Varda Scarcity tools for the Nearverse

I’ve been encouraged by William Idrissi to post the content of my grant proposal for the collaboration between Varda and the Nearverse here on the forum, in order for interested people to be able to comment it.
This proposal is the result of a Call we had this week and I would particularily appreciate if @Cameron (who’s been mentioned on the call along with @illia ) could give their opinion on this idea.
General purpose
We want to expand the NFT Staking tool (scarcity tool) built for the Varda Vault to enable Nearverse builders with a set of pre built DeFi and NFT scarcity integrations for their parcels, allowing the Nearverse to funnel NEAR communities towards basic investment and relevant NFT interactions for a healthy ecosystem growth.

Fields of action

  • developer tools
  • DeFi
  • social impact

About me

As active member of Humanguild and judge of VR-DAO before and humanguild-dao now I already curated the birth and growth of many projects in the near ecosystem, The Varda Vault is in fact a tool for other gaming and NFT projects to grow towards the vision of adding an unlockable utility to NFTs. I’ve been suggested to ask for a grant by the Nearverse team to be able to build a solid collaboration.

I’ve reached the Near dev certification exactly one year ago and have been deepening my knowledge on rust and react ever since. I’ve been UI and php/javascript developer/designer for years now, and personally built the www.varda.vision website. In the 4 years before taking the Near dev certificate I focused on 3D design, teaching in college and after college specialized schools CAD design, blender 3D, and theory of product design.
I’ve been a metaverse builder in the last two years, building parcels with javascript interactions for most of the major metaverse platforms.

I’ll be using the help of VitalpointAI (Aaron, with whom i already share a repository for one of the Varda Vault subgraph) and will also need Matt Lockyer to audit the Nearverse scarcity tools before mainnet.

Relevant links

https://www.varda.vision

https://github.com/jilt/varda-vault https://github.com/jilt/near-create-app-webpack5-bundle https://github.com/jilt/NFT-staking

https://github.com/jilt Paid collaborators: https://github.com/VitalPointAI/ and https://github.com/mattlockyer

What and Why

The tools we’re developing are intended for parcel builders, owners and creators of NEARVERSE to be able to integrate by default in their parcels two interactive objects:

  1. The scarcity tool of the Varda Vault, to burn unwanted NFT in exchange for liquid staking tokens (stNEAR from metapool), this action educates NFT creators/investors about the standard staking mechanics of the near blockchain while forstering the concept of scarcity connected to the value of NFTs (the ones that are really valuable won’t get burned).
  2. A completely new class of interactive objects built for play to earn mechanics and connect to ref.finance liquid pools tokens, which enable P2E mechanics on the NEARVERSE to educate an illiterate audience to the investing dynamics of liquid pools without burdening them with the anguish of losing their first investment, after all, it’s just a game.

Final products

_Develop an audited NFT burning tool with token rewards (audit with Matt Lockyer) to create a js component compatible with NEARVERSE (1 year maintenance)
_develop basic interactions with ref.finance API and smart contract to enable reward distribution on Play2Earn NEARVERSE js components (min 2 max 3 components/interactions)
_build 2 or more subgraph on these components to ensure long term sustainability of the project, the subgraphs’ source code may not me open source (depending on our collaborator’s availability) but they will be free to use for each nearverse builder that chooses to use our interactive object in their builds.

Licenses

OPEN SOURCE LICENSES are aligned with the policy and vision of the Varda Project but I can’t force my collaborators to use them for their work, so i can assure that all my tools will be open source but the subgraphs’ source code I will use may be not, nevertheless any subgraph will be usable and we guarantee indexing investment as part of the current grant request.

Timing

We expect the project to be completely built in 6 months starting from the middle of May.
2 months and 30.000$ is the requested effort for the whole development part
20 to 30 days for the collaboration launch event (depending also on interactions and synchronicity between the two teams, Varda and NEARVERSE) and 10.000$ for the launch of an NFT swapping tool and the involvement of well known voxel artist, the very first builder of the near metaverse.
DeFi and Liquid staking investments will be needed for funds to be distributed to the community by mean of the scarcity and play to earn interactive objects on the NEARVERSE, 10.000$ to metaPool for stNEAR tokens and 20.000$ to mecha tracker and/or cheddar pools; thiswill take about one week of calls to get arrangement with all teams (just to be sure they understand our purpose).
We reserve 10.000$ for counseling (audit and subgraph) and server/subgraph payments, as long as maintenance of the code repo for one year.
We have added 30 days to the schedule in order to be ready for little delays that can heppen with external collaborators and when two teams from to different continents need to synch.

Impact
The two main intents are to bring awareness of the concept of scarcity in the near NFT ecosystem while educating people on using staking tools on the blockchain nodes, and to literate people who approach the decentralised technologies for the first time about opportunities and risks of investing in liquid pools, giving them a chance to approach the DeFi world in a playful way.
We created this visual schema to represent the impact that our tools can have in the context of NEARVERSE
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yq1ZegmTC4jCldeF0xBXAx6i8DOLQu3t/view?usp=sharing
The following video is a DEMO of the Varda Vault NFT utility services as they will be released in the coming week.

Funding in progress

We don’t have a funding round open but our NEARVERSE reusable objects will be enabled just as long as the funds last, after that each builder will have to “fill” the interactive objects in his own parcel with funding from stNEAR or/and from a liquid pool on ref.finance; in order for this second step to work we’ll enable builders to edit the appearance of the objects on their parcels too, for them to be finally, completely involved in the investments/ecosystem mechanics.

Amount requested

80.000

Project long term sustainability

The main resource for further funding will be the subgraphs, once they’re used by many builders they will generate the amount of income needed to maintain the packages, if they won’t be used it means that the object are not useful for the Nearverse and didn’t have the impact we wanted. The subgraphs’ interactions are both a long term reward source and a checking method to ensure the usage of our code.

Milestones

The only milestone we have planned to use is the collaboration launch event, with a small collection of 10 NFTs commissioned to an highly recognized voxel artist, how many NFTs will be sold and then swapped for NEARVERSE parcels will let us understand the potential of builders and creators in this new metaverse reality.
The subgraphs and the statistics of their interactions (along with the revenue flow that will come from them) will help us understand the impact of our interactive tools on the metaverse itself allowing us to understand if and in which direction the project has a future.

Other ongoing Grants

GRANTS are ongoing with the humaguild DAO for building the main Varda Vault unlockable content free service and the NFT marketplace CONNECTED TO THE VARDA P2E GAME, not for the reusable metaverse tools which are the very subject of this request.

Video of the unlockable content interface due to be released in the next weeks

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Forgot to mention that the meta pool liquid staking project that we’re going to use has recently launced a call mentioned here to create awareness about staking opportunities, so i guess we can all agree there’s a need for these kind of tools.

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