Finn 0:42 Hello and welcome to The Ether. Today is Thursday, February 17th 2022. This episode of The Ether is brought to you by Talis. Talis Protocol is the NFT platform for independent artists on Terra. Talis helps to provide artists with the tools and resources needed to transition from traditional arts into the NFT world. With their v1 launch coming soon, Talus will be the place to see real world art reflected on Terra. Be sure to join their Telegram and follow Talis on Twitter for updates on their roadmap, validator, and other Tallis news. Find your next favorite artist on talis.art. This episode of The Ether is also brought to you by WeFund. WeFund is a community crowdfunding cross-chain incubator on Terra, and it's the first launchpad that implements a milestone funding release system to protect investors. All money raised for projects is deposited in Anchor Protocol and it's refundable, and all decisions are based on community voting power. WeFund is community focused and designed to be a user friendly experience for both project creators and investors. Be sure to follow them on Twitter and join the Telegram for more information. Links are in the show notes and check them out online at wefund.app. TerraSpaces appreciates the support from all our sponsors. Today on The Ether we have the Lavana Space hosted by Galactic Punks. Let's take a listen. Karma 2:01 Yeah, and just as info, hello, this is Karma on Galactic Punk's account here. So if anyone from Levana's side joins and would like to join as a speaker, please request to speak because I'm having problems adding people manually. Twitter Space is just a bit temperamental. Levana Protocol 2:17 No problem. Okay, so if it's okay with you, I'm going to record this with some visuals so that when we post it on the Twitter, we'll have some of the visuals as well. I apologize. Okay, hold on a second. I'm just pinging Mimi, thanks everybody for their patience and flexibility. Karma 2:45 Of course, this is always like this. We always need a couple of minutes for Twitter Spaces to work as intended. And Levana and Galactic DAO, I have added your accounts as co-hosts so you can also help manage speakers and add people later in the AMA when we will be accepting questions. Levana Protocol 3:02 Well, thank you so much. Jackisnotinabox 3:04 I see that you have denied me of my co-host powers this time. Levana Protocol 3:08 Ah, well, yeah, that's... Karma 3:10 You gotta earn this. Levana Protocol 3:11 Plenty to go around. Karma 3:13 We hear you furiously typing. Now, I will just repeat in case someone joins us right now from Levana's side, please request to speak. I don't see any requests yet. Levana Protocol 3:23 I'm working on pulling in the right people. And so dealing with some technical hiccups. I think it's just you know what, I don't think... We had somebody trying to connect on desktop but we will... I think it's only supported on mobile so give me a second. Karma 3:48 It is indeed in order to be a speaker... So you can listen on desktop but in order to be a speaker you have to connect on your phone and there is a microphone icon in the left bottom corner that you click on to request to speak. Levana Protocol 4:03 Okay, let's see if we've got... Anybody else from the team here? We got a lot of people... We got one other listener. I think this... I don't even know how much is here. Okay, I might... Hopefully I didn't just hang up. Jackisnotinabox 4:21 Nope, you're still here. It's all good. Levana Protocol 4:25 That multitasking. Karma 4:27 Now if you don't mind, I think to be fair, we could kick off if you don't mind just answering the first questions yourself. And we will work on... Levana Protocol 4:36 Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Karma 4:36 Absolutely and we will work on adding speakers just as we go so they can join us later. Levana Protocol 4:41 Okay, so give me one second just to start the visual recording. And then we'll go from there. So I'm almost ready. Thanks, everybody for your patience. Karma 4:57 You're just hiking up the suspense. Levana Protocol 5:00 Yeah, right? Okay, so it is Thursday, February 17th. And we are on with the very gracious Galactic Punks DAO team. And we are going to be talking about today, the Faction War, the Talismans, what we're working on here at Levana, and we have some very gracious hosts. And I think that you guys have a few questions. So why don't we just start with some questions, and then we can jump in and kind of tell the whole story from the beginning, if time permitting. But happy to jump right in and to give the information that I know the Galactic Punk community, which is a community that we hold very near and dear to our hearts, is very excited to hear. Just to be clear, so I've had a Galactic Punk basically since the beginning. I didn't... I wasn't able to get in to the initial minting. But very quickly, I just fell in love with the project and collected them. And I know a lot of other people on the team have them, and we're incubated by Delphi and Delphi as a big supporter, and even some of the the core team that was behind the initial minting of Galactic Punks are friends of ours within the Lavana team. We've actually had an opportunity to meet in person and so it's really just an honor to... We've been excited to be able to work with the team and work with the project. And if anybody saw when I was in Portugal, I think it was, we were recording a live Terra Bites podcast, and maybe I'll retweet out the conversation, but somebody from the Delphi team asked, "What are you most excited to see in Metaverse on Terra?" And the thing that immediately came to mind is I want to be able to take my Galactic Punk, and I have... I named my Galactic Punk Zahava, which is the main character of the Levana story. And I'm very excited to be able to take Zahava and have her ride on a Levana dragon. So the interoperability of different projects and being able to take aspects from multiple different NFT experiences and have them be interoperable and composable, I think that that's the zero to one that NFT is bringing to the space and that's where the area of innovation that we want to kind of be pushing the limits at what Levana does and brings to Terra NFTs. So it's really exciting to kind of kick this off with the Faction War. And I'd love to just jump right in and tell you more about it. Jackisnotinabox 8:04 Yeah, we'd love to hear some more. Obviously this all kicked off with you guys dropping the Galactic Punks Talismans to us, which actually came quite unexpectedly. We saw that there was a community vote, and people are talking about it. But obviously, we were very, very surprised at the airdrop that we received. And I think a lot of people here are probably still questioning what exactly the Talisman does. So if you guys could just start off by maybe giving some details on that, because I believe that links into your Faction Wars. Levana Protocol 8:37 Yes, absolutely. So we'll start with this. About three months ago Levana dropped a meteor shower. Now, to back up, what Levana is, Levana is an acronym. It's a DeFi protocol. It stands for "leverage any asset". We're building a perpetual swap platform and a leverage basket platform, which will launch soon after Mars launches, which is scheduled to go live in a couple of weeks. So our launch, please God, will be in roughly four to six weeks. So in building up and building this community, there was a thesis that came out from our organization, which is that NFTs are the strongest way to create a dedicated community within the crypto space. It's far more effective than governance tokens have proven to be because governance tokens have a tendency to just be farmed when APYs are very high and then just dumped. So we started looking at where the new entrants into the crypto ecosystem were and it's clearly within the entertainment sector. And there's some really interesting articles that we put into a Medium post called DeFi-tainment, which is using entertainments to allow for DeFi to grow. Levana Protocol 10:02 And so, this kicked off about three months ago, with... Really about five months ago when we started writing Levana, the story. So Levana, the story is a story... It's really the story of crypto. And it's told as a science fiction novel, a science fiction and fantasy novel of a future society that lives on Mars, it struggles to be able to maintain self-sustainability, it's controlled by a very harsh government that forces people to live a certain way and have certain economic policies and controls what they do. So it's really an analogy for the world that we live in but kind of dressed up a little bit for a science fiction and fantasy audience to be more appealing than if you just simply preach the story of crypto, as many people have tried to do over the last decade or so. So now, we had this story of where something just arrived on the planet from outer space, these meteors. And the meteors, again, which is an analogy for essentially the invention of Bitcoin and then the entire industry of crypto, if they broke open, and then inside of them were these eggs. And now the eggs were initially just novelties. And then as dragons grew out of them, and as the dragons became bigger, it actually changed the whole planet. It changed the ideology and the belief system of the people where now they saw that they could really lead themselves and they didn't need to be controlled by this oppressive government. And so that then led to what actually would be known as the second civil war of Mars within our narrative. Levana Protocol 11:54 So now within the NFT game that we've built, we started with a meteor shower, and that lasted for three days. And we had about 6,500 participants that minted about 41,000 NFTs of these meteors. And the NFT is were essentially loot boxes that would either be cracked open to have inside of them these... They came in four different tiers. So Common, Rare, Ancient, and Legendary. And depending upon how much you donated, you would get the more rare one or the less rare one. And then you could crack them open to either reveal eggs or dust. And then the eggs... The dust is kind of like a magic potion. And the eggs could then be cracked open... Or not cracked open but could be hatched. And we're in the process of that in terms of the NFT narrative, to create these baby dragons, which then there will be a Metaverse quest, which will educate a broader audience on how to interact with perpetuals, how to interact with things like Anchor, and Mars, and other DeFi protocols, all in the process of evolving kind of a Tamagotchi or, a Dogs, if you're familiar with the Nintendo or those 90s toys, to evolve from a baby dragon up to an adult dragon. Levana Protocol 13:20 And, as part of this, at each of the stages, we really liked having a surprise. So when our players took the egg and found the matching magic dust, because that was part of the game is that they would have to go out and they would have to perform a dust quest, and when they found it in the markets like Knowhere and RandomEarth, and then they found what was compatible for the dragon that they were trying to hatch. So the narrative as we put it is that in order to hatch a dragon, you would need to find a place for it. It needs to be a safe place where the temperature is the right temperature. And it's protected from predators. And so you need to find a cave. So a cave was hidden on our website. And then they would need to start the process that... The hatching process of the egg, which in the real world use an incubator. So in the world of Levana, you would pour this magic dust on it. Now, when you go to lean down to pour the magic dust, there would be a slight glimmer that you would see out of the corner of your eye. And you as the player would reach over and you'd see something in the dirt there in the cave that you had prepared for your dragon. And as you picked it up off of the moonlight you would see this tiny little Talisman which had one of the four major Factions of the inhabitants of Mars. Levana Protocol 14:52 And then now that Talisman actually became an invitation to participate in the the evolution and revolution of Mars, the civil war that occurs within the story of Levana. And so there's four different Factions. So there's the Council who are the current leaders of Mars, and they're the most well organized, they're the wealthiest, they own the most amount of dragons, and they currently control the landscape. And their goal, like everyone's goal on Mars is to terraform the planet, but they have a very particular way that they envision it. And they're their focus is on that you create the most amount of strength by having a very small centralized group of power that is the decision makers. So the second Faction is the Guardians. So the Guardians were the police force for the last 100 years on the planet of Mars. And now that the dragons have arrived, this police force has realized that maybe the people that we've been serving, who are the Council members, maybe they don't really know what's best for the planet. And maybe what the planet needs is that it needs more of a unifying, militaristic force, to be able to best bring this... To bring the planet forward. And again, I don't want to get into the analogy, but if you read the news, you might you might find similar narratives in the things that you see as how the world is changing today. Levana Protocol 16:38 So now the third group is the the Free Martians. Now the Free Martians are the most interesting ones. The Free Martians are the ones that predicted the coming of the dragon. They have a narrative of how we came to this planet in the belly of dragons, and how dragons eventually would return back. And that's an allusion to Elon Musk, and his rocket ships, which are called dragons as well. And they believed that and they still believe that dragons will come back to the planet, and will eventually finish off the Civil War, which started 100 years ago, which would then allow for them to be able to live actually free, thus in their name, as kind of like independent libertarians. And they live about a week's travel away from where the rest of society lives, which is controlled by the Council. And again, in the first civil war on Mars ended in a stalemate. And now it is multiple generations later, where you have this almost like a Bedouin culture, which lives closer to the equator of the planet, and lives a very different lifestyle than the lifestyle that's outlined by the Council. And then the third, or the fourth group, the Terrans. And the Terrans are the largest group, and they represent the population. They're the builders, they're the workers. They are the common man, the common woman. They're the ones that are the farmers, they produce the food that everybody else lives on top of, that without everyone would essentially starve to death. Levana Protocol 18:19 So now, each of these different demographics represents a major narrative within the crypto ecosystem. And so as we get ready, as Levana gets ready to bring its products to market, its suite of DeFi tools to market, and to bring a gamification layer, which will bring... Our goal is to bring 100 million people to Terra and, for them to understand the value of UST and to understand the freedom that really comes from really taking the red pill and jumping down the rabbit hole that is crypto. And the way that we feel that this best can be accomplished is through strong storytelling, and through gamification, through the creation of a very strong play-to-earn mechanics, play-to-earn form of entertainment that then can target the next generation of crypto participants. So those are people that are not necessarily coming because they want out of the gates to get 20% APY on Anchor, because they don't really understand that, they're not finance people. But when you come and you teach them about gameplay, about video games, about adventure stories, about dragons, then that catches their attention. Levana Protocol 19:50 So coming back to the Faction War and the Talismans, the Talismans are directly linked to the launch of the Levana Protocol, which will be governed via the governance token, which is the Levana governance token, whose ticker is LVM. Now, we didn't want to just airdrop the tokens to large audiences, because if you're familiar with any of the data, the actual metrics of airdrops, 90% of it is just a waste. You might just drop it to LUNA stakers, which is very popular on the Terra ecosystem, you might drop it to voters, you might drop it to people who own NFTs. But most people aren't... First of all, they're not even going to redeem it. And then secondly is if they do redeem it, the majority of them just dump it. And Flipside has some great information about that. So we thought, what if we created a distribution method that was far more engaging, that actually started out as a game. It was a game that would be free to play, and we would invite the community members that we most value to come and participate. So we started through the distribution of the tokens to the NFT members of the Levana community, and we've had really great turnouts and just high levels of engagement. Levana Protocol 21:27 And then we asked our community, who else would you like to participate in this? Who do you want to be the recipients of the Levana airdrop, and to be the community members? And the the answer that we got, the first answer that we got, was we want the Galactic Punk to join. And so after many heated debates and conversations, we contacted the Galactic Punks team, and they were very gracious to help us with the logistical aspects of distributing these free Talisman. And we distributed... To every wallet that had a Galactic Punks in it got randomly one of the four Factions. Now, you can do whatever you want with with that Talisman. You could ignore it, you could go and sell it. They sold... I think they went for anywhere from half a LUNA and up, and obviously it depends on whatever the market is. We just gave them away, so we didn't expect... We had no idea what the community would value them at. But we had about over 5000 distributed to Galactic Punk wallets, wallets of owners of Galactic Punks. Levana Protocol 22:53 And then we saw from that, that hundreds of... I think was about 15% of the recipients chose to come to our website, Factions.levana.finance to stake their token to which they could either use the team, be part of the team that they were randomly selected, or they could trade on Random Earth are Knowhere Art to find the Faction that spoke to them more closely with the narrative. We have a comic book series, which is on our blog, if you want to learn more about the Factions or more about the story of Levana. And then we will start next week a series of... We actually started a week ago or about two weeks ago, with a game, a mini game our first play to earn mini game, which is called Salim's Side-scroll Adventure. So Salim is a Free Martian. He's one of the main characters of the story. And he is asked by Ima, who's the leader of the Free Martians to go to the ancient dragon graveyard, because this isn't the first time the dragons came to the planet of Mars, and to receive something that would be critical for the Free Martians to be able to win the Levana Protocol 24:17 the Faction Wars. Levana Protocol 24:19 So players went out, and if you have a Levana NFT, it's free to play the game. You just need to be part of the community and you show that you're part of the community by owning a Levana NFT in your wallet. And we've now given away probably, I would say, probably over 20,000 NFTs for free to community members to make sure that it's distributed and that plenty of people can play. And so to date, if you complete the first mini game of the Faction War, which is already live, which is Salim's Adventure, which you can find the link to that on our blog, or link to it directly on our website, which is levana.finance, or even if you jump in our Discord and you ask somebody for a link or how to play, there's also really great walkthroughs. So if you want to get involved in the Faction War and you want to learn more about Levana and you want to be eligible for the Levana airdrop, which is happening in a little over a month's time, so then you take the Talisman that was airdropped to you, you stake it into the Faction War website, you learn a little bit about the lore, you join our Discord, and then verify that you have a Talisman through our verification bot, which is provided by Gravity DAO, a great team, and we know that Galactic Punk's Discord uses them as well. I think that you guys actually made the introduction so we appreciate that. And then join the channel for your Faction, and then start preparing. Levana Protocol 26:01 We've got a series of mini games which will come to market, very similar to Salim's Side-scroll Adventure. And we're taking the four different Factions and they'll actually be competing in terms of engagement, as to which of the four Factions performs these mini games the best. And everybody that participates in the Faction War is going to be a winner. So there's going to be NFTs that are airdropped, there'll be, God willing, tokens that will be airdropped. And I think everybody will have a lot of fun playing it. Everybody likes classic video games, everybody likes riddles, or at least I like riddles. And so that's kind of what our vision is. When we did our NFT drop, we said, "You know what, we're going to do something different." And so now that we're getting ready to launch the protocol, we also decided that we're going to do something different. And we're hoping that it resonates with a large enough audience, that people will show up, they will participate, they will live-action roleplay. Because I think that that's a big part of what makes it fun is coming in, and just having a good time and meeting people and trash talking the other teams, tastefully obviously, nobody wants to hurt anybody's feelings for real. And then just kind of getting into it and living the story. And then hopefully getting cool swag throughout the process. So I know that we have BeachDragon on here, who's one of our big brains, like I've said in many of the other podcasts, I have the best job because I don't really have to do any of the hard work. I just get to talk about it and come on and be recorded in the videos. So Beach, I don't know if you are available to speak, but we'd love to have you. BeachDragon 27:49 Thanks so much. That was a great intro. And it's really hard, obviously, to follow that. But if anyone has any questions about the Faction Wars, I wanted to emphasize one thing, which is that I really do feel like each Faction, whether it's Counsel, Guardians, Free Martians, or the Terrans, can speak to that little voice inside us all where we find ourselves in our crypto journey. And it's so much fun, we've had so much fun since the Talismans dropped, and we surprise the community with them. And I think people have really leaned into the story and the Faction that they belong to, or they found the right Faction, they've sold their Talisman and bought a different one on the secondary market. And it's really fun to see the community come to life like that. When we originally had the idea to do evolutionary NFTs, it was something that we invented. And people said to us, "You can't evolve NFTs." And we said, "But if it's just gonna sit in your wallet, that's not very exciting. Let's do something really radical." And so to see this idea truly evolve over the last six or seven months is awesome. And to watch the community come with us is really fun. So we're glad that the Galactic Punk community was so gracious and allowed us to airdrop to everyone. And we're excited to have you in the war with us, and have you experience the journey with us and it really has been an adventure Jackisnotinabox 29:11 Yeah, well, thank you for including us. Obviously the airdrop came unexpectedly. And obviously lots of our holders appreciate it and to bring us into your world like this with our own GP style Talisman. But the way you guys are planning on distributing your token down the line and obviously getting people involved in the protocol is just such a innovative way of doing it in a fair way. And also making sure that people who get tokens are the ones who are contributing. And that's the sort of thing that we at Galactic Punk we're looking to do as well. So we're actually building a staking protocol for Galactic Punks. So when we vest into upcoming launches, holders are able to stake their Galactic Punks in a contract almost like a cryogenic chamber. Well, that's the look we're going for anyway. So imagine your Galactic Punk is traveling through lightspeed, and you lock it up for a number of years. We're not doing a set lock as such, but imagine they are sleeping in a cryogenic chamber. And then tokens will get distributed to those who are participating. So it's a great way to obviously make sure that we're fairly distributing these tokens across a number of people. It not only helps Galactic Punks and their holders, but it also helps the protocols that are building the space to make sure that their tokens are fairly distributed. Levana Protocol 30:35 I mean, that's, that's brilliant. Oh sorry, sorry, Beach, go for it. BeachDragon 30:43 No, no, it's fine. I was just saying, I love the idea of frozen in time.That's awesome. Levana Protocol 30:49 Yeah and I love the pushing the envelope. And when I got involved in NFTs, it was shortly after the, I think... What year was it? Was it DEF CON 4? When did the Punks Drop? I think it was DEF CON 4. So when the original Punks came out. So I saw them and I actually had admitted a whole bunch of NFTs. I took pictures of the staff at the... I was working in a cryptography company at the time. And so I took pictures of all the staff, and I used a pixelator, it's a website where you upload a photo, and then it just makes it look retro video game style. And so I made a series of custom Punk NFTs for all of our staff, and then distributed those out. And it's just been... The vision that we had at the time of where NFTs were going to go was that NFTs would be the front end, the visible layer that exemplified interoperability, which means that multiple protocols can all talk to each other, and composability, meaning that assets that are minted on one platform can be used on another platform. Levana Protocol 32:32 We always envision that... This is a story that Vitalik tells if you get him to reminisce about the early days of Ethereum, that one of the things that motivated him to build Ethereum, which is the first smart contract platform, was that in World of Warcraft they changed the rules. I forget what he said. He had a... Maybe it was a dark elf... I'm sure it's in a blog post somewhere. But he had one of these characters, and it was very powerful, and he had leveled it up. And then there was an upgrade to World of Warcraft, and the rules had changed. And so now his character, which was super powerful was kind of muted, it was diminished significantly. And that was crushing to him, because he had spent so much time investing in creating this character with its inventory and its powers, and it was just crushing to see all of that taken away. And so that was one of the sparks that came and motivated him to build a smart contract platform. And that's really what attracted me, that story and other stories like it, really attracted me to DeFi and to the ownership economy. So it's the idea that there could be an experience where you participate in a game, and games are just experiences at the end of the day, that nobody can take away from me, that when I own it, I own it. Levana Protocol 34:14 And if somebody else wants to come and create an additional, an extension experience, then they would be able to do that. And that's what's so exciting, that's what I loved about the Grids that you guys created. That's what I love about the warm relationship, and the we're all going to make it attitude, that I think makes specifically the Terra ecosystem such a powerful ecosystem to build in. And it's just exciting to kind of see here now, we are four years later, and four years is a lifetime involved in crypto, and I've been working professionally in the space since 2016, and I've had basically about every role that you can imagine in crypto from an investor, a builder, a researcher, and everything like that, and so to kind of see these early concepts come to market in a real way, is just so exciting. And I think that our projects Levana and Galactic Punks, and the ability that we have to work together really is a flagship and a lighthouse to what I see will be the future of cooperation and interoperability within the Terra NFT ecosystem. Karma 35:38 Hello, Manus. Sorry, I just wanted to butt in for a second. Now you have mentioned how NFTs are the best way to build a passionate audience, and Levana seems to be doing that incredibly well with unparalleled storytelling that you have just so passionately displayed. I think you might have touched upon every single of the questions I have had, which is why we will have to just touch upon a few of them again. I was just wondering, since it ties very well to what we finished with. I was just wondering, when I look at my Talisman, I can't seem to notice there seem to be three different roles ascribed most of them. Now there is a Premier role, and then mine says Punk role. Would you mind just maybe explaining a little bit about the different roles and how they relate to Talisman roles? Levana Protocol 36:33 Sure. So the Premiers were an Easter egg. Again, we think that surprises is something that's great in an adventure, if you've ever played Dungeons and Dragons, or even more modern video games, the elements of surprise and knowing that you don't know all the rules, you don't know what's going to happen, is part of what makes it fun. So when we dropped the Talismans, it was important that a very small percentage, I think it's less than 2% had these Premier roles. And we in our minds thought that the community is... We're going to encourage live action roleplay. And so we suspect that the natural leaders will gravitate to the Premier roles, and that we can, as a team, offer the Premiers more tools to help them better organize their teams. So if there's any Premiers that are listening, we highly recommend that you reach out to us, that you introduce that you're a Premier, obviously, your privacy is very important to us so you can do that in an anonymous fashion, or a non-anonymous fashion. And we can provide you with resources, like data scientists, and graphic designers, and other resources, so that you can help organize your team. And we've seen this excellently within the Council. The Council has just come together. I mean, they're a better well-oiled machine than Levana itself at this point. They've created their own summaries of the lore, they have their own private chat and websites. Levana Protocol 38:33 And obviously, we encourage people to be coming into the Discord to playing together, where we've kind of laid out the, let's call it the game board, or the magic circle where we hope that the game is experienced in. And because really it's kind of a meta game. So right now we are playing the game. This conversation that we are having, this is part of the Faction War. And this is really just onboarding of troops. I'm hoping that there's people that are listening to this that will be inspired and will join one of the Factions. So we really tried to kind of view it as there is no fourth wall to the Faction where it's something that exists on Spaces, on Discord. And it's the Premier's responsibility to help their Faction win. So if their Faction wins, then the Premiers will get a bonus, they'll get a large bonus. Levana Protocol 39:35 Now, if you're playing as a result of nesting an egg, which means that you've been playing... You're not on level one of the Levana game. You've been here for three months, tou participated in the meteor shower, you went and you you cracked your egg, you joined the various social channels, you went out and you hunted your dust and you've poured your dust on in order to nest it, and then you generated... Then you're called a Member. So you're an existing Member of the Faction War and of the Levana ecosystem. Now, we also wanted to invite guests. And so we didn't want to make it just generic guest and write a line item as guest because we thought that that wasn't personal enough. We wanted something that was warm and welcoming. And so we created the role of Punk. And now there also will be... We got approval from the Discord, we did a number of votes. So there was an approval to airdrop to some of the other communities. So I'm not gonna name names quite yet, but we'll be talking about that kind of right before the Faction War starts so there will be other guests as well. And so, the Punks are the first guest that we invited, and then there will be... We're hoping to get it out because it is somewhat laborous to airdrop to existing owners of assets of other contracts. It's not out of the box. So all of these other NFTs, these guests NFTs will have the name on them of the reference to the NFT contract of their invitation. BeachDragon 41:39 And they'll also be customized, right. So that way, the other communities that we'll invite, every Talisman that we make is designed specifically for that community so that it fits in the story, essentially, of that community and that everybody can feel like they're part of Levana, but at the same time they retain their own identities as well. The Galactic DAO 42:00 Okay, well, that all sounds very interesting. I had a question. My name is Manos, by the way, I'm one of the Ambassadors in the Galactic DAO. I've been watching Levana for a long time, and I guess from just a surface level have been particularly excited for the dragons one day. As someone that now does have a token and entering into the space and the game, what is the time commitment required to get into it? Levana Protocol 42:39 Well, some of it is going to depend on how good you are, if you grew up playing Nintendo games or not, or even other styles of mini games. Some people just to look at some of the metrics for the first mini game that defines the Faction War, which was Salim's Side-scrol Adventure, some people told us that they were able to beat it in about 15 minutes. Most people, it took about 45 minutes to an hour to beat that game. And then the worst case is, I had someone who said to me, "I've been playing for eight hours now, and I still haven't beaten it." So I don't know if they were exaggerating or not. But obviously, there's skill sets to it. So we're looking at this leading up to the token launch, which is a little bit more than four weeks away. So over these four weeks, we're going to be revealing more mini games that will be played, which will be in the style of classic games, if you've been playing casual games on your iPhone, or classic games from Nintendo inspired or Playstation inspired past. And then there will also be some things that aren't just button mashing. So there will be things like solving riddles, there will be points given for community voting on memes and things like that. So, I would say that you probably could commit... Let's say that you're a decent video game player, and you'd be able to beat a mini game styled in one of the games you grew up playing, and that would take you 20-30 minutes. And let's say that there would be... I don't want to say exactly how many there are, because I think that ruins some of the surprise. But I would say total commitment between now and then, we'll probably be looking at about two hours of gameplay, which would then be broken up over multiple stages of experience, which then would include a lot of just getting to know people on your team, live action roleplay, coordinating, asking questions, participating in a scavenger hunt, and learning from the things that other people learned. Levana Protocol 45:07 But in terms of time commitment, our goal isn't to make it overly bearing. And obviously, you can stop at any time, and you're not forced to do anything, you can just kind of participate to the extent that you want. And it's not all or nothing, if somebody was to just do some of it, and then come back later or try and catch up, we wanted to make it that it would be easy to catch up if you checked out for a week or two in the middle. So we really don't know, because it hasn't been played yet. But that's more or less what we would imagine that somebody would experience and we hope that if they have a good time, that they would stay longer and participate longer. The Galactic DAO 45:53 Yeah, okay. Perfect. I think one of the things with if you haven't been in the Levana community the entire time, I know you've had a lot of stages, so sometimes it can feel like there may have been a lot that's missed. So to simplify it down is nice and easy. I think Karma had a question. BeachDragon 46:17 I just want to add to that, before we go to the next question, which is that your Talisman actually gets marked with the metadata of the things that you do during the Faction Wars. So if you can think of a Talisman is some kind of entry ticket, like a punch ticket, where you decide on the things that you want to do, or the things that you want to play. And if there's something that you don't want to do, then don't do that. But at the end of the Faction War, if you've stayed staked the entire time, then your Talisman becomes much more rare and valuable, because it's recording all of your achievements and your quests. Whereas an unused Talisman... Isn't a war hero and hasn't gone through that experience yet. So you can sort of think of it that way. And we've definitely designed it so that you can essentially consider what's happened until now as a separate entity, almost, and that you can join the Faction Wars, read the lore, catch up a little bit on the backstory, but you don't have to feel like, "Oh, I missed the meteor shower. Therefore Levana is out for me," or, "I'm priced out," or, "I'm experienced out, and I can't ever get back." So nobody's played the Faction Wars yet, not Levana members and not Galactic Punk members, so this is totally new. We've designed it as a new and standalone experience. Karma 47:36 Cheers. That's incredibly interesting. I can't wait for... Recording metadata on an evolving NFT is something brand new. And I think everybody is incredibly exciting to see how this will work. Now, I just wanted to circle a little bit back to something we've discussed at first, which was the importance of what you have called DeFi-tainment and the gamification to pulling in new crowds. I often feel lately that within the Terra NFT space, were sort of all swimming within the same pool just in circles. Now, since you've touched upon this topic, I wonder, first, how big the team at Levana must be for you guys to be able to produce such innovative stuff, and these incredible games. And then, two, how could we possibly market these games? Or are there any plans to do so in order to pull in new crowd instead of just the audience that is already familiar with all of this? BeachDragon 48:43 I was just gonna say those are two really great questions. I want to touch upon the second question, and I'll let Jonathan speak to the first one. But if we think of ourselves as almost like a DAO within the NFT space, right, if every project can come together, and rather than thinking about this small pool, right, which everybody's, "Oh, I sold my Levana egg so I could get a Galactic Punk so that I could trade that..." Instead of thinking of the people that are already here right around the table, if we look around and we say, "Hang on a second, the smallest NFT community probably is the Terra NFT community. But there's a huge community of NFT lovers and users and acquirers in ETH and in SOL and in other chains, who are so used to paying essentially the fees that we pay for our NFTs, they're used to paying those as gas fees. And so if we think about it, there's a huge community out there. And if we work together, right, we can attract those users. We've seen a huge influx, actually, within Levana of users from other chains recently who are starting to look at prices, and value, and utility, and other things, and saying to themselves, "Wait a second. I've heard about Terra," or, "I've heard about opportunities on other chains. Let me go check that out." So I think that together as a community we need to come together and think about better ways to onboard people. We all have the same issues of how difficult it is to get into Terra sometimes, and how difficult it is for people to onboard. So I think we need to look at that as a community and not just as individual products. Because otherwise that vision that we have of 100 million users, even if we lower it down to 10 million users, is going to be so difficult for all of us. And I think it will affect all of us. I think you're absolutely right to call that out. And we don't want to be swimming in the same pond, we want to be swimming in an ocean together. And I'll let Jonathan speak to the other question about the size of the team. Levana Protocol 50:39 So there's a the team has about... Full time is around 30, and then part time is around a similar number. And then we've got a growing amount of volunteers that just create content. A lot of the content... You'd actually be shocked to see how much content just comes from community members that are just not even officially part of the project. They just send us stuff. And we post it and then we always try and lean in and say yes, so when somebody contributes, we try and think, "Okay, how can we integrate this? How can we encourage this behavior?" And so it's attracted a lot of builders, a lot of artists, a lot of creators, a lot of storytellers. And again, it's that we're trying to create something that has a certain profile, a certain mindset, that will come around the table, because right now we're kind of in... There's two phases, one of the phases is to building our core community. And so from this, that's going to be Terra power users like LUNAtics, it's going to be people that have a long term vision, and we're trying to do things to somewhat shy away from the traditional DeFi model, which is that you have this narrow market of Web 3 users, they come to your dApp not because they care about using your dApp, but because they just want to get the high APYs of the farming rewards. You hope that if you give them a bunch of tokens, either through airdrops or through being liquidity providers, that they'll participate in a DAO. But the DAO is overly complex. It's unclear how much your vote actually counts. And so after the initial interest wanes, and the APYs drop, then these professional farmers, so to speak, which they're not professional... They're professional because they're very good at it, not that they necessarily do this as their day job. But they end up just dumping into an AMM, which if there's protocol owned liquidity just kind of makes the DAO members the bag holders at the end when everything crashes. And then you end up with this very common alt coin pattern, which is you get this high spike, and then just two years of trickle outs as the project kind of bleeds out. Levana Protocol 53:03 So we've taken that model and tried to evolve it to something that we call DeFi-tainment, which is really been inspired by DeFi Kingdom. I think they were the first ones that got this really well, where they took a fork of Uniswap and they moved it over to really a ghost chain, which was Harmony One, not to say that there's anything wrong with Harmony One, just it had never been used before. And then on top of their AMM, they built a very light narrative and an NFT experience that focused on a design pattern called pseudomorphism, which is where you take digital narratives and you map them to things that you do in the real life. So when you farm on Uniswap, you're just kind of clicking buttons and depositing assets, when you farm on the fork of Uniswap in DeFi Kingdom, then you're actually planting seeds, your LP tokens are called seeds, and you you have to go and you have to harvest your crops. And if you want to build up reputation, so then the reputation is found within an NFT that becomes your avatar. And then you can perform almost mini games but like quests with your avatar that then unlock new aspects and features. So we were really inspired by this because it was something that we were trying to really kind of figure out how do you merge... How do we know that... How do we take the attention span of a large audience, and we're talking millions of people, our goal is hundreds of millions of people, and then bring them to a complex product, like perpetual swaps, or Prism, or Apollo, or White Whale, or even Anchor, because so many of these things are just objectively good for society. But the barrier to get people to use them is too high. Levana Protocol 55:16 And so if we can now build out an engaged community, that is not focused on Web 3, targeting Web 3, but is really focused on Web 2, and there's a lot of work that's going to need to go into this. We need improvements on the wallets. It takes a village, it literally takes a village to build out Levana's vision, because we're not going to be able to do all of it, but we can help. We can help bring the people that are building the building blocks to this mega vision, we can bring them to... We can help them grow, we can help them with the market research that we've done, we can help them in terms of structuring their businesses and growing and their infrastructure, we can help them with the investors or seed investment that they need to get it off the ground with grant programs from Terra and from other places. So the vision is, we want to be the spearhead to the 100 million mark on Terra. But we know that we can't do it alone. We know what the lowest hanging fruit is, which is probably the Solana ecosystem. There's definitely education that needs to be done in terms of how to get a Terra wallet, how to move your funds from Solana to Terra. And then the same goes for Ethereum, the Ethereum ecosystem. Levana Protocol 56:52 And so we see this as, really... Right now we're just trying to build our family inside the house, which is get as many people excited about this vision, about the economics and the core principles behind DeFi-tainment, to recognize the problem that's happening in DeFi today, which is a greater problem that crypto is having today. I mean, just look at it, look at some metrics over the last year. Obviously it's hard to pinpoint this but a conservative number is that 200,000 new wallets, new people came to participate in DeFi. But yet 17 million people came to participate in blockchain entertainment, which is primarily led through the collection and trading of NFTs. Now, you could say that the audience of NFTs is not the audience of DeFi, that the people that are coming into DeFi are traders, and earners, and farmers. But most of the people are coming into NFTs to do the exact same thing, to participate in market speculation, to get in early into projects to be on that whitelist, to participate in the minting. And the onboarding that NFTs enables is also the onboarding for DeFi. Because you have to get your wallet, you have to learn your seed phrase, you have to learn about gas, you have to learn about bridges. The educational process is almost 100% overlap. The problem with most NFT projects is that they just stop at the minting, or they just stop at some type of community. Levana Protocol 58:29 So I think that the way that we're going to bring new people in to make this little pond of Terra that we're swimming in into a vast ocean of, I don't know, we can call it... I don't know what to call that transition. But I think it's going to be, number one, is making sure that the narrative is very strongly felt within our own house of Terra here, and that we build out a very well polished onboarding experience that's targeted, where we ask ourselves, "Okay, I've been trading on Solana, and on Near, and on Polkadot, and on Harmony, and on Polygon. I've been doing all of these actions. What exactly is the funnel? What's my workflow and my user experience to go from my ecosystem to my first interaction with Terra DeFi and Terra NFTs?" And then polishing that whole experience. And this is a process that's going to take months. But it's something that we think is critical, not just for the success of Levana, but for the entire success of Terra. And then the next thing is to create that strong narrative so that it's interesting enough for somebody to care about it. When you see high quality artwork, when you see video footage, when you see a cool video game, that's the hook that can bring you over especially knowing that there's an ability to profit from this. So if you've got entertainment, and you've got profits, and you've got beautiful artwork, and you've got strong storytelling, and you've got a smooth onboarding experience, that's when I think that the floodgates open. And we're not there yet. But the vision is pretty clear. Karma 1:00:12 Yeah. I will now say we've been going on for a while, so we possibly need to pivot towards questions soon. I just wanted to add some of my own thoughts first. We've started today's AMA set on nesting an egg, and cracking some meteors. But we have managed to travel through so many more subjects and push the storytelling boundaries of Twitter Spaces. And I just wanted to touch upon the topic that you have talked about earlier. Well first, I wanted to say, the Levana team being 60 people, basically, that is incredible. And I absolutely cannot wait to see what you guys will produce. Just for comparison, the Galactic Punk's core team is five people with six community ambassadors. Incredible. And I fully agree with you, you spoke a lot about it. And I think we are just now unlocking the full potential of community building by NFTs. But us the Galactic DAO, of course, we also see the other way around, building through community. We are a decentralized collective working together to provide value to the entire Terra NFT space beyond just our own holders like you guys are trying to do. You have just mentioned, a lot of content is delivered to Levana by volunteers and excited participants. And at the DAO, it's nothing else, we provide the framework for people to engage, people who might otherwise not be full time crypto, and their contributions would be lost or more difficult for them. And these people often look for more education as well. There's a big audience of NFT users who does not actively engage with DeFi. And even there, more engagement is necessary and pulls in so many users from other chains. Solana, ETH NFT collectors come over to get early into Terra NFTs, but they stay for Anchor, or for Prism, and for other exciting protocols. And Levana will combine the two audiences, I think in a very innovative way. So I think I speak for everybody here when I say we are all very excited. And I would now invite everybody who has a question to come forward and request to speak. Jackisnotinabox 1:02:24 Whilst we're waiting for some people to come and speak. I think just touching on bringing other people from different chains onto Terra, we had a partnership with, or we do have a partnership with SMB, where we're mutually delegating to each other's validators. And running initiatives like these are great ways to bring attention to other chains, especially if we start with the NFT projects, and then branch out from there. So it'll be interesting to see obviously, when you guys are launching your mini games as to the crowds that can be brought in from other chain into blockchain gaming and that sort of thing. This is a whole new thing on Terra. So it'll be great to see exactly what communities we can bring across, because there are people always looking for new stuff and new ways to get involved with DeFi products as well as NFTs. Levana Protocol 1:03:14 Absolutely. And I think that the more projects that kind of have this expansionary vision, that it's not a zero sum game, that... We spoke to some projects, and this is one of the things why I have so much respect for what you guys are building in the Galactic DAO and just the entire Galactic Punks project is that you share so many of the same core values that the Levana team is really built upon. And I think that's why it's always been nothing but just positive experiences working with you and I look forward to many years to come. The work that we do together between our communities, I'm having tangible results. It makes me so happy when I... Like what Beach spoke about, that we we get DMs from people or they post on the Discord saying, "Hey guys, I just came from Solana, I saw some of the dragons on Twitter, and I just had to come and check out what that was. And now I'm hooked." And then they show off which egg that they nested. And I've poked a couple times to see... Because they're linking to their wallets, you can also see what else they have. And it's not shocking to see the large overlap of people that come in that end up getting a nested Levana egg and they also own not just one but a couple Punks as well. Karma 1:05:06 And we can greet Colin Johnson right now, who has joined us as a speaker go, Colin. Colin Johnson 1:05:11 Hello, everybody. Jack, Karma, I think you guys all know that these are my two favorite NFT projects. But Jonathan, to your point that you made earlier about like onboarding, I agree that it's absolutely crucial. But one element of onboarding that you can't really control, the NFT collections, or the games themselves, is the exchange, right. And it's kind of like a crucial part to the onboarding journey that that go well, and the exchange be kind of understandable and integrate all around experience. How do you all think about the exchanges on the Terra ecosystem? Are there changes that they should be making to sort of encourage a smoother onboarding experience? And is there any other way to kind of smooth that out? Levana Protocol 1:05:55 So we've thought a lot about that. And we've also just... We're very sensitive to the community's feedback. So we've asked them, should we just have a starter pack that you can just buy, kind of like how you can go to a comic book store, and you can just buy a starter pack of Pokemon cards or other... I collected Dragon Ball Z cards growing up, and so it's very sensitive about that. And obviously, you want to maintain the scarcity of the assets. And so that creates a challenge. That means that at least some of the game assets are going to be limited in supply, which means that the user will have to go to an exchange. I think that the exchanges are pretty much catered towards power users that are already within the Terra ecosystem today. I know that I've had from my in real life community, a number of people that I've had to handhold, actually come over to their house and help them install the Terra Station wallet and then, backup their seed and everything, and then actually just gift them LUNA and UST because they don't have a KuCoin account, they don't have... So it's definitely we have a problem that we're only catering to power users today and people that are already on boarded into the Terra ecosystem. Levana Protocol 1:07:32 I think that projects like Angel, projects like Zendo, which doesn't support DeFi, which NFTs are a part of DeFi, because you need to be able to scan the wallet connect code, but it's on their roadmap. So these types of projects, we don't have like a Magic, or Fortmatic, or Portis, which are some of the things that took years for Ethereum to develop. But I think that we're going to need to... The stores are going to need to help handhold. And I don't know whether it's going to be the stores' responsibility, or a third party's responsibility. But the flow has to be, at least from my view, I saw something that caught my eye in... Well, I'll just use the term "dragon" but I mean that as just a general concept. I saw a dragon on TikTok. And I said, "What is that? I have to find out more." And I click a link, I'm on mobile, and now I'm at some type of educational onboarding experience. And it asked me to connect with my Twitter account, or some type of OAuth, maybe it's my Gmail account, something that feels very Web 2. Maybe I can even pay with Apple Pay to make my first purchase. And I'm really onboarded in a very Web 2 style into a Web 3 experience that then allows me to very quickly just focus on the value drivers, the zero to one Levana Protocol 1:09:23 that can be the game changer to to make people have the aha moment of where they see now, "Oh, I came for the lols of entertainment," whether it's NFTs or blockchain gaming, "And then I stayed for the life changing financial liberation that's already been created," and I think is relatively mature compared to other ecosystems that's found within the Terra DeFi or TeFi ecosystem. So that's how I kind of envisioned it. And again, I think that the stores have done a great job. There's probably some performance and search issues that could be fixed. I find that things like usability studies, and like tracking where people are clicking on websites, and like what's the mobile experience, and what's the funnel rate of people dropping off, this type of stuff that if you come from the world of Web 2 of building, or e-commerce, or app development, you're familiar with all of these funnel optimizations. So I feel like we're still at a point where none of that has been done. And so it's just we're at the grind now, which depending upon who's behind the wheel, that grind is going to take six months, or it's going to take six years. But hopefully, we're closer to the six months part than the six year part. But that's the grind. And it's no different than any industry. And look, I was building iPhone apps before the iPhone store existed. And we went through the same birth pains. It was hard to adapt to a new paradigm of computer human interaction. And it takes time. But what's nice about being in Terra, is that we can see what worked and what didn't work from the Ethereum ecosystem, and even from the Bitcoin ecosystem before it. And so we can kind of jumpstart that evolution to focus on what we've seen have success in the past, and not have to kind of make those same mistakes that blockchain apps that came to market in 2018 very frequently made. Colin Johnson 1:11:46 Awesome. Yeah, that totally makes sense. It just feels like that's the last piece of sort of uncontrolled... It's an uncontrolled atmosphere within the onboarding chain. So hopefully, it does get a little bit more results soon. Sometimes I almost wonder if there's some kind of an interface that an NFT collection can create that's not a marketplace. So it's sort of a direct consumer to that individual collection rather than the marketplace to some degree. But anyways, love that answer. Thanks a lot. Levana Protocol 1:12:17 Yeah, and I agree with you that marketplaces are probably not the best onboarding because they have a lot of noise, they are hard to navigate, and they make lots of assumptions. When someone arrives at a marketplace, we as the Dungeon Master assumes you walked into the bazaar because you knew what you needed, you knew the currency, you knew the language, and you knew which tent sold it. So I know many of you that's listening have never been in a bazaar in your life. But I shop at a bazaar almost on a weekly basis. And I've been to bazaars in countries all over the world. I've been traveling throughout the Middle East for the majority of my life. And it is overwhelming. You can look out instantly and you can see the people in a real life bazaar, that this is their first time experiencing that. And I think the marketplace of NFTs gives newcomers, or the uninitiated, that same glossy look on their eyes and over their face. Jackisnotinabox 1:13:31 I'm really sorry to jump in here, guys. But we're all pushing time a little bit. So I think we're going to have to look at wrapping up now. So if everyone could just say their final peace and their goodbyes, and we'll end the Spaces. Levana Protocol 1:13:46 Great. Well, I think I'd said everything. I apologize that I talked so much and for so long. But I hope it was fun. And I hope that some of the message that I conveyed resonated with the audience. And as always, if you want to learn more our DMs are open Levana_protocol. We focus a lot on non-English language. So while I'm a native English speaker, we know most of the world isn't. So we've translated our lore, we've translated our Primer, which is like the one... If there's one article that you wanted to read to understand what is the vision behind Levana, it's called the Great Levana Primer, P-R-I-M-E-R. So you can find that on our Medium. You can find links to that on the blog on our website, but it's like a 10 minute read and it just goes through so much of what we talked about today, all in one article with a nice frequently asked questions at the bottom. But if you have other questions, the community is very warm. You can join the Discord. You can follow us on Twitter you can follow us on Telegram you can join the Telegram of your own native language, you can join the Discord channel of your own native language, and you can also read the blog posts in your own native language. And our DMs are always open, and we respond. Right now we're getting literally hundreds of DMs every day. So it does take a team of volunteers to respond so be nice to them, just know that the person that you're talking to is a volunteer to the project, and so they might not be able to get back to you immediately. But we're here to welcome anybody that is interested in the vision and the if anybody that's interested in the world that we want to create. Jackisnotinabox 1:15:38 Amazing. Well, I'm going to go and stake my Council Talisman right now I think. BeachDragon 1:15:42 Oh we've got a Council, so that makes us our tribal enemies. But I guess we could still be friends. [chuckle] I just wanted to add that... Check out your wallet, see which Talisman you got. If you don't resonate with that Faction, you can always go to the secondary markets. It's called Levana Loot. So that's sometimes confusing to people, the Talismans are found under Levana Loot. You can either keep your Galactic Punk Talisman, or you can get a Member Talisman or you can upgrade to a Premier Talisman, whatever suits you and is the most appropriate. And we hope to see you in the game. The Faction War starts next Tuesday. So you don't have that much time. And rewards are obviously greater for everyone that's in the war the entire time. So if you're going to stake then definitely do it before Tuesday. And thank you all so much. It was great to be here. Karma 1:16:28 Well, brilliant. Thank you, for me as well. And the Galactic DAO is working on a proposal to start our own NFT treasury and we are right now in the NFT nebula, which is our work group, discussing the exact outline and the list for the NFTs that we would like to purchase. So we will certainly be getting back to you guys to just have a little guidance for the best way to actually nest our little Galactic DAO dragon egg. So let's look forward to that. Thank you to everybody who tuned in to listen to us today. And see you soon with the next AMA. Thank you guys. Levana Protocol 1:17:09 Thank you. Jackisnotinabox 1:17:10 Thank you everyone. Finn 1:17:10 Thanks for checking out another episode of The Ether. That was the Levana Space hosted by Galactic Punks. Recorded on Thursday, February 17th 2022. This episode of The Ether is brought to you by Orbital Command, a community validator on Terra dedicated to educating, expanding, and promoting the LUNAtic community. Have you heard about the new Terra Invest Strategy Discord server Orbital Command spun up? If you're looking for a chill place to chat about different LUNA stacking strategies, or looking for some alpha, or if you're trying to find the best UST farms, or even if you just have a quick question you need answered, be sure to stop by TIS and say hi to the Orbital Command gang. Hell, I'm even in there sometimes when I'm not editing hours of Cephii Spaces. You can find me in that server chatting about NFTs and answering basic Terra LUNA questions. The link to the server is in the shownotes and for more information check out orbitalcommand.io. This episode of The Ether was also brought to you by Luart. Luart is the first gamified NFT platform built on the Terra network. Luart provides a seamless minting and trading experience all while earning you rewards just for being a user. Be sure to follow them on Twitter and join the community in the Discord server for the most up to date news and announcements regarding all the hot new NFT launches, platform upgrades, and new projects hitting the secondary marketplace. Are you ready to #PutYourHelmetOn and join the movement? Find out more luart.io. TerraSpaces appreciates the support from all our sponsors. For terraspaces.org, I'm Finn. Thanks for listening.