Aavegotchi Haunt 2 Signal Proposal is Live!

8 min readJul 8, 2021

A second chance to bring more Gotchis into the Ether Realm!

To cap, or not to cap, that is the question! While most popular NFT projects such as CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, and Hashmasks embrace the idea of a “fixed supply” to ensure digital scarcity, here at Aavegotchi we opted for another path, instead allowing the community to decide when additional Aavegotchis should be created.

This allows the collection and wider brand to grow as needed, instead of constraining supply and limiting adoption potential. The goal is to strike a balance between collectability and growth, and we firmly believe that the community “hive mind” knows best!

AavegotchiDAO has a growing number of areas it directly controls regarding game decisions. Above all is this primary responsibility of deciding when and how many more Aavegotchi to create. This is “supply by consensus.”

After much discussion at dao.aavegotchi.com and our Discord, we are excited to move forward with a Signal Proposal (SigProp) on our Snapshot voting page to enable the creation of a second Haunt of Aavegotchi. This vote will last one week and, if passed (with quorum reached) we will upgrade to one more round of voting with a binding Core Proposal (CoreProp).

👉Vote now: Link

A Brief History of the Haunts

March 2021 saw Haunt 1 arrive with a First Come First Serve (FCFS) NFT drop that released 10,000 NFT Portals. Each portal has the ability to summon one of ten randomly generated Aavegotchis. The entire Haunt sold out in a breathtaking 60 seconds, prompting a conversation around minting a second Haunt sooner than later.

A proposal for a Haunt 2 was put forward and even endorsed by our core team, Pixelcraft Studios. That proposal offered four options and, therefore, a higher requirement for consensus to be considered achieved. Such consensus, in favor of creating a second Haunt, fell short by less than 5%.

While one would think the endorsing core team would be disappointed, we mostly found ourselves genuinely impressed by the multitude of perspectives introduced throughout the conversation and the community’s agility in handling a complexity of options. The engagement was positive but never toxic and the results, in retrospect, were probably the best decision possible.

Now, months later we are in a very different position in terms of development achievements, roadmap updates, and maturity of the Polygon ecosystem. Indications of growing support for a Haunt 2 have continued to grow, so in June we opened up a new DAO discussion thread dedicated to a Haunt 2 possibility. The discussion has been overwhelmingly supportive of a new Haunt and the SigProp being formalized today is the culmination of details hashed out in that thread.

Without further ado, let’s lay out the SigProp’s details and also clarify some key points in regards to portal sales revenue sharing and Rarity Farming reward pools.

Haunt 2 Proposal Details

How many Portals?

15,000 Portals (each Portal summons one Aavegotchi)
Each Portal contains 10 potential Aavegotchis

Stake what tokens to summon?

Polygon Aave.com amTokens

What Spirit Forces are completely new?

WBTC, MATIC and WETH designs + GHST (pending listing on Aave.com)

How will Portals be distributed?

80% will be listed in a GBM bid-to-earn style Aauction
20% will be raffled

How does Haunt 2 relate to Season 2 of Rarity Farming?

40% of total Portal revenue will fund the Rarity Farming rewards pool.
2 new “Rookie Season” leaderboards will be added for Kinship and XP (see below)
Season 2 reward distribution caps at a maximum 2 Million GHST
Any additional GHST in the pool will be reserved and staked to earn more for future seasons.
Top 5000 in each of the five categories will farm GHST

Why Haunt 2 now?

The #1 question within our social channels is consistently, “wen Haunt 2”? And there are many reasons for this. The demand for Aavegotchis is great. So much so that our native NFT marketplace, The Baazaar, rarely sees Closed Portals sell for under 800 GHST.

This is typical price discovery for successful “10k avatar” type projects, but Aavegotchi has much more to offer than a profile picture. Our vision is for far wider adoption of playable NFTs, and the first step to achieving that means leaving the scarcity memes behind and focusing on being able to offer meaningfully unique experiences to more people.

The “supply by consensus” approach is something we’ve embraced from the start. AavegotchiDAO is far more than a governance-in-name-only rubber stamp. The first time Haunt 2 was put up for a vote (and openly endorsed by Pixelcraft Studios) it failed to achieve consensus. Since then, much has changed and the community has, in more than one way, expressed seemingly wide held support for a new Haunt of Aavegotchis.

Some of the changes and clarifications include:

Exclusive, non-transferable Haunt 1 themed backgrounds for all first gen summoned Aavegotchis.
Two new H2-specific eye shapes
An update to the UI indicating which Haunt each Aavegotchi belongs to
Significant progress on the Pixelcraft Studios development roadmap
Incredible user growth on our home chain, Polygon (aka Matic Network)
The release of details and timelines regarding The Gotchiverse Realm virtual world
A new NFT drop method, powered by bid-to-earn mechanics

Adjustments to the Virtuous Cycle

There are also a few shifts on the financial side that need to happen before Haunt 2 goes live. The original Haunt had a revenue split that included a massive 33% GHST token burn (along with 40% player rewards, 17% Pixelcraft income and 10% DAO funding). In retrospect, we as the core team found such a significant burn was not the best use of capital. Lessons learned include:

Dampened effect: The unique nature of GHST token (asset backed by DAI and minting/burning on a bonding curve) means burning has minimal impact on volatility.
Opportunity costs: This massive amount of value burned could have been put to work on behalf of Aavegotchi. In one example, a certain leading exchange offers an OTC desk product to high networth individuals and institutional investors. We were approached to have GHST offered in their catalog, but in order to do so, a minimum stake north of 1 million GHST would be required. By providing that GHST, we would be exposing our token to larger scale investors and also could earn a decent percentage return for simply providing the tokens on a long term loaned basis (not selling them). If we hadn’t just lit our GHST on fire, we would have had the reserves to execute on this sort of opportunity.
War chest: Finally, Pixelcraft and AavegotchiDAO are extremely ambitious organizations facing their own unique challenges in regulations, taxation, and scaling. For example, potential taxation on a 33% token burn represents a significant risk factor for Pixelcraft Studios. Even if sailing is smooth, a strong warchest helps both Pixelcraft and the DAO continue healthy growth while remaining independent. While flexible and open to strategic partners, we’d rather not have to ever be in a position where we feel we must sell out to outside parties.
Marketing campaigns: Ticket giveaways are a great way to drum up interest in Aavegotchi, but since we are committed to not “pre-minting” any tickets, they must be earned by staking just like everyone else. Having more GHST to stake allows us to generate more tickets which can be used for strategic marketing campaigns and airdrops to help grow the #GotchiGang!

These are some of the main reasons we are advocating for an adjustment to the virtuous cycle to go along with any new Haunt being implemented. The new breakdown greatly reduces the burn while increasing distribution to Pixelcraft Studios and AavegotchiDAO as well. We believe the 40% rewards pool has proven very successful and should remain the same. The proposed distribution goes as follows:

Rewards pool = 40%
Pixelcraft Studios = 40% (up from 17%)
AavegotchiDAO = 15% (up from 10%)
GHST burn = 5% (down from 33%)

Pixelcraft Studios is strongly committed to growing the Aavegotchi ecosystem, so we hope our frens can understand why burning GHST is great in theory, but in practice distributing more GHST to Pixelcraft and AavegotchiDAO to use and re-invest benefits everyone more.

👉Vote now: Link

Haunt 3, Haunt 4 and beyond

The introduction of new leaderboards for Haunt 2 makes sense, but is this sustainable for more Haunts in the future? Are we going to end up with all sorts of tiny slices of pie for each Haunt’s own rewards claim?

We understand that leaderboard creep is not desirable and have looked at potential solutions along the community for many months now. In fact, the Rarity Farming leaderboards were at the forefront of design decisions for the forthcoming Gotchiverse Realm. We believe the solution proposed addresses many of the community’s concerns, while also accounting for new players and recently-introduced game mechanics.

First, we are introducing the new categories as “rookie season” themed. That means when Haunt 3 comes, they will enjoy their rookie dedicated leaderboards while H1 and H2 respectively compete directly. By that point, the most dedicated of earlier Haunts will be competing on a more even footing.

That’s because everything converges with an increasing amount of avenues to earn XP and spend Kinship. Play-to-earn potions in the Aarcade can distribute XP to the most active Gotchis, and alchemical channeling induces downward pressure on those who have already accumulated kinship.

For example, players will be able to decide whether to “juice” their Aavegotchis kinship on a REALM parcel or keep their kinship scores “un-juiced” for the purity of Rarity Farming leaderboards.

With so many player earned based mechanics in the making, we’re more bullish than ever on the future of Rarity Farming leaderboards.

Conclusion, time to vote

The conversation for this SigProp will continue in a new SigProp-dedicated dao.aavegotchi.com thread. The vote is set to last for 7 days. Upon reaching quorum and a majority of support, we will see the contents of the vote upgraded to a binding Core Proposal AGIP11. If the vote fails to reach quorum or reach consensus, we will again table Haunt 2 until further notice. It would likely not come up again until some time in Q3 or even later depending on circumstances and the signals received by the wider community.

To conclude, we are aiming for wider adoption and so moving beyond the focus on scarcity of Aavegotchis. This is all carefully balanced with unique attributes retained for Haunt 1 Aavegotchis and the momentum building toward The Gotchiverse Realm and more.

We look forward to your vote in any direction! And remember, thanks to AavevotchiDAO, your voting power now is informed by your GHST balance, your Aavegotchis and your wearables. See you in the poll booth!

Stay spooky frens,
Aavegotchi Team