Today I wanted to introduce to you an ICO that was brought to my attention by one of our community members and that is the project Chimaera. The reason I wanted to cover this project even though there are other projects before it in the queue is because the phase 1 of the pre-ICO which is a 30% discount is due to end in about 48 hours, so it’s time sensitive news for those who might be interested.

there is a video link at the bottom for those who prefer an audio version

Chimaera is a Blockchain gaming platform. So where you might build Dapps on a platform like Ethereum or NEO, on Chimaera you would be building games.

Unlike most current Blockchain projects where it’s the team’s first time in the scene. The team behind Chimaera are very experienced and have been in the Blockchain scene for a very long time.

The team has already developed 2 early Blockchain projects, the first being Namecoin.

Namecoin will be not be familiar to many of you. It was actually Bitcoin’s first fork back in 2013. It was also the first Blockchain project to implement merged mining (which we just covered in Elastos) and it was also the first Blockchain project to introduce decentralised DNS (which is a solution to problems like DDOS attacks) and it was also the first project to attach identity information to digital assets. So you can call it the pioneer of Blockchain identity projects like Ontology, TheKey etc…

The second project the team has developed is Huntercoin.

Huntercoin was the first Blockchain decentralised game and it was released in 2014 as an experimental test to see how Blockchain technology could handle full on game worlds. Huntercoin is a simple game where you walk around to collect coins and you can also fight other players to collect their coins, those coins can be cashed in for actual crypto and the process was called human mining. Huntercoin was very successful and achieved over 35,000 users and raised $1million within a few weeks of its launch. In those days, that was a very big thing. The game didn’t need a server, because it was a Blockchain project and the same technology is improved on and used in the creation of Chimaera. So already you know the technology they are employing will definitely work to a certain extent, at least for simple game. That’s a huge risk reduction for investors.

By combining their experience and these two projects, this veteran team is now releasing Chimaera which is a gaming platform.

The gaming industry is a very lucrative industry, it is currently worth $115.8 Billion and rising at a rate of 6.2% annually.
In the Blockchain space, we’ve seen many Blockchain games created to try and claim a share of the market, e.g. Crypto kitties, spells of Genesis, Tron dogs etc.. but none of them are really great open ended games. They are simple games that can’t really be compared to mainstream games like final fantasy or DOTA etc.. I mean a simple game like cryptokitties single-handedly crippled the entire Ethereum network, there is no way any current blockchain can host a complicated game.

But there is where Chimaera hopes to change the scene.

Besides offering scalability to keep up with the creation of complex games, the platform will also be an ecosystem that offers some very interesting features.

1 There will be asset management. So through the Namecoin technology, users will own their assets e.g. character skins, items etc.. and will be able to sell them. This is coupled with their human mining feature, which basically you earn money by playing games. So as you play games, the items you find in-game can be traded on the platform for CHI tokens, which is the native token Chimaera token.

Now this aspect of the project may sound very similar to Enjin Blockchain project which also monetises in-game digital assets, but the difference is, where Enjin has to partner with games that are not owned by them or run on the blockchain, Chimaera’s asset management will be run on games hosted by on them on their platform. Meaning it is likely to have a lot less resistance. Obviously each game still gets to decide the in-game rules, but when they build on Chimaera, the games know and accept that they are building into the existing ecosystem.

2 Chimaera will also be making themselves attractive to game developers by providing a developer Hub which is basically all the essential tools they need to integrate their game into Blockchain, as well as a
3 Chimaera studio and incubator to provide crowdfunding and dev support for game creators.
4 There will be no server fees because there is no server, its all blockchain.
5 And their platform is fully compatible with every operating system out there.
6 Besides the trading platform for digital assets we mentioned earlier, they will also have a community hub and multiplayer arena with organised tournaments and real money rewards for gamers.

So there’s a lot of attractive features for both developers and gamers!

Tech

Let’s take a look at their tech now to understand the actual platform a bit better.

The main thing we need to understand is how can they scale to meet the requirements of multiple intensive games? The answer is through game channels and DAUs which stand for decentralised Autonomous Universes. Il explain what this is.

Imagine you have a blockchain like Ethereum. Currently if I was to build a big game on the blockchain, it would take up a significant part of the bandwidth, storage, throughput of the blockchain, literally one game could block up the whole blockchain which is what happened with Ethereum and Cryptokitties.

Now imagine if I moved the entire game off the blockchain to create a side chain. This separate entity is called a state channel or in this case, they call it a game channel.

Now when you play the game and do battle with another player for example, a transaction happens. The entire transaction happens on the game channel not the blockchain.

The final result of the transaction, which is a small piece of the data, is then transalted back to be recorded on the blockchain. This is their off-chain scaling solution. It is very similar to lightning network, the proposed scaling solution for Bitcoin, for those of you who are familiar with it.

Now if you have a very big game. That big game can be divided or sharded into smaller sections.

Each section than functions as its own game channel and when you play in that section, you only interact with the immediate surroundings. E.g. when you play an RPG and you move from one town to another, the game has to load the next region, that process in this case would be moving you to a different sub game channel. This method of sharding the game into smaller sections is called DAUs/ decentralised Autonomous Universes in the Chimaera project.

Now lets take a closer look at each transaction on the game channel.

For a transaction to happen, you need at least 2 parties. And in blockchain style, you need a concensus between the two parties. Meaning you need both parties to agree for the trade to be accepted onto the blockchain. So for example if I buy an item from you in the game, both of us would have to agree that I received the item and you received the right amount of currency for the transaction to be a valid transaction.

In that ideal case, only the start and end point are recorded on the blockchain. All the middle bits will be disregarded. So then the result of the transaction that is recorded is very small and not burdensome for the blockchain.

If there is a dispute, the only the sequence of events that are agreed on is recorded, the dispute sequence is not recorded.

If the dispute is resolved, then the sequence that is agreed on is recorded and the rest is again discarded.

The loophole in this system is that the dispute record will always be longer than a straightforward sequence. So if someone wanted to disrupt the system, they can create lots of dispute and potentially clog up the blockchain. The way Chimaera address this loophole is to use what is called Ephemeral timestamps. This is basically silent snapshots of the transactions that can be used to check who was at fault and the party at fault will have to pay a penalty which is the cost of the dispute. This makes it very uneconomical to intentionally cause disputes.

The actual consensus algorithm used on the blockchain is proof of work. So you will ideally need special GPU and hardware to mine it.

The foundation of Chimaera’s technology is based on Bitcoin, because Namecoin was a fork of Bitcoin, Huntercoin was a fork of Namecoin and now Chimaera is a fork of Huntercoin. So it’s basically a much improved version of Bitcoin’s older technology rather than brand new technology like DPOS etc.. I can break it down to explain it to you the principles behind it, but the truth no one can tell you whether it will work. The true test of this platform will not be with the first few games which imagine will be simple games. Because their technology already worked on Huntercoin, so I’m expecting it will work in the early stages with fewer and simpler projects being launched. The true test will come when they have many projects running on it at the same time, and it’s heavier games like MOBA or RTS or MMORPG or VR games.

So one of the risks of investing in ICOs, or even pre-ICOs like this one is that you don’t know that they will deliver. You hope they do and if they do, the returns will be great. High risk for high gains.

Now, with this model of game channels, theoretically the blockchain itself has almost infinite scalability, because the bulk of work is never done on the blockchain but on the game channel. There will be a bottleneck for games being developed however, and that is the processor on which the game is built on. This makes sense of course, but I just wanted to point out that infinite scalability for the blockchain doesn’t mean limitless game construction.

Token Use

Now as token investors we always want to know there is token use, cos token value depends on token demand. And in this case there are many different uses as you can see from above. This is a project with good token utility.

Team

This is their team and advisors, it’s a big team. As always I wont go through all the resumes, but I will go through a couple for you to have feel of the team

Dr Daniel Kraft has been involved in Bitcoin development since 2013. Since 2014, he has been the main developer for Namecoin and Huntercoin, and successfully reimplemented both on top of the modern Bitcoin Core codebase. Where possible, Daniel also contributed improvements back to upstream Bitcoin, and is currently the #29 contributor to Bitcoin Core. He published multiple research articles in peer-reviewed journals, including two directly related to cryptocurrency.

Mike Handverger has 20 years of experience as a software engineer and manager. and is currently president of Tricky Fast Studios. At Tricky Fast, he’s worked on AAA Mobile Games like Star TrekTM, The Walking DeadTM, TransformersTM, and Wheel of FortuneTM. He’s also contributed heavily to other games, including Grim Dawn, Fieldrunners: Attack, and Poptropica Worlds. Outside of gaming, Mike was one of the first employees at Etsy.com, and during his time there, he led the development team to scale the site up to 1 billion monthly page-views. Some of his other projects include a cryptocurrency algorithmic trading application, Multiverse 3D (a type of decentralised MMORPG platform), and various Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning applications.

So it’s a very competent team who definitely know both the gaming and blockchain world.

Feel free to check each of their profiles out on their website.

Token metrics

Taking a look at their token metrics, 40.5% token sale which is reasonable. 10% goes to the company which again is reasonable. Some unreasonable projects allocated up to 80% to the company, that is what you don’t want to see.

Now what we are interested in is the token price at pre-ICO now and whether its worthwhile investing in this ICO. This is often the make or break in decision making for ICO investors.

Il start by saying that there is confusion in the information they give.

Firstly—if you look at the total tokens available for the pre-ICO, it should be 50 million. But when you look at the breakdown, it is only 35million. So that’s an error.

Secondly, if you were to calculate the Stage 1 of the Pre-ICO which we are in and is due to end in 48 hours, the total number of BTC worth should be 0.000014 mulitplied by 7 million which is 90 BTC. However, on their website cover, it says 250 BTC with 227 BTC raised already.

I enquired this discrepancy on their Telegram chat and their admin clarified the white paper is the right figure.

Now for the sake of estimating the token worth, we have to make some assumptions, so I am going with the figures in the table to calculate their worth. If you calculate the total value of the pre-ICO and ICO combined, based on the current value of BTC which is $8252 USD at the time of this recording, then the total amount raised as hardcap would be $19million only. This is incredible small. That would make this project a very attractive investment.

To give you an idea, $19 million in marketcap on the market currently would put this project at around rank 380. That’s ridiculous. If they ever made it into the top 100 coins, that alone would be an almost 10x gains.

So assuming that the current amount they are raising is 98 BTC and not 250 BTC, the token distribution and pricing is very attractive.

Social media community

Another aspect of ICO that you want to pay attention to is their social media following.

As token investors, you want the token price to rise, this mean you want people to FOMO into the project. The bigger the community the better, because it means more people will be unable to get in the ICO because of country regulations or other reasons so when the coin hits the market there will be people waiting to buy it.

This point of social media size is really more relevant to public sale for ICO. Not currently at pre-ICO. The reason is because most projects don’t have the money to do mulit-million dollar marketing. They have to use the money from pre-ICO to do marketing. This project has indicated that a portion of their pre-ICO will go to ICO fundraising.
Currently their community is small. Their twitter has 1400 followers, and their telegram only has 6000+ members. Again this is alright in pre-ICO, but just before the public ICO stage, you would usually want numbers above 20,000, popular projects go up to 50,000 members even. So if you’re watching this video later on just before ICO, this is something you might want to take note of.

Roadmap

The last thing I want to point out to you is their roadmap. It’s a very long HODL guys. The road map goes to 2019 Q2 and then it needs to be updated, but the 2.0Alpha, not even beta, just Alpha is only due then, which is one year away. In this fast moving market, that’s a long time to lock in an investment.

But a lot of people who invest in ICO anyways invest to cash out at the point of the token hitting exchanges, that will happen way before next year Im assuming. So if you’re investing that way, the only thing you need to look out for is a lock-in period which I don’t think there is. Or I haven’t come across it anyways. If there is no lock-in, when this project first hits exchanges, be careful of a pump from FOMO and dump from Pre-ICO investors. Happens commonly with new coins.

In conclusion, I like Chimaera, I think a blockchain gaming platform is a much need project in the blockchain space and this project will have first mover’s advantage. They have an experienced and successful team. But as with any pre-ICO investment, it is always high risk for high returns. The big risks here would be if their tech can deliver in the long term and if they can pick up their social media awareness by public ICO date. Otherwise, the currnent entry price, if calculated correctly is very attractive.

I hope this post was helpful for you. If you liked it, give us an upvote and follow. Thanks very much for joining us guys, have a super day wherever you are, and we will catch you again very soon!