DFINITY Ecological Interview: Toniq Labs and its ecological applications built based on DFINITY
Hello everyone, I believe that friends in the community who are familiar with the DFINITY ecology have a certain understanding of Toniq Labs. In just over two months, Toniq Labs has launched Stoic Wallet, token standard EXT, NFT “pet” Cronic, and the game “Rise of the Magni” and other application tools and ecological projects for the DFINITY ecosystem, especially Cronic and “Rise of the Magni”, these two NFT-related projects have gained widespread attention and love from the DFINITY community once they were launched.
For this event, we are honored to invite team members from Toniq Labs to elaborate on Toniq Labs and its ecological applications built based on DFINITY
The following is the detailed content of the AMA.
Host：Before the event officially starts, the guests are invited to make a simple self-introduction.
Stephen Andrews ：My name is Stephen Andrews, I’m CEO of Toniq Labs and lead developer. My business partner, COO and lead-designer is Mac and we both live in New Zealand. We have a small core team, and utilize other developers, designers and illustrators on a casual basis.
Question 1: What kind of organization is Toniq Labs? (The original intention of the establishment, the business being carried out, the background of the team members, etc.).
Stephen Andrews ：We have worked together for a number of years, and have been involved in blockchain development work for the last 5 years.
We have only recently joined the ICP development community in May of this year. Our intention is to build, experiment and innovate on the IC.
Host：Wow，it is really a long time for your team to be together and participate in the blockchain industry, you are the witness of the whole development of blockchain technology.
What is the reason for you to choose DFINITY and what do you think of DFINITY?
Stephen Andrews ：Yes we have been involved for blockchain development for some years and have seen a lot of good innovations, but nothing compared to DFINITY.
Reverse gas model, and fixed gas costs are HUGE if you want to develop an app that will be used by millions/billions of users. This combination will allow for apps to be developed that will be a lot more usable for non-crypto users, and that’s where adoption begins.
And then on top of that, the scalability and speed of ICP means that apps that we do build can easily grow and scale
Host: What a sharp insight!
DFINITY do hope many more innovative developers like you participate in the ecology.
“Rise of the Magni” is a very interesting game, people not only can play it for fun, while it can also make money. Could you please introduce us more about the game “Rise of the Magni”, especially the design that you think will be attractive to the community？
Stephen Andrews ：I want Rise of the Magni to grow to become a viable competitive/esport game, even if it’s just at a casual level. We want to continue to develop the storylines of the characters, and have really rewarding online competitions as well.
All characters/Magni are NFT’s that will cost a user to buy, and to build strong Magni you need to use in-game tokens and fusion items. These things can only be won via the online competitive mode and completing challenges — those that are good at the game will be able to earn more than those who aren’t.
Players who are not so good will look to purchase items to make their team stronger, or stronger Magni to add to their lineup. These can be traded via the marketplace p2p for ICP or other tokens.
We see RotM as having a Play To Earn aspect, a fun element for casual players, and a potential esport for blockchain
We have a planned tournament for August, with a current prize pool of 40ICP + NFTs, and we hope to run more in future with streamed events
Host: Sounds very interesting! 40 ICP!
Stephen Andrews : Yes! We have had over 80 interested people apply to participate so far
Host: Everyone who loves competivie/esport game can join the game and have a try.
What is the future plan of “Rise of the Magni” and what will be released in the recent days?
Stephen Andrews : We have some ambitious goals, and this will all determine on if we can secure funding or not. We want to be able to release a public beta this year/early 2022 and eventually start a competitive season in 2022 with continuous improvements and future additions to the Adventure mode. I’m fairly certain we should be able secure funding and grow out the team to do this, and we’re really excited about the next few months. The current iteration that we have got is a very early alpha demo.
Host: Where there is a will, there is a way :)
What you hope will eventually come ture with the hard working of you and your team. We will looking forward to your good news.
next question: You launched Cronic’s NFT products, and you also launched the Cronic trading market. What plans does Cronic have in the future?
Stephen Andrews : Cronics started off as an experiment to test our our EXT token standard and NFT platform, and we are blown away with the community response. We are actively building this concurrently with our other projects. Cronics will be digital pets that you can interact with on-chain, e.g. play with them, send them treats, and give them medicine etc.
Everything you do will update their online viewable SVG in real time, so feeding your Cronic pepsi might give him a “burping” mouth! We also have accessories, which are secondary NFTs that you can send to your Cronic and they will wear it! We have plans to build out breeding and minigames for your Cronics too!
Two of the planned minigames are 1) a auto-battle type sim game, and 2) a beauty pageant/voting game
Host: It totally will be a good news for the pets lovers, have a pet home and raise a pet on cryptoworld. It will be very interesting！
Regarding the EXT token standard, what are the similarities and differences between it and the token standards of other blockchains such us Ethereum?
Stephen Andrews : Initially, EXT was modeled after ERC1155 — the multi-token standard. I still am a firm believer of this standard, as it results in some pretty big computational and storage savings. For example, it is similar to VM hardware sharing hardware resources.
The other big difference is that we are building a swap/exchange protocol directly into our token standard. This is the eDEX protocol — we believe that swapping/exchanging should be a native action of a token, not a 3rd party service that you have to pay to use (like DEXs/liquidity pools). We have this partially working already, and it’s how the NFT Marketplace we built currently works.
Both EXT and eDEX are part of a bigger project we are working on — our NFT/Token Platform, Exponent. We hope this will be a very viable option for people wanting to deploy tokens and NFTs on the IC
Host: got that:)
The container of DFINITY can be stopped or deleted. so next question: For users, this seems to be a risk. What solutions do you have in terms of container governance?
Stephen Andrews : I think this will evolve with the protocol in time. Canisters that run out of cycles can be halted, but at the same time they can be topped up by someone. I think a community run DAO that raises community funds/cycles could be setup to auto-fund some well-loved canisters, voted on by community members. This is not really an area that I’m currently exploring, but I would say others are or will in the near future. The same can be said about management/governance of canisters — solutions should be built, and need to be, but it’s currently something we don’t have the time to spend on.
Host: yes, the final solver will come out will better solution. Let‘s looking forward to that.
At present, we can see that Toniq Labs has built many projects and tools. What is your product business plan? What is the ultimate goal?
Stephen Andrews : 1) Grow our team. 2) Continue to build, experiment, and innovate. 3) Rinse and repeat.
Right now we are looking to raise funds to extend our runway, and in future look to do a funding round. We think we have things in a good place at the moment and really look forward to the future 😁
Host: Hope what you hope come true，the gold will shine everywhere，that’s what Chinese people always say.
Last question: Does Toniq Labs currently face some difficulties, such as technical difficulties based on DFINITY development Or other aspects?
Stephen Andrews : I personally don’t have many issues with DFINITY from a technical point of view. I think as the protocol grows, so will the tools, but I have nothing really to complain about so far. The team behind DFINITY are also great too! We as are a team are really lucky to be early developers as it allows us to pioneer some really innovative tech which good grow to be huge in the future!
Host: lol，DFINITY will be very happy to hear that
OK, time flies, my question part is over, let’s see if any questions from our audience？
Q1: Why not put a Token in a container
Stephen Andrews : I think this is regarding our multi-token approach compared to a single-canister per token approach? With EXT you can do both — you can deploy a single token in a single canister, which is what we did with WTCToken.com.
As mentioned above, we believe multi-token approach has a lot more benefits though. Imagine an NFT collection — would you deploy each NFT as a separate canister, or would you have all of them reside within a single canister and have their own unique IDs within that canister? When you think about it, an NFT is the same as a fungible token except the total supply is 1.
Q2: On DFINITY, is the EXT token standard compatible with the token standard constructed by other project parties?
Stephen Andrews : We haven’t really seen many other token standards, but we want to try and have a similar interface, or bolt on an interface to support these standards. I spoke with Igor earlier today actually, and he let me know that he was going to start pushing the discussions among developers to assist the community to come up with a standard that we can agree on.
Q3: Will different Cronic have different attributes in future games?
Stephen Andrews : We have been contacted by someone who would like to build a battle game use the same genetic code, but taking the traits from different parts of the code (so they are unique to the visual traits). This is such a cool idea, and we’d love to see other mini games being developed by other devs too. We do also plan to remap new traits, e.g. hair style/hair colour, and add new accessories too
Q4: I feel that the current projects are all hotspots at this stage. What is the main direction of your project?
Stephen Andrews : The underlying platform that is powering the NFTs (both of our games) and the marketplace is our Exponent platform. We believe this can grow to compete with something like Enjin.io. That is currently our “flagship” project, but unfortunately it is mostly hidden and behind the scenes. We are thinking about spinning out a separate team to fucus on game development and related projects as well
Q5: Will Cronic and “Rise of the Magni” be handed over to community governance in the future?
Stephen Andrews : The underlying platform that is powering the NFTs (both of our games) and the marketplace is our Exponent platform. We believe this can grow to compete with something like Enjin.io. That is currently our “flagship” project, but unfortunately it is mostly hidden and behind the scenes. We are thinking about spinning out a separate team to fucus on game development and related projects as well
Q6: What kind of reward activities do you have that ordinary users can participate in in the near future?
Stephen Andrews : As mentioned, we have an upcoming Rise of the Magni tournament, and we hope to showcase some cool IC apps (not just our work, but others too)! Potentially give away a Cronic accessory to live viewers as well, but nothing is set in stone.
We also want to work with other IC developers and event organizers too, and mint NFTs for cronics, like a badge that you participated in a hackathon etc
Q7: The project side is short of funds. Why not issue tokens to raise funds
Stephen Andrews : Not right time to issue tokens we don’t believe, we only need seed funding to help us with runway, and then look to a token sale or VC funding round in future
The above is all the content of this AMA
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