ICE Poker Delegation v2: Play and Own

Background

~90% of our daily active users are delegated players. This group is the core of our player base today yet they have very few options or motivation to reinvest back into the game economy, resulting in consistent dumping of their $ICE rewards.

While the current system was extremely successful for bootstrapping player liquidity, it’s presented real long-term challenges for our game economy.

Proposal

We implement a change to our delegation system. Wearable owners would still be able to delegate their wearables to players using the same process as today, but the main change here will be that the rewards earned by delegated players will be stored in an “ICE Bank”.

As delegated players accrue banked ICE, they can:

• Purchase a tournament-only wearable to start playing ICE Poker SNG (net deflationary).
• Add Shine to an existing wearable to continue playing ICE Poker SNG (net deflationary).
• Purchase an ICE wearable (Mobile or Metaverse wearables), transitioning them into a player-owner in the process.

There will also be the option to redeem the banked ICE balance for $ICE, but it will incur an 70% redemption penalty, meaning they will be able to withdraw 30% of the banked ICE as $ICE. This would still be subject to the 2k ICE claim limit, as per the previous proposal: https://snapshot.org/#/decentralgames.eth/proposal/0x9a71b2078eee33d9b5381f57a21de32bb2f240f8f734bd54eeb32610ab47ea6e. Specifically, you would need to earn at least 6,667 banked ICE in order to claim at least 2k ICE.

To be clear, wearable owners will still receive their regular ICE rewards, whereas delegated players will accrue a “banked ICE” balance that can be redeemed for any of the above. The amount of banked ICE that it costs to redeem each of the wearables will be finalized closer to the time of launch and will be at the discretion of the team to adjust.

Rationale

The result of this change would be that in the immediate term, ICE emissions would drop by an estimated 55%, bringing us to over a 1:1 burn-to-earn ratio. And while this would reduce down over time as banked ICE is used to redeem wearables, it will still be a significant contributor to a sustainable burn-to-earn ratio.

We’d also expect this to shift the makeup of the player base over the long term to include more player-owners, thus increasing wearable upgrades, which is an important token sink.

On top of all of this, we create a zero-cost entry point to becoming an owner that’s all centered on players investing their time into the game to eventually own a part of it. This will be a key play and own element of ICE Poker that will help us grow sustainably moving forward.

Important Caveats

The introduction of this new delegation system would result in a few recently passed governance proposals that are in our development queue to no longer be possible to implement. Voting “Yes” to this proposal is also a vote to invalidate the following proposals:

• “Delegated Player Reputation Multiplier to Incentivize Governance Participation and Reduce Abuse” (https://snapshot.org/#/decentralgames.eth/proposal/0x92a8151ea53d6460ef2e753b86c01ebed1ebaad5be2bf66bdee0a559c34ee385).
• “Fidelity rewards: Incentivize upward mobility” (https://snapshot.org/#/decentralgames.eth/proposal/0x9a920162b50f4bccff343f1a414993e476e9c754637823cde88d328a5fc1426c).
• “Biweekly Claim Period for Players” (https://snapshot.org/#/decentralgames.eth/proposal/0x55018965c4c36be46fdff7b491024efecf111138e710286c6e95809393dcf0d7).

Lastly, Delegation V2 would be launched after SNGs go live.