Equinox Ecosystem Community Update June ‘24
Equinauts,
We would like to provide you with an important update regarding our plans for the NOX Public Round and NOX listing.
UPDATE HIGHLIGHTS:
Development on Track, Phase 1 Nearing Completion
All development tasks are on track. Most of the functionality envisioned for Phase 1 of our roadmap has already been delivered. Holding NOX already grants access to presale opportunities on the fully operational Noxstarter platform. The final development tasks in the Phase 1 Roadmap are scheduled to be completed in July.
Equinox’s Position as a Desirable Go-To-Market Partner Established
Our STX Creator Campaigns with Shrapnel have been very successful, paving the way for more engagement campaigns like this in the near future. Additionally, the way we positioned Equinox and leveraged our network to offer KOL campaigns to our partners has been well received and proved very effective. These positive results and reception allows us to secure even better opportunities for our community, just as we planned.
Challenges We Have to Overcome
◾️Development
Developing new solutions requires extra time and attention, but with access to an excellent development team and focussing our attention on these tasks, all development goals are being achieved, and the development progress is on track.
◾️Marketing
Despite many successes in completing our technical and business development goals, we have not communicated them to the world effectively. Understanding of our platform and its benefits is still low amongst both gamers and Web3 native users. Additionally, our marketing efforts bring limited results in current market conditions.
◾️Public Round
Limited understanding of our platform, ineffective marketing efforts, and current market conditions contribute to poor results in our NOX presale Public Round.
NOX Public Round and Listing Timeline Changing
◾️Public Round Timeline Extended
Stage 4 of the Public Round has been extended until the end of June, when we will re-evaluate our position and apply further adjustments as required.
◾️Listing Date is Delayed
A new target date for NOX listing will be set after we re-evaluate our progress at the end of June.
Due to lower-than-expected participation rates in the Public Round, we have decided to adjust our strategy. Our goal is to enhance visibility, increase engagement, and better prepare for a successful token listing that benefits our entire community.
Our Next Steps
◾️Claiming NOX and Arbitrum-Version of Celestial Collection NFTs
With the NOX token undergoing its final audit, our development team is focusing on delivering the claim and staking portals. These portals will allow everyone to claim and stake their NOX and NFTs on the Arbitrum network, completing our transition to the NOX-based system.
◾️Preparing for NOX Launch
We have on-boarded an established Market Maker as our strategic partner for the NOX listing on Uniswap, and we are in discussions with several CEXs keen to list NOX on their platforms. Additionally, we are exploring opportunities to provide partnered launchpads with NOX allocations in the Public Round and to conduct an IEO on one of the CEXs.
◾️Intensifying Marketing Efforts and User Onboarding
With development tasks on track, we’re shifting our focus to marketing and community engagement efforts to ensure our successes are proudly displayed to the world. We will also create content and activities to communicate the benefits of active participation within our ecosystem and make the onboarding process to our platform easier.
Continue reading for more detailed insights…
WHAT WE’VE ACHIEVED SO FAR
As you know, in Q4 last year, we began consolidating our plans and vision for the next step in the Equinox Ecosystem’s evolution: Equinox 2.0. We’ve combined all the lessons we’ve learned from previous cycles and the long crypto winter we just emerged from, working tirelessly to turn this vision into reality ever since.
This new iteration of our ecosystem aims to utilize the latest breakthroughs in token standards to build a more sustainable, inclusive, and equitable system, ensuring long-term benefits for all participants. It is designed not only to reinvigorate Equinox and realign it with the ever-changing meta of Web3 but also to leverage the extensive network we built in the gaming sector throughout the bear market. This network enables us to reach new projects and communities in this space and connect with them on a deeper level. As a result, we can get to know the teams and projects better, gain more exclusive insights, and secure better opportunities for our community.
Combining our extensive experience in launching projects, being investors and gamers ourselves, and developing our own IPs puts us in a unique position. Armed with insights from various angles of the space, we understand the challenges faced by everyone involved. This drove us to redesign the Equinox Ecosystem to address these needs, wants, and pain points, resulting in better user participation experiences on Noxstarter and our ability to connect and partner with promising projects.
We are well on our way to completing all goals of our Phase 1 Roadmap. Our vision for the Equinox Ecosystem is fully outlined and continues to manifest in our efforts:
◾️Marketplace Update
We have restored and improved the functionality of the marketplace, ensuring our NFT holders can manage their Celestial Collection NFTs.
◾️Comprehensive Guide
We’ve created an extensive guide to share insights into our renewed ecosystem with our growing community and partners.
◾️NFT Tools
We have provided tools to help our NFT holders understand the benefits of the upcoming NOX-based system. You can check your NFT eligibility using our Telegram Bot, NFT Eligibility Tool, or the “My Contributions” tab of NOX Public Round details.
◾️New Website
We have launched a new Equinox 2.0 website, serving as a hub for all information about Equinox.
◾️Support for Compromised Wallets
We devised a process and built a tool to help our gifted NFT holders whose wallets got compromised, ensuring they can retain access to our ecosystem.
◾️NOX Token
We have designed our groundbreaking NOX token, which paves the way for a new model, rewarding long-term holders and avoiding the pitfalls of token vesting and allocations that lead to inflation.
◾️Successful Private Presales
We completed two exclusive presale rounds, raising $1.1M through providing early access to NOX to our OG Community and the selected partnered communities. This approach allowed us to avoid VC funding, prioritizing our community’s interests by putting the NOX tokens in the hands of those likely to use them within the ecosystem.
◾️NOX Early Participation Staking
Early participants in the NOX presale had the opportunity to stake their purchased NOX for a share of a generous 3.5M NOX rewards pool. This pool was increased to 3,697,852.54 NOX to accommodate additional rewards for those participants who did not transfer their staked NOX into the updated staking contract. This new contract was deployed to address the conflict between the original staking contract and the way Arbitrum handles blocks.
◾️Noxstarter Platform
We launched Noxstarter, the next step of the launchpad evolution, offering inclusive and equitable access to exciting opportunities. This new version of our platform includes a completely redesigned UI and participation process.
💡If you are still not familiar with Noxstarter and how it works, this article will help explain it.
◾️Completed Noxstarter Sales
Despite the platform still being in development at the time, our amazing development team quickly turned around the critical elements of the Noxstarter platform. This allowed us to bring opportunities for participation in three high-quality projects before the official launch of the platform: Aether Games, Octavia, and Astra Nova.
◾️Live Noxstarter Sale
The prefunding for Community Round of Bravo Ready ecosystem’s token $READY is live now, offering NOX and NFT holders access to this exciting opportunity. You can learn more about the Bravo Ready studio, $READY, and their flagship game BR1:INFINITE in the deep dive article on Noxstarter.
◾️Upcoming Projects
We have secured allocations from seven additional amazing projects so far, including Big AI, Rumble Kong League, and Sparkball listed on Noxstarter.
This list also includes two in-house IPs from Grow Studio, which has been recently added to the extremely selective Helika’s Incubator Program, providing incubation to Mindborn Sons and Plank Pushers. NOX holders will have exclusive access to opportunities within these projects, not available outside of Equinox.
We are continuously working on securing more opportunities for our community and as a result, we will be announcing additional 2 projects soon, including a Node sale landing in June and a AAA-quality extraction shooter with enormous potential.
◾️Referral Program: We’ve recently launched a referral program, developed in-house and tailored to our needs, helping gifted NFT holders unlock their gifted NFT NOX allocations.
◾️Community Engagement: We have conducted a series of game nights, streams, AMAs, and creator contests across our platforms. Some successes in this area include:
- Securing exclusive early access for our play-testers in Creatorverse by BreederDAO.
- Onboarding Orangie, an established gamer and content creator, as a Sentinel of Equinox, who hosted numerous game nights with our community.
- Hosting a SHRAPNEL game night with Demetrious Johnson, aka Mighty Mouse, another established gamer and former UFC Champion.
- Running a successful series of SHRAPNEL STX Creator Contests, which resulted in the highest engagement ratings in our social media history. The success of these campaigns provided a significant exposure to Equinox within Shrapnel’s community and proved our capabilities as GTM partner.
- Launching a Zealy campaign to offer more engagement opportunities for our community and attract new users, while using it to help gifted NFT holders unlock their gifted NFT NOX allocations.
WHERE WE ARE NOW
DEVELOPMENT
◾️NOX Token Contract
The contract has been updated to remove a potential vulnerability highlighted during a second audit and is now being audited by a tier 1 auditor to ensure its security and reliability.
◾️Claim Portal
Our development team is focused on developing and perfecting a complex claim portal for transitioning to the NOX-based system. This portal will be used to:
- Claim all purchased, won, and earned NOX tokens.
- Claim NOX token allocations from NFTs.
- Claim Arbitrum versions of Celestial Collection NFTs.
- Potentially distribute token allocations from some projects according to vesting terms, with more exciting plans in Phase 2 of our roadmap.
◾️NOX and NFT Staking: Alongside the NOX claim functionality, we will introduce NOX staking, which will be required to activate claimed NOX within the ecosystem. Staking NFTs will provide a boost multiplier on NOX staking for NFT holders.
NOX LAUNCH
◾️Market Making:
Following a long search for a suitable partner, we have on-boarded a respectable Market Maker who’s helping us with the NOX launch strategy. The innovative and non-conforming to the traditional standards nature of NOX proved challenging for many professionals set in their ways. Therefore, finding the right partner who understands and shares the values and principles used to develop the NOX token model required a lot of effort on our part. We avoided the cookie-cutter approach of using standard practices, trimmed where they do not apply to our model. Instead, our partner is keen on utilizing the best suitable practices where possible, adjusting them where required, and working with us on developing new ones to support our model in the best possible way.
◾️DEX Listing: We have selected Uniswap for the main liquidity pool for NOX. The exact details of the listing will be finalized with our Market Making partner as the Public Round concludes.
◾️CEX Listing: While initial feedback indicated NOX might not be compliant with some CEX requirements and standard processes, we have identified several prominent CEXs open to listing NOX. We are in discussions with these CEXs and our Market Maker to ensure the best approach to our listing strategy.
◾️NOX Public Round: We have launched the NOX Public Round, marking the beginning of the NOX presale’s final phase. With 3 initial stages completed, we continue to monitor our progress and seek further opportunities for ensuring our success.
CHALLENGES WE FACE
DEVELOPMENT
Our development team is reliable and capable of delivering all the functionality we envisioned for the Equinox Ecosystem. However, the development of bespoke and innovative solutions is not easy and requires time, testing, and iterations to ensure the desired quality and unquestionable security. We are proud of what our development team achieved so far, and it seems there are no limits to what they can do. Nevertheless, developing these new solutions is time-consuming and often requires additional time to overcome obstacles we encounter along the way. It also demands significant attention from the team to ensure the development deliverables align with our vision for their functionality.
MARKETING
While our connections in the space and the support we offer to our partners yield fantastic results in creating engagement and user acquisition for their games, attracting users to our ecosystem proves problematic.
We are closely monitoring the KPI (Key Performance Indicators) from our Public Round sales, campaigns, and marketing efforts, as well as keeping a finger on the pulse of overall market conditions.
The results show that all our efforts to attract new users fall short in the current conditions, translating to the underperformance of our NOX Public Round.
While the test KOL campaign resulted in additional exposure and engagement, it failed to deliver a satisfactory return on investment due to poor conversion of the engaged audience into new community members.
We believe there are three main factors contributing to this result:
◾️Limited Exposure
Significant technical and business development efforts have been put into Equinox 2.0, but we did not provide enough exposure to showcase these efforts. The time and effort required to secure these opportunities and deliver the platform’s functionality resulted in limiting our ability to provide enough attention to our own marketing effort. With all the work done on the new platform, we have plenty to show and shout from the rooftops about, but we have not done this effectively yet.
◾️Market Conditions
Recent token launches have shown low sentiment from the Web3 community, with limited demand post-TGE. Despite the market warming up again, most liquidity seems to be locked away in Bitcoin and main chain tokens, while degens seek opportunities among the overwhelmingly inflated number of memecoins. Generally, we see engagement, but mostly from people seeking additional liquidity rather than investment opportunities.
◾️Target Audience
Unlike our campaigns for partnered projects, which target specific player demographics, our KOL campaign targeted the general Web3 community to improve brand awareness and reach users interested in early prefunding rounds. This proved ineffective.
Additionally, the disconnect between our audience of gamers and Noxstarter functionality results in poor conversion from the exposure we get through streams and campaigns with our partners.
Lack of familiarity with launchpads creates significant friction for users otherwise well-versed in Web3 elements like airdrop farming or using DeFi tools and platforms. This friction is significantly amplified for those who lack understanding and experience in Web3, often attracted by our partnered gaming projects.
PUBLIC ROUND
Data from the initial three stages of the Public Round show limited demand for NOX within the demographic we reached so far, which results in a vast majority of the offered tokens being burned.
Three out of ten stages have been completed, where we:
- Sold 266,611.40 NOX
- Raised $24,240
- Allocated 113,885.60 NOX as bonus rewards
- Burned 1,361,899 NOX
While our token and fair launch design allows for this without breaking its functionality, burning all tokens allocated to the Public Round would be a waste of the opportunity and undermines our efforts to offer an inclusive and fair launch of NOX.
Continuing on this trajectory would also create a series of unfavorable circumstances for Equinox and NOX holders:
- Impairing opportunities for community growth
- A lower raise means smaller liquidity pools for NOX, necessitating stricter anti-dump protection post-TGE.
- The higher the initial raise, the more opportunities we have to solidify our position in the market and amplify our reach. With a limited Public Round raise, we would be immediately reliant on the revenue generated by the sales tax, whose effectiveness could also be hindered by having a smaller pool of holders.
CONCLUSION
Current market conditions combined with limited exposure and understanding of the Equinox Ecosystem create unfavorable conditions for the NOX Public Round and token listing at this time. Rushing the this without sufficient exposure and understanding brings no tangible positive results and would be detrimental to the project and all NOX holders.
While we aimed for the NOX TGE by the end of June, we always stipulated that this target was not final and driven by many factors, out of which adherence to an arbitrary date was never a priority. Given the circumstances and challenges we identified, it is clear that delaying the NOX listing is in the best interest of Equinox Ecosystem and our Community.
In light of these circumstances, we have decided to modify our plans for the Public Sale and TGE schedule. Effective immediately, the 4th Stage of the Public Round has been extended until the end of June, giving us more time to adjust our strategy and finalize additional means to attract more attention to our project. Further adjustments may be required, depending on market conditions and the results of our efforts, which we will re-evaluate at the end of June.
Effectively, the NOX TGE is delayed. While the exact dates are not known at this point and are highly dependent on changes in market conditions and the effectiveness of our efforts to showcase the strengths of our existing community and the ecosystem we’ve built, we are committed to improving the ease of access and educating all potential users on the benefits of active participation in our ecosystem.
We assure you that we are not simply waiting for better market conditions, hoping the highlighted issues will resolve themselves. We already have several initiatives in motion to address this situation. While we planned to roll these initiatives out alongside the Public Round of the NOX presale, the need to educate everyone involved on the novel aspects of our system and finalize the details of individual arrangements require additional time.
OUR NEXT STEPS
Considering that our development targets are on track and in the final stage of what we envisioned for Phase 1 of our roadmap, we feel confident shifting our focus to marketing and community engagement. Our plans revolve around three main focus points:
Bridging the Gap Between Gaming and Web3
We will intensify our efforts to eliminate the onboarding friction points by educating gamers within our reach about the benefits of active participation in the Equinox Ecosystem. This includes offering easy-to-understand tutorials explaining the benefits of Noxstarter and ways to participate in project sales, including setting up wallets and securing USDT.
◾️Utilizing Our Network to Access New Communities
The success of the STX Creator Content we ran with Shrapnel showcased the effectiveness of our approach and brought new dedicated community members. We are working with our partnered projects to generate more engagement campaigns, providing opportunities to our community members, and bringing more attention to our ecosystem. In addition to increasing our brand recognition through our presence in the space, we have a great opportunity to actively engage with new communities and invite them to participate in our ecosystem. A key element of this strategy is educational content that introduces newcomers through activities encouraging them to engage with different elements of our ecosystem.
◾️Extending the Public Round Beyond Noxstarter
We are actively discussing opportunities for providing NOX allocations in the Public Round to several partnered launchpads, as well as conducting an IEO on one of the CEXs.
Thank you for your continued support and patience. We hope this update gives you a good overview of our progress and insights into the reasons for our decisions, reassuring you that we remain committed to transparency and to making Equinox 2.0 a success. We look forward to sharing more updates with you soon.
