Crypto Society AMA recap with Yakuza — 14 March 2024.
Yakuza.Kage.Finance
Yakuza = Upcoming CW404 Project by the Kage Finance Team in celebration of the CW404 innovation by the DojoSwap team on the fastest L1 Chain — Injective Protocol.
The Yakuza project will feature a set of never before seen mechanics and utilities across any 404 projects in production currently.
These mechanics are designed to provide a level of gamification + rewards to reward Yakuza holders in the KAGE ecosystem.
Bilo — Crypto Society
Welcome @izakaya_yakuza , it’s our pleasure to have you with us today. I would like to welcome you here on behalf of our entire community.
Could we begin with a brief history of yourself and your team, your role at Yakuza, what you were doing before Yakuza and explain Yakuza’s relationship to Kage Finance?
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Hey all! First of all, thank you for your invite over to this wonderful community and for giving us the opportunity to share about Yakuza.
I’m Izakaya, the boss of Yakuza. The Yakuza is an offshoot of the Kage Finance team, I’m sure some of you here might know Kage Finance? The lore goes that the Yakuza was formed by disgruntled ex-Kage clan ninjas, with the sole aim of taking of Kage in the near future.
Bilo — Crypto Society
We are all very respectful of the Yakuza 😰
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Well you better be!
Project lore aside, I’m actually a part of the core Kage team who spun off to focus on the Yakuza project, so you can say that Yakuza is a special project under the Kage Finance umbrella, which will be synergistic with many of the product offerings under Kage Finance.
Bilo — Crypto Society
Maybe tell us a little about Kage finance. Also as a side note, I wanted this AMA to ensure I have the protection of the Yakuza. I may need a few favours too.
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Don’t worry, no one will touch you when I’m here.
Anyway, sure! Kage Finance is the all-in-one trading platform built for Injective. It currently features a telegram trading bot with advanced features like limit orders, token safety checks and direct staking in app.
In the future, we are adding more advanced features, such as a community favourite — token sniping feature.
We are also constantly thinking about ways to improve user experience, hence the future of Kage Finance will be an all-in-one terminal both on mobile and on the web. The terminal will essentially be an all-in-one destination for traders to trade their favourite normal tokens and their favourite 404 tokens!
Bilo — Crypto Society
I can speak on behalf of everyone by saying we are very excited to see all this come to fruition.
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
It will essentially be a rollup of coinhall, dexscreener and dojoswap, with additional boosted features that cater specifically to 404 projects, a particular section that we are particularly bullish on.
Bilo — Crypto Society
How did Yakuza start? Please tell us about the concept of CW404 and your implementation of this as the second CW404 project on Cosmos, the first being SushifighterNFT which was also launched by Dojoswap.
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Wow this is going to be a long one!
But sure, Yakuza started off as an idea within the Kage team to solidify the community that had rallied around Kage Finance since our launch. At that point of time, Pandora and other 404 projects on ETH had just exploded into relevance, and everyone is beginning to realise the potential of the 404 standard.
We saw the potential of the 404 standard when combined with what we were building at Kage Finance.
Since it essentially unlocks the NFT liquidity for trading on Telegram Trading Bots like us!
Luckily at that exact same time, Dojo (our strong partner) was already building out the CW404 standard.
So for those that are still confused over what the 404 standard means, it is essentially a smart contract standard that combines the best of the -721 NFT, non-fungible token standard and the -20 token standard which are tokens that are fungible.
For a long time, NFTs suffered from a lack of liquidity, given that they are sold more as an collector’s item individually, and it was almost impossible to price the actual floor price of a collection fairly, or participate in a project that had a very high floor price.
The 404 standard essentially enables a collection to fragmentise the NFT into a basic unit of a token, enabling the collection to tap into liquidity.
For the first time, traders and collectors can coexist on the same project.
Traders are not forced to purchase often expensive illiquid NFTs. If one is bullish about the project, traders can finally participate in the price action without holding on to one whole token!
One more benefit of a CW404 is the ability to regenerate your NFT!
Bilo — Crypto Society
That is quite the achievement. Started out as an experiment but we are fortunate to see it works and your partner Dojoswap, as well as the first CW404 is proof of that deep liquidity.
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
This means that you can constantly reroll your NFT until you find one that you love, which is certainly not what I’m doing during my off time as a Yakuza boss for the right sushi.
Yep! In fact we had already started work on the code base for porting 404 to cosmos, when we learnt that they were already on it!
Bilo — Crypto Society
Hahaha. Yes that’s quite fun too though.
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
It was great that we had such strong ties, else it would have wasted someone’s efforts.
Anyway, the ability to reroll opens up a whole new playground for devs and teams to build, and this is something that we are looking at very much to support with the Kage Terminal.
Not sure if you guys are gamers, but whenever I start a game, I would always try to roll the best looking/ most powerful character.
We foresee that many collectors are doing that actively in fact, trying to get a higher rank Sushi with the tama egg on the back etc…
So I’m really proud to share that you will be able to one-click reroll any CW404 nft with the Kage Terminal in the very near future!
Bilo — Crypto Society
Is there a fixed number of NFT variations or are the variations dynamic?
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
The beauty of CW404 project is that project teams can choose both!
For Yakuza, the variations will be dynamic.
This means that even we cannot tell you what your NFT will look like!
Bilo — Crypto Society
Very cool 🔥
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Also, with dynamic traits, it actually opens up the opportunity for project teams to add on additional traits at a later stage!
So, it’s incredibly useful for projects that are building something like a game, imagine adding a Christmas only theme background before the Christmas holidays.
Of course, for Yakuza, this particular feature will be very central to our plans going forward 👀
Bilo — Crypto Society
So you’ve already told us about Kage & Yakuza. Why did you choose to build on Injective Protocol?
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Well other than the obvious tech benefit of building a trading platform on a low cost, high TPS, instant finality chain, we really liked that Injective has a very close-knit group of developer teams.
A special shout out would be for the champs at DojoSwap.
We were invited by them to be their second launchpad project back in Jan, gosh it felt like yesterday.
And we were really impressed by the strong community within Injective, it reminded me of the early days of Solana or even (am I allowed to mention this) Terra…
Bilo — Crypto Society
No ser. Pls delete the last word
PTSD
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
A Yakuza never goes back on his word, or edits his words.
So in short, tech good, community good, good good!
Bilo — Crypto Society
What are you currently working on and can you describe your future roadmap including the launch date
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
So we are currently on the prelaunch stage for Yakuza, where we are busy securing marketing partnerships, and also fixing some of the small artwork details that we are still not satisfied with.
The artist in the basement will remain there until we are fully satisfied 😊
Anyway, based on our last count, we have over 16 marketing partnerships secured, and we are looking to close more soon.
One of our key goals for Yakuza is also to bring in users and capital from outside Injective, leveraging Yakuza as a gateway for new users to try out Injective.
So far we have quite decent traction from other communities, so don’t be surprised if you see some surprising names mentioning us soon.
Have I said how insanely bullish we are about the launch?
Bilo — Crypto Society
I think we can always hear more 😋
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Next on the roadmap will be the launch itself, we don’t have a date pencilled in yet as it is really heavily dependent on when the art is approved for prod.
In any case, the launch will happen soon (else the artist will suffer in the basement), hopefully within the month.
It will feature a presale model, so if you are familiar with NFT mints during the NFT bull run, this will be right at home for you.
Bilo — Crypto Society
Yakuzas don’t use pencils. Only pens. Permanent marks. 🥸
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Yakuza will be launched on the Kage Finance 404 Mint Pad.
Yes, we make sure that the ink stays
The 404 mint pad is another one of our special projects at Kage (honestly we have soooo many of them)
Bilo — Crypto Society
When I grow up I want to be a yakuza boss just like you.
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
It sort of came about because after Sushi launched, there was an incredible amount of interest from the dev community to launch their own 404 project, but some of them didn’t have the know-how on how to launch one straight away.
Bilo — Crypto Society
Loving all this so far 🔥
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
This is where Kage steps in, we provide the expertise and the platform for these teams to go from 0 to launch as soon as possible.
It will be launched on the Kage 404 Mint Pad, featuring 3 rounds of presale.
Presale 1 obviously the cheapest, will go to our Kage supporters — $KAGE stakers and LPs.
Bilo — Crypto Society
Presale 2, for the OGs (up for grabs later on), and SUSHI holders (necessary tribute to the OG)
and then public sales
Thereafter, we will launch $YKZ which is the Yakuza token
The roadmap after that is super crazy, I’m just going to reveal abet here.
Bilo — Crypto Society
Ser I Heard that owning a Yakuza NFT entitles its holder to lifetime protection. Can you confirm this?
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Yes, I confirm
But if you sell the NFT………..
Anyway, with Yakuza, we really want to form a community surrounding trading, collecting NFTs. We are going to strongly gamify the collection, so that as holders, you aren’t just stuck with the options of looking at the price chart or looking at your beautiful pfp.
One of the first initiative is the “Find the Mole” game revealed in our medium article —
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
You are tasked with helping me, the Yakuza boss, find out who tf is leaking our secrets.
Bilo — Crypto Society
I have no doubt you will.
Succeed in this as your community is also the sushifighter and dojo community and we’ve witnessed their engagement and loyalty.
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
(turns out it is the boss himself leaking the secrets in public AMAs🌚)
Bilo — Crypto Society
Ser. I hereby pledge myself and crypto society to this.
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
We will feature a wanted mole NFT, and then holders can surrender their NFT to us for a bounty if the traits of the NFT matches the description of the mole.
So it basically becomes sort of a flywheel, where users want to reroll their NFT (generating a small fee for the project, plus volume for the token) to claim the bounty.
This is but one of the examples of gamification that we are cooking up.
Bilo — Crypto Society
Will there be additional functions or benefits for holding or staking Yakuza?
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Yep! So since Yakuza is a flagship product of Kage, you can imagine there will be benefits to holding Yakuza when you are using the Kage line of products.
We will also be setting up a staking pool + LP (the usual defi shenanigans) to satisfy the defi bros.
One thing I’m toying with is the idea of EXP and levelling up.
But that’s honestly not ready for public discussion heh…
Bilo — Crypto Society
You level up by performing more “tasks” for the Yakuza right?
Could you please provide us with some challenges Yakuza has faced but overcome?
Also,have you learned anything from SushifighterNFT or other 404’s that has helped you refine or change anything in your process?
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Honestly not challenges, given that the team has overcome them rather quickly, but the lack of infrastructure/documentation etc means that dev effort is slightly more challenging. It isn’t a plug and play to launch a CW404 NFT collection. But that’s BK (before Kage).
Bilo — Crypto Society
It was a silly question — yakuza don’t have challenges — 🫡
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
With the Kage main team committing to building the 404 mint pad, it solves quite a bit of headache for 404 projects like Yakuza tbh.
Yes, whenever we see a potential challenge, we crush them before it can grow to become a challenge.
The SushiFighter NFT launch was honestly a homerun of a launch.
It’s not just about the price action (obviously sushi looks better at $1K USD than at $150 USD)
But that almost every group I’m in, I can find someone sporting a Sushi NFT.
Bilo — Crypto Society
So the Sushighters slogan is cute & deadly.
Is the yakuza slogan just plain deadly?
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
So I guess, if there really has to be a challenge, it would be the challenge of putting Yakuzas on everyone’s PFP
Afterall, not everyone wants to be a Yakuza 👉👈
Bilo — Crypto Society
We will punish them if they don’t!
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Yes
I will hold you to your words.
Bilo — Crypto Society
Show them to me — I’ll handle them for you as a sworn Yakuza soldier.
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
On the refinement, our tech team actually submitted a few code updates to the CW404 standard, which is too technical to be discussed that adds more flexibility to the standard.
You will have to learn to spell Yakuza right first, young padawan.
Bilo — Crypto Society
I would normally insist and push around my guest until they divulge but in your case, I dare not.
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Good decision
Bilo — Crypto Society
So as a Yakuza inductee, I have a right to this question as per the Yakuza code of honor of which you are bound to answer or there could be some power struggles from the different clans.
Is there any exclusive breaking news about Yakuza or Kage Finance that you could share with us here today?
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Heheh what a trap
LB — Crypto Society
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Let me see,
Kage Finance is moving a quite honestly breakneck speed for development.
Our terminal was supposed to be launched in Q2, but our Devs said I can do you better and built the MVP last month.
So, we are honestly quite close to releasing that, it will feature a mobile Telegram browser so you can trade on the go with your TG Bot, without all the UI/UX friction that a TG bot has.
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
The initial spec of the terminal was really to replicate what was on the TG bot (spot trading, limit buy/sell etc), but now we have taken the decision to house the 404 part of the business within it.
So we are quite honestly building the first trading terminal with native 404 integration (ability to view NFTs across multiple collections, 404 reroll capabilities, mint pad etc).
Bilo — Crypto Society
Wow now that’s something, thanks for indulging me boss.
Really appreciate the alpha ❤️
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Heh you have done well in getting that out of me.
Bilo — Crypto Society
Do you wish to let us know anything else that was not covered in the questions above?
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Hmm, I think I’ve covered much more than I should 🌝
Can’t show all my hands on one sitting, you gotta wine and dine me first.
Bilo — Crypto Society
I will do so at our next sit down.
Thank you for your time in answering our questions here today. We are all very appreciative of your time and of the answers you have provided.
With this, we will open up the chat for those who wish to personally thank you for your time with us here today.
@izakaya_yakuza will be selecting some best questions to get OG roles.
Please keep in mind this champ is chatting with us at 4am in his time zone.
Chat is open
L B — Crypto Society
Thanks so much for the time and the especially and the info and the alpha u shared with us. ❤️
FIO
Thank you for an amazing AMA. Given the significant trading volume in CW404, are there any plans to introduce a new token tied or based on Yakuza’s trading volume? This token could offer rewards, enhancing NFT rarities or providing boosts, incentivizing users to reroll more frequently and in effect increasing even more the volume.
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
This is honestly a possibility, but I think we wouldn’t want to be a freely tradeable token, but more of a “EXP system” which I’m currently cooking up.
Reason for not having another freely tradeable token is that it can potentially dilute the value accrual to YKZ and Kage
MIAU
Sold the project for me haha. Is there a way to invest now or in near future?
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Honestly, best way is to hold Kage, stake it or LP it whichever you prefer and get the airdrop. Kage Team always operates on the notion of rewarding our loyal supporters constantly. You can get an OG (we are running OG giveaways with marketing partnerships right now), so secure it and you can get a discounted presale $YKZ.
MIAU
Do you have any projects lined up ready to use what you building?
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
Yes, we are talking to multiple projects, with a few having committed to launching on our 404 mint pad. You should see some news about that soon.
Yannik
Thanks for the mind-blowing ama!
So you’ve mentioned the first 404 trading terminal which will work in combination with telegram trading bots if i got it right.
Will it simply create its own wallet inside this connection or are we going to use/create and fund a new wallet?
Izakaya Yakuza — Boss
I think the general priority for Telegram Bot would be that we are prioritizing speed and efficiency over security, so for TG bot it would probably be a generated wallet (trust us bro), but for the terminal on web, we will enable you to bring your own wallet.
Bilo — Crypto Society
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