The Voyage to Clam Island

Can you hear that folks? That’s the sound of Captain Nacre’s ship, slicing through the waves of a secret channel previously unknown to humankind in the South Pacific Ocean. And its passengers, who are eager to be the first in the world to see Clam Island open in full glory, are sailing closer to Clam Island by the day.

Some passengers have pre-loaded themselves with $SHELL tokens, courtesy of Tanja. Some of them have purchased an early batch of Clams from Diego. Others are just curious to see what the fuss is about. But one thing is for certain — they are going to somewhere special.

So what does the rest of the voyage look like? Read on to find out. And just note — we have saved the best till last, you’ll want to read the end of the article, trust us!

Security at Clam Island

Security is paramount at Clam Island, especially given the slew of rugs and exploits in yield farming projects recently.

In addition to our independent code reviewers, we have now also engaged Bramah Systems to audit our smart contracts. For those of you that are not aware, Bramah Systems is the auditor behind a number of well-known quality DeFi projects such as dYdX, OctoFi and Mai Finance.

To offer the best and safest experience for Clam Island visitors, we have made the decision to launch after full completion of the audit. An audit is of course not a guarantee, but given the novel features we are adding to Clam Island, being audited by a reputable firm can go a long way in ensuring that everything will work smoothly and as intended.

Clam Presale and Tokenomics

Our Clam presale launched several days ago, with 1/3 of the available Clams being sold in about an hour. However, things have slowed since then, and we are currently at 58% filled.

We have identified two main reasons for things slowing down:

1. The market suffered another crash and a slew of exploits and rugs shortly after the launch of our Clam presale. Investor confidence is currently low and people generally have less funds to spare for entering into new projects.
2. Some people view the Clam NFTs as being too expensive.

From a tokenomics perspective, we believe the value of each Clam NFT is solid. However, this will not be evident unless you understand the Clam Island ecosystem, and that is something that takes a bit of time and effort.

There is nothing we can do about 1, but we believe we have a satisfactory solution for 2.

Despite the justification for the current Clam pricing, it is important that the general public is willing to participate in the ecosystem, buy Clams and farm Pearls. No one is forced to participate, but the incentives must be adequate for the system to work as intended. We are therefore revising the pricing and redemption structure as follows:

• Each Clam will now be able to be redeemed for 1 $SHELL, increasing by 0.1 $SHELL with each Pearl produced;
• The starting price for Clams will be 150 $GEM when Clam Island opens, and the supply in the first week will be 2,500, then reducing by 50 each week;
• Each Pearl will now cost 10 $GEM to produce;
• Pearl production time will be changed to between 1–5 days instead of 5–15 days.

These changes are designed to reduce the price and floor value (based on redeemable $SHELL) of each Clam by a factor of 5, lowering the entry cost to fully participate in the ecosystem and making it much more affordable to purchase Clams and to produce Pearls.

To implement these changes, we will be closing the current presale and deploying a new presale contract with an adjusted bonding curve, and a max limit of 5 per wallet address.

For those of you that already bought Clam NFTs in the presale, never fear — of course we haven’t forgotten about you!

Every buyer address in the presale will be eligible to claim 4 more Clams through a separate claiming portal before Clam Island launch. How’s that for kickstarting your collection?

And now for the big news.

We have had to hold on to this one for some time while we finalise the legal side of things, but it is now official and public.

Clam Island is proud to have been accepted into the Tachyon Filecoin Launchpad Accelerator.

For those of you that don’t know, Tachyon is the accelerator arm of Consensys. The Filecoin Accelerator is designed to fast-track the development of projects in the IPFS space (nearly all NFT projects are).

Clam Island is one of 20 teams in the Spring 2021 cohort, starting on 28 June and running through to September.

As a participating team, Clam Island will receive initial funding of $80,000 to boost development, and at the end of the accelerator program we will have an opportunity to pitch our project to Consensys and Filecoin VC partners.

It also means that several of our core team members are doxxed to Tachyon.

The Voyage Ahead

What does this all mean for Clam Island?

First, we do have to push back the launch date. It was always tentative, but with everything that has been happening, it is more important than ever that we get the launch right, both in terms of user experience and in terms of security.

The Filecoin Accelerator also presents us with a unique opportunity to leverage newly available resources (which, beyond the grant, includes mentorship and partnerships) and build something truly designed for the long term. This is at the heart of what Clam Island intends to become. We may only be developing phase one, but we have phase three and beyond already being planned, and it goes much further than just Clams and Pearls.

It will not be practical to launch with the full set of features that we have planned for Clam Island (many of which are not yet announced), even with two new team members recently added (bringing our team size up to 9 members). Therefore, the team is currently conducting an internal audit to determine the full scope of work remaining in the short to medium term, and the particular features that we want to include at launch, taking into account the development timeframe. We will release our estimate of the timeframe to launch within the week, once the internal audit is completed.

Rest assured that the entire team is working hard to open Clam Island as soon as possible, and will be working even harder with the imminent commencement of the Filecoin Accelerator program.

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