Vanilla Network: AMA by the Community

Question: I may have missed it but what dApp — can you please provide an update on what phase one means and what is next after H2H? Blackjack or poker?

Vanilla Network: Our aim at the moment is to launch the Head-to-Head betting dApp. We’ve been designing this dApp since early December (our Alpha, which was not released to the public has been ready since February). We’ve made some tweaks to actually simplify the first version to make it more playable for the consumer.

Mistakes past betting cryptocurrency projects have made include creating complicated procedures which mean these apps are rarely played due to their difficulty to use. This includes having to interact directly with the contract on Etherscan in order to facilitate a bet. Therefore, we’re taking an iterative approach.

Phase one: The dApp will be simply head-to-head bets, run on Matic Network. This will allow consumers to bet on anything they want, select an event, and/or manually write what they want to bet on.

They can then either make this bet public or private. For private bets, they can choose a specific user to match the bet. Or, they can make it public, and if someone likes the look of the bet, they will match it! So very social, and hopefully quite fun.

Phase two: This is also currently under development. Phase two, allows users to create their own betting houses — this is for known events that are scheduled. Such as a soccer match, Man Utd vs. Liverpool. The user will then provide liquidity for the bet they can provide, and determine their own odds. As they are providing liquidity, they will be offered staking rewards from doing so.

Therefore, this becomes a wider extension of the platform and builds on the usability of phase one. Of course, we will always listen to consumer feedback and there can be changes made as appropriate.

After the completion of phase 2, we will move onto our new game. At the moment, we have drafted up poker (an adaption of a popular variant) that will be created. We don’t want to reveal too much at this stage due to potential copycat attempts, but we are excited by this one.

Question: How will the winner of custom bets be determined?

Vanilla Network: Under phase one of the head-to-head betting dApp, in the main, this will be admin controlled. (1) to ensure we don’t receive any malicious bets that will go out into the public domain and (2) the scenarios are likely to be unusual in nature, so will be difficult to find an oracle provider that can automate this. Rest assured, we’ve undergone a recruitment process to hire several admins to manage this process.

In some scenarios for phase (1) and the majority of phase (2), results for the bets will be oracle-driven, as they will be for known events. Only that the odds will be adjusted for the liquidity provider of the betting house.

Question: How will blackjack work? At a casino there's a buy-in to participate in order to get your cards. I assume the dapps will have a buy-in as well?

Vanilla Network: Yes, it will be very much like you would play in a live casino. To be honest, other competing projects have already successfully created a very good version of these types of casino games but we’re taking a step further to get the Defi element working in our favor.

The big challenge is to ensure there’s a suitable treasury reserve to help facilitate payouts (this in part, will come via the community fund that has been set aside). Blackjack has the best odds against the house from a casino game perspective, but generally speaking over the long term the house will be profitable. Likewise for Roulette, however, the house has an even larger edge.

Not to overcomplicate matters but for these type of games where it’s not a zero sum outcome, we will be looking at introducing a mining protocol for users to be able to obtain the rewards / profits the house generates from such games. Users will provide liquidity and in return will receive VNLA rewards from their staking.

The ‘gamble’ comes into the fact that there may not be sufficient rewards available to facilitate any payouts. However, in the future, we would hope the DAO facilitation will allow community voting to take place to ascertain the rate of return for such payouts on a periodic basis.

This really pushes the boundaries of the Defi element for our protocol, very much like a decentralized bank. Users provide liquidity e.g. cash and in return, they are rewarded for doing so with $VNLA rewards.

The mathematical solutions behind these concepts are complicated, but we believe this will be groundbreaking. However, as above our focus is to obtain a good user base for Head-to-Head betting before we invest further resources into developing the above platform.

Question: When will come betting site?

Vanilla Network: We are working extremely hard to get this launched. We can’t put a specific date just yet as we are going through another round of Quality and Assurance due to a few amendments we’ve made. Our extended team has also been impacted by Covid-19, but we do not expect this to provide significant setbacks as a result.

We continue to invest heavily in time and funds, but equally, realize quality is more important than speed of delivery. Once phase two beta testing commences, we will aim to provide further platform updates and gameplay reveals for this.

Question: Are you all tracking the burn rate and if so is that information public? I’d love to monitor it.

Vanilla Network: It’s all available from Etherscan (which is public information), which unfortunately requires regular snapshots to ascertain the daily burn. However, we do appreciate people love these metrics to help understand how their staking rewards are performing. We stand by our comments that we expect this to accelerate as our games are released.

However, we will do our best going forwards to actively monitor this to provide some form of graphic to contextualise how this is moving.

Question: Is there an indication of how much vnla got rewarded to them, during staking in the past 2 weeks to a month? So with the volume from the past month. And the amount of vnla staked by them.

Vanilla Network: Again, this is a challenging metric to present as it really depends on each individual's stake shareholding of the overall pool. One user reported to have staked 45 $VNLA tokens and received 0.8 tokens in around 2 weeks. This is a relatively modest stake, but as an annual APY — this ranges at around 45% which is fairly reasonable.

We understand members also have concerns if they un-stake as this will burn 5%, or if they sell they will lose a further 5% which will eat into their return. However, it’s notable that total supply is also reducing as time goes on; so even if your net return doesn’t feel as significant — as supply continues to reduce your overall return as a percentage of total VNLA will be increasing.

To put this into context, as of 1st April we had burned 144,497 tokens. By 25th April we had burned 156,031 tokens. So this equates to around 1.5% of total supply burning during a period of relatively low volume. So if you stick around for the long haul, there is decent potential your net worth will increase.

Question: If we go to the moon, what is stopping us from Mars? Or Neptune? Or even another galaxy or solar system? Do you think it’s possible Vanilla can be in another solar system? Would it make it through the earth's atmosphere without vaporizing? Theoretically of course.

Vanilla Network: Of course, we love our investors making a sizeable gain. However, we’re fully focused on our long-term objective and price is not so much of an immediate priority for us (albeit, we understand this is where the excitement lies for many cryptocurrency investors).

Question: You need to market, wen marketing?

Vanilla Network: We do receive comments such as when will marketing commence, why can’t I find Vanilla mentioned anywhere? Our response is a simple one, we are undergoing gradual marketing (which is project managed and scheduled) that will help increase our user base.

Critical to this is releasing regular content which you will see more off — this includes how to play and use the Head-to-Head dApp. Firing out 100s of YouTube videos, and using the best influencers actually doesn’t provide a great return on investment as it’s somewhat temporary (in our opinion). Taking time and effort to build this up is critical and provides longevity and relevance.

Question: Will you give us a full breakdown of expenditure and investments including development activities?

Vanilla Network: We are very careful with token usage, and are prudent with investments we make. We’re experienced in many fields, including business and we aim to be as transparent as possible. However, we also have to safeguard our partners (who may request a nondisclosure agreement) and avoid any potential leaks.

However, any major investments we will of course announce this to the community, and any investments we do make is for a return on investment over a longer timeframe.

Question: From the dev team perspective, what’s preferred at this point, high amounts of staking or high amounts of burning?

Vanilla Network: Interesting question. High amounts of staking, means consumers believe in the platform and the potential — which is great! High amounts of burning, mean there is a real usage of our platform, which equally is beneficial to the protocol. So they are both important, but the burning should occur as the games are released, or when additional staking pools are opened.

Question: Is Rutherford a real person?

Vanilla Network: Our core leadership team are public, and is full-time on this project.

Covid permitting, we will be presenting our project to industry leaders on 21st June, in Dubai at the 7th Annual Blockchain Congress, celebrating Defi and NFTs. This will be live-streamed so you will get to see Rutherford in all his glory!

He’s also extremely critical to the smooth operations of the project and loves spending time chatting to the community. If you want to speak to him as well, he’s just a phone call away!

Question: Is there any way to contribute more personally to the project? How can we as a community help VNLA grow, in a healthy manner?

Vanilla Network: Play on our games when they are released, and let all your friends know! That’s the least we could ask. However, we really appreciate the re-tweets and likes on Twitter, we’re doing really well on this social media platform, in particular, to get our name out and about.

Also, providing new members to the telegram group support is also highly appreciated. It gives the family feel, which is critical to the success of Cryptocurrency projects.

We do believe our protocol will be a mainstay attraction (through both bull and bear markets), so all the support you can provide is really welcomed. Maybe one day we make it to the top 100 in the Cryptocurrency Charts…