BlackPool Newsletter #2

Good afternoon, troops!

Welcome to the second edition of the weekly BlackPool newsletter, bringing you news and fresh updates to help you navigate what’s cooking in the BlackPool HQ. This week we bring you a short update from last weekend's NFTParis event, word about all of our verticals, as well as what's cooking in the Lab. Much to cover, so let's get started!

Last Saturday was a big day at BlackPool HQ with all hands on deck for the NFTParis event.

On one of the most red days in recent history, Julien Bouteloup took the stage to talk about the Ape Tax, discuss the work of StakeDAO, Stake Capital and BlackPool respectively and give his perspective on the maturing crypto market, developments in the DeFi ecosystem and 2022 as the year of Layer 3.

BlackPool's head white coat in charge, S.A.M. took the stage during the morning sessions where he gave us an insight into the inner workings of our Lab, as well as the Academy. Additionally, the topic focused on what novelty Web3 gaming brings us, how important communities are for the success of these new models of games and what is the secret sauce that makes games like Axies, Aavegotchi and Cometh so successful in the grand scheme of things.

With much being done behind the scenes at the moment, the Lab boys have been hard at work this past week to bring us a couple of key points about their work.

• The Lab has welcomed 2 new scouts to strengthen the community R&D department. Notably, the Lab is starting to experiment with a new potential troop... not in P2E gaming.
• The accepted Gods Unchained community proposal has led to discussions with some of the best players in the game. Stay tuned for an imminent and exciting announcement!
• The Guild of Guardians troop is slowly building itself up with a few strategic purchases made over the past few months. A dedicated troop leader is going to join the family as we get closer the end of GoG’s journey with the Lab...and the beginning of a new standalone troop.

• Aavegotchi ‘s Wearable Raffle is around the corner, starting today 2pm UTC, you can stake your raffle tickets. Ends on Saturday 29th 2pm UTC. At BlackPool, we’ll be computing some data this coming days and jump in on the train too!
• You can now have a general view on BlackPool’s Aapegotchis assets on ghst.gg. We take this opportunity to salute our frens at ordenGG for building such cool analytics tools!
• Welcome to the Gotchivault project, a great initiative that’s following in Aavegotchi’s decentralised and fully on-chain footsteps to offer to take care of your Gotchis and make you earn passive income on your GHST. Oh, and they plan to integrate Aave's aTokens and Qi Dao to maximise your return. How cool is that?

• Another week, another update: this new release brings 12 new cards, maxes out your deck up to 40 cards, as well as diminishes the amount of HP you start with in order to make matches shorter. Get in touch with Admiral Hazelstar if you want to get access to the alpha!
• Join BlackPool’s Space Troopers for a Cometh Let’s Play event on Discord, this Friday 28th at 8pm UTC! Who will be challenging Blackyugin? 👀
• If you’re a LP and/or a BPT holder on ComethSwap on Polygon, you might want to head over there as liquidity has migrated to new contracts. Look at those yields! You'll find your LP position from previous pools in the archive section here: https://swap.cometh.io/#/archived

• Last year the guild set aside 2.5 ETH for helping our scholars that have suffered from Typhoon Odette and we're proud to say that the first relief payments were made (these are verified and costed - so an investigation has been undertaken and the value of the works estimated). These funds are currently helping rebuild the houses that have been blown down. BlackPool has made this a priority and will continue to fund such endeavours in the time to come.
• Accounts are being updated and upgraded with more proven scholars getting more energy.
• Lunar New Year Axie Release Programme - we have sent 20 Axies on their journey to the far side!
• On the side of RON farming - BlackPool is currently sitting on around 4k RON when goes farming goes live.

• Sorare dropped some major news this week, announcing that Serena Williams has joined them as a Board Advisor. In the reports covering this story we were told this would lead to Sorare expanding into 2 new American sports!

• In-game, the team shipped their first main updates of the year as users were treated to improved team building and social sharing options 💪
• This period has also been particularly successful for our managers and their January performance will be published early next week!

Last but not least, this Monday we executed a fantastic AMA with Diego from OVR, where we discussed what's coming up next on their augmented reality metaverse platform, as well as how it feels creating a more detailed map of the world than Google. Check out the link below for more alpha!