Curious about the world of web3 projects you can earn with, but short on time? Look no further than our Meet a Builder series.

In these short format interviews, we speak with the teams behind your favourite projects for their insights on what they’re building behind the scenes and what’s next. Join us for an inside look at the projects shaping the future of the web3 earning ecosystem.

Today, we’ll be getting a glimpse behind the scene of Aavegotchi, an innovative NFT Gaming Protocol that is taking the blockchain world by storm. Under the hood, Aavegotchi is an open-source, community-owned protocol that enables total asset ownership for gamers in true Web3 fashion. With its 100% on-chain assets, DAO governance, trustless NFT Lending, decentralized marketplace, and Bid-to-Earn auctions, Aavegotchi has attracted a vibrant and passionate community of players and developers who are exploring new ways to interact with DeFi and NFTs through gamification.

Transcript

SARAH, web3earner:  Welcome back to our Meet a Builder interview series. Where I  have the pleasure of talking to the teams behind your favorite Web3 earning projects.   

Today, we’ll be getting a glimpse behind the scene of Aavegotchi, an innovative NFT Gaming Protocol that is taking the blockchain world by storm. Under the hood, Aavegotchi is an open-source, community-owned protocol that enables total asset ownership for gamers in true Web3 fashion. With its 100% on-chain assets, DAO governance, trustless NFT Lending, decentralized marketplace, and Bid-to-Earn auctions, Aavegotchi has attracted a vibrant and passionate community of players and developers who are exploring new ways to interact with DeFi and NFTs through gamification. We’re excited to have the opportunity to talk to Jesse from the Aavegotchi team and learn more about the game’s vision, mechanics, and future plans.

How are you today Jesse?

JESSE, Aavegotchi: I’m doing well, thanks for having me.

SARAH: You’re very welcome. Can you start by giving us a brief explanation as to what Avaguchi is and an understanding into the gameplay?

JESSE: Sure, so Aavegotchi’s are ideated as this open-source Avatar where anyone can own their own Gotchi, bring it to life, nurture it. If you’re familiar with where we kind of give the hat tip,  the Tamagotchis of the 90s, it’s like a crypto pet. Aavegotchi has been around for two and a half years and counting, and our focus was “let’s make a better crypto pet” was the very central premise at the start. So we baked in a lot of dynamic on- chain data, which, especially two and a half years ago, was not a thing; even now, it’s quite rare. So we are quite proud of leading the way on what you can do with dynamic data for your NFTs. What I mean by that, in a practical sense, is we have something called kinship, and you actually pet your Aavegotchi every day with the on-chain transaction, and that kinship score is stored on chain and moves up or down in accordance with how often you take care of your Aavegotchi. It’s kind of proof-of-attention to your favorite NFT, as opposed to maybe some other crypto NFTs you have, and they just sit in your wallet, and you don’t really interact with them or take them out very much.

So the Aavegtochi in and of itself is a game, and the intrinsic game is taking care of it, naming it, dressing it, doing all of these things, and then the extrinsic is using it as an avatar for open-source gaming, and that’s where the Gotchiverse comes in. We’ve been live with the Gotchiverse almost a year now, and the Aavegotchi DAO, which is one of the most active DAOs in the world, where we’re literally building a game together. So if you’ve ever dreamed of being a game developer, we attract a lot of talented, very smart individuals who want to contribute time and energy to creating Aavegotchi-themed games.

SARAH: I love it. As someone who was obsessed with Tamagotchis and is also a blockchain fanatic, I just really love what you guys are doing. It’s so exciting.

SARAH: Can you give us some ways that people can earn with Aavegotchi?

JESSE: Yeah, there are many ways. One of them is the kinship. So if you take care of your Aavegotchi, your Aavegotchi will take care of you. That’s what we’ve always said. We’ve funded this through what we call the circle-of-win. From the very start, we want a very fair, equitable NFT sale, and so a very large percentage, somewhere around 35 percent of all of the NFT drops two years ago, all of that went into a rewards pool that funds interacting with your pets. It’s basically like you bought the Aavegotchi up front. It’s your pet. If you actually take care of it, you’re going to climb these leaderboards that track your on-chain metadata across three different specs, and the funds return to you. So it’s kind of a fun way to say, “Look, you’ve got your collectible. Whatever happens in the market with that, that’s one thing, but no matter what, it’s always returning things and giving you love back in an on- chain way.” Just taking care of your Aavegotchi is the first way. ‘’

The other way is the Gotchiverse. Other than our governance token $GHST. E verything’s on chain to the extent possible that we can do with the Gotchi verse. So, this is a metaverse social world for your Aavegotchi avatars and there is a farming element where you actually take care of your plot of land. I believe this was the first of its kind. There are four tokens collectively called Alchemica and these magical tokens are the kind of DNA of the whole Gotchi verse. If you collect these, you can use them to craft new NFTs. You put them together in a recipe book, and you actually make, we don’t just mint the NFT, you craft it at your crafting table. You can collect those by simply showing up and playing in the world.

Another thing we love to say is we’re trying to make it so you play with your crypto, and I don’t think enough of the web 3 games do this. They’re always trying to make you feel like web2, and what we do differently is when you enter the Gotchiverse, you know you’re in a crypto game. Like there’s very little question, it has a whole different aesthetic. When you start hanging out at a social event and you see a super chat and it says, maybe Jesse dropped a thousand FOMO tokens, this is one of the four Alchemica. They literally are like the reverse of Pac-Man, they’re dropping on the ground all around you and it just really gives you a great metaverse party feel that most metaverses fail at where it’s kind of stuffy and boring. Here, people are running around literally tipping each other, we’re doing super chat and literally throwing crypto at each other, and I don’t know anywhere else you can go and do this, and you’d be surprised, people are very generous in the Gotchiverse. We’re throwing these on-chain assets all around the map at each other and just having a good time. Every weekend we do a kind of get together and make that a reality.

SARAH: I love it, I love the social element and then bringing in the web3 aspect. You guys are doing some really interesting stuff.

SARAH: What’s some latest development within the Aavegotchi ecosystem, and how will that impact players’ ability to earn rewards within the web 3 space?

JESSE: 2023 has been a huge year for us already, and we’re just exiting Q1. A lot happened in that first quarter. First, we closed the bonding curve which I wish I could talk more about but it’s basically our on-chain Kickstarter that started all of this back in the summer of 2020. It was basically a liquidity pool, an AMM, where GHOST (GHST) token would be minted if people put in the DAI stable coin. We were very aware after some of the black swans of late last year. We said, you know, our whole ecosystem is kind of built on top of MakerDAO and the DAI token, and we love them, but we’re at a point now where our DAO is two and a half years into maturity, we have our own infrastructure, why are we still relying on DAI? We literally have a governance token partially backed by DAI tokens, which is pretty cool. So we said, you know, maybe that’s not the way forward. We need to think bigger. And so we started a three to four month process to close the curve, and that took all the DAI that was there as just liquidity and transformed that into treasury for the DAO. So we basically concluded in effect a token sale and also removed the risk of being reliant on Maker DAO. So now the token is free-floating, the treasury is filled to the tune of I think about 33 million dollars worth of DAI, and what that does is it really unlocks the ability for our community to go to the next level. And the next level is Gotchichain.

We are one of the earliest adopters of major NFT to bridge over to Polygon. We’re very close with the Polygon leadership team, and we were approached early on about their Supernets Program which is basically a layer three, it’s like an app-specific chain, a permission chain, dedicated to whatever program you’re doing. And in our case, it’s all things Aavegotchi. So Gotchichain will be one of the first Supernets to go live, and it’s going to be almost like my metaphor is like a video game console launching like a new PlayStation, a new Nintendo console, late summer 2023, Gotchichain will be going live with a plethora of new gaming experiences, DApps all centered around Aavegotchi assets and NFTs. So we are super excited about what that means. North of 2000 transactions per second, no more downtime, no more fighting for bandwidth with other games or whatever chain, and just a much better UX where we can start shifting our attention more towards mainstream gaming. We’re at GDC this year, and just looking at all the options for onboarding in a big way where all that friction is kind of eliminated and people can just enjoy Aavegotchi’s for what they are. And so that’s where we’re going this year. 

SARAH: That is extremely exciting. What’s this space. I think that’s going to really take you guys to the next level. I’m sure your whole community is jumping at the seam for that one. 

Thank you so much, Jesse, for joining me today. It’s been wonderful to have you on and hear about what’s going on in the world of Aavegotchi, and how people can get involved, and your plans for the future. Thank you to all those that have, yeah, thank you to all those that have joined in and we will see you next time.

JESSE:  Thanks, Sarah.

Learn more about Aavegotchi and how you can start participating in their ecosystem here.