By Paul Barclay, CTO
I’ve been analysing our last Claim sales in greater detail, as well as looking at the activity around Genesis Worlds. Activity and interest are increasing. New people are coming in, seeing the existing Claims, and buying them. None of this is a surprise, but it’s always nice to see it in the data. You can look at the data below (it’s really nice doing data analysis in the decentralized world, because I can just share it with the community, rather than having to hoard it for competitive advantage), but first, I want to talk about what we need to do next.
The data clearly shows that speed is the most valuable asset in Mining Claim purchases. How fast you can click all the buttons is more important than making smart, reasoned decisions. That’s not what we want. The data also clearly shows that there’s a growing contingent of people who are using their speed advantage to scoop up a lot of early Claims then flip them immediately after purchasing, clogging up the sale for community members. Because speed is important, the guaranteed result is that people will write bots to take advantage of sales. If we don’t make any improvements, a well-written bot will exist, and will allow a user to automate picking up every single Claim under 700+ GENESIS with the intent to flip them for a significant profit.
Improving the Purchase Experience
What this all means is that we’re loading increased demand onto an already imperfect buying experience. Don’t get me wrong, our experience is good, and it’s far, far better than most other NFT sale experiences. It’s just not as good as it could be. Our next NFT Mining Claims go on sale Feb 17th at 8am PST. Without making a change, the next sale will be a worse experience for everyone than the previous Claim sales, with more flipped Claims, and many more failed transactions. So, we’re going to implement the “fair launch pricing” technology to ensure it has the necessary economic and behavioural impacts. The goals are, in order:
- Significantly reduce the benefit of being faster than other users
- Continue our track record of zero bots during Mining Claim sales
- Significantly reduce the number of failed transactions during the Mining Claim sale
- A smoother Mining Claim sale, with less frantic activity in the first 2 minutes
- Reduced friction for users who want to purchase more Claims for a single world
Fair Launch Pricing
The Claim price will start at 1500 GAME, reducing at a rate of 1 GAME every second. Once the market price goes above the fair launch price, the market price will take over – this is exactly how the normal bonding curve works. No matter what happens, the fair launch pricing will be in effect for at most the first 16 minutes of the sale. Though, the most likely case is that people will buy in significantly before that, and the price will be found in the first 5 to 10 minutes.
In addition to improving the transaction experience, we’re also raising the limit on the number of Claims purchased in a single transaction to 100 Claims – the fair launch pricing feature removes the need to limit early purchases to prevent bots and flippers.
After the sale on the 17th, we’ll review the results against these goals; if it does not meet the goals, we’ll look for alternate solutions. If it does meet the goals, we’ll set out the criteria for adjusting the starting price to ensure the purchase flow continues to be smooth – 1500 GAME should be effective for this next sale, but with a larger community, or an especially high-demand world like Bitcoin or Cat World, it won’t have the desired effect.
How will the fair launch pricing impact me?
- Less Stress: The biggest change the fair launch pricing causes is that you no longer need to be lightning fast on your transactions. You’ll have a lot more time to decide what you want to do, set the gas price correctly, and double-check you’ve got everything right. So it should be less stressful.
- Easier to buy: Previously, if you wanted to buy a decent-sized position in a world (say, enough to own a 4×4 land plot), you’d have to make six separate transactions. Transactions aren’t too expensive in gas costs, but they take time, and they take mind-space.
- Fewer failed transactions: You get to decide when you trigger your transaction. You can vastly reduce your chances of failed transactions by sending your transaction earlier, before most people do. Even if you don’t manage to time your transaction, transactions are spread out across a larger period of time (5-10 minutes rather than 30-40 seconds), and this makes a huge difference.
- Less incentive for bots and flippers: This gets us even further down the road of a fair launch, with the most level playing field possible. There are still opportunities for flippers/bots: A world could sell 2,000 Claims at launch, and then another 1,000 in the run-up to its land sale. But, the flippers/bots are on the same playing field as the rest of us.
The Data
The number of Claims bought over the first 5 minutes of sale increases slightly with each new Claim released. The exception is Wonderland, where a technical difficulty caused some transactions to fail. Even Nexus, the world with the most total Claims sold, is lowest on this curve. We expect this trend to continue; more awareness means more users trying to get into Claim sales in the first second.
The large dips at 8-15 minutes for Area 51 and 10-20 minutes for Wonderland are the flippers taking quick profits. We expect this behaviour to accelerate over the next few Mining Claim launches.
Looking at the number of people who made the maximum purchase in the first 15 minutes of a sale, it’s absolutely clear that the 3 Claim limit reduced people’s willingness to purchase more Claims. In the first 5 minutes of Wonderland and Area 51, 90% of the Claim purchases were at the maximum of 3. That compares to 70% of the more popular Nexus and Neo Tokyo.
Worlds bought per day
Total is the net number of worlds bought & sold each day; world columns are the net for that individual world on that day. We’re seeing more people organically discover the project. Also (not shown here), roughly 10% of Claim sales in the last week are bought using MATIC, showing an up-tick in the number of new people coming into the project.
| Bought | Burned | TOTAL | Nexus | Treasure | Neo Tokyo | Wonderland | Area 51 | |
| 1/18/2022 | 5499 | 444 | 5055 | 1796 | 1555 | 1704 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/19/2022 | 175 | 15 | 160 | 77 | 50 | 33 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/20/2022 | 36 | 40 | -4 | -9 | 10 | -5 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/21/2022 | 31 | 37 | -6 | -3 | 9 | -12 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/22/2022 | 13 | 5 | 8 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/23/2022 | 12 | 8 | 4 | 5 | 3 | -4 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/24/2022 | 9 | 19 | -10 | -8 | -1 | -1 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/25/2022 | 3014 | 661 | 2353 | 0 | -37 | -54 | 1187 | 1257 |
| 1/26/2022 | 155 | 63 | 92 | 10 | 0 | -3 | 51 | 34 |
| 1/27/2022 | 71 | 15 | 56 | 5 | -2 | 4 | 25 | 24 |
| 1/28/2022 | 33 | 33 | 0 | -1 | -1 | -4 | 12 | -6 |
| 1/29/2022 | 47 | 19 | 28 | 6 | 4 | 2 | 9 | 7 |
| 1/30/2022 | 32 | 26 | 6 | 2 | -4 | -10 | 20 | -2 |
| 1/31/2022 | 57 | 8 | 49 | 8 | 8 | 6 | 14 | 13 |
| Totals | 9184 | 1393 | 7791 | 1891 | 1597 | 1658 | 1318 | 1327 |
Transaction counts per day
Also, number of Claims bought per transaction. There’s a notable increase in purchases of Claims in the second week, compared to the first week. More people are buying, and in greater quantities, which is expected, as more people discover the project. High-quantity purchases are mostly concentrated in the launch window for the Claim, though significantly more people are buying 3+ in week 2 (again implying more new users).
| Buy Txes | Burn Txes | Buy 1 | Buy 2 | Buy 3 | Buy 4-9 | Buy 10 | |
| 1/18/2022 | 1178 | 444 | 486 | 106 | 47 | 156 | 383 |
| 1/19/2022 | 93 | 15 | 75 | 5 | 2 | 5 | 6 |
| 1/20/2022 | 23 | 40 | 16 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 |
| 1/21/2022 | 23 | 37 | 17 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/22/2022 | 13 | 5 | 13 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/23/2022 | 10 | 8 | 9 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/24/2022 | 9 | 19 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/25/2022 | 1199 | 661 | 251 | 81 | 867 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/26/2022 | 90 | 63 | 48 | 19 | 23 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/27/2022 | 39 | 15 | 19 | 8 | 12 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/28/2022 | 24 | 33 | 19 | 1 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/29/2022 | 33 | 19 | 23 | 6 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/30/2022 | 19 | 26 | 12 | 1 | 6 | 0 | 0 |
| 1/31/2022 | 39 | 8 | 28 | 4 | 7 | 0 | 0 |
