d usually find in token sales, such as gas wars or allocations being over-subscribed.
OP: Question 3: Have you being audited ? Have not heard you talk about that security of funds is what every investor craves for and plans to escape incase of insecurity if funds,scams and rug pulls ? How strongly built are your security put in place?
https://t.me/IgniteCrypto/921965
Mr.Daniel Chilvers:
-We have been audited, many times. To name a few we ran through audits with Certik, AvoLabs, ByteRocket, HashCloak and one of my personal favourites was “Code 423n4” which is an auditing competition we ran.
One of the nice benefits of Code 423n4 is that you find many hackers from all over the world and they will each try to penetrate your contracts using their specific set of skills. You aren’t just hiring one developer or company that need to try every attack, for instance if you are a hacker that is really good at re-entrancy attacks you are incentivised to have a go using your speciality to attack our contracts and we pay you to do it. In this way you can find some of the most specialised hackers attack your project using their specific skills. This was so much better than some of the other audits we ran, we did it TWICE!
-We do also keep up with trends, we have systems in place where we can freeze the contracts should we see an attack taking place. There are time-locks on deposits such that if the developers were to freeze everything and disappear, then after a certain amount of time the users can not be stopped from withdrawing their own deposits. We don’t have upgradable contracts on the Treasury, so what you see in the code there is fixed, we can’t just add new code that may be compromised.
-One of the other benefits we have is time, over time people will try and attack you, we have seen people trying things during our beta. Over time trust can be built in a system. The Treasury contract we will be using at launch is the same one deployed over a year ago that has held all many users funds securely all that time.
OP: Question 4: How did you get the community involved in developing the project? and how do you build a strong community to grow globally?
https://t.me/IgniteCrypto/921862
Mr.Daniel Chilvers:
-I feel like we really involved the community from the beginning. We start off pretty small and without marketing. So our initial users were the more hardcore fans that we met at conferences or through other projects we had worked with. We grew close relationships with those users and have taken on board their feedback. We are now growing rapidly but we didn’t want to lose our core community or have their voice diminished in the sea of the many. There are a couple of things we are doing to help us with this. Initially we created the OG role on our discord, this is where anybody that has taken part in our Alpha or Beta tests can access gated channels and have more in-depth conversations with us. We are currently expanding this system so that the users who actually take part have easier access and more of a say in what we do (also adding ways for new users to join in and climb up the rankings). In the longer term we will be migrating to a DAO, at that point the token holders will propose and decide everything, until that point we do want to listen to the community as much as possible.
-Globally we are now making more efforts. We started last year by opening up a Chinese speaking channel on the discord. But we are expanding this now, we are hiring community ambassadors for Korea, Vietnam, Turkey, Russia to name but a few. Although the product was developed in the UK by a mainly European team, we want to reach a global audience.
OP: Question 5: How many team members do you have? Do they have enough experience in the blockchain field? Do they have any experience on working in crypto and non-crypto project?
https://t.me/IgniteCrypto/921852
Mr.Daniel Chilvers:
It can be hard to keep track as we expand, but right we have 16 full time team members and many more contractors, ambassadors and a very strong board of advisors and investors.
The team has 8 developers with the majority of them working on polishing the protocol for more than 12 months now. There is a mix of crypto OG devs and non-crypto devs alike. For instance the developers working on the backend really need the crypto experience, but the UI developers not so much. In marketing we have a more focussed crypto experience team.
As I mentioned in the other question we are expanding across the globe now. We have team members and ambassadors all over Europe, India, UAE, Korea, Australia, Canada to name a few. But we aren’t stopping there, the search for more community ambassadors is going on.
Our board of advisors is also very strong, with some of them being deeply involved in multiple coins that are currently in the top 50 on coinmarketcap.com. We also have experienced tech advisors who created some of the top wallets in use today.
The investor sheet isn’t too bad either. Some wish to remain anonymous but we do have founders from POAP and Bankless on there. We also have some of the Eth core developers, some have even pushed commits to our GitHub.
🔰Follow RealityCards at the following links so you don’t miss the latest updates from the development team
➡️Website: https://realitycards.io/
➡️Email: hello@realitycards.io
➡️Twitter: https://twitter.com/realitycards
➡️Community Telegram VN: https://t.me/RealityCardsVietNam
➡️Telegram: https://t.me/realitycards
➡️Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX45THPiIFu9FA7rSpDcc8w
➡️GitHub: https://github.com/RealityCards
About IgniteCrypto: IgniteCrypto is a community formed by a group of members who are passionate about and believe in the future growth of cryptocurrencies from Vietnam. With the aim of creating an exchange community between investors and those interested in the development of cryptocurrencies
➡️Telegram Group : https://t.me/IgniteCrypto
➡️Channel Ann: https://t.me/Ignite_Crypto_Channel
➡️Twitter: https://twitter.com/ignite_crypto
➡️Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/groups/586178599129379
