Town Hall 60

Read up on what went down during the 60th Town Hall with Crypto Unicorns' CEO and Co-Founder Aron Beierschmitt!

Over the past 3 years, we've worked tirelessly to build a grand vision for Crypto Unicorns—a vision that was, admittedly, ambitious and expansive. While our goals were always centered around creating a thriving and vibrant ecosystem, the reality is that our current structure has become unsustainable after the recent liquidation event.

The Need for Change

We've reached a point where the size of our team and the scope of our efforts have grown beyond what is feasible given our current resources. Our focus has been stretched too thin, leading to a situation where we're unable to operate at the efficiency and effectiveness needed to continue delivering on our promises to our community.

In an environment where agility and focus are key, we've found ourselves bogged down by the complexities of maintaining a large team and managing the technical debt that comes with it. This has led to a misalignment between our resources and our goals, which we must address head-on.

The Path Forward

To ensure the longevity and success of the Crypto Unicorns ecosystem, we are making the difficult decision to scale back our operations and refocus our efforts. This means:

• Reducing Team Size: We will be significantly reducing our team to better align with our current financial runway and the new direction we are heading in. (80-> 15)

• Pivoting the Core Game: The core Crypto Unicorns game will transition into a fully on-chain experience, with a focus on creating a deflationary economy that preserves the value of the assets within our ecosystem. This shift is aimed at ensuring a more sustainable and resilient future for the game and the broader community. We look forward to your feedback as we begin building this new gameplay

THE CURRENT GAMEPLAN 

Core Game Shutdown

By far the most expensive aspect of Crypto Unicorns is maintaining and continuing to develop the current core land gameplay. As such, the core land game will be deprecated and scheduled for shutdown. This will occur on August 30st, 2024 at 3pm PST. 

The core land game is also the biggest source of new token emissions, rivaled only by staking rewards. Shutting this down would not only mean significantly reducing the treasury burn rate but would also allow us to shift focus to even more deflationary economics.

Skeleton Crew

As part of our strategic pivot, we have made the difficult but necessary decision to reduce our team to a skeleton crew. This vastly leaner team is designed to maintain essential operations while driving the next phase of the Crypto Unicorns experience. Effectively we are keeping the core blockchain team as well as a handful from our live operations team (CM, CS, Content). Zyori and Aron will also be staying on to continue supporting and pushing the project forward.

The remaining team will be as lean as possible, with a more unilateral focus. A deep understanding of blockchain and ethos will be a prerequisite moving forward for all team members. 

Fully Onchain

Shifting CU to a fully on-chain experience is only made possible thanks to the speed and cost efficiency of XAI, something that didn’t exist when the current core game was originally built almost three years ago. Thanks to the massive progress made on gaming-specific blockchains, we can now build a foundation that is primarily on-chain and much more efficient to upkeep.

Moving forward we will be able to expose all data to the community, allowing them to build out tools, projects, and interfaces as desired. Similarly, removing the need for centralized servers will solve the data & analytics issues we’ve struggled with to date.

We will also be placing an emphasis on open-sourcing our smart contracts moving forward. Our systems will be fully transparent and open for all to see. We hope this will make things easier for folks like Venticello to do what they do best and build openly on top of our ecosystem with little to no restrictions. 

NEW EXPERIENCE

The new on-chain experience for Unicorns and Shadowcorns is still being discussed and we want to actively involve the community and DAO in this process. 

There is still ~ $1 million in the CU-ETH liquidity pool (much of it locked until May 2025), and there are still 19M $CU tokens earmarked for distribution to players. And with nearly 240,000 Unicorns and over 6 million Minions currently in the hands of players, there are still a lot of resources available to fight over. 

Our vision is to do a deflationary “battle” between Unicorns and Shadowcorns where players are rewarded for committing assets to the war efforts and burning them. It would be one, final battle that would take place over time and reduce the amount of assets currently in the ecosystem.

With the core land game turned off, players will no longer be able to breed Unicorns which gives us the opportunity to quell the population down to the favorite and most rare Unicorns that are worth collecting. And if it's ever-appealing in the future, the DAO could opt to restore breeding and allow the collection to inflate again.

Many aspects of this vision can be calibrated, and we could use your feedback to help make those decisions.

POSITIVE OUTLOOKS

Despite sad news related to the Core Game there are still many reasons to be optimistic on the CU IP going forward. 

Rainbow Rumble

Mostly unaffected by this change. Second party studio is already engaged, and the launch plan continues forward. We will continue ahead with the esports concept and see how much traction it gets.

Content Licensing

Our 90-second pilot for a potential animation series is complete and looks fantastic. We showed it to a select audience at Rare Evo and our producer continues to work towards getting it in front of the right people. In a few weeks, we will be releasing it publicly for all to see.

Merch Toys

Our vinyl Unicorn toys are entering the first stages of production and are currently on track for the holiday season. Merchandising and content licensing go hand in hand, and our Unicorn IP continues to test well in these markets. Unicorns are more popular than ever before, and Shadowcorns continues to present an alluring opportunity to bring Unicorn concepts to the young male demographic.

All of the aforementioned opportunities could still come to fruition and be serious revenue drivers for the economy. We still have all of the same buyback and burn mechanics in place, allowing the $CU token to benefit from any inflows into the treasury. 

If any of these pathways become viable, then we will have a new flagship experience. Brands like Pudgy Penguins have shown us what’s possible when it comes to licensing and merchandising; we are still optimistic that our Unicorns can forge a path for real-world revenues.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Although this news might come as a surprise to some, the remaining members at Laguna Games feel strongly that this course of action will position Crypto Unicorns with the highest chance of success.

This is not the end. Far from it. This is a new beginning.

Laguna Games will be pressing forward with a much stronger emphasis on blockchain values and rebuilding piece by piece with a specific focus. Efficiency is now the name of the game! 

We look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback about this big change.

Thank you for giving us your trust and confidence over the last three years. We look forward to many more, with our Unicorns at the center of the blockchain gaming zeitgeist.