AMA Recap: Octopus Vietnam x Atocha Protocol

This is an English recap for the AMA of Atocha Protocol with the Octopus Vietnam community moderated by Hai with Kim from Atocha Protocol. The AMA took place on 21 April 2022.

Q1 — What kind of puzzle game can I play when the mainnet is up? The current puzzle game that is ready when our mainnet is up and integrated with the Webapp will be more of a quiz puzzle. In short, it will be a question (or multiple questions) to be answered correctly by the players in order to win the prize. The player must solve by answering the exact answer provided by the creator of the puzzle in order to win and unlock the prize. On the other hand, creators can create any kind of puzzle based on this format and challenge the players. As of right now, you can experience what the whole Webapp interface is like through this Demo that we have prepared. DEMO Link: https://atocha.io/wp-content/atocha-io/dev2/atocha_dev_list.php Q2 — What are the differences between playing puzzle games with the existing applications and on Atocha? The biggest difference in terms of experience is from the Creator standpoint. Whatever puzzle games that you created will be owned by you, recorded in the blockchain, and immutable. What’s more exciting is that you can even trade your puzzle game as NFT which will be the next upgrade of Atocha Protocol. In other words, it is a whole new NFT category that can do decentralized storage of your puzzle’s metadata, receiving sponsorship, auto distribution of prizes, challenge mechanism, and Atocha Points reputation system. As for players, the different experience for you is that as long as you are participating in the puzzle games that are integrated with Atocha Protocol. Not only you can get your chance to win some sweet rewards and prizes, but you can also earn Atocha Points while playing different games. By gaining more AP, you can raise your reputation score and become the top player on the leaderboard. In addition, being at the top means you get to claim ATO coins with your Atocha Points every week. On the contrary, other game apps are more of a silo where each game itself has its own tokenomics that cannot be shared with another game. Q3 — How do Play to Earn and Create to Earn work on Atocha? In Atocha Protocol Version 1.0, our Webapp can enable Play to Earn (technically is Solve to Earn) when a player successfully solved a puzzle and passed the challenge stage. As of now, most of the puzzle game available are more logic, intellectual challenging kind of puzzle game with a combination of text and images. While a player participate in solving the puzzle, the player will gain Atocha Points (when the puzzle is being sponsored). That will be considered as a part of Play to Earn mechanism that we have in place for the players. On the other hand, Create to Earn mechanism works for the Creators. We welcome those who are creative and innovative to design puzzle game that can challenge the players. When the puzzle game is good that it attracts sponsors, the creator will then start to earn Atocha Points while the players are attempting to solve the puzzle game. In addition, the Creator is welcome to receive a commission from the Sponsors where they can customize puzzle games for them in order to achieve particular intentions like driving traffic to their business website, increasing community awareness about their brand, etc. Q4 — What is the go-to-market strategy plan for Atocha? It is important for Atocha to establish a sustainable business model from the beginning. Hence, the team aims to close multiple sponsored puzzle games by The source of revenue will be coming from the total amount of sponsors coming in to utilize puzzle games as part of their marketing strategy. This has similarities to the business model of Kahoot where they create “classrooms” with different themes of different brands and the intention to engage with the students. As the sponsors allocated their funds for commissioning the creators and sponsoring the prize, Atocha will gain revenue through the taxation of the transactions. The strategy is to get more ATO locked as puzzle game prizes so that it will create a spike in demand which can also drive up the value of ATO coins too. This will be beneficial for both the team and the community. Q5 — How is Atocha plans to build a sustainable business model? The sustainability of the business model can be achieved when the team is able to drive the completion of the economic loop of the puzzle game. The process of sponsors approaching Atocha, sponsoring the puzzle game prize, commissioning the creation, players engaging with the puzzle, and lastly prize is distributed to winners. The completion of this loop and the continuous cycle of this loop is critical for the sustainability of the proposed business model of Atocha Protocol. Of course, this can be enhanced by different feature upgrades on the protocol side like adding in NFT capabilities, improving the creators’ team whereby quality puzzle game can be delivered and Atocha amassing a critical mass of players to play which the brands or companies can achieve max exposure. With that, there will be 3 main pillars for Atocha Protocol to collaborate and realize the sustainability of the project. First, the Atocha Protocol core team. The team will be in charge to deliver feature upgrades for the protocol and in constant talk for the partnership to expand the community awareness of the project. Second, Atocha Game Guild is a decentralized community for the players and creators to get together to form different sub-communities based on puzzle game preferences and interests. Third, Atocha Game DAO where acts as a community fund to incentivize creativity and innovation for the proposed programs like Bounty Program, Game Master Program and Puzzle Creator Program. Q6 — Will there be puzzle combat like forming a team for a puzzle combat event? Yes, there will be a group mode for the puzzle game in the future upgrade for the protocol. The current protocol can only support a single wallet (but a single wallet can be a group of players engaging with the puzzle). Q7 — Crypto Market has recently been in a bear market, in this case, it’s hard for investors to invest and trust upcoming projects. How do you see this challenge? how do you convince investors to play puzzle games and invest in your project? The market will definitely affect the fundraising and public sale for any other projects. However, what we believe is that the market will always recover. As long as the project team delivers value, we have no worries about surviving. For the investors, it is of utmost importance that they know the risk that they are taking by investing in the early startup which is similar to any other projects that are starting off. We do advise the investors to have proper risk management and do have patience for the team to build plus deliver. Also, playing puzzle games does not correlate directly with the price action. What we want to achieve is that through the puzzle game, the focus of the community will be much more on the challenge and fun than just on the token price. Moreover, by being an active member within the ecosystem, one can earn Atocha Points which later can be redeemed into ATO as well. As long as the investors believe in this business model's feasibility, we welcome them to join us and grow together. Q8 — What plans and intentions do the project have to attract more strategic investors who are large funds in the crypto world? (eg: Binance lab, Coinbase venture, Animoca…) Our plan is pretty simple. Complete the proof of concept for the proposed business model that we have with some repeated successful cases. Speaking of which, we already secured a few sponsors and we have customized the puzzle games for them which will be launched once the Webapp is up. By repeating and improving the process, it is natural that the top-tier VC can be persuaded by the result that we produce. In fact, we are indeed in the talk with a few large VCs fund. Q9 — What do you think about the combination of adventure game genre combined with intelligence (puzzle game) to create a series of game series with many attractive and consecutive parts? You get the right combination that we want to implement and launch. Our current strategy is to collaborate with existing and established NFT projects within the Near ecosystem and also beyond. We believe that NFT projects that have strong story background and also some with puzzle elements as well will be a good fit for Atocha Protocol. Q10 — I would like to know if Atocha Protocol can support the migration of other existing gaming platforms built on other blockchains that aim to migrate and build on their protocol, if that is possible what could be the process in doing that after your project is launched?‬ Yes, it is possible for the existing gaming platform to migrate and build on Atocha Protocol. However, we have not developed an EVM-compatible pallet that can easily onboard Solidity-based Gamefi. As of now, we will target HTML5 puzzle games which can be integrated easier with the protocol. As for the process, you can help us refer these existing puzzle game projects to us. Once we identify as a hot lead, a bounty will be paid to you as well. We will then finalize the structure of integration with the puzzle game team as we will help on the integration part while the puzzle game team will just need to provide us with the parts that they intended to integrate with the protocol. Q11 — Does Appchains-based project built on Octopus Network and Near Protocol requires an Audit before launch? As I see your project is about to start their IDO soon and didn’t see where the Audit was stated? Every appchain that is running on Octopus Network will need to be audited before getting into Voting Stage. You can check out https://mainnet.oct.network whereby two appchains are currently in Audit Stage. Is a good question that we will include the audit as well on our website so that they are aware of the onboarding process for Octopus Network Appchain. Adding to it, the audit will be vetted through the utility function and tokenomics that the team has proposed in the Whitepaper. Whereas the security of the blockchain is in charge by Octopus Network themselves as it is an LPoS (Leased Proof of Stake) consensus where Appchain leasing the required security from Octopus Network. This will largely reduce the cost of security for any appchain. Q12 — The majority of investors focus only on the short-term price of the token instead of the actual value of the project. So what are the benefits for long-term investors in your Project? Speculative investors will focus on short-term price action while long-term investors are those who share a similar vision on how puzzle games can create a good social impact on the community. Being an ATO coin holder, you will gain value appreciation as the ecosystem starts to grow exponentially while the token demand starts to hike and supply diminished (more to be locked away in a puzzle game). In short, we believe that the ethos of doing good do well for the community is a perpetual value asset. Q13 — Could you share more about your backers and partners and how that partnership will help the project? Our backers are Damo Labs, Octopus Venture DAO, Big Brain Holdings and Primeape Capital. They are investors of our seed round and strategic round investment. As for our partners, we have 3 types of partners: game, strategic and community. Game partners will be entities like NFT projects, existing indie game developers, or even brands that want to utilize puzzle games as part of their marketing strategy. The current Game Partners are Holistic Pilgrim, Hunt for The Lost Cryptocubes, Skyharbour NFT — The Clan Guild, and Electric Neon NFT. Strategic partners are entities that can help us in improving the utility of Atocha Protocol like NearPad, Skyward Finance which provides launchpad service for us, Ref Finance and NearPad DEX, Open Web Sandbox for hiring, Flying Rhino marketing, Near Insider, and Near Stars Guild for social media marketing. As for community partners, they consist of community-based guilds like Near Philippines Guild, Near Malaysia Guild, Near Nigeria Guild, Near Vietnam Guild, Near Games Guild, and NFXT. Q14 — What is Atocha's plan to attract oct stakers to receive Atocha token and increase security for the system?. Currently, the fact that the gameplay to earn is hacked is a painful problem and a concern of many people. One thing to be clear is that the hacking mostly happened in the bridge infrastructure while it doesn’t affect the puzzle game or any other game. Of course, when the hack siphoned out money from the ecosystem, it will create an adverse effect on the economics of the ecosystem which we do not want to happen at all costs. Our focus is to create good utility for the appchain to work for the community while Octopus Network will be the security gatekeeper to ensure the safety of asset crossing using their IBC bridge which could cross between appchains and also Near ecosystem. As our project is just starting out with a decent size of the community, we already can achieve the minimum required security with 11 validators (or slightly more) as suggested by Octopus Network. The good thing is that we do not need to overspend on security while the capital can be spent on development and community building. Q15 — What is your target customer and how can you reach more of these audiences? There are three target audiences that we have. First, the creators. They are the rarest segment of the community which will be taking charge of creating puzzle games for the community. Second, the sponsors. They will be the ones who will be funding the puzzle games with ATO for prizes and also paying commissions to the creators to customize puzzle games. Third, the players. They will be the large majority of the community where they can engage with different puzzle games that are integrated with the protocol. Our current short-term strategy is to create 2–5 puzzle games that could onboard at least 100,000 players to play. Hence, a combination of challenging puzzle games and the right amount of prizes to be won will be the formula for us to attract more players AKA audience Q16 — Great project, but one spicy question! Why people will play puzzle game in 2022? When there’s hq games available in blockchain, will atocha expand the game list or will stick with the puzzle game concept? Depending on what high-quality game you are referring to. Based on our market research, puzzle game has expected total revenue of $24.72 billion USD for 2022. With the estimated annual growth rate (CAGR 2022–2026) of 9.21%, the projected market volume will increase to $35.16 billion USD by 2026. As for the population that is interested in puzzle games, statistically, there are approximately 600 million people that share a similar interest in puzzle games based on Facebook advertising tool. With that, we are confident that the market is there for us (7–9% of the total market of the gaming industry).

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