Clam Island 2022 New Year Update

Ahoy there Clam Island citizens, farmers and visitors!

It has been quite an eventful few weeks, not just for Clam Island but also for the Crypto market in general. Despite the market volatility, there has been many positive developments here at Clam Island. Let’s start with the one thing that is on everyone’s mind.

Community / Marketing

As announced on Telegram shortly before Christmas, @da0uch has joined us as our new Chief Marketing Officer.

He is a professional growth marketer and an ex mentor at ConsenSys Mesh and Tachyon Accelerator. He was actually one of our mentors when we were in the Tachyon Filecoin Accelerator Program, so it is a testament to the strength of our product that he believes in us enough to come on board as our CMO.

Mr Oppo / Yelf, who served as our CMO, will be stepping back into a business development role, focusing on partnerships with other projects.

In addition to our new CMO, we have also recruited two new community managers @Syrecx and @matijarma, who will be working together to get the Citizenship Program back on track and to further help build community engagement across our social channels.

One of the issues we had in the past was the marketing workload when the CMO was managing both marketing and community engagement. With two community managers on board, our new CMO can now fully focus on marketing. We acknowledge that despite some good ideas and initial traction, our marketing has been less than ideal in the past, mostly due to the discrepancy between workload and available time. Our new marketing structure and CMO’s professional background as a marketer should resolve these issues as we prepare Clam Island for growth heading into 2022.

More details on our marketing and community engagement plan will be revealed soon, stay tuned!

Clam / Pearl collection gas fees

We have been hearing a lot about the high gas fees to collect a Clam or Pearl, which was made worse by the rising BNB price. We have been working on optimising this in between other developments, and just before Christmas we dropped a surprise gift by deploying an update that halved the gas. But that’s not all! We have more optimisations to come, with the next one expected to half the gas again.

We are also aware of the issue where sometimes a collection transaction would fail and consume more gas fee. While this has been made better by the lowered gas cost, we are working on a solution to permanently fix the intermittent error. As the error only occurs occasionally and Solidity’s error reporting is notoriously unhelpful, the cause of the issue has been difficult to track, but a potential fix will be deployed with the next optimisation.

GEM Inflation

We had some community members discuss the yield farming and GEM inflation recently. More specifically, some of you are concerned about the non-native pools in the yield farm.

This is a common concern for many yield farming projects. However, it’s important to remember a few things:

• As part of our long term vision to attract mainstream retail investors to the platform, it is important to offer “safer” investment options for the first time yield farmers in order for Clam Island to be a legitimate “Play-to-Invest” platform that can compete with other yield farming and investment platforms.
• Our farming lock mechanism means that 50% of farming rewards are locked for 7 days. During those 7 days, the locked rewards can still be used to purchase Clams. As farming Clams for Pearls is also the highest APR option available on the platform, the user is incentivised to try Clam farming at some point. And if the feedback we have been receiving about our product holds true, for many people simply trying once is enough to get them hooked!
• Insofar as yield farming inflation is concerned, macroeconomics is much more important than focusing on the potential sell pressure and APR from non-native pools. What matters is the weighting distribution between native and non-native pools, and the overall inflation schedule. In relation to the former, our native pools currently collectively hold 62% of the total reward weight. We are comfortable with this from a long term perspective.

In relation to the overall inflation schedule, from 13 January 2022 onwards, we will be implementing a 4% reduction of the inflation every week. Our current total supply for GEM is around 3.5m, which means that the inflation schedule over the next 4 years would look something like this:

It is important to remember that the above numbers do not take into account GEM inflation from Clam farming — that is, buying Clam NFTs to farm Pearl NFTs and redeeming the GEM rewards. We will explain this shortly. But for now, looking only at yield farming, the total supply would start to taper out at around 8m at the one-year mark, and reach just shy of 9m by the end of the 4th year. That leaves plenty of room for growth, irrespective of inflation from non-native yield farming pools.

Of course, the inflation from Clam farming cannot be ignored. However, this is impossible to predict because the amount of inflation is dependent on the price of GEM and price of Clams.

To demonstrate, assuming a GEM price of $0.05, Clam price of $200 (i.e. 4,000 GEM), Clam sales of 100 per week and an overall GEM stream reduction of ~25% from people claiming GEM early (without a Pearl traits match or claiming the GEM upfront without the stream, both of which incur a 50% penalty), those figures would result in inflation of approximately 1 GEM per block using current GEM yield multipliers.

However, if GEM price is $1, Clam price is $600 and Clam sales per week is 300, then the inflation from Clam farming would amount to approximately 0.5 GEM per block.

What we can say is that we will be monitoring growth closely and that the current average multipliers (2x for Clams and 2x for Pearls vs GEM spent) will almost certainly be adjusted down as time goes on and the project grows.

Upcoming features and updates

With the New Year comes a new plan for the features to come. We will be publishing an updated Roadmap shortly, but in the meantime, features that we are focusing on over the next several months include:

• Compatibility with third party NFT marketplaces (as this item is already delayed, this is one of our priority items which we aim to complete over the next couple of weeks);
• Optimising the GEM stream contracts to remove the current 20-Pearl stream limit (which prevents you from burning more Pearls if there are already 20 Pearls streaming in one wallet);
• Further gas optimisations across the smart contracts;
• Implementation of a locked $SHELL pool that provides additional benefits on Clam Island to locked stakers;
• Implementation of a zap function to enter / exit yield farming pools (i.e. use BNB to directly enter into / exit from a pool without having to acquire or convert out of LP tokens first);
• Integration of a fiat onramp;
• Allowing the purchase of Clams with BNB (80% of which will be used to buy and burn GEM, with the other 20% going to treasury);
• Allowing people to choose a size tier when buying Clams, with prices matching the size tiers and the resulting effect on Clam multiplier. This will allow someone to buy, for example, one Clam that is likely to have a multiplier that is 3x higher than the lowest tier Clam, instead of having to buy 3 separate Clams.
• And more to come!

Stay tuned for our updated Roadmap. In the meantime, we hope that you found this update informative. As always, to keep up with the latest updates, please follow our Twitter, Telegram and Discord. In fact, if you have a look at Discord now, you’ll see that our new Community Managers have already been busy re-organising!