February Roadmap Update + Legendary Clam Bugfix
Ahoy there Clam Island citizens and visitors!
Another month flies by at Clam Island, and it is time for us to look back and reflect.
Unfortunately a number of unexpected circumstances have caused some delays in the delivery of items on our Roadmap. These include two devs being sick and one being away travelling in the past week, heavy rain and flooding causing Internet connectivity issues for our CEO in Brisbane, and last but not least, the Legendary Clam bug, which we will discuss later in this update.
We understand that this is probably disappointing news. However, we remain fully committed to the project and our long term vision. No matter how low things may seem, we are here to see the project through, and we have plans to make that happen.
While development continues, our short term focus will be on getting the marketing push off the ground. this is not officially a roadmap item, but it’s the modified marketing strategy that we devised since the initial publication of our 2022 roadmap.
The push will involve co-ordinated efforts across the GEM buyback campaign, some growth hacking techniques for short term boosts to our visibility (details of which we cannot reveal), reddit posts and some influencer videos. At present, everything is lined up except the influencers, whom we are still reaching out to. If any of you have suggestions for good DeFi / P2E BSC influencers at around the 10–20k followers mark, please feel free to suggest them in discord or TG. The goal is to have 3–5 of them post videos at around the same time that the GEM buyback and growth hacking goes live.
For this push to work, timing is critical, so while I understand many of you are getting restless, we absolutely need every piece to be in place before we launch it, as we believe this is our best chance of gaining the traction that our projects needs and deserves.
In preparation for the commencement of this marketing push and to discuss other initiatives the team has been working on in the meantime, we will be having another community call next week. Exact date and time will be announced later in Telegram.
The latest update on our roadmap items are as follows. We are sharing the details to remain completely transparent to the community, but please be aware that as always, deadlines are estimates only. Unfortunately one of the pitfalls of having a remote team spread all over the world is the difficulty in co-ordinating concrete deadlines for a project with a complex infrastructure like Clam Island. We will, however, as always, do our best to deliver.
Gas fee optimisations — now complete. Further optimisations will be available once IPFS / third party marketplace compatibility is live, as it will allow us to move some gas-heavy storage costs to IPFS instead of on the Smart Contracts.
Removal of Pearl Burn limit — all coding is complete and passed testnet deployment and testing. However, live deployment has been delayed due to our two main solidity devs being sick. The live deployment should happen this week.
3rd Party Market Place Compatibility — we ran into an issue with transposing some of the 3D visual traits for Pearls into exported models compatible with IPFS. That was just resolved last week, but the dev responsible for this element is now travelling. ETA on this is approximately 1–2 weeks.
Buy Clams/Produce Pearls with BNB — delayed due to solidity devs being sick last week. Expected to be completed this week.
Zap Feature for Yield Farming Pools — Zap in from BNB is complete pending connection of smart contracts to the frontend. Given the delays, this is expected in the second week of March.
Clam Island Leaderboards — unfortunately this one has been delayed due to an issue with the service provider we were using to populate and sync Smart Contract data into a usable database. We had to switch at the last minute, so there is no ETA other than to say that the target is March.
Re-launch Citizen Program — this has been delayed as we believe the program should be relaunched following the next marketing push.
Launch of PR/CPC Marketing Campaigns — PR is well underway, but it takes time before articles hit the press. As mentioned in Telegram, many of the face to face interviews to happen at ETHDenver did not happen simply due to the logistics of meeting at the event. However most of them have been rescheduled as Zoom meetings, and at present the VentureBeat interview has already happened. CPC through BitMedia (banner ads) was tested and currently paused, pending the rest of the marketing push.
Legendary Clam Bugfix
On the topic of unexpected circumstances, one of the updates we pushed to deploy gas fee optimisations caused a bug where Clams minted were always of the Legendary tier. These bugged Clams have most of their traits missing and cannot load their 3D models in the frontend, but they did keep their Legendary tier multiplier.
The bug was not technically due to faulty code. Rather, new initialisation functions were required to make use of the gas fee optimisations, and our mainnet deployment script missed calling those functions despite our testing scripts including those functions. Not calling those functions meant that the trait values were not populated into the DNA Decoder contract, causing the aforementioned bug.
The issue was fixed within hours of discovery (in the sense that new Clams minted will have correct traits and tiers), but by then, bugged Legendary Clams #6798 to #6804 were already minted. We deployed a further fix to correct the tier and traits of those Clams within 24 hours, but some of those Clams had already produced Pearls using their Legendary multipliers.
After some analysis, it appears that the wallet address 0xe533b78c3cf0e994297e9651a5d2d051e1fabf57 was the only one that took significant advantage of the bug. It owned Clams #6799, #6800 and #6801, each of which produced multiple pearls. The vast majority of pearls have been burned and redeemed for $GEM upfront at 25% of max yield. In total, it was able to collect 861,690.46 $GEM. Some of these $GEM were used to produce Pearls using the bugged Legendary Clams; effectively all of the remaining $GEM, a total of 799,000 $GEM, were sold.
Although that might sound like a lot, the low liquidity and market cap of $GEM was, in this case, a blessing. The 799,000 total $GEM sold only netted ~6.5 BNB for this wallet. Given that there is only ~10BNB pooled in the GEM-BNB LP at the moment, that amount of sell pressure, which occurred between 21 February to 25 February, did have a significant impact on the $GEM price. However, our $GEM buyback will have significantly more BNB when it is next executed, so in the grand scheme of things, and as far as “exploits” go, the effect has been minimal.
For full disclosure, the same wallet address also did burn one other Pearl for 100% max yield at 75,530 $GEM on a 30 day stream. We are looking into options to correct GEM streams in this regard.
In addition to the main exploiter above, another wallet address 0xCB2DB422097c39Bcc6BD04b1e779677e8c158d17 was able to produce one Pearl and burn it for 50% max yield at 138,566 $GEM on a 30 day stream. This wallet currently holds >100k $GEM and 112 Clams. Clearly, this person is a true supporter of Clam Island. Although we are not too concerned with this isolated stream in terms of its effect on the overall ecosystem, we still encourage this person to reach out to us on Telegram or discord to discuss an amicable resolution.
Even though the effect on the ecosystem was not substantial, we still want to compensate the community for what has happened. We will therefore allocate a further 8 BNB from our treasury to our existing buyback (which was paused pending the next marketing push). As always, to avoid frontrunning, we will not announce the timing of the buybacks, but once the campaign is complete, we will disclose the relevant buyback wallet/s and transaction/s so that it can be publicly verified.
We are also reviewing our testing to live deployment flow to prevent this kind of human error in the future.
As always, to keep up to date and stay tuned for the latest updates, please follow our Twitter, Telegram and Discord.
