Another month has passed, and we’re excited to share with everyone what the team has been working on throughout these last weeks. Several major milestones have been reached, and while there always will remain room for growth and optimization, it certainly was a successful March.
As mentioned in our first Polemos Monthly, we’ll be taking both external and internal feedback into account, adjusting the format of these reports accordingly. One change that we’re already implementing as of this report is to focus our highlights on certain categories that should remain important for multiple reports to come.
But enough of the introduction, let’s jump right in.
Team
While we did add less new names to the team compared to February, in no way does that diminish our hiring achievements during March. With Celine joining us as Data Engineer, our Data Team received another incredible addition to its ranks, and behind the scenes a multitude of interviews, tests and more have taken place, leaving us hopeful that April is going to be another month with several new hires at once.
Across our entire workforce — made up of internal team members, external partners and several advisors — more than thirty people are working full-time on Polemos already, and we don’t plan to leave it at that. Keep your eyes open so you don’t miss an opportunity in case our career page suddenly includes a position you’d be interested in: https://polemos.io/we-are-hiring/
Treasury
End of last year, we raised $2m during our strategic round, featuring an exceptional list of backers. Since then, the team has worked relentlessly to raise the bar even higher, and as we announced just recently, our seed round closed with an incredible raise of additional $14m. Next to the capital itself, we’re especially proud of seeing such strong and ongoing support from our strategic investors, while also having managed to add additional high-profile names to our list of backers.
While the main three categories of expenses are easily listed in Team Compensation, Technology Development and Game Investments, as of next month, we’re planning to slowly start ramping up the transparency of our treasury report. As promised before, our goal is to be as in-depth as possible over time, as long as it doesn’t interfere with our operations or in any other way risk the success of the protocol. Adding more visibility to our funds and asset management is going to be a crucial step to provide the desired transparency.
Community
March was a time of significant growth for our Discord community, almost breaking 9,000 members already, and up from approximately 5,000 on the first of March. The vast majority of those members came from our most significant partnership announcement to date, Illuvium. As part of this announcement and event series, Illuvium created and held a giveaway for a Polemos branded Illuvial NFT. Polemos was the second featured guild in Illuvium’s “Guild NFT Series”, after Yield Guild Games in early December.
Throughout March we also developed a plan to fill the community calendar with a variety of events of increased frequency. Each week, Polemos now hosts a multitude of activities such as AMAs, FAQ sessions, weekend game nights, and we have even begun to stream live art sessions on Twitch!
All of this increased activity has seen a marked improvement in engagement within the ranks of our most dedicated members, but we are always striving to expand that cohort. Keeping these goals in mind, we finished constructing the first iteration of the honor system which is to be eagerly tested in early April. Keep in mind though, that this is only a preliminary version, meant to provide early opportunities to start the journey of ranking up within the Polemos ecosystem. Additional means of doing so, and more sophisticated technologies for the tracking of it, will be added over time.
Marketing
March has been a monumental time for the Polemos Marketing team! We have expanded our social presence by joining Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and (soon-to-be) TikTok. As our community grows, Polemos will be able to connect through social media, regular Twitch streams for our Game Nights, and our new weekly newsletter filled with industry updates and essential Polemos information.
Marketing campaigns in March, including NFT giveaways with Illuvium and MonkeyLeague, brought value and new members to the community. For example, our Illuvium giveaway of 100 Cosplay NFTs brought many people into our Discord and was a great introduction to our GameFi platform. We’ve hosted several AMAs with Illuvium team members, including game developer Matt and multiple new council members.
Our most recent giveaway, a team of 4 MonkeyLeague Monkey NFTs, has also been an excellent contributor to the growth of our community. We’ve created a short guide to understanding NFT utility within the upcoming game, followed by an AMA to answer any community questions. We will continue to build educational resources, such as our FAQ Fridays, to introduce newcomers to the Play to Earn space.
Our internal teams are working together to develop and plan weekly events to spread knowledge about our partners and get people ready for the future of Polemos. We are excited to bring everyone along for the journey!
Games
March saw somewhat of a spring cleaning when it comes to the approach we’re taking with partnerships. Noticing the trends in GameFi, and taking a hard look at all of the titles in the blockchain space, we took time to reshape standards and come up with a new strategy in how partnerships are formed and maintained. The time of only preparing for upcoming games is slowly ending though, and we’re starting to see Polemos members actively engage in some of the titles we’re involved in.
Legends of Venari scholars were responsible for generating 22 bonus base passes from the original 15, allowing for more scholars when season 1 opens up. Additionally, the launch of Fancy Birds has many players finally flapping for FNC. Erock, one of our most skilled bird pilots, scored a Polemos Bird from the team after finding great success, now pushing a Polemos branded bird all the way to the top of the leaderboards. When it comes to the FNC generated by scholars moving forward, we will use those to breed and add to our supply. Already, 35 birds have been bred, including a mutant and two fully Polemos branded copies. Look for the full release of the Rental System soon though to really see us add to the growing flock of 284.
What might seem like an otherwise slow month from the outside, actually saw many highly promising connections being established, and you can be sure that April will be busy with new partnerships being established and more scholarships to be filled.
Polemos Token
After completing our first security audit already, we’ve now received a preliminary report for the second audit as well and are in the process of working through it. We expect to be able to publish a clean bill of health for the token and staking this month, from some of crypto’s most respected security organisations. Kudos to our development partner and our audit collaborators for a high quality process and what looks like a great, solid outcome.
As of right now, we expect staking, governance and revenue sharing to be up and ready by May, and the early views of functionality and user experience are very encouraging. It is important to highlight though that the technological readiness of these features does not in any way suggest a Public Sale by that time. As we’ve mentioned many times already, we are building with a long-term outlook in mind, and as such, do not plan to rush our token release. Instead, we will continue to carefully evaluate development progress, community growth and market sentiment, waiting for the right time to move forward with the Public Sale.
Polemos Forge
Current focus is on staking, revenue share, as well as the DAO elements of the Polemos Token, while the rest of the Forge (University, Armory, Data Analytics) has been in POC and design mode. As a result of our in-depth research, we are developing a deep understanding of mechanisms required for safe game asset lending and for providing a fantastic experience for our scholars. We’ve also had some exciting progress on making PC based games playable remotely in browser, which is a facility we will offer to some of our scholar base when Illuvium (and, later, other PC games) are launched.
At this point, we still expect to have the majority of Forge functionality ready by Q3, although the final integration still remains dependent on certain game launches.
Conclusion
With lots of progress made in development, community growth and fund-raising, we can only declare March a success ourselves, but we’re certainly aware that a lot has been mostly happening behind the scenes. Many things are slowly reaching a tipping point though, and throughout the next few months, we expect to be able to start sharing actual development insights (even preliminary UI leaks look amazing!), detailed financial numbers (transparency is important to us!) and even more game related content as we continue to expand the roster of games we’re involved/invested in.
So make sure to keep an eye out for some exciting announcements and leaks to come. We’ve barely started our journey together, and there is no doubt in our minds, that it will be a long and epic one at that…
