Atlantis World <3 Conflux Network

[cj_atlantis.world]

Atlantis World, Conflux Network Grant Funding Proposal

Funding Tier: $50,000

Introduction to Atlantis World
Atlantis World is a pixel metaverse with token-gating, video calling, gamified DeFi + in-game DAO voting. We believe that as much as metaverse should be open, it should be accessible (lightweight) + plug into DeFi applications in a fun / gamified way.

Existing virtual worlds are inaccessible because they have a 3d/immersive focus, resulting in a high-cost barrier to entry (since in order to enjoy seamless loading experience, users must go out + buy the latest iPad / gaming pc, this technology / hardware is neither inexpensive or readily available globally).

Also, we believe that we are missing a huge onboarding opportunity into DeFi as a collective space by not gamifying leading dApps / protocols inside of virtual worlds with additional interactive learning modules.

We are adding video/audio calling capabilities to user-owned, token-gated spaces inside of our pixel metaverse for communities to interact with each other; whilst gamifying DeFi protocols like Aave / Yearn / Sushi, curating interactive learning modules in our Web3 Academy + gamifying DAO voting.

To provide further value to the space, we’re exploring adding tooling products like CoinGecko to the Atlantis experience, as well as transforming our favourite NFT avatars into versatile, hyper-composable playable characters by building open source sprite sheets + full walk cycles ready to be used by those communities not just in Atlantis, but in all of pixel metaverse.

We’re also building public spaces + rethinking decentralized governance in collaboration with our community. We plan to build the City of Atlantis -> ​​a buzzing, entrepreneurial capital owned / governed by its users / inhabitants, where ETH is money + creative culture is king. If users want to open a business, like a virtual cafe, music venue, movie theatre or an independent art exhibition, they’ll be able to apply to occupy land for free to do something creative.

Project Details
Atlantis World aims to interconnect all the best DeFi, DAO, web3 projects, protocols, dApps and blockchains within one metaverse. We believe that by building within the intersection of web3, gaming, social / education, we’ll enable users to have seamless, fun experiences while benefiting from the wider web3 ecosystem. We’re just getting started and already onboarded (received support from) top players like Polygon, Audius, Yearn, MetaCartel, Balancer, and more coming soon. We believe that by integrating and collaborating we create network effects that benefit all parties involved. With that said, we’d love to integrate the Conflux ecosystem and build Conflux City within Atlantis World that’d help users have interactive experiences with Conflux.

Here’s the screenshot from token-gated crypto punks space inside of Atlantis World:

Tech Details

• Phaser - Browser based javascript game engine used as the main hub controller of the game.
• Moralis - Database and api management used to change all the calls for crypto data.
• Socket.io - Online websocket communication handler used for chat and handling player movement tracking.
• APIs - Audius : used for our streaming music player, Rarible : used for our nft museum, Aave & Yearn : used inside of DeCentral Bank building.

Team

• CJ Hetherington - Co-Founder, Product Lead
  multi-dimensional crypto-native. Current Polygon advocate, product manager, community architect, serial entrepreneur & growth hacker.
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/cjhweb3/
• Rev Miller - Co-Founder, Growth Lead
  serial entrepreneur with 7+ years experience in building & growing media, FinTech, 3D / XR, and Web3 networks. He’s also leading Witnet adoption.
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/revmiller/
• Michael Kuvshinov - Tech Lead
  full stack wizard from SeoulTech. He recently postponed internships at Amazon & H2O to work on Atlantis & has worked on SoftBank robot assistants.
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkuvshynov/
• Ilayda Pinarbasi - Lead Designer
  game designer with 4+ years experience. You can see some games she designed here. Ilayda is a Youtube creator & editor with ~500k views!
• Julio Alcantara - Game Developer
  game & web developer with over 6 years design experience. His PhaserJS games have won him a hackathon, whilst also team leading at Mintbean.
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/deadheadstudio/
• Dmitry Kapeliushnyi - Blockchain Developer
  blockchain developer with 4 years of JS experience that has been writing smart contracts for the past year. He built The Lamp, whilst contributing to Moralis.
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitry-kapeliushnyi-097940213/

We’re also currently in the active process of growing our team and onboarding further tech talent.

Adding value to the Conflux ecosystem
We believe we can provide long term value to the Conflux ecosystem in a number of ways:

• Launching Conflux-native dApps in a gamified way inside of Atlantis World.
• Building a fully Web3-enabled token gated city for the Conflux community with NFTs, video calling, DeFi + in-game DAO voting! The city will be map sized and totally personalized with Conflux brand assets. All game assets (even textures) will be NFTs deployed and tokenized natively on Conflux!
• Enabling network effects by rolling out gamified Conflux products in our public cities and cities of other DeFi communities such as Yearn to onboard more users who are already Web3 native.
• Tokenizing further Atlantis game assets natively on Conflux.
• Airdropping token-gated city to the Conflux community.
• Adding Conflux booth and portal to Atlantis City.
• Creating interactive learning modules centred on Conflux to onboard new users into web3 .
• Conflux wearables + in-metaverse branded items inside of Atlantis World.
• Conflux (ie core contributors) token-gated (NFT/POAP/social token, etc) co-working space.
• Other suggestions from the Conflux community.

Community Engagement: Conflux will become one of founding cities of Atlantis, thus getting the most traction, community engagement, brand recognition, and will be featured in Atlantis’ Hall of Fame. Beyond that, we’ll create a professional, ongoing collaboration announcement + progress updates on multiple social platforms.

Delivery Requirements: anyone will be able to test and share their feedback once we’ll integrate Conflux + build the Conflux City within our main demo link https://demo.atlantis.world (with the commitment to deploy on beta + main version in the future)

Grant Funding Request + Milestones

Total $50k grant funding request

Milestones:

• An immediate release of $15k will enable us to integrate and launch 1-2 ecosystem dApps on Conflux inside of Atlantis.
• A following release of $15k will enable us to design, build and implement a custom Conflux building inside of the Atlantis World demo. Here, users will be able to use Conflux native dApps and also learn more about the Conflux ecosystem. The building will also include social links and a portal to https://confluxnetwork.org/. As well as this, we’ll also design a mockup of the Conflux token-gated city to engage the community and receive feedback.
• Remaining $20k will be allocated to actually completing the Conflux City, testing it out with core contributors and community members, following potential development improvements (i.e. bug fixes and suggestions).

** We’d love to point out that anything we integrate for Conflux Network into our current demo, will also be featured in the Atlantis City Public Beta (development will start in Q4) and any future versions **

Next steps to explore with Conflux community:

• Enabling network effects by rolling out gamified Conflux products in our public spaces and cities of other DeFi communities such as Yearn to onboard more users who are already Web3 native.
• Tokenizing further Atlantis game assets natively on Conflux.
• Airdropping token-gated city to the Conflux community.
• Creating interactive learning modules centred on Conflux to onboard new users into web3 .
• Conflux wearables + in-metaverse branded items inside of Atlantis World.
• Conflux (ie core contributors) token-gated (NFT/POAP/social token, etc) co-working space.
• Other suggestions from the Conflux community.

Development roadmap:
Since we aren’t clear on timing of grant allocation, we will provide some general guidelines on the timelines we usually work toward and the ideal scenario for our Conflux Network collaboration below.

As a rule of thumb, we typically commit to delivering on demo integration milestones 1-2 weeks after grant allocation.

So, should the immediate release milestone be allocated before Q3 end (with up to 1 week buffer, so hard stop Oct 8 2021), we’d commit to the following timelines:

• 1st Conflux-native dApp integration, early Q4 (mid October).
• 2nd Conflux-native dApp integration, early Q4 (late October).
• Conflux building designed and implemented as well as Conflux City mockup, mid Q4 (November).
• Conflux City beta launch + community testing, late Q4 2021 (December) - early Q1 2022 (January). Following development improvements (core Atlantis upgrades, bug fixes and community suggestions) to be launched in Q2 2022.

Please note: since we have an overwhelming interest in collaborations and integrations within Atlantis, we may need to revise these timelines if the immediate release milestone is not allocated by Oct 8 2021.

Learn more
Website: https://atlantis.world
Discord: https://discord.gg/TYA2kmzJq6
Twitter: https://twitter.com/atlantis0x
Hack FS submission (Won Best DeFi Project on Polygon):
https://showcase.ethglobal.co/hackfs2021/atlantis-world
Yearn announcement: https://twitter.com/iearnfinance/status/1432387438014435332
The Defiant featuring Yearn <> Atlantis + Aleksandr from Axie Infinity:
https://thedefiant.io/yearn-degens-metaverse/
Balancer collaboration blog post:
https://medium.com/@BalancerGrants/atlantis-world-will-be-building-balancer-city-with-its-new-grant-ebb0c6755b20

Final Notes
Our current ecosystem partners have social media communities of 1M+ that will be invited to beta test Atlantis and become our early adopters. Joint marketing is a core part of our GTM and we’re onboarding new partners at an unprecedented rate.

We also plan to enable network effects for all parties involved, by incentivising and encouraging different partner communities to try each other’s products inside of Atlantis. As well as this, we’ll also target non crypto natives with interactive learning for DeFi and other Web3 building blocks like DAOs, blockchain games and blockchain wallets.

We currently have 1000+ early access sign ups, and 1.3k super active Discord users, with 700+ of those actually mobilising to make a contribution to our GR11 grant. We raised a total of over $10k (including matching), with intentionally little to no sharing from our side.

[cryptopowers]

This looks like a great project to me…

[SmoothCB]

Thanks for posting! Looking forward to hiving on this together

[guanzizai]

cool

[GLM]

looks worth a try at least

[Tristception]

Interesting application , Will see what the demo is like tomorrow when i have more time. Thank you for your posting on the conflux grants forum! If i have follow-up questions ill post them in replies.

[thegaram]

Thank you for applying for a Conflux Network grant! Atlantis World looks like a fun way to interact with the web3 world, and explore the Conflux ecosystem in a visual, gamified way.

1. How are new spaces and dapp experiences added to Atlantis World? For instance, if I am a dapp developer, can I design and add an experience myself, or do I need assistance from the Atlantis World team for this? Same question for token-gating, let’s say I deploy an NFT contract and want to create a “gated community” based on this, can I add this myself?

2. How does “Conflux City” relate to other parts of Atlantis World? Can users move freely between cities, or are they completely separated?

3. How does video calling work? Can I initiate calls with players in my vicinity?

4. Can you elaborate on the DAO aspect of Atlantis World? What changes/decisions are subject to DAO decisions, and how can one become a stakeholder?

5. “Learning modules in our Web3 Academy” how does this work? Is there a “Conflux University” inside “Conflux City” where we can add educational content? Can users earn by engaging with these?

6. If I understand it correctly, the scope of this grant is the general Conflux City plus 2 Conflux dapps. The stuff under “Next steps” (learning modules, Conflux skins/wearables, co-working space) are not part of this grant, is this correct?

7. When is Atlantis World expected to go live on the mainnet?

[1996]

Looks nice! We have that amazing NFT called Guardian NFT in our ecosystem. It will be great if you decide to implement it!

[revmiller]

Hey everyone, Rev co-founder + growth lead @ Atlantis World here. Super grateful for all of your support and constructive feedback. We’re thrilled to explore collaboration with Conflux and build the best experience possible for you inside of Atlantis World.

Would love to answer your questions @thegaram

Q: How are new spaces and dapp experiences added to Atlantis World? For instance, if I am a dapp developer, can I design and add an experience myself, or do I need assistance from the Atlantis World team for this? Same question for token-gating, let’s say I deploy an NFT contract and want to create a “gated community” based on this, can I add this myself?

A: At the moment, we’re onboarding manually our founding ecosystem partners, integrating their protocols, dApps inside of Atlantis World. Though, that’s not the way to move forward - as we’re aiming to enable progressive decentralization and actual community ownership within AW.

We’re exploring multiple ways to approach the permissionless building, though there’s always that tricky part of sustaining a high level of quality and community engagement. With that said, we’ll have a governance module. For every individual/project planning to occupy ‘token gated land’ and build their City there, they’ll need to create a governance proposal to Atlantis DAO, where DAO will either approve or not. And, even if approved, one couldn’t just own the land; for some time, they’ll occupy/rent it from the DAO (enabling revenue-sharing model across all DAO members / AW). Think about changing one’s citizenship; you don’t just get one (in most cases, though ofc there’s an ‘investment citizenship’), we’re exploring gamified, long-term value-add on mechanism to the ecosystem that ensures all parties will benefit from given individual/project/DAO occupying specific land/city.

We’d be happy to explore and share more with you. Feel free to reach out via DM on discord or telegram; we can schedule a call or even host a community call featuring the Governance x Permissionless Building aspect. It’s pretty critical for us, and we’ll for sure implement the best model we can.

Q: How does “Conflux City” relate to other parts of Atlantis World? Can users move freely between cities, or are they completely separated?

A: Conflux City will be one of our founding Cities, together with Polygon, Yearn, Balancer, Perpetual Protocol, and other top players. Each City will have its unique design, including all separate assets, beyond that - most of them will be token-gated (with little to no native token equivalent to 1$), and within some Cities we’ll have token-gated buildings (ie token-gated co-working space). Users will be able to move freely between cities or use portals to access multiple parts of AW.
We’ll incentivize all communities to interact with each other in a super fun way and even create incentive structures with gamification elements around that (ie map exploration, dApp/protocol interactions, quests/missions)

Q: How does video calling work? Can I initiate calls with players in my vicinity?

A: Currently, we’ve integrated public, private, and ‘space-based’ (ie bench) text chat. We don’t have audio/video calling atm; we’re actively researching that, as most of the market solutions (APIs) aren’t suitable for our needs & the filters we have. Though users will be able to speak with their friends, community members via a) private calls, b) group calls, c) spatial meetings/calls (speaking with people 3-7m around you)

Q: Can you elaborate on the DAO aspect of Atlantis World? What changes/decisions are subject to DAO decisions, and how can one become a stakeholder?

A: Becoming a sustainable, versatile DAO is one of our core goals.

We believe that rushing out won’t help, as we’re exploring many novel models inside AW, including governance. For example, having land parcel = governance votes, with their owners having multiple layers of in-metaverse credibility and voting power based upon their contribution to the ecosystem.

As we’re still exploring that ourselves, we can’t share all details yet - simply because there’s no such thing in the industry that we’re trying to implement, and we need some time to test it out and make it work. Our continuous community feedback loop helps us to test out different models, types of stakeholders, onboarding filters and decentralized decision making.

With that said, there won’t be Atlantis DAO right away, as we’d love first to build a sustainable, loyal community around AW, run experiments, analyze the outcome, and decide the best model of operation moving forward with the community. Even though we’re building something novel - we aren’t the smartest people in the room, so we’re surrounding ourselves with them and iterating a lot while building AW.

Q: “Learning modules in our Web3 Academy” how does this work? Is there a “Conflux University” inside “Conflux City” where we can add educational content? Can users earn by engaging with these?

A: We could explore both a) having Conflux interactive learning modules inside of web3 Academy and b) having a separate Conflux University building with exclusive Conflux learning materials. Web3 Academy building will have different classrooms and floors for people to walk around and learn from basics (0 floor) to advanced materials. We’re also exploring some exciting collaborations on that side, though we can’t share the project names yet. And yes, we’ll implement the ‘learn to earn’ model either through collaboration with the best projects in the space doing that or we’ll build AW native incentivized learning mechanisms.

Q: If I understand it correctly, the scope of this grant is the general Conflux City plus 2 Conflux dapps. The stuff under “Next steps” (learning modules, Conflux skins/wearables, co-working space) are not part of this grant, is this correct?

A: Yes, that’s correct. By the time we’ll finish building Founding Cities of Atlantis, we’ll have v1 of Web3 Academy (Q1 ‘22), as well as skins/wearables.

Q: When is Atlantis World expected to go live on the mainnet?

A: Ideally, Q1 ‘22, realistically - Q2 ‘22.

Thanks again everyone, your support and interest are greatly appreciated! <3

Make sure to join Atlantis World Discord channel to stay updated, share your feedback & receive support : https://discord.gg/j43Ycp72uK

[Conflux_Cami]

Hi @cj_atlantis.world, thank you so much for your proposal. I had a few question regarding one of your answers above.

“At the moment, we’re onboarding manually our founding ecosystem partners, integrating their protocols, dApps inside of Atlantis World. Though, that’s not the way to move forward - as we’re aiming to enable progressive decentralization and actual community ownership within AW. We’re exploring multiple ways to approach the permissionless building, though there’s always that tricky part of sustaining a high level of quality and community engagement. With that said, we’ll have a governance module. For every individual/project planning to occupy ‘token gated land’ and build their City there, they’ll need to create a governance proposal to Atlantis DAO, where DAO will either approve or not. And, even if approved, one couldn’t just own the land; for some time, they’ll occupy/rent it from the DAO (enabling revenue-sharing model across all DAO members / AW). Think about changing one’s citizenship; you don’t just get one (in most cases, though ofc there’s an ‘investment citizenship’), we’re exploring gamified, long-term value-add on mechanism to the ecosystem that ensures all parties will benefit from given individual/project/DAO occupying specific land/city.”

Does this mean, Conflux dapps would have to apply and get approved by the DAO to build correct?

Also, who would you say are your competitors?

Based on your current milestones, since Conflux is it’s own PoW blockchain, how hard would that be to integrate dapps from our Ecosystem?

[cryptopowers]

Yes, there area few apps from Conflux that I would like to see integrated as well as some upcoming projects…

[cj_atlantis.world]

Hey Camilla, tysm for reaching out… sorry for the late response, things have been hectic on our side!

Whilst progressive decentralisation is a huge priority to us, and we’re actively exploring launching a sustainable + fair DAO model as soon as that would make sense (DAO will make up core part of Atlantis future) we’re currently doing the hard work and actually just integrating the favourite dApps recommended by Conflux community. In the future, we plan to launch SDK so that almost any community can build their dApp (on effectively any chain, we will already support a vast number by the time of our beta launch next year) into Atlantis ecosystem.

In terms of competitors, we really believe in a collaborate vs compete ethos. We want to integrate most dApps in crypto ecosystem + give users a choice. When we consider existing virtual worlds like DCL or Somnium Space for example, we don’t view them as direct competitors since they’re building with a 3d/immersive focus. We want to make the virtual world experience super lightweight, accessible on any device from anywhere in the world and build social features (like encrypted text chat, spatial video/audio conf) on top of Web3 building blocks like NFTs, DeFi, DAO voting etc. We believe what we are building to be extremely novel, and don’t yet see a lightweight nor fully Web3 enabled metaverse.

In terms of integrating dApps, since Conflux is EVM compatible, we don’t see any problems with that or any core changes to our existing tech stack that need to be made.

[Geoff]

Hey @cj_atlantis.world Thanks again for the application, it was great chatting the other day!

Below are some suggestions on your milestones to help expedite this grant application. Generally we are looking to see more specifics on the deliverables around your grant broken up into milestones since payments are milestone based.

You can respond directly to this post with your updated milestones.

Please specify the deliverables for each suggested milestone, and feel free to shuffle timelines of the deliverables around. These are merely suggestions to highlight what we are looking for in your milestones. You can also see some general milestone guidelines here: Grant Application Milestone Guidelines

Let me know if you have any questions!

[thegaram]

In terms of integrating dApps, since Conflux is EVM compatible, we don’t see any problems with that or any core changes to our existing tech stack that need to be made.

Because Conflux is EVM compatible, redeploying your contracts should be easy. However, our APIs are somewhat different from other EVM chains, so you cannot use web3.js or ethers with Conflux directly. Would this be an issue? Also, could you tell us a bit about what blockchain tools you use in your tech stack?

One issue I see come up often is that many Ethereum dapp frontends rely heavily on event logs. With the amount of data on Conflux (2 blocks per second), log filtering on large block ranges can be pretty slow.