PVP

Project Overview

PVP (Player vs Player) is a custom ERC20 token concept on Base where users can "raid" any wallet to steal their $PVP balance.

• Every wallet holding PVP was a potential raid.
• Raids started at 0.001e and were essentially an ALL-PAY auction.
• Failed bids would be added to the raid pot. The winner of the raid would get all of the failed bids AND the target's tokens.
• The wallet that was raided would receive the highest bid.
• A portion of each raid was taken as rake, and a portion was also used to buy and burn $PVP.
• Raids lasted 24 hours and would extend on new "bids."
• Users could match the current bid to defend their tokens.
• Eventually, users were able to protect their PVP in a separate contract for a weekly fee.

Launch Details

• Fair Launched by pairing the full token supply with 1 ETH in the v2 pool, which launched it at a ~$5k marketcap.

What Went Right

• We announced the launch ahead of time, and had significant hype post-Circle.
• We implemented a minimum buy for the first 5 minutes, an attempt to stop snipers (you can't really stop snipers—instead of buying 1e on one wallet, they would just buy 0.05e on twenty wallets).
• There were no contract or logic bugs, which is always a huge win and the scariest part of any launch.

What Went Wrong

• Raids started at one hour and eventually settled at a 24 hour length. There were bugs in the frontend that caused some users to have issues defending in that first hour.
• As a result, momentum was halted after the first night.
• Some people bought the token on DEXs and didn't know they were playing a game, which caused confusion and anger when they lost their tokens.
• We learned that people would rather have their tokens inflated and become worthless, rather than actually removing the tokens from their wallet.
• The game had too many moving parts and the incentives didn't work as planned. The goal was for each raid to have three participants, two bidders, and the user who was raided. Users would bid up the auction and the raided wallet would eventually get paid out an ETH amount higher than their tokens were worth (this played out a few times).
• Due to lack of demand, there weren't many bidding wars and it was just users arb'ing the price difference.

Wrap-up

This was one of my favorite projects we've launched, albeit the least successful. It probably lost around $10k invested (Domain, Audits, Graphics, etc.) and a few weeks of development time in creating it. That said, everyone I respect who played the game echoed a similar sentiment: they found it exciting and cool.

The goal was to illustrate that, for every person making 1e on a coin, someone is losing 1e. It's all just a transfer of value, although many people disliked how explicitly this was demonstrated. That said, the incentives of the game didn't really work—it's hard to see a reason why you'd hold PVP, other than hoping the price will go up. Overall, it was still extremely fun to build and release.