Clam Island Ecosystem Modifications

Ahoy there Clam Island citizens and visitors!

We have been monitoring our ecosystem closely and listening to the feedback of our community on ways that we can improve the Clam Island experience. Our platform actually went through a lot of turbulence in the first two weeks of launch, from token price fluctuations to hiccups with the oracle responsible for generating our Clams and Pearls’ DNA.

We do like a challenge at Clam Island, or we wouldn’t have created a novel ecosystem. But, as with any novel ecosystem, it is important to adapt to real world demands once it is deployed into the wild. While we wanted to avoid knee-jerk reactions, it is important to identify weaknesses that require improvement.

For Clam Island, the drop in $GEM price has revealed a flaw where the price of the NFTs, in this case Pearls, can become so low as to be overshadowed by transaction fees. And since we use a proper randomness oracle to generate a unique DNA for each and every NFT on Clam Island, and then decode the DNA into traits on-chain using our custom smart contracts, our transaction fees are higher than your typical yield farming or NFT project.

This issue affects the utility of the Pearls since the $GEM yield boost for each Pearl is, on average, about 1.5x of the $GEM price paid to produce it. It is further exacerbated by the fact that our ecosystem implements a dynamic $GEM price for NFTs that adjusts itself weekly based on the demand for Clams. This all contributes to a negative feedback loop where people are less willing to buy Clams due to the lack of utility for Pearls, which drops the $GEM price of Clams further, which in turn burns less $GEM to combat inflation, which then in turn generates additional sell pressure on $GEM, and so on.

To break this loop and make our ecosystem resilient to all price scenarios, and to generally improve the ecosystem according to the feedback from our community, we are announcing the following changes:

1. Clam purchasing / Pearl producing price adjustment

We are changing the way Clam and Pearl prices are determined by referencing dollars’ worth of $GEM. For example, if a Clam’s price were fixed at $200 for this week, and the current $GEM price is $0.20, then it would cost 1000 $GEM to purchase the Clam. In this way, when $GEM price falls, you need more $GEM to buy Clams or produce Pearls, so it would actually have the effect of burning more tokens.

The price of a Clam in dollar terms will still be dynamically adjusted to demand, albeit in a new way (see item 2 below). Therefore, in order to avoid another scenario where the price drops so far as to make the transaction fees overshadow a Pearl’s utility, we are fixing a floor price of $100 for a Clam, and adjusting the ratio of a Pearl’s production price to be 1/10th of the Clam purchase price (meaning a floor price of $10). Since Pearls on average yield 1.5x their production price in $GEM, this should make those transaction fees a lot easier to bear.

2. Clam price auto adjustment mechanism update

We currently have a Clam price adjustment mechanism that is updated weekly, based on the demand for Clams in the previous week. This approach does not appear to be fluid enough, especially if we are going to set the price of Clams in dollars’ worth of $GEM. So, we are going to make it adapt faster.

We are going to use a fluid method that calculates how many clams should have been sold by the current time within a given week assuming that the available supply is sold out at exactly the end of the week, and base the price on comparing how many clams have actually been sold in that time period.

This creates an almost AMM-like effect that will constantly shift the Clam’s price based on demand at any point in time. Where demand outstrips supply as a function of time, Clam price will increase in dollar terms, and vice versa, except that the floor price for Clams in item 1 above will still apply and there will still be a maximum of 50% drop or 100% increase in price in a given week.

3. Adjustment to Clam and Pearl $GEM boosts

We took some time to think about the way the $GEM boost works for Clams and Pearls, and we realised that it didn’t really make much sense for Clam to produce a fixed $GEM yield, since you directly spend $GEM to purchase it.

Fixed $GEM boost for Clams will therefore be removed. Instead, we will implement a “Pearl Boost” for a Clam— depending on the rarity tier and size / lifespan of a Clam, the $GEM boost from a Pearl that the Clam creates can be increased by a multiplying factor. The factor will always be 1 for a Common Clam, and will be higher for higher rarity tiers.

As for the $GEM boost from burning Pearls, we will be implementing the following changes:

• Shorten the traits rotation to every 12 hours. This means that any given Pearl will get a rotation approximately once every month, with the average wait time being half a month.
• allow Pearls to be burned at any time, but if its traits do not match the current traits rotation, then the $GEM boost is reduced by 50%.
• allow the user to choose to get all the $GEM boost from a Pearl immediately by forfeiting 50% (which will be cumulative to the 50% reduction above, so if the traits also do not match the current rotation then the user will end up with 25%), or have the boost streamed over 30 days without forfeiting any.

Moving forward

We believe the changes above will dramatically improve the ecosystem by ensuring better utility for Clams and Pearls alike. However, it will take some time to implement these changes since they require upgrades to smart contracts in a complex ecosystem. Did you know that we currently have 15 smart contracts interacting with each other at Clam Island?

We don’t want to commit to any specific timeframes at this stage, but the team will be working as fast as possible without compromising code integrity. What we can say is that we are talking a matter of weeks and not months to complete these changes, and we plan to roll out these changes in stages so the more critical components are shipped faster.

We should add that these are not the only things we have planned to increase the utility of our NFTs and our tokens on the platform. We have something else that links our NFTs with the real world in a big way while also giving more utility to our tokens. We won’t be announcing it yet until we are sure all necessary elements are clicked into place, but we can say that we are very excited!

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