The 1UP-Cartel: A Meta-Guild For Blockchain Games & HIVE Community Gamification

HIVE - A Metaverse For The Metaverse

HIVE is embracing its full potential of tokenized communities, blockchain gaming, dividend tokens for passive income, fast and feeless DeFi and NFT minting as well as a funding platform for aspiring projects. None of that is new or surprising but the development speed and complexity of all these areas are seeing a enormous growth and adoption. It has never been more interesting to be on HIVE than right now.

HIVE is becoming a hub for gaming, offering a plethora of opportunities for developers, publishers, gamers, streamers and investors. At the same time, we see the Metaverse-hype outside of HIVE, with tons of projects launching on Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, as well as entirely specialized blockchains like ENJIN and SOUL. Also, gaming guilds like YGG and ZenSports are collecting millions of Dollars in investment capital to expand further into the metaverse.

Projects like @gamestate are using HIVE for their IDO (initial DEX offering), @hivepunks and @hivefolks show the power of embedding NFT minting directly into our community. Promising new game projects are doing their first steps on HIVE, like @psyberx and @ehon, who are following the footsteps of @splinterlands, @dcity, @risingstargame, @hashkings, @cryptobrewmaster, @exodegame, @dcrops, @rabona - the list is getting longer by the day!

And on top of all of that, everyone can just blog about it on HIVE and earn various tokens, ONEUP naturally being the first on the list, as it is designed to reward gaming and NFT content. But other tokens like LEO from the LeoFinance community are also ideal candidates for gaming-articles that focus on the financial aspects of the game. And Splintertalk with its SPT token is leading the way for a tokenized gaming community for one specific game, something that could easily create an industry standard for thousands of gaming communities to come.

Incredibly exciting potential - and incredibly confusing for all of us. Who can follow any of that to make sophisticated choices for how to invest our time and money, to be part of this Express Train, that has already left the station and is accelerating faster and faster by the minute?

One Cartel To Rule Them All

This is where the idea of the 1UP-Cartel comes in. The name is a wordplay of "card" (as in NFT cards like in Splinterlands; plus the word "cartel" originally derives from the Latin word "charta", which translates to "card") and its meaning of collusion for financial profit and market domination:

A cartel is a group of independent market participants who collude with each other in order to improve their profits and dominate the market. Cartels are usually associations in the same sphere of business, and thus an alliance of rivals.

The 1UP-Cartel is a mix between a gaming guild like YGG (that invests into gaming assets and creates scholarships for gamers, sharing the gaming revenue), a dividend token (similar to BRO, LBI, INDEX and UTOPIS, paying out regular dividends to token holders from part of the revenue stream) as well as one of the most extensive curation service initiative on the Hive-Engine ecosystem thus far (inspired by the popular @monster-curator service, which itself will merge with the cartel).

But since the cartel will also acquire shares of other gaming guilds, gaming projects, other dividend tokens and build a top-level curation system it is fair to say that:

The 1UP-Cartel serves like a meta-guild, a meta-index token and a meta-curation service.

The CARTEL Token

The original idea for the CARTEL token was created in half a year ago, when Splinterlands was in its final days of the Praetoria land sale (hence the current token byname "Praetoria Cartel"). We wanted to collectively buy into the land expansion and manage it for the token holders. While the idea was cool, it came too late and land sold out before we got enough funds together.

Now the idea and its token is being revived and build out as the 1UP-Cartel.

The CARTEL Tokenomics

The maximum supply of CARTEL tokens is 75,000, with a precision of 2 decimals (0.01 CARTEL is the smallest unit).

The initial sale will offer 25,000 CARTEL, each 1 CARTEL at a fixed price of $10 USD. The sale will run for 30 days or until all 25k CARTEL are distributed. The remaining 50,000 CARTEL will be held in the treasury for future distribution at a higher value than the initial distribution.

100% of the funds generated through the token sale will be mostly invested into gaming assets and tokens and to a small degree into promising NFT projects (like @hivepunks and @hivefolks) as well as other dividend tokens. All assets will be owned by the CARTEL treasury and hence indirectly owned by the CARTEL token holders.

The 1UP-Cartel will manage these assets for the token holders for an operator fee, that is split between the players of our game investments and the managers of the 1UP-Cartel. Each game will have its own unique operator fee because some games require very little time investment, while others require a lot. This will be a constant work-in-progress and needs rebalancing over time for every single game we play.

From the remaining revenue after operator fees, we will use 45% to buy more assets, 45% to pay out to token holders and 10% for the 1UP treasury, to partly finance future development and also to buy ONEUP from the market and add it to our own liquidity pools, providing more and more liquidity over time and strengthen the ONEUP token. The liquidity added to the pools this way will be blacklisted from LP rewards, to reserve all rewards for the other LP providers.

The CARTEL Governance

During the first three months 100% of the revenue (after operator fees) will be compounded back into the 1UP-Cartel. After the first three months, we will make a vote about whether we begin distributing dividends or postpone payouts for another three months max. This means, that after six months at the latest we will begin paying out dividends to token holders.

Voting will be inspired by @lbi-token, via a simple governance voting system, where token holders get between 1-5 votes depending on their CARTEL holdings, in order to prevent whales from controlling the 1UP-Cartel and give smaller investors a chance to participate in the governance in a meaningful way. Until the first vote, we will look into enabling staking for the CARTEL token both for security reasons as well as voting power for governance (not to be confused with voting power for posts as in HIVE Power or ONEUP Power).

However, most of the decisions of the 1UP-Cartel will not be up for vote, or else we will end up doing constantly different votes for various aspects, which is slow and troublesome. This kind of governance is reserved for only the most relevant changes of the cartel and will happen very rarely.

The cartel founders are @flauwy, @e-rich1, @ricorose & @r0llingh00d.

The CARTEL Investments

We will invest A LOT of our capital into Splinterlands, mostly via pack purchases and direct card buys from Chaos Legion. Our goal is to set up multiple playing accounts at the Silver-Gold League level. This will make a significant amount of our investment. For that, we will put aside enough funds, to buy packs on launch day or even join an investment pool. In case we get enough funding, we will do an over-the-counter purchase directly with Splinterlands.

We will also offer a special management service for Splinterlands land plot owners, as soon as the land expansion begins.

Further, we will add at exposure to all HIVE games and have at least one account for each of them, that grinds out their maximum potential with our assets in them. To kickstart that, I am personally handing over ALL MY ASSETS from dCity, Hashkings, Exode and Rising Star to the cartel treasury for about 50% of their current market value, paid in CARTEL. We also might accept assets from you on an individual basis in exchange for CARTEL, but only for a massive discount and only for certain games. We will never buy assets at or close to market value from you!

Other investments we will make on a smaller scale are into new HIVE games, like @psyberx and @ehon, who both look very promising. We are also interested in STATE tokens from @gamestate and we will hold some PIZZA and PGM, which are both some pretty cool gamified rewarding tokens with their own communities on HIVE.

Further we will expand a little bit into the dividend tokens on HIVE, starting with APE from @apeminingclub which just launched recently, as well as some INDEX, BRO and UTOPIS.

We will obviously look heavily outside our HIVE box as well, and acquire other gaming assets from many of the new blockchain games. High on our list are Gods Unchained, Thetan Arena, Illuvium, Star Atlas, but also established games like Axie Infinity (we probably get three Axies for playing and breeding). I am also personally involved in developing ChiFiBots, a game from @nftstudios, designed by the amazing @kevinli - the CARTEL will also get one playable set from our cards.

Quite frankly, it is kind of impossible to make up a proper roadmap for our investments, as things change so quickly these days and more and more games pop up like mushrooms. We will always be careful and never ape into projects without proper research. It is very likely that this blockchain market will create a similar amount of frustration through unfulfilled projects like the ICO crave of 2017. Therefor we are mostly interested in projects that have a working game already.

How To Buy CARTEL?

CARTEL will be sold over the counter exclusively.

Option 1: USD Stablecoin Payment:

Send any amount of HBD, SWAP.HBD or SWAP.BUSD dividable by 10 to @oneup-cartel.

You will receive your CARTEL tokens usually within 24 hours. This is done 100% manually because we cannot sell tokens on the Hive-Engine market for a USD pegged price.

Don't send any amount to us that is not dividable by ten, as this would just create an unnecessary effort for us. Only send amounts of 10/20/30...100/200...1000/1110.

Option 2: HIVE payment:

Send any amount of HIVE or SWAP.HIVE to @oneup-cartel. Minimum is 10 USD worth of HIVE.

This form of payment is much more complicated for us. If you decided to use HIVE, we will sell the HIVE on the market for a stablecoin at current market value. We will do this once per day.

If the HIVE price goes down in the meantime, YOU will get CARTEL, according to the market price.

We will not be responsible for any loss of token value in the meantime. If you don't want to risk any market volatility between you sending us your payment and us issuing you your tokens, please select payment option 1 with a stablecoin!

The Curation-Cartel

One of the great expertise's that I personally acquired over my time on HIVE, is an eye for valuable content with relevant information for the according community as well as for community members that actively engage with the authors over a long period. My first curation service was @monster-curator, which became one of the most well known accounts on the HIVE blockchain, rewarding thousands of great Splinterlands authors for the past two years and cleaning up the community from abusive behavior.

The cartel will continue this work and expand it massively: We will create a strong partnerships with our sister tribes, starting with #LeoFinance, #SPT, #CTP, #CINE, #PALnet, #ProofOfBrain, #Archon, #NeoxAG, #Hive-Engine and others. Every single one of these projects will get their very own curation service, starting TODAY. Just like @monster-curator, you can delegate your staked tokens to dedicated accounts for each of these communities, that will do diligent daily manual curation for them all and pay out daily curation rewards to its delegators.

All of these curation accounts will take a 5% fee, which will automatically go to the @curation-cartel account, where they will be partly compounded to further grow our curation power and partly be used to add more and more liquidity as pairs for ONEUP pools. For that purpose we will add more pools in the future, starting with a ONEUP::LEO pool very soon^tm.

This liquidity will (unless something dramatic happens) never leave these pools again, creating a black hole event for both ONEUP and LEO. The more pools we add over time, the more black holes we can create, further deepening liquidity for the participating tokens.

Phase 1

Starting today, we are offering the following accounts to delegate to, which will begin paying out curation rewards as passive income to delegators as soon as curation rewards are coming in.
(It takes 7-14 days to stabilize and then create a relatively constant revenue stream for the participants. There is also a 24h payout freeze, after delegating for the first time to each account.)

Other tribes might join the list eventually, but this is currently already a major undertaking and we need to enter Phase 2 first before we can expand further.

Phase 2+3

In the second phase, which is currently in development, we will offer a smart voting system for whitelisted curators. We are onboarding some of the most active and reputable community members on HIVE, who have shown in the past their value through their content and engagement. These users will be able to call our curation accounts to any post on the blockchain and distribute all eligible tribe upvotes to the most deserving authors.

If you are interested and you have a high reputation on HIVE, please reach out to me on the 1UP-Discord. Curators will be able to earn upvotes on their own comments, based on their activity and effort. All curator reward upvotes will be done 100% manually.

Phase 3 will also include a dashboard for curators, showing voting power of all our curation accounts and help to manage and organize all these accounts. I will not reveal too much about this phase, but it will basically pick up what the very first iteration of 1UP from three years ago was originally intended for. It will be a cool alternative for curation on the HIVE blockchain and create a much more efficient system to handle our voting power and assign upvotes to authors.

Ok, that's it. Let me know what you think. I guess there is a lot to discuss!

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta