Building Clovers Network with Billy Rennekamp

for coming by you guys middle the hackathon and all maybe something you guys have seen this already from the other day forgive me but I'm going to talk about a project I've been working on for a while called clovers and clovers is an aetherium based game uses a novel proof-of-work algorithm to create non punchable tokens first a little bit about myself my name is Billy I do a lot of work with cosmos Network previously doesn't work with Eric on black on the implementation of batch bonding curves with gnosis doing atomic arbitrage work on their decks I'm the author of VIP 16 33 the refundable token and some fun hackathon projects ans nifty and meme Lords clovers was built by myself and been studio with help from Cora Levinson with CAD CAD it's been made possible support from the ECF Fundacion oskol tar barrack all pioneer works and L 4 so I'm going to quickly go through a kind of a onboarding with the game you can maybe get sort of a sense of what mechanics are like this is the sort of landing learning tutorial page and you can click through and see that there's something called clovers and they can be generated right here in your browser this is the clover getting generated in real time nice job again make another one look at the screen a little bit and if you were to keep going we'll make a third so each of these clovers get added to your basket you can see this icon up here and let's go ahead and see what happens next now let's say you found a symmetrical clover see this one is symmetrical on the line of X equals 0 it's even a smiley face the symmetrical ones are rare if you find one you can claim a reward so a reward for example in this situation would be 0.2 - clover coins which equals roughly 6 cents right now now you can look back at the asymmetrical clovers that we found earlier they're not symmetrical you can still collect or sell them I'll get into why you might want to do that later to keep or sell a clover first you need to register it and once it's registered it would appear on your profile it would appear in the public feed where you can buy and sell them it's kind of a marketplace you can also go back to your garden this is a version of what we were doing earlier where clovers are generated in real time as you scroll new clovers are seated and grown there you can add them to your basket like we did before you can also use a pig so the pig is sort of like a truffle pig it runs ahead and sniffs out these rare clovers on your behalf and it'll be running in the background it's just a web worker if you're familiar with cryptocurrencies which you might be if you're here it's kind of like a miner so if we were to just hop over to the garden really quick I'll show you really quickly these are new ones getting generated you can think of this a little bit like watching clouds go by most of them are just sort of noise lightning might strike and then you see the face of Jesus Christ and the clouds like maybe right here there's a crypto Punk so you'd be able to sort of save it for later or go ahead and sign in and register it on aetherium but I'm gonna hop back and talk a little bit more about the background the project and what's going on here so clovers use what I call a proof of search it's an alternative to proof of work anyone and it actually utilizes a board game called Othello which is a classic board game that has some really unique properties that make it function very similar to a hash function so Othello is nice and that it's a very simple game the rules are very easy to model you can verify games inside of the EBM but it has a very very large game tree for this reason it was used in a lot of early AI search because you couldn't do brute force look ahead to try to find the most optimal game play so you ended up having to sort of design heuristics to make intelligent play it didn't take long for the best computer to beat the best human in this game but the game continues for human-to-human tournaments a lot and it's still unsolved in that there's no proof that the optimal play is possible or that white or black has the best moves it's been like weakly proven but not strongly because the game tree is again just just way too large so this has a nice quality for using it as a hash function because you can use the moves of the game that move all the way to the final end state and due to the nature of the way the board works every time you make a move the board is very drastically changed it's very difficult to tell what was actually changed at each move especially when you run it backwards so it's sort of this one directional trap door function where you have the kind of public key at the end but or like you know the result of a hash but you have no idea what steps it took to get there what what input seed took and so I put little squigglies here because this is like a public key and the moves that it take written here in chess notation are like the private key not quite the same but kind of get the picture what's also really nice is that in the bottom left you can see this is the board encoded as a hex value and this can be used as the NFT ID so these NF T's are nice because they're sort of interoperable across the system they immediately show up in your wallet they can be bought and sold on open C they have all the sort of properties that are nice about NFC to begin with inside this game when you get these rewards I mentioned that they're based on this symmetry but there's actually five types of symmetry we saw this vertical one here in the demo can be horizontal can be rotational like here in the middle diagonal and diagonal the other way you also noticed that there's different colors here so black background means that the the like black player had more tiles at the end which made them the winner of that game white background is the opposite grey background means there's a tie that's sort of like a diskette and there's also the possibility of having green squares so this is when a game ends early this was a shutout game between black and white black one so the background is black there's all these empty green squares on the tile left so I mentioned before that there's that payout there's that reward of for the example 1 6 cents that comes from a bonding curve so a big part of this project is being able to offer my users and off-boarding for whatever the coin I just handed them for their activity and so I realized early on that one of the great ways to do this are these automated market makers available around the ecosystem things like uni swap we're using a bank or implementation of a bonding curve because the the minting of the coin is actually attached to the market maker and you'd rather use uni swap if there's a separate source of the coin and so it's currently backed by around eight or nine thousand dollars of ether backing the entire sort of population of clovers it's very very highly collateralized so there's very little slippage in this system and we wanted to do that because we didn't want to make this a game about prospecting we just wanted to be able to provide payout for users who are actually earning these of course if you have an inflationary token how do you maintain value in that there is a very complicated but maybe easy seeming scheme in which there are token sinks to counteract the inflation from minting rewards so if we were to break down this map a little bit you can see there's a few different characters and settings the player the garden pig and the miner player is you it's a person might use the pig it might use the garden to find clovers might take rewards for finding symmetrical clovers or it might take the risk on actually buying a clover and not trading it for the reward I'll get a little bit more on why somebody might do that in a second by the garden you remember earlier is sort of the space to generate clover slowly it's where you do it kind of like cloud watching and have the the act of pareidolia looking for shapes inside this noise like pattern recognition the pig was that helper who just looks through all of the globe really quickly and throws away everything that's not symmetrical it's helping you find the ones that have kind of cash in hand payouts and then there's a minor you can think of as a kind of user or a player who's only interested in cash in hand payouts they would maybe use the pig or maybe they would build their own mining system to sort of accelerate the process and be able to to search through these more efficiently so the whole system sort of accommodates for these different types of users and things that they might do so that first story would be the player sort of just liking the way one of these things look you know this is kind of the basic idea of why you would play with cryptokeys you just think it's cute or you think it looks good if you were to decide that and decided to keep it you would burn some of this ecosystem token called clover coin and that would help offset the inflation for the rewards that other people get you would keep your clover and going your merry way another story might be a player who is interested in making money with this system but maybe they don't want to do it just from mining like the miner so they might find an interesting image an interesting clover in this field and see a lot of potential in it maybe it's looks like their pet I'll show you some examples in a little bit of some of the exciting asymmetrical ones you might get a example of why somebody might get excited about the way these look they could keep the clover similar to the first scenario by burning some token and then they might add some contextual value to it like naming it identifying the fact that it looks like Sasquatch or the Loch Ness monster they might add comments to it other people would do it as well there's also albums where you can sort of group them together there's a lot of animal looking clovers that end up coming up there's a lot of clovers that have looks like numbers or letters so you have this sort of weird meta challenges of trying to find all of the ones that include the entire English alphabet or so and then you can put it back on that market place where you might have the option to sell it to somebody else who realizes that they want to complete their collection of all the letters or all of the dog looking ones and so they would be willing to pay and in that point that player would have made a profit without having to use the miner and then that brings us to the third scenario which is the actual miner who might just throw tons of hardware at it searching for all of these super super symmetrical ones or maybe they design their own clover that they want to find they've put in you know a perfect mandala or something like that and they set their miner to search for specifically that one they can cash it out and when they cash it out and accept that inflated reward token the clover still exists it just becomes orphaned it gets owned by the contract itself and then goes for sale on the market so if another user comes along one day in the future decides they buy it they could purchase it from the market and if it's being sold from the contract itself that fee that they pay is burned so the goal is to have these tokens sinks sort of counterbalance this inflation reward and if that works out you have this happy balanced world so we launched in August and was really exciting we've had a lot more activity than I expected 5,000 transactions was on the first day over 20,000 in the first five days diaper labs who has a wallet that subsidizes gas costs paid three thousand dollars in fees on the first day from all the users using it there was 20,000 new clovers in the first three weeks there's currently almost 500 clover holders and a little over 40 thousand clovers in circulation there's 33,000 clovers and clover coins in circulation this is the sort of economy that's running current token price is about 26 cents from the inflation from the beginning there's been a drop of 11 cents this is sort of planned on and incorporated in the way that the the rollout would work we did a lot of work with some software called CAD CAD which is simulation software for state machines to sort of see okay let's assume that the worst case scenario happens is just people showing up and mining and trying to pull money out of this contract because they know they can make a quick buck how many clovers can we get generated at what different parameters and so we started running these simulations with the idea that it would only only go down and we've had much better results than than what we've seen we sort of expected that all $10,000 that originally went into the bonding curve would be depleted sure would be depleted with only 20,000 clovers getting generated and we've already seen twice that number and the token price is still far from being zero we've had three contract upgrades a couple hacks all of them rather benign and friendly for podcasts we have a telegram group that's growing a discord that was created by a community member that's also over 100 we have a very long average user session it's over ten minutes on average which for most websites is really great we also have some traction on open sea because we have our own marketplace a lot of the activity happens on our marketplace but if people want to use open sea it's obviously an option the average price for a clover on open sea is 0.1 ether we've added some new features and since launch we've received one new grant as well as a meme I think maybe multiple memes but this is one of our favorites the pig is running it's getting asymmetrical but thank God sometimes it celebrates with a symmetrical one so here's some of the exciting symmetrical clovers that have come up we have Deutsche Bank logo some weird sort of ACORN I'm really into these sort of rotational ones and it's been really exciting to see the conversations in the discord to see what users think are rarer more desirable and how that correlates to what the contract is able to pay out so the rewards are auto adjusting if a lot of diagonal symmetrical come out they start getting less and less valuable whereas the perpendicular ones are a little bit more rare so they maintain a higher payout and rotational ones even more so bloggers that have multiple lines of symmetry end up having you know two three or four to three or five times as much of a payout so you can see in this middle right is a clover that has all five lines of symmetry rotational perpendicular both ways diagonal both ways plus some green squares so that was a really exciting one obviously a beautiful be the bottom left some of the asymmetrical ones that I thought were cool top left this is supposed to be a turtle next one is spy versus spy obviously a weird face we have kind of a dressage horse the next one's supposed to be a unicorn Kitty the middle left is a dog with floppy ears you have a cellphone selfie stick a cat then with the green is I think looks a lot like skydiving turtle the one next to that is kind of the Loch Ness monster that's coming in and out of the water baby lamb jumping cigarettes high heels weird dude bottom right is kind of like a Mario character playing Golf so upcoming we're excited to start using a bouncy system where people actually can design the clovers they want and put up rewards for them we've been talking about using a dollar auction system which if you're familiar with is kind of like a diabolical way to convince people to pay more money for something that's not worth what it is but I think it starts becoming useful if you use it with more people than one so the dollar auction it's like I put a dollar for sale and you can buy it from me for 10 cents but somebody else can bid 11 cents and they can go up but the the hook line & sinker is that whatever you bid you have to pay whether you win it or not and so you get up to the fringe of a dollar and you might be willing to pay a dollar at that point just to recover the dollar you were already spending the other person would pay a dollar and one just to recover that 99 cents they were already spending but if you make it into a bounty system then you have all these different people who are like oh I also want this clover that was bountied I'd be willing to pay this amount if it's the top amount they're the ones who receive it somebody else is like actually I would like to say it so they could pay some amount if it's the top amount they'll keep it but that original person's maintains the still part of the total balance so the person who actually does find it it's going to get a much larger payout than if it was just from the single highest bidder pre-cell mining basically a way to remove risk from users who think there might be somebody who wants to buy their clover from them so they can kind of register it on the blockchain without having to pay the cost to keep it it kind of becomes like an orphaned clover without a payout and we're building a POA bridge for no coin on boarding so let's make it possible for people who have never owned a 30 come up to the site start searching and finding clovers earning ether by submitting meta transactions that go to the POA network get verified using their arbitrary message bridge to pay the gas costs on theorem that will then result in a reward of clover coin which can be immediately transferred into ether atomically so that a user could show up and just start trustless li earning ether without registering or do anything like that so really excited to sort of open up that onboarding to people who have never interacted with theory and before because I think games are a great system for doing that and giving them a way that they can actually earn clovers themselves or earn earn the money that they need in order to interact with the rest of the system is something that we're excited about looking at so that's a clovers network you can get ahold of us and all these great social channels my name is Billy I'll be here hacking on a terrible project if you want to come talk to me about that or clovers I'd love to see you I think there's also the graph is giving out prizes and something that I've been meaning to do for a while is is implement the graph with clovers Network so if you're still looking for a project one that has a good payout I bet you could win it with building a graph using clovers that's all thanks very much you guys