Hi,
It has been 45 days since the launch of the METASHIP and METAL smart contracts on the EVM. This concludes the internal timeline that we set to observe and analyze this stealth project post-launch — and it is now time to share the results.
Who?
This anonymous project was designed and developed as a “trial by fire” breakout project into the blockchain sector by the team at Cosmic Games ULC.
What?
METASHIPS was a self-sustaining “gamified” yield farming NFT protocol with a future use-case of being utilized for decentralized governance token distribution. Users minted “ship” NFTs (ERC721) with randomized rarities in exchange for METAL (ERC20), which then generated additional METAL tokens overtime based on a number of variables. Read more here.
Why?
The purpose of releasing this project anonymously and without hype was multifaceted, primarily:
[1] Proof-of-concept for our team to gain real production experience in the EVM/Solidity environment.
Solidity is a bleeding edge SDK for the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine). Very few universities even offer classes on Blockchain, let alone Solidity. It’s a rapidly evolving space where documentation is only as valuable as the date it was last updated.
We absolutely could have launched this entire project on a testnet chain like Rinkeby (which, we did initially), but felt it was critical to launch an actual production project on the main Ethereum blockchain to identify more complex action items that aren’t necessarily considered when deploying to testnets. (DEX liquidity, CMC/CG applications, Etherscan source code verification, LP incentives, IPFS deployment, etc).
[2] Avoid causing unrealistic levels of “hype” from our existing users/the crypto space in general for a project that was internally viewed as a production sandbox.
The cryptocurrency space, especially low market-cap coins, is currently the wild-west of speculation and momentum. We are not interested in entering this space to make a “quick buck”, or to irrationally hype up an infant project. We take the idea of users exchanging fiat currencies for tokens and NFTs curated by us extremely seriously, and understand that buzz around new projects can get out of hand very quickly.
Cosmic Games ULC has been creating products for 7 years, ranging from Minecraft, Roblox, Unity, and even vertically expanding into the CDN/DDOS mitigation space via Cosmic Global Networks, LLC. We are partnered (and owned) by large influencers with huge social media followings. We have an extremely high standard for everything we do, and it didn’t feel right to promote a project we internally viewed as a test case.
[3] Gain insight to the challenges that unfunded/unknown teams face in this space, as well as common solutions and practices.
With hundreds of ERC20 tokens being deployed daily, all claiming to be the “next big thing”, it’s extremely difficult to stand out. We wanted to feel this challenge first hand, and to identify what promotional strategies do and don’t work — such as the importance in building up a loyal community prior to contract deployment.
[4] Create a fully functioning closed ecosystem on EVM from an “anarchy” launch (no wallet controls contracts) that would never need updates.
It was paramount to our team to stay true to the philosophies that created blockchain — an immutable, decentralized, “trustless” ledger. So upon deployment, we:
Obviously “anarchy” launches are a fairly primitive way to run a “trustless” project compared to mature DAOs, diamond standard smart contracts, etc. But for this project’s objectives, we felt it was sufficient.
The idea of immutable code was a novel concept to our team. We’ve designed complex in-game economies before, but always with the ability to regress/adjust variables as the project matures. To build a project that is self-sustaining ad-infinitum was a different and fun challenge — Non-predictive Random Number Generation, Token Utility, Token Emission Forecasting, Dynamic METASHIP price adjustments based on previous “sell out” times to name a few… not to mention gas/tx optimizations!
Metrics
The team was surprised the protocol got as much attention as it did, however minor, considering we did ZERO advertising (and as of writing this have 2 followers on @metaships twitter). We suspect most users found us by utilizing bots that scrape all new ERC20 contract deployments.
The ERC20 token used to mint ships, METAL, peaked at $7,005 liquidity and $2,419 24-hour volume on SushiSwap. Initial locked liquidity was $1,000. Cumulative trade volume since deployment was $14,229.
The METASHIP contract burned over 8.6 billion METAL (~0.75 ETH) worth as a result of minting ships.
782 METASHIPS were minted at an average cost of 36 million METAL (cheapest minted for 1 million METAL), or 0.003 ETH. A total of approximately 2.35 ETH was used to mint METASHIPS.
213,248,567,281 METAL was collected from METASHIPS, which is currently worth a cumulative total of ~17.8 ETH. This is particularly cool, to see that the protocol paid out 7.5x more ETH than was used to mint the METASHIPS (liquidity permitting). Add in more non-quantifiable utility and buy pressure for the METAL token and all of a sudden you have a self propelling economy.
The Future
We love blockchain. It is an innovation that simultaneously creates enormous opportunity while promoting fairness and equality. DeFi, NFTs, and “play-to-earn” are some of our favorite current use cases. Beyond that, we feel it’s an important technology to embrace in order to move our world forward in a positive direction for all.
As a result of the success (and lessons learned) of METASHIPS, we have started internally designing a number of ambitious blockchain projects.
Development of METASHIPS is suspended at this time, however the small community that did interact with these little experimental contracts will receive exclusive proportionate airdrops of all future projects we release.
Follow us @metaships to stay in the loop about future product alpha drops.
— :)
