DFKSolver Grant Proposal

Description

DFKSolver is a set of premium products that assist engaged DFK players in playing the game.

We have already implemented our prototype, which we’ve been working on for months, it is the Summoning Expected Value (EV) Calculator. Summoning EV will calculate the projected profit or loss between a pair of heroes should they summon together.

Our Minimum Viable Product (MVP), has two modes of operation:

  • evrent: Accepts a single hero id as input and will find the most profitable pair for that hero from the rental market.
  • evpair: Accepts two hero ids and will calculate the profit or loss when those heroes summon.

How it Works

Summoning EV is a measure of the average profit you can expect from your summoning pairs.

Summoning EV is determined by:

  1. Calculating all the possible outcomes of the summoning pair.
  2. Assigning a value to each possible outcome thanks to our “Hero Floor Price Calculator”.
  3. Accounting for all the related summoning costs (summoning fees, rental fees, depreciation, and tavern fees) we calculate the net value of each possible outcome.

With these steps completed we can determine your average expected profit and how frequently you will profit.

Short-Term Product Goals

The functionality and features of Summoning EV will be expanded to include many practical features as they have been requested by our beta-test users and our experience has showed.

Some of these features include calculating the summoning ROI of heroes before purchase, finding the most profitable pairs of heroes to summon between your entire wallet and finding you the best heroes to buy that will produce profitable summons with your existing heroes.

Short-Term Engineering Goals

We are in the process of building a blockchain indexer for DFK from first-principles. That means, a transactional block crawler that will index all the topics of interest DFK emits.

We are starting by indexing:

  • Current Heroes and all their properties.
  • Summoning events, tears and stones used and state of hero at the time.
  • Sale events and the state of hero at the time.
  • Maintain sync of the entire Hero Rental Market.
  • Multi-chain (SD and CV).

These indexed data on the application’s local database will further increase calculation speeds and allow for even more complicated and data intensive calculations.

Grant Rationale

There are two reasons why we submit this proposal:

  1. We want to develop (by outsourcing) our branding and website frontend.
  2. We want to partner with DFK and explore collaboration opportunities and / or technology licensing.

Grant Amount

  • 50K USD. Budget analyzed bellow.
  • We offer 30% of all proceeds to be transferred to the Questing Fund Multi-sig wallet of DFK.

The DFK Grant’s budget

  • Branding Design: $3,000. We strongly believe that branding and a good corporate identity is what tells apart a trustful, professional venture. The budget for branding is on the very low-end, considering avant-guard branding identities involve at least 5 figure budgets. We will leverage our experience and talent acquiring skills to find the most appropriate up and coming branding designer that would accept to deliver a full-fledged branding, including a branding manual at that budget.
  • Website Design:
    • Initial budget for R&D, UX Research and implementation of initial core pages: $5,000.
    • Ongoing Collaboration: We’ll be looking for a permanent collaboration at the range of $40/hour, for a day per week. That’d translate to a roughly $1,300 monthly cost, span across say 4 months for a total of: ~$5,000.
  • Frontend Engineer: We’ll be looking for a permanent collaboration at the range of $90/hour.
    • Starting out we’d need a more intense employment of at least 3 days per week for delivery of the bulk work. For a span of 3 to 4 weeks. So we estimate that initial budget to be at: ~$9,000
    • After initial delivery, we’ll be reducing our engagement to 1 or 2 days per week as demand dictates (~6 days per month). Span across say 4 months for a total of: ~$17,000.
  • Unpredictables: Venturing is not an exact science. Considering the scope and budget of the venture, and so as to avoid running out of funds, we estimate we’ll need a safety margin.

Team Information

FaultyPoker: Deep analyst, former professional poker player, the mastermind behind the analysis of Summoning EV Calculator.

Anton Yip: Software engineer, has built DFK Analytics Dashboards for Serendale and Crystalvale.

Thanos Polychronakis (thanpolas): I am a family man in my 40s and I am a seasoned engineer. I have “retired” to web3 after a fulfilling and rewarding career in Web2. During my career I helped navigate startups through brutal hardships and held the keys to kingdom come of many businesses and dreams.

My Open Source work exceeds 200 repositories on Github.

I am a moderator on the (third-party) DFK Developers discord and I have received grants for my Open Source and private contributions from Uniswap, Synthetix, Balancer and AAVE.

Today, I work full-time producing tools, services and content for DFK.

I am fully doxed. If you google me, which I recommend you do, you will find dozens and dozens of pages of my community contributions on every imaginable setting (open source, meetups, conferences, etc.). It’s just what I love doing, helping people.

Requests from DFK Team

  • Discussion on technology licensing of the hero floor price calculator so DFK Discord and in-game users can easily get a value estimation of their hero.

Connection to DFK Game and DFK Blockchain

We fetch everything we need from the blockchain, our application is “read-only”, so no permissions or white-listing is needed.

Deliverables

As mentioned above product is already operational. Our rough schedule now includes:

  • Official Launch Date on the week of June 13th.
  • Implementation and incorporation of the indexing engine before official launch.
  • Automated billing system within July.

Payment Schedule

  • $25,000 At the approval of the grant.
  • $25,000 After first delivery of website design and initial core pages.

Timeline with Milestones

DFKSolver is now on a public beta. It will become a premium service on the week of June 13th.

  • By that time we expect to have the DFK Indexer implemented.
  • By early July we expect to have a fully automated billing system implemented on top of the blockchain.

Grant Related Milestones

All timelines will be relevant upon the final approval of the proposal and procurement of funds.

  1. Branding: Starting at day 1 and expected to complete in 21 days.
  2. Hiring of Frontend Developer: Starting at day 1 and expected to complete in 14 days.
  3. Website Design: Starting after Branding is complete and expected to be delivered iteratively with the first delivery starting in 14 days and keeping the cooperation active.
  4. Website MVP: Considering the complexity involved the first website MVP implementation should not be expected before 40 days after initial works have started.

We expect the Summoning EV product to be in full-force in Q4 2022.

Measures of Success

  • At Premium Launch time (Week of June 13th) we expect to have at least 10 paying customers signed up.
  • By September 2022, we expect to have at least 30 customers.
  • By Q1 2023, we expect an MRR exceeding $10,000.

Long Term Plan

We are a team of analysts, professionals and engineers. We are passionate about DFK and perform deep analysis and research on the game mechanics of DFK. Then, we rapidly prototype tools through intense R&D as new features of DFK come out.

Leveraging our professional and engineering skills, we perform a product viability assessment and decide on which tools are worth productizing and which should be shared with the community for free.

In that spirit, we will continue to produce products as DFK releases new features. For instance: a pet rarity helper, or a DFK PvP solver. We intentionally leave these product descriptions vague as we don’t have the information needed to talk about them more, DFK has not released the features yet.

External Links

File Uploads

Example of DFKSolver finding most profitable rental pairings:
Example of DFKSolver finding most profitable rental pairings.

Branding in follow up message due to limitations on new user’s posts.

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DFKSolver Branding Assets

Funny trivia: The above handsome gentleman is called MrSolver, he is the long lost brother of MrZipper, they got separated during birth. One was raised to be a human and the other bot. Who is who, you’ll have to judge for yourselves.

Excited to meet you and discuss this in the next few weeks. We will work on a rating and engage the core team to help us review it. :+1:

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Looking forward to this!

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$50/months for this service is very high.
Especially if they are getting grant from DFK, they should low this price.

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This is very helpful thanks Faulty! Love the summoning simplicity here.