BlockTalks x ZooDAO AMA Transcript!
We recently hosted an AMA with ZooDAO, on November 14th at 2PM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by Arber, Community Lead at ZooDAO So here we are up with the AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this blog post will be a saver & feeder of knowledge for them.
Introduction Questions Asked By Team BlockTalks!
Q1. Could you please introduce ZooDAO to our community in layman’s term?
Ans —The concept of ZooDAO is pretty simple, and now we’ve developed it, almost obvious. ZooDAO responds to the challenge of NFT utility. We believe NFTs should have the same potential as other crypto assets to earn NFT holders’ passive income, in a meaningful and engaging environment.
In ZooDAO’s dApp, NFT holders have two options:
1. Stake their NFT, earning yield and ZooDAO collectible cards
2. Stake their NFT in the Battle Arena, to participate in battles against other eligible NFTs, earning $ZOO and $DAI as a reward.
ZooDAO isn’t exclusively for NFT holders — those who don’t own NFTs are critical to the outcome of NFT battles, as they decide the winner through an open vote, earning $ZOO and $DAI in the process.
ZooDAO bridges the gap between NFTs and DeFi protocols, enabling interoperability between a multitude of NFT projects. The possibilities for growth are limitless with the various yield and gaming strategies embedded in our dApp.
We’re excited to have the community join us as we create greater purpose for NFTs!
Q2. What are the advantages of ZooDAO to the other alternatives in the Blockchain field?
Ans — The reason we’re so confident in ZooDAO’s success is the fact that we’ve come up with a product that answers a very real challenge that nobody seems to really be addressing. Not enough people are thinking about what to do with their NFTs in the long-term. Sure, yield farming on NFTs exists — but we’ve built out a solution that is engaging for users through gamification.
We’ve managed to build the bridges between DeFi and NFTs, bringing along some super exciting projects — like Cryptopunks, CryptoKitties, BAYC, and tons more. Our platform is inclusive, enabling both NFT holders and NFT enthusiasts to earn rewards, and have fun in the process. Most importantly, our NFT Battles are no-loss, meaning nobody leaves the Battle Arena with less than they came with.
We’re aware that ZooDAO is ahead of the trend here — and we’d like to bring the whole community along with us. We’d also love the community to bring other NFT projects on board and share the opportunity for NFT holders to earn from their digital assets.
Q3. What are the major milestones ZooDAO achieved so far & what are in the future pipeline?
Ans — We’ve certainly come a long way since we started building ZooDAO! There are far too many exciting developments to mention here, but a few which we’re particularly proud of are related to our integrations and partnerships.
We know partners are critical to ZooDAO’s utility, in many ways. A major milestone for us was being able to reach out to major NFT projects, like Polymorphs, Pudgy Penguins, Cool Cats, Hashmasks and lots more to present our solution to their teams. We’ve had amazingly positive feedback from the teams and communities, as they see an opportunity for ZooDAO to be complimentary to their products. Building those relationships and integrating top-ranked NFTs to ZooDAO has made all the hard work leading up to it worth it.
The second exciting milestone was finally building out our DAO. ZooDAO is community-governed and relies on users like you all to make the decisions for the future of the project. We integrated Aragon, the best-in-class service for DAOs to enable open decentralized collaboration and couldn’t be prouder of the partnership we’ve built with them.
Questions Asked on Twitter For ZooDAO Team!
Q1. How big is your team ? Are you a public team or not? Please tell us more about team background?
Ans —We’re a group of passionate crypto enthusiasts who have been active in the world of crypto assets since the early days. In total our team is constituted of 12, with experience in Blockchain Development, Banking & Finance, Software Development, and Compliance & Regulation. We’re supported by an enthusiastic group of professionals from the Marketing & Communication and Web Development space.
We decided as a team to remain anonymous for multiple reasons :
First, we want our technology to speak for itself. We wanted to allow ZooDAO and its features to take the forefront, instead of the personas of the team which back it up. We recognize trust is built through transparency, however simply releasing our names does very little towards building that trust — rather it may place the resilience of ZooDAO’s infrastructure at risk.
Second, maintaining the safety of the ZooDAO ecosystem is paramount. We’ve seen instance of personality scams and social engineering attacks adversely impact users and erode trust in the past — we’d like to take every opportunity to avoid these issues.
Finally, the ever-growing challenge of complex regulatory frameworks and increased scrutiny over DeFi by governments presents a real challenge. Some of our advisors and team work in traditional finance, an industry which while previously hostile to DeFi has now recognized the value of true decentralization. We don’t discount the possibility that this competition would lead to exploitation of regulatory compliance measures to adversely affect the success of DeFi projects in general, should our names be publicly available.
ZooDAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization — built with the users, and for the users. We value the anonymity of our users, and seek to uphold the tenets of true decentralization. Never before in history have individuals been able to seek to hold an asset of value with true anonymity — we’d like to maintain that anonymity for ourselves and users.
Q2. What are your status regarding the audit of your project and the security mechanisms to protect and assure the participants of the ecosystem?
Ans —We’re very aware that in providing a service to the community, we’re also requesting the community place their trust in us.
Simply requesting you place your trust in us isn’t enough. Members of our team have also been victims of various scams, hacks and rugpulls — we know it feels terrible and erodes trust in the community. That’s why in the next stage of our Roadmap, we’re opening our code to an external auditor for a full audit of our smart contracts and dApp backend. Only with an external audit do we have the right to request your trust in us.
Whether you entrust us with your NFTs, or simply participate in the DAO and dApp as a voter, we’ve created mechanisms to safeguard your trust. We recently published a full article on Medium about the mechanisms built into ZooDAO that guarantee fairness — like integrating Aragon to build out our Decentralized Autonomous Organization, involving the community in decisions on its future — or integrating Chainlink’s VRF to guarantee impartial outcomes of NFT Battles.
Safety involves the community as much as it does the team and structure of ZooDAO; we’re always looking to improve and hope the community remains an active part of our journey.
Q3. Does your project support staking program? if yes. how is your stake system work, what is the requirement for user if they want to stake in your platform? Do you have a Token Burning plan to increase Token value and attract Investors to invest?
Ans — ZooDAO supports staking of your NFTs. In ZooDAO’s dApp, NFT holders have two options:
1) Stake their NFT, earning yield and ZooDAO collectible cards
2) Stake their NFT in the Battle Arena, to participate in battles against other eligible NFTs, earning $ZOO and $DAI as a reward.
$ZOO token serves as a utility, and enables users to not only participate in ERC-721 yield farming, but also decide on the future of the platform thanks to the role of the token in our governance model.
To maximise the rewards available to the community, we chose to make $ZOO a deflationary token, driving increased value over time as tokens are redistributed as incentives.
In keeping with our mission to ensure ZooDAO is a community-owned project, we have created mechanisms to secure the project against market manipulation and ensure an equal playing field is maintained for users. Our token specifications are as follows :
Burn mechanism
A 0.5% burn mechanism makes $ZOO rarer with a deflationary mechanism
Initial supply
A fixed supply of 100 Million tokens will be available to the community. No minting of new coins is enabled, to ensure longevity of the community investment.
Redistribution
0.3% of each transaction with $ZOO will be redirected to reward LP stakers.
Community supply
A majority of tokens are intended for distribution to users, with more than half the remaining supply dedicated to rewards.
Q4. I read about the NFT battles in your platform. But is it necessary to hold your own NFTs to participate or can the users use NFTs from third parties? How does the NFT battles work? Will the holder have full control of the NFTs? How are the rewards calculated and distributed?
Ans — ZooDAO isn’t exclusively for NFT holders — those who don’t own NFTs are critical to the outcome of NFT battles, as they decide the winner through an open vote, earning $ZOO and $DAI in the process.
The NFT Battles are composed of 5 stages :
Stage 1 begins with the Battle Arena accepting NFTs for staking. Staking is possible at any time during the 3-day window, with rewards paid to NFT holders at the close of Stage 1. NFT Holders staking their NFTs receive $ZOO tokens in compensation for gas fees, and additional tokens as a yield from staking their NFT. Yield rewards are attributed at the start of Stage 2, and claimable after 6 months.
In Stage 2 of battles, the weight of each votes reduces over time, as we get closer to the end of the voting period. This prevents last-minute sniping, and whales from manipulating the outcome of the battle by reducing the value of a vote cast in the last day of voting by 30%.
The battle begins in Stage 3 with the Battle Arena generating a random pairing between two NFTs. $DAI staked in Stage 2 determine the number of votes, and the odds of the competing NFTs of winning the battle.
In Stage 4, the votes are tallied and transparently displayed to players- who can then continue to vote using $ZOO tokens to further influence the odds of winning. Again, votes are weighted to encourage early voting, and prevent last-minute sniping from disrupting the balance of odds.
Most importantly, the number of votes aggregated in Stage 2 and 4 does NOT determine the winner. The mechanism isn’t like elections, in which whoever has the most votes automatically wins. Votes simply determine the ODDS — the relative probability — of winning.
In Stage 5, the NFT holders may un-stake their NFT and claim rewards, or leave their NFT in the Battle Arena to participate in the next battle round. NFT voters that have voted on the concerned NFT may also withdraw their staked $DAI to their wallet. New battles are launched the following day.
Aggregated votes are submitted to Chainlink’s Verifiable Random Function (VRF), which then uses the votes to weigh the probability of winning for each NFT and return a winner.
These mechanisms are in place to safeguard the outcome, and promote fair play.
We go into full details of these mechanisms in our Fairness article on Medium:
Q5. I didn’t found details about any Partnerships and Sponsorships on Zoo DAO site & we all know that both partnerships & sponsorships are backbone in making any project more widespread. So, Can you list some of ur partners with us?
Ans — We’ve certainly come a long way since we started building ZooDAO! There are far too many exciting developments to mention here, but a few which we’re particularly proud of are related to our integrations and partnerships.
We’ve been in conversation with some large players in the DeFi space on building partnerships, however we’d like to ensure we have a robust partnership agreement in place first before making any announcements. Our conditions for partnership are primarily that partnership enriches the experience of ZooDAO users, without any opportunity to disrupt the potential for maximizing value of users NFTs. Striking this balance is challenging — but we’ll keep ZooDAO insiders updated through our telegram group as we build those bridges.
We are particularly proud of our developments related to integrations. Integrating projects is critical to ensure our project’s success. We were able to reach out to major NFT projects like Polymorphs, Pudgy Penguins, Cool Cats, Hashmasks and lots more to present our solution to their teams, and received amazingly positive feedback from the teams and communities, as they see an opportunity for ZooDAO to be complimentary to their products.
Many more partnerships are to come so stay tuned and follow our Twitter account (https://twitter.com/ZooDAO_) as a ZooDAO Insider to ensure you do not miss any new announcement!
Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session to ZooDAO Team!!
Q1. I read that you have integrated the Verifiable Random Function (VRF) feature of Chainlink. Why are you taking advantage of VRF support and how important are votes in determining each NFT’s chance of winning the battle in ZooDAO Phase 4? How much of the rewards generated through ZooDAO’s dApp are distributed to community members and how are proposals submitted to the DAO decided?
Ans — Chainlink’s VRF integration guarantees fair play, providing cryptographically-secure randomness within our NFT battle mechanism. In fact, we have previously seen many outcome manipulation by miners.
Users do not systematically win if they have got more DAI than their opponent but rather more chances to win.
Essentially, Chainlink VRF works like a Roulette where if you have 50 DAI and and have 50 DAI staked, the Roulette’s result is going to be 50% black or 50% red.
Q2. Everybody loves anonymity but when it comes to investment, investors tends to trust DOXXED team with their funds, though I don’t have any issue with ZooDAO being anonymous but my concern is safety of funds that will be kept at your custody. Will you be transparent in the way these funds would be utilized? How can you assure us that users funds won’t be diverted towards another cause?
Ans — We decided as a team to remain anonymous, for multiple reasons:
First, we want our technology to speak for itself. We wanted to allow ZooDAO and its features to take the forefront, instead of the personas of the team which back it up. We recognize trust is built through transparency, however simply releasing our names does very little towards building that trust — rather it may place the resilience of ZooDAO’s infrastructure at risk.
Second, maintaining the safety of the ZooDAO ecosystem is paramount. We’ve seen instance of personality scams and social engineering attacks adversely impact users and erode trust in the past — we’d like to take every opportunity to avoid these issues.
Finally, the ever-growing challenge of complex regulatory frameworks and increased scrutiny over DeFi by governments presents a real challenge. Some of our advisors and team work in traditional finance, an industry which while previously hostile to DeFi has now recognized the value of true decentralization. We don’t discount the possibility that this competition would lead to exploitation of regulatory compliance measures to adversely affect the success of DeFi projects in general, should our names be publicly available.
The beauty of smart contracts is that the use of funds is verifiable on the blockchain. In addition to a full audit, we will provide a detailed medium article to explain how users, from n00b to pro users can find, and interpret smart contracts of our platform to verify flow of funds individually.
Q3. You have built a dApp that is able to integrate 8 NFT projects for battles. But what are the NFT projects that have been integrated into your platform and do you plan to continue integrating? How do you determine the power, attributes or features that NFTs will have for battles?
Ans — We have first decided to add major NFT projects to let the possibility to as much people as we could to participate in our battles. However, as the project is a community driven DAO, smartcontacts of NFT Battles are completely customizable through Aragon portal, which will allow people to vote in additing additional projects.
Q4. I’m in awe of the inside of the $ ZOO ecosystem, NFT owners can pitch their assets against competitors, fighting for supremacy and earning rewards in the form of $ ZOO tokens, with NFT Battles. Do we have to have $ ZOO to participate? Do competitors retain full control of their NFTs?
Ans — Owning $ZOO is not a strict condition for participation in battles; we didn’t want to prevent NFT owners from engaging, so the utility of $ZOO is isolated to improving odds at a later stage of battles, rather than a condition for entry. Our litepaper provides a full perspective on how our battle mechanics work :
