Thales Royale deep dive, side events, and the Royale of Royales 👑

Thales
7 min readFeb 22, 2022

Participating in Thales Royale is one of those Defi experiences that makes you realize it has more to it than what the eye initially sees.

We have some new initiatives (aka side events), for you to participate in while waiting for the next Thales Royale season. But first, let’s have a deeper dive into what we’ve learned so far by developing this, along with the Thales community.

(If you can’t wait to know about the side events you can scroll over to the second half of this post)

So far we’ve enjoyed one Optimism Kovan event, with thousands of participants, and one of the first six Thales Royale Seasons a couple of weeks ago (with the second one being currently disputed by 3 survivors going into the last round, a nail-biting finale!), and what strikes us the most is the engagement and passion we see in those participating.

This is one of the reasons we believe Thales Royale is a game (hence why it’s fun!) but not only that, it’s also a tool to build communities.

Let’s quickly unpack these thoughts, shall we?

Thales Royale is a game.

Yes, this point is pretty clear as games aim to engage by creating experiences and by being fun.

Without going too deep on it, we can say that Thales Royale purpose is to leverage the 4 kinds of fun, according to Nicole Lazzaro:

  1. Easy fun (achieved by casual interactions, novelty, and curiosity): In Thales Royale case when people have friendly banters, rally for one of the survivors in the game by roleplaying, or have fun trying to guess where the market will go.
  2. Hard fun (achieved by challenges and competitions): In this case, the whole event and smart contract suite are built around a winner-takes-all competition.
  3. People fun (achieved by forming teams or communities): Here is where the social aspect of Thales Royale shines, because besides interacting with the smart contracts on Optimism network, participants also meddle with others on #thales-royale channel in Thales Discord.
  4. Serious fun (doing meaningful things, could be for the planet, for others, or for oneself): In Thales Royale case, we started delving into this by adding a layer of collectibles (important to oneself) associated with the game. We started with exclusive NFTs for the winners, and we continue researching ways how to integrate Optimism NFTs into the mix 👀
A not so fun diagram about the 4 kinds of fun

Okay, so Thales Royale is a game, what else?

Thales Royale is a tool for community building

At this point it is common knowledge that building a strong and tight community around your use case, product, and brand is fundamental for sustained success.

With crypto markets being very volatile and bull or bear cycles lasting months, sometimes years, it seems fundamental to us the need to develop activities that tie together community members without having to solely focus on short-term price action.

And what best way to do it than being open to feedback and willing to quickly iterate and improve, testing out novel ways to leverage Thales’ core protocol offering (Parimutuel markets), and above all, have fun while doing so enjoying the journey together.

Basically: Eat, sleep, develop-listen-iterate-improve, repeat. (*while having fun)

So far, Thales core contributors have been enjoying participating in Thales Royale along with the community, sharing some laughs and also some frustration when getting eliminated (hey, we have feelings too! 😆).

I know we’ve stressed this point before in this post, but the mere fact of opening a fun and safe space where core contributors, Thales Council members, old school community members, and those that are recently discovering Thales (and the potential of Parimutuel markets) can share in a more relaxed or chilled manner does wonders for the general vibe of the project and for everyone involved.

So, how are we planning to move forward and potentiate this?

Thales Royale side events

Thales Royale meme competition

Calling all the master meme creators out there!

Starting today and ending on Thursday, March 3rd, 4PM UTC, when Thales Royale Season III positioning phase starts.

We’ll be receiving all submissions of memes directly related to Thales Royale in this dedicated #thales-royale-memes channel. You can also post your memes directly into the general #thales-royale channel and we’ll make sure to copy those and tag you on the competition channel.

The memes can be visual (static JPEGs or moving GIFs) or audiovisual (short videos)

Prizes in THALES tokens are to be distributed as follows:

1st place: 500 THALES
2nd place: 400 THALES
3rd place: 300 THALES
4th place: 200 THALES
5th place: 100 THALES

The final results will be decided by Thales community's oldest governance form: Emoji voting 👍

Submit your entries here!

Wolverine missing Thales Royale, colorized.

Thales Royale “create the best copypasta competition”

Calling all the copypasta archivists, creative writers, and anyone with some writing abilities!

Starting today and ending on Thursday, March 3rd, 4PM UTC, when Thales Royale Season III positioning phase starts.

For this one, those who’ve participated in any of the Thales Royale previous events have a clear advantage as they’ll be able to tune into the deep emotions that arise when playing one of these events.

If you’ve been in crypto/web3 for more than a few weeks you’ve already noticed the abundance of “copypasta” flying around, or in simple terms, pieces of texts no longer than a few phrases and as short as one phrase, that are funny (for different reasons) and tend to be shared and “copy-pasted” into different Discords, Tweets, and other mediums.

For this initiative you have creative freedom:

  • You can create your own text, based on your experience with Thales Royale so far.
  • You can dig up from Discord or Twitter your favorite messages (yours or from someone else) and re-share them as you find them or modify them to create something new.
  • You can write about the sublime feeling of winning a Royale (or the devastating feeling of losing one in the last round! 😆)
  • You can modify some already famous copypasta and make it fit for Thales Royale theme, etc.

As you can see the sky is the limit with this, the only rules are:

  1. It has to be in written form and no longer than half a page (ideally way less, but up to you!)
  2. It has to maintain a minimum of common sense regarding the topics it touches (not overly violent, no racism, etc). Excluding some entries will be up to Thales core contributors criteria.

Prizes in THALES tokens are to be distributed as follows:

1st place: 300 THALES
2nd place: 200 THALES
3rd place: 100 THALES

Here the final three will be decided by community emoji voting on the submissions made on #thales-royale-copy channel, but the final result for the selected 3 (and the winner) will be determined by Thales core contributors.

Who knows, maybe the winner’s copypasta ends up in some famous cameo…

Submit your entries here!

Royale of Royales

Oh boy, where do we start with this one to not spoil the surprise?

We’ve decided to run a Thales Royale even with a higher buy-in on 100 sUSD (normal buy-in is 30 sUSD), and to sponsor from treasury every Thales Royale champion from Season I until Season VI.

This event will be held after Season VI (final date TBD) and will be incentivized with extra THALES tokens plus an exclusive NFT to crown the champion(s) of this Royale of Royales.

Be sure to bring your best for this one!

Wanna take a peek at the NFT (currently work in progress)? 👀

Royale of Royale NFT being worked on by Thales designers

We’ll be sharing more news and details regarding this initiative in the upcoming weeks, so stay tuned!

And what about improvements to the current Thales Royale offering?

Thales Royale pass as NFTs

If you’ve been following the discussions in our Discord, you’d know about TIP-29 and the introduction of Thales Royale passes that you can mint as NFTs on Optimism and use those to register for any Thales Royale Season (that has the same buy-in, currently 30 sUSD).

You can read more details about it in the linked TIP, and of course, share your opinion or ideas in the dedicated Discord channel for this TIP.

We are really excited about this and all the potential that can be achieved as a marketing tool!

Thales Royale private rooms

What if you could set a dispute with a friend about who’s the best trader, on-chain?

Can you imagine two “clans” battling each other to see which community has the best traders?

What if you would like to create your own Thales Royale event for another asset besides ETH (that has a Chainlink feed on Optimism, of course)?

All of this, and more, will be possible with the introduction of private rooms for Thales Royale.

This feature is still in its development stage (you know, devs doing something) and it’s promising, to say the least.

With much more to come… 🔥

What to do next?

First of all, you can join this Discord event for Thales Royale Season III (so you get a reminder when the registration phase starts), and if you are interested in participating in the Thales Royale meme competition and Thales Royale best copy-pasta competition, jump into our #thales-royale channel on Discord and start sharing!

Don’t miss it!

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Thales

Thales is an Ethereum protocol that allows the creation of novel on-chain, permissionless, and non-custodial Parimutuel Markets.