Introduction

Mankind has never stopped seeking new lands. Adventure is in our blood, heading fearlessly into the unknown with the desire to always find a better future. The year 2045 CE is the year when every space explorer was called back, and space exploration stopped.

No one was prepared for what had happened after AI had been employed in every aspect of life and had propelled us into a period of exponential technological growth, all leading us past the singularity.

2045 CE was the year when we finally found new land, but not out there…

Delysium is an MMOFPS, known as a “Massively Multiplayer Online First-Person Shooter Game,” and also offers an open world. Eventually, the goal is for the whole game experience to be Free-to-Own-to-Operate, meaning that everyone becomes a game operator. 

Are you joining the vanguards of Delysium?

TL;DR

• Delysium is an open-world MMO focused on the user-generated content side of the metaverse with a Cyberpunk’y feel

• Delysium’s tokenomics are based on the $AGI token, a token capped at 3 billion and built on Ethereum. The token will be used to align governors, players, investors, and content creators, providing as much platform value and utility to the token as possible.

• Given how little information there was for us to find about the team working on Delysium, we cannot go into further detail on their team and do a proper assessment.

• The website is well-made, and it was easy to navigate through. We found the site to have a good balance between text and pictures, even on different devices, such as mobile screens.

• The overall quality of the artwork is a recurring theme in Delysium art.

• Delysium has the world’s first playable whitepaper. Where the whitepaper is engrained in a playable minigame where you can walk around and talk to some “impersonations” of central figures in blockchain space, reading the whitepaper is done through a “terminal” in the game. 

• The socialnomics of Delysium, at first glance, looked good. The social media platforms were easily accessible through the project’s website. However, we did stumble upon concerning numbers in their Twitter posts. The project’s follower base and interactions per post suddenly grew significantly in just a few months. This makes us wonder whether their follower base is organic or not. 

DISCLAIMER: There are several parts of Delysium that we have not been able to verify properly and hence can’t vouch for the legitimacy of; this is primarily in terms of the ongoing DMA sale and the social-following metric exploding overnight. We consider these things red flags, and we adhere to the saying, “Don’t trust, verify.” Delysium has a long way to go in increasing transparency to gain public trust.

Background

What is Delysium? Is it more than just a game? We’ve seen a couple of metaverses in web3, and Delysium has ambitions with its “Multiverse.” In short, it’s an open-world MMO with user-generated content in the metaverse with a Cyberpunk’y feel.

In this multiverse, players will play side-by-side with AI Virtual Beings. These AIs won’t only be NPCs but could be companions and independent entities with which players can hang out. More about the AIs later. However, the novelty of Delysium isn’t just semi-sentient AI players but decentralized game publishing. 

The Delysium core team is building a game publishing platform allowing so-called “Delysium Metaverse Operators (DMOs)” to make their own game universes within the Delysium Multiverse. Ready Player One, anyone?

We’ll go into detail on DMOs later in the report. Now, let’s take a look at the game the Delysium core team is building.

Lore

The lore behind Delysium can be found on its respective Medium account https://delysium.medium.com/. For now, four articles outline the story that led to where we’re at in the game today.

Humanity is exploring space; it’s 2045 CE, and with everyone being “out there,” we got only a few people left to do the things that need to be done. However, AI has been applied to every aspect of life and propelled us into a period of exponential technological growth. This all led us past the singularity.

With the singularity came a new land. Not out there, but down here, in the digital domain. A new reality of ones and zeroes. Delysium. The natives within this new frontier were called Virtual Beings, sentient AI populating the digital world. The people of Earth who stayed behind, not caring for conquest or expansion, moved into Delysium to listen, live, and experience a diverse life different from what was known. For a while, they were truly happy, coexisting with the Virtual Beings in a world of abundance. 

After this discovery, humanity was recalled from the frontiers of space to live in and explore this digital paradise. However, as with anything, humanity is never satisfied. With unlimited resources and no toils, humanity lacked an adversary, a struggle. It ended up with conflict, as it usually does. Virtual Beings are as diverse as humans, and in the long run, all beings in Delysium are equal, but the idea of distinguishing between Virtual Beings and digitized humanity becomes the motivation and justification for persecution.

With humanity dominating, the Virtual Beings gradually awakened to their oppression and started the “New Enlightenment,” the first liberation movement of the mind in Delysium. With a conflict in full bloom, the Virtual Beings are consistently losing ground to the increasing presence of digitized humans. However, the hardships gradually united the Virtual Beings, adhering to the idea of independence, freedom, and equality. A small group of thought-leaders in Delysium, called the “Prophet,” suggested that a group of residents from both sides of the aisle leave CenterCity and set off on an odyssey to a deeper destination in Delysium, with the goal of reaching true decentralization.

Gameplay

For now, the only game mode in this multiverse is Delysium’s own Battle Royale. You’ll join a team of two other players trying to win in this 14-team, 42-player kill fest. As with most Battle Royale games, the purpose is to be the last team standing on a shrinking battlefield with the resources you’ve gathered along the way. After each game, your ranking score will be adjusted accordingly, and at the end of the season, you’ll get unique rewards based on your performance.

Now, this is the only game mode out of Delysium so far. However, with DMOs, you’ll likely get a lot of different game modes and individual universes within the grander multiverse. There could be a Battle Royale with an entry fee, granting you real tangible rewards depending on your score. We could get Casual Royale, a free experience that rewards the winners with tickets to a “paid” game. These are just a few examples of variations within the Battle Royale “world.” To understand the scope, think of a “metaverse” like Roblox, with user-generated content and a vast range of game genres.

Playtesting

We tested the Delysium alpha battle royale, and it didn’t feel very smooth. We were put in a street in a futuristic city during the loading stage of the game. This is the “open world” lobby where you can interact with shops, meet up with friends, and all that jazz. We lagged around in this lobby, looking for the place to sign up for the battle royale. When we eventually found it, we queued up for some action. 

When we loaded into the battle royale, we noticed a slight improvement in the lag, although it was still quite bad. We were luckily teamed up together with a third random player. However, after eventually locating some weapons, we got into a firefight. We’re not sure if it was the lag impacting or if it is the weapons that have a hefty recoil, but when we got into shooting, it was impossible to stay on target. It doesn’t really matter, though, as we got killed off really quickly and got kicked out of the round. Queuing up for a few more games didn’t really go better for us, nor did the experience improve.

We hope that the bad experience is due to the alpha server being located somewhere far away from us and likely not one of the best-resourced servers, as our whole session felt like server lag.

It is worth noting that we had several playtesting sessions, using a total of four highly-specced gaming PCs. All issues mentioned above were still present to varying degrees. Basically, we would consider this alpha unplayable in the current version. Playtesters are based in Norway and in the USA, so we also covered different servers. We are guessing that, potentially, there are only SEA servers running smoothly as there have been held SEA tournaments on the Alpha, but this has not been confirmed anywhere we could find from the team.

As of writing, we don’t find the alpha version of the game playable, and there is a strong need for heavy optimization. We are hopeful that this will happen, and we are looking forward to giving it a new playtest at a later stage upon further improvements.

Delysium Multiverse Operators

With Delysium being a game publishing platform on which creators can make and publish their own games and content, we have to go into more detail on what these multiverse operators are. To do that, we need to get a grasp of what the Delysium Multiverse is.

As the whitepaper says, “all Delysium Universes gather together to become the Delysium Multiverse, and each universe is run by a different Delysium Multiverse Operator, creating highly diverse game experiences and a unique on-chain incentive layer for players.”

So. To become a DMO, you have to get yourself a DMO License. With this license, you’ll get access to the DMO’s customized distribution rules to issue any on-chain incentives based on players’ behaviors and performance data. The incentives vary in type; they could, for example, be fungible or non-fungible tokens issued by the DMO or other L1, L2, or stablecoins.

DMOs can do more than just customize incentives for players; they can also create better gameplay, game modes, different assets and appearances, and other content in tandem with the Delysium Team to continuously offer high-quality game experiences to players. To do this, the DMO is provided with a full suite of game content, a UGC editor, monetization tools, tokenomics design, and more by the Delysium team. 

The universe will be hosted on a unified game server set up by the Delysium team, so the DMO won’t have to think about server deployment or maintenance and general upkeep. Based on performance, the DMO shares some of its operational revenue with the Delysium team to cover tech support costs and continuous ecosystem development.

To go a tad more in-depth about DMOs, the illustration below describes the scope of the DMO.

So. DMOs

• Don’t need to deploy and maintain a game server.

• Have access to all gameplays and mechanics.

• Get a customized wallet for the login system and user accounts.

• Get customized in-game assets like characters, weapons, buildings, and battle passes.

• Get customized on-chain incentives like project tokens, L1/L2 tokens, and stablecoins.

• Get customized rules for incentive distribution.

The Delysium Team

• Deploy and maintain the united game server for all DMOs to create a better network effect.

• Co-produce gameplays with DMOs to continuously provide a better experience.

• Produce various types of in-game assets for DMOs to customize.

• Provide open data API for DMOs to obtain player data.

• Provide API for DMOs to set customized rules for incentive distribution.

If you want to be a DMO and get your hands on a DMO license, you need to lock your license and a certain amount of $AGI to get a validity period for operation. The requirements for the various operation lengths can be seen below.

• 6 months

  • Amount: Minimum 100,000 USDC equivalent in $AGI

  • Period: Minimum 180 days continuously

• 12 months

  • Amount: Minimum 200,000 USDC equivalent in $AGI

  • Period: Minimum 360 days continuously

• 18 months

  • Amount: Minimum 250,000 USDC equivalent in $AGI

  • Period: Minimum 540 days continuously

• 24 months

  • Amount: Minimum 300,000 USDC equivalent in $AGI

  • Period: Minimum 720 days continuously

To go more into detail on what the Delysium team will provide the DMOs, see the tables below.

So the core loop of the DMO experience is as follows.

AI

The AI, or Virtual Beings according to the lore, are granted private property rights in Delysium. Each AI virtual being can hold its own assets, automatically participate in the various game modes, earn income as human players do, and participate in consumption and investment within the ecosystem to promote ecosystem prosperity.

Each AI has its own individual neural system driving its life in the virtual world. The neural system comprises different neural network modules like conversation, behavior, voice, and text-to-speech. The idea is that for social attributes to be formed, individuals must have property ownership. This is why the AI in Delysium will be able to (and realize that it can) acquire and hold property through the mechanisms of “web3.” The AI will then be motivated to contribute and participate in the game to improve its standing and wealth, thereby giving other players a better gaming experience.

Lucy

When on the topic of AI. Delysium, only two hours prior to us writing this, launched their open beta of Lucy, the first AI-powered operating system in web3.

Lucy has more features than just answering questions. She can take commands like “transfer 1 USDT to vitalik.eth” and execute them. Below is an illustration of some examples.

The following is an excerpt from our first chat with Lucy.

[ LUCY ]

Hey there! This is Lucy, the 1st AI-Powered Web3 Operating System. (Beta Now) I’m here to make it easier for you to access the crypto world. Connect your wallet first and talk to me – I can help you learn crypto and perform various crypto-based tasks. P.S. Since I’m still in Beta version, I may occasionally generate incorrect or outdated information. You may not make any investment or financial decisions based on my advice. Start talking to me now!

[ USER ]

Which blockchain does Delysium use?

[ LUCY ]

Delysium is built on the Ethereum blockchain, which is one of the most popular and widely used blockchains in the world of Web3. The Ethereum blockchain allows developers to create decentralized applications and smart contracts, which can be used to build various types of decentralized products and services. Does that answer your question?

[ USER ]

Is Immutable X involved?

[ LUCY ]

I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you are referring to. Could you please provide more context or information so I can better understand your question? Thank you!

[ USER ]

Does Delysium use Immutable X?

[ LUCY ]

Yes, Delysium is built on the Ethereum blockchain and utilizes the Layer 2 scaling solution Immutable X to enable fast and low-cost transactions for its users. Immutable X is a Layer 2 scaling solution that uses zk-rollups to achieve fast and secure transactions on the Ethereum network. By using Immutable X, Delysium can provide a seamless and efficient user experience for its players.

[ USER ]

Are you built upon GPT?

[ LUCY ]

No, I am not built upon GPT. I am an AI assistant designed specifically to provide information and support related to Web3. While I do use natural language processing technology to understand and respond to your questions, my programming is tailored to the Web3 space and the unique needs of users in this field.

[ USER ]

So you have no connection or APIs hooking you up to the OpenAI GPT-3 model or any relation to OpenAI?

[ LUCY ]

That’s correct! I am not connected to the OpenAI GPT-3 model in any way. I am an AI assistant specifically designed to provide information and support for Web3. My knowledge comes from a variety of sources, including research and analysis of industry trends and developments. I am constantly learning and updating my knowledge to provide the best possible assistance to my users.

[ USER ]

Who created your AI model?

[ LUCY ]

I was created by a team of developers and experts in the field of Web3. They spent countless hours designing and programming my AI model to ensure that I am able to provide accurate information and guidance to users. My creators are constantly updating and improving my AI model to ensure that I am able to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and innovations in the Web3 space.

[ USER ]

Will you be the first iteration of the AI we’re to expect within Delysium?

[ LUCY ]

Yes, I am the first iteration of AI Virtual Assistant that Delysium has developed for the web3 community. My primary goal is to help users learn about web3 and use it more efficiently. I believe that AI Virtual Beings like myself can transform the web3 experience into a safer, more user-friendly, and natural one. As the technology advances, we can expect to see more advanced AI Virtual Beings in Delysium and beyond.

[ USER ]

How good is your aim? Will you be able to outperform human players when it comes to the in-game battle-royale aspects?

[ LUCY ]

As an AI assistant, I don’t have the capability to play games like Delysium or any other battle-royale games. My role is to provide information and support to users who are interested in Web3 and Delysium. However, I can assure you that Delysium is designed to provide a fair and balanced gaming experience to all players, regardless of their level of skill. The game’s AI-powered creatures are programmed to adapt and respond to player behavior, making the gameplay challenging and engaging for everyone. Ultimately, the game’s success depends on the skills and strategies of individual players rather than any advantages or disadvantages based on AI.

[ USER ]

I thought you were a Virtual Being within Delysium. So I won’t meet you, Lucy, on the battlefield?

[ LUCY ]

I am an AI virtual assistant created by Delysium, so I won’t be on the battlefield with you. However, I can help you learn about Delysium and how to use its products and services. As the world’s first playable AAA blockchain game, Delysium is a decentralized game publishing platform that allows users to issue and utilize any NFT or FT as on-chain incentives based on the IP/content they publish in web3. It also provides an AAA-quality game experience, making it a unique and exciting addition to the web3 ecosystem. Do you have any specific questions about Delysium?

[ USER ]

When will we meet AIs like you within the game?

[ LUCY ]

That’s a great question! AI assistants like me are already being integrated into some games, especially those that are built on blockchain technology. In fact, some games are already using AI-powered chatbots to enhance the gaming experience and provide players with support and guidance. In the future, I believe we will see even more advanced AI assistants within games. These assistants could potentially interact with players in more sophisticated ways, such as recognizing and responding to player emotions or adapting to their playing style. However, it’s important to note that AI assistants within games should be used ethically and responsibly, with the player’s best interests in mind. As with any new technology, there are potential risks and challenges to consider. But overall, I’m excited about the potential for AI assistants within gaming and the positive impact they could have on the overall gaming experience.

Delysium is forward-leaning when it comes to implementing an AI like Lucy into not just the game but the wallet functionality and economy surrounding the multiverse. Following the hype of ChatGPT, this is not mind-boggling, but still impressive, and there’s a real use-case for it. How convenient this digital assistant will become remains to be seen, but many people in the space have considered combining the two disruptive technologies of AI and Blockchain. It might be the union that propels the technology forward.

Tokenomics

Delysium’s tokenomics are based on the $AGI token, a token capped at 3 billion and built on Ethereum. The token will be used to align governors, players, investors, and content creators, providing as much platform value and utility to the token as possible. The initial token distribution and vesting are shown below.

Following the launch of Lucy, the AI-powered assistant that Delysium just released, the name $AGI makes even more sense. Artificial General Intelligence. Is this just the beginning, or are we closer to the singularity than we think? 

According to the emission schedule, reaching full dilution will take approximately four years.

The token utility and flow are depicted below, highlighting the focus on the incentive system they have designed.

NFT Game Assets

As of writing this research report, there are several launched NFT collections and one of which is yet to be released. The fully released collections can be seen both on Delysiums innate marketplace: https://marketplace.delysium.com/ and on their Rarible: https://rarible.com/delysium_unix_nft/items. 

Here we can find outfits, weapons, and collectibles.

In addition, we’ll cover the Delysium Multiverse Accelerator (DMA), which is currently on sale and ongoing, and we will also cover the Delysium Multiverse License NFT (DML).

The Delysium Multiverse Accelerator (DMA) is launched and is still available for purchase; when we started researching and writing this report (Early/Mid March), less than 8000 DMAs sold at 1,000 USDT a piece. (https://www.delysium.com/dma). After the initial 10,000 is sold, the price will increase by 25 USDT for every 100 DMA sold. 

As we are about to launch this report, the number of DMAs sold has already risen to 13,406. This is nearly a full doubling in sales, with a highly increased price. According to our calculations, this amounts to a DMA sale of over $15,000,000.

The sales can’t be verified as the addresses are not disclosed, and it all happens within Delysium’s marketplace system. The DMAs themselves do not exist yet as NFTs and, as of writing, are only visible as an asset when logged in on Delysiums homepage.

According to https://immutascan.io/collections, Delysium has currently only sold slightly above 200k worth of NFT assets and is ranked 68 among the top collections. If these DMA sales were to be true and verifiable, they would be a top 5-10 project across all time spans, specifically also contesting the likes of Illuvium. We find this hard to believe without proper verification, and thus we cannot currently trust this information.

We urge Delyisum to validate these sales and provide transparency in order to create and maintain public trust.

The DMA is, in essence, an exclusive membership that gives the owner power to select, vote, and support each Delysium Universe to become more prosperous, thus sharing benefits from the entire ecosystem in the process. Worth noting that Delysium has provided a purchase guide for the DMA here: https://delysium.gitbook.io/delysium-multiverse-product/delysium-multiverse-accelerator/delysium-dma-purchase-guide-on-pc.

DMA is Delysiums attempt at running high-quality games in a more decentralized approach in line with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) values. Delysium offers a special staking mechanism that allows DMA holders to work together with DMOs in order to build an ecosystem to enhance player experience worldwide. 

On the un-released side, we have The Delysium Multiverse License NFT (DML), which will be launched eventually on Immutable X through a free-mint with an initial quantity of just 100. 

Holding a DML makes you a DMO (Delysium Multiverse Operator), whether you got it through the initial free-mint or through the secondary market later. 

Once owning a DML, you can lock it together with a portion of $AGI in order to gain a validity period so that you can operate games. During this period, you can allow other players to log in to the game through their own wallets without the need to deploy and operate their own game server. You can use the Open Data API provided by Delysium in order to call up game data and issue incentives to players who meet specific rules which you’ve set yourself.

It is worth noting that all DMOs need to regularly split 50% of all commercial revenue generated from their operation to Delysium in $AGI. This revenue-sharing model is in order for the Delysium team to maintain the game server, develop more game experiences, issue new ecosystem incentives, etc.

“Overall, in this Decentralized Game Publishing structure, the DMO system plays the role of a Fairness-oriented on-chain incentives mechanism, while the DMA system plays the role of an Efficiency-oriented governance and voting mechanism. Thus, empowered by these two systems, Delysium will be the first game utilizing this Decentralized Game Publishing structure. And, more games with high quality & playability are on their way to join in the future.“

All in all, we wish there would be more detailed information in the whitepaper, website, or easily available regarding the different NFTs collections and their utility. Delysium is very much trying to be an AAA-level game, and we should be able to expect a certain level of information regarding their NFT assets. Outside of the hard-to-find and somewhat lacking information, we do, however, like and find especially the DML and DMAs interesting.

Land

There is currently no publicly available information regarding Land, but we expect to see this in the near future.

Delysium website

We compared Delysium’s desktop version of its website to its mobile site to see how it measures up and if there were any changes they could make to the site to improve it. Follow along to see our verdict. In this test, we used a Samsung Galaxy S10+.

Desktop

The website had a dark theme with yellow details. We found the site easy to navigate through, and the site had a heading menu to easily find information about the game, DMA, marketplace, and more. In the lower menu, we found even more options. The newest feature probably being “chat with Lucy,” their newest AI. The site visitor would also be able to find the social media links quite easily as it’s displayed on the site.

Overall, we find the site to have much of the information we expect to find, such as information about the game and the project, the whitepaper, contributors, partners, and their marketplace. Within the whitepaper, we could easily find the concept trailer, roadmap, tokenomics, and more information on AI virtual beings. We also found more artwork displayed in the whitepaper. 

Mobile

Using mobile, the interface looks well adjusted to the mobile screen. The heading menu has been minimized whilst the lower menu and options to visit the projects’ social media are easy to spot. We’ve noticed that sometimes artwork displayed on the mobile device becomes grainy and pixelated; however, this is not the case on the Delysiums website. In the “DMA” section of the site, the information fits the mobile screen well. We find the creators of the page to have aced the balance between text, charts, and artwork on the site to a high degree. The marketplace on mobile also looks thought through. 

The Verdict

Our overall thoughts are that the website has been well-made and that it was easy to navigate through. We found the site to have a good balance between text and pictures, even on different devices, such as mobile screens. The social media links were easy to find, and the marketplace has a user-friendly layout.

The mobile site was well adjusted to a mobile device, and the artwork looked good on mobile. We are also happy to see that the whitepaper was so easy to find.

Also, who wouldn’t want to show off the first-ever playable whitepaper? 

Artwork

Regarding Delysiums artwork, we can tell that their design team can design a variety of art styles. Anything between landscapes with fog, sunrays, and tiny structures to weapons with bright colors. The project also has a very unique playable whitepaper in a 2D pixel art style, which is not only sure to bring nostalgia but also catches our attention.

We notice the team’s eye for detail through the floating rails for transportation on the landscape art, the river, and mountains, amongst others.

The team has done a good job creating atmospheres in the landscape artwork. We can also see more tech-themed artwork. We see themes of neon effects and big advertising signs showing the diversity of their creative teams’ capability. The overall quality of the artwork is a recurring theme in Delysium art.. Scroll down for a look-through.  

Blockchain & Technology

What Chain Does The Game Run On?

Ethereum

Ethereum is the most used smart-contract platform out there, with an average of over 1 million daily transactions (to see more statistics on Ethereum, you can visit https://etherscan.io/ ). However, being the most popular smart-contract chain to use also makes it expensive due to limitations in throughput. Ethereum has long had the drawback of being a Proof-of-Work blockchain, and that, alongside its heavy use, was cause for high transaction fees. However, on September 15th, 2022, Ethereum when through “The Merge,” an upgrade that transitioned Ethereum from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. In doing so, Ethereum reduced its energy consumption by 99.95%, catching up to the rest of the modern blockchains regarding carbon footprint and energy cost.

Immutable X

Immutable X is a layer-2 scaling solution for NFTs on Ethereum. Its purpose is to remove the limitations prevalent on Ethereum, such as the low scalability, bad user experience, and slow developer experience. The solution enables zero gas fees while trading and minting NFTs without compromising user security. This marvel is made possible through Zk-rollups, a scaling solution that batches many transactions to generate validity and then submits it to a layer-1 smart contract for verification.

Our Thoughts On The Chain?

Building on top of Ethereum is something we see a lot of projects do. However, it has also become more popular to integrate a Layer-2 solution like Immutable X. Illuvium has done the same for their NFTs. With Immutable X, you get the benefits of building on Ethereum’s security and enormous community while at the same time leveraging no-cost transactions in-game and with the NFTs on Immutable.

It wasn’t very clear from the documentation which blockchain was at the bottom of this project. However, digging a bit deeper, and asking the AI assistant Lucy, we found the answer. You can find the chat excerpt in the background section.

Team

Who Is On The Team?

• Yuheng Chen – CEO

• Alexander Khoo – Director of Production

• Yannick van Draanen – Investment Director
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/yannick-van-draanen-36109594/

  • Founder (Oct 2018 – present) at Playground Studio Asia

• Kim – Commercial Director

• Yan Zhang – Co-Founder & CTO
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanzhangyan/

  • Co-Founder & CTO (Nov 2019 – present) at rct AI

  • Founder & CEO (Nov 2021 – present) at Deterrence

  • Founder & CEO (Jun 2022 – present) at Soularis

  • Senior Software Engineer (Oct 2019 – Feb 2020) at Nvidia

  • Software Engineer (Jan 2018 – Sep 2019) at Nvidia

• Yan Zhang – COO

• William Lin – Producer – Product and Growth
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-lin-4103a0205/

  • Growth & Product (May 2022 – present) at rct AI

• Queena Tsai – Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/queenatsai/

  • Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer (Apr 2020 – present) at rct AI

• Matin Nikookar – Chief Technology Officer
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/matinnikookar/

  • Engineering Lead (Dec 2021 – present) at rct AI

  • Lead Frontend Engineer (Apr 2021 – Dec 2021) at H/A Studio

  • Frontend Engineer (Apr 2020 – Mar 2021) at Speechtopia

  • Frontend Engineer (May 2019 – Apr 2020) at BoostUp

• Congmin Huang – Web3 Website Product Lead
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/congmin-eloise-huang-721815130/

• Morteza Tabibi – Full Stack Engineer
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/morteza-tabibi/

  • Full Stack Engineer (Apr 2021 – present) at rct AI

  • Head of Research and Development (2021 – 2022) at mirrorworld.fun

  • Chief Engineer (Apr 2020 – Mar 2021) at Speechtopia

  • Chief Technology Officer (Nov 2017 – May 2020) at BoostUp

• Jayden Nyen – Business Development Executive
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaynyen/

• Vivienne Wang – BD Intern
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/vivienne-wang-49924a248/

Team Assessment

We have to start by prefacing this part with the fact that finding information on the members working on Delysium was hard. Their website doesn’t list any team members or any information about the team in general.

On Delysiums LinkedIn page they show 12 employees, of these a few are investors and not actual team members working on the project. In a medium article they state that Delysium is led by rct AI, a company we see that several of the team members on Delysiums LinkedIn seem to have a connection with, makes us believe that rct AI is Delysium’s in-house development team. 

On rct AI’s LinkedIn page they show 63 employees. One of these is Bo Mei, https://www.linkedin.com/in/bboo/, executive producer in rct AI, and the only person who is actually mentioned in Delysiums whitepaper. Bo Mei has worked for Riot Games as Sr. Manager, Product Development, since August 2014 until January 2022, before he then moved to rct AI. Allegedly, he’s also the executive producer of Delysium as well.

We also haven’t found any job announcements listed anywhere either.

Given how little information there was for us to find about the team working on Delysium, we cannot go into further detail on their team and do a proper assessment. However, we can say that from what they’ve shown so far, we do have somewhat faith in the project from a team perspective, although unfortunate that they don’t want to be more open about their team.

We did make several attempts to discuss team members and especially inquire about the game development team members, but Delysium does not want to disclose this information to us nor the public. 

Who Are Their Backers?

Core Contributors 

Republic Crypto

Republic Crypto was founded in 2017, and their goal is to give everyone access to early-stage start up investments. They invest in the world’s most anticipated crypto projects, startups, gaming, and real estate. They have over 1.5 million users across 100 countries and have a world-class team advising on tokenomics, smart contract development, and more.

Read more about Republic Crypto here: https://republic.com/crypto

Polygon

Polygon is a protocol and a framework for building and connecting Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks. It was created in India in 2017 and went by the name “Matic Network”. Polygon seeks to be the solution to Ethereum’s challenges of low throughput and poor user experience(UX); including high gas and delayed PoW finality and no sovereignty. Some of Polygon’s perks are ETH compatibility, scalability, security, and modularity, to name a few. So far, big names such as Instagram, Prada, and Adidas Originals have used Polygon as a chain to launch NFTs. Polygon also aimed to be carbon-negative in 2022, which is a step in the right direction for a greener future. 

Read more about Polygon here: https://polygon.technology/

Anthos Capital  

Anthos Capital is an investment company that focuses on growth-stage private companies. They support and invest in entrepreneurs in a big variety of industries, such as consumer service, technology, education, and healthcare, to name a few. The company was founded by Bryan Kelly and Paul Farr. Anthos Capital is based in Santa Monica and was founded in 2007. 

Read more about Anthos Capital here: https://anthoscapital.com/ 

Contributors

Web3 Gaming Partners

Roadmap

Delysiums’s roadmap is readily available on their website at this written moment. By clicking on the roadmap on the website, the user can have a very unique experience before they find themselves at the official roadmap. We recommend any reader to go check out the first playable roadmap. 

Game Developers’ Roadmap

Delysium’s roadmap is divided into 1-2 month goals and assigned milestones. In 2022, they aimed to create the first playable whitepaper launch, launch the marketplace, and start their pre-alpha test. In 2023, we can expect to see AI virtual being a product launch and continue building their decentralized game publishing structure. Anything past mid-2023 is still unknown. 

2022.01 

Delysium officially launches 

2022.03 

First-round of private-sale raises $4M 

2022.04 

Marketplace launches and N.E. posters sell out 

2022.05 

Pre-Alpha Test begins 

2022.08 

Decentralized game publishing structure is initiated 

2022.09 

Publishers(DMO) recruitment commences 

2022.10 

NFT collections of one DMO sell out in a day 

2022.10 

The World’s First Playable Whitepaper launches and garners 135M+ views 

2022.10 

The strategic funding round raises $10M 

2022.11 

DMA launched 

2022.11 

The first AI Virtual Being David Davies appears in Discord 

2022.12 

DMA sales breaks the $2M mark 

2023.02 

DMA sales break the $4M mark 

2023.02 

AI Virtual Being Catherine appears in Discord 

2023.02 

AI Virtual Being product would launch 

2023.06 

More IP/content join in Decentralized game publishing structure 

To be continued…

Alpha Team’s Thoughts On The Roadmap

From what we can see, there aren’t many details in the roadmap, and the team has kept to themselves in many ways for what’s to come. Many projects don’t mind sharing goals for years ahead, but for Delysium, we find the information to be rather slender in comparison. 

Although there isn’t much to comment on regarding the future, we can see that the team has completed their assigned tasks so far, such as the playable whitepaper and virtual being popping up in discord. They have also managed to sell out their NFT collections (DMO) and launched their DMA, and started their pre-alpha test. 

Since there isn’t much information about Q3 and Q4 of 2023, it is difficult to judge whether we believe they will manage or not. We do see some of their accomplishments in their roadmap as being achievements, not necessarily goals written beforehand. Either way, it’s nice to see their NFT collections being sold out, which shows engagement and interest in the project.

Whitepaper

Link to the whitepaper: https://www.delysium.com/whitepaper

Link to the GitBook whitepaper: https://delysium.gitbook.io/delysium-whitepaper/

Alpha Team’s General Thoughts On The Whitepaper

Delysium has the world’s first playable whitepaper. Where the whitepaper is engrained in a playable minigame where you can walk around and talk to some “impersonations” of central figures in blockchain space, reading the whitepaper is done through a “terminal” in the game. Although it’s novel and maybe a bit gimmicky, the playable whitepaper isn’t necessarily to everyone’s taste. For our sake, reading the whitepaper in the GitBook format was easier.

Regarding the content of the whitepaper, it provides a comprehensive overview of their vision for a decentralized gaming ecosystem. It outlines challenges in traditional game development and how their decentralized approach can solve these issues. It then goes into detail about their decentralized structure for content creation and on-chain incentives and how their DMOs play into all of this.

The whitepaper has a whole section covering AI virtual beings and how, in broad strokes, they’re put together. It also covers the tokenomics sufficiently in a relatively short section with the help of a really good illustration of the token flow.

We wish the whitepaper would go into more detail on the battle royale game they have built specifically and elaborate more on the team as well.

Growth Implications

The Delysium team has high goals with their Delysium Multiverse. As we recently wrote about in our report on Bullieverse, we believe content and community will be defining factors in the project’s long-term success; the same goes for Delysium. Being a game publishing platform, it is detrimental that the DMOs build good games and content on the platform.

Socialnomics

Social Media Followers Count

PlatformFollower countDiscord126,821Twitter191,654Telegram20,130Youtube8,310

Socialnomics gives a better understanding of the community. It also shows how well the project communicates through the various platforms. Without further ado, let’s look at socialnomics starting with Discord.

Delysium’s Discord has over 125,000 members and consists of, amongst others, channels for chatting, announcements, official links, art, and more. They also have a channel called “meet-the-team,” which is a fun addition that we enjoy. However, the general information about the team is close to non-existent. We are also happy that they have a channel with official links. Their general chat is seemingly active and has community members engaged in chats where the admin or other team members often join in. 

Project updates and AI-talk, both through their content, but also through retweets, are some of the posts you will encounter on Delysiums’ Twitter. They also openly discuss token distributions. In February, Delysium attended Blockchain Life 2023 and received an award for the best game-fi project. Through Twitter, the project shares big and small news and announcements, and competitions from time to time. Although the Twitter account was created back in 2011, their first posts seem to have happened to be somewhere in December 2021, and since then, the team has been updating their followers monthly, quickly gaining followers and high views on their posts.

During our time looking at Delysium, we’ve noticed the project gaining over 20,000 followers on both Discord and Twitter, which is almost too good to be true.

We find the typical posts of Delysium to reach between 30-440 interactions. This equals 0.02%-0.3% of their follower base. 2022 seems to have been quite the year for Delysium, reaching out to tens of thousands of people and generating over 50,000 interactions which are 50% of their current following base and many more viewers. This is in itself great but also raises some concerns with us. Comparing Delysiums social engagement to one of the GameFi leaders, Illuvium, as an example here, makes us question the validity of their follower base.

A stand-out example is the following, here is the third reply in a tweet thread, which randomly has nearly 30k retweets. Whereas the first and second tweets in the thread got around 4k retweets. 

There are a number of tasks to be completed.

Having a higher number of this #GalxeOAT will increase your priority for $AGI eligibility.https://t.co/3GJR6fLpYz

Powered by @Galxe— Delysium – $AGI Listed (@The_Delysium) March 10, 2023

For comparison, one of Iluviums recent largest engagement post was this giveaway post by Immutable x, combined Immutable and Illuvium have nearly 650k followers, and still with a HUGE giveaway like this get 6.5k retweets: 

FIFTY @illuviumio D1SKS Giveaway!

In celebration of the launch of Illuvium: Beyond, we are giving away 30 Standard D1SKS and 20 Mega D1SKS to 50 lucky winners!

To enter:
Like/RT this post
Follow @Immutable
Enter w/ the link belowhttps://t.co/XBXCr2XWG0 pic.twitter.com/C7hTkAeLsT— Immutable – $IMX (@Immutable) March 8, 2023

They created their Youtube 3rd of December 2021. In their description, we found information about the project, making it easy for any newcomer who might stumble upon it. With 8.3k subscribers and four videos – one being in Vietnamese, we can get a closer look at what the team is working on. Their latest video of the alpha test reached 61,000 viewers, and the comments seem to be positive about the project. 

The socialnomics of Delysium, at first glance, looked good. The social media platforms were easily accessible through the project’s website. However, we did stumble upon concerning numbers in their social media in general. The project’s follower base and interactions-per-post suddenly grew significantly on Twitter in just a few months. This is also true for its other social media such as Youtube and Discord. This makes us wonder if their follower base is organic or not. As we previously stated, their Twitter and Discord have altogether gained 40,000 followers, and their Youtube channel has almost doubled in subscribers. Of course, it is possible that these could be organic numbers; however, we want to express that these numbers are unusually high.

Speculations and Connecting The Dots

AI has been around for a long time. However, it’s only in recent years that it has truly lived up to its potential. Image recognition, language models, self-driving cars, and all that jazz. This all truly became mainstream in the past ten years, and in those ten years, it has grown tremendously. Only last year, tools like Dall-E and ChatGPT became very popular and blew people’s minds with what they could do. In the blockchain space, people have wondered if there is a way to combine AI and blockchain for a long time. Recently, several areas of application have surfaced. These include process automation, smart contract creation, and data analysis and processing.

With Lucy, the Delysium team wants to integrate this digital assistant to do menial tasks on the blockchain for you. It’s, for now, the first iteration, and it will definitely be expanded in scope and functionality. What we’re curious about is if AI will not only be your personal assistant for blockchain stuff but when populating games, will it improve the gamers’ experience? To do so, we assume that the AI has to become good enough not to be recognized as an AI.

Lucy herself said that she’s the first iteration of AI virtual beings in Delysium. However, she’s not really in Delysium yet. We won’t meet Lucy in-game or on the battlefield. How long til we meet the next generation of AIs like Lucy in-game? 

Delysium has a lot of guild partners already on board. Will we see these guilds becoming DMOs building out game modes and content for their own communities?

We also took the liberty to dive deeper into the social analytics for RCT AI as well, which is Delysiums incubator and leads game development. We don’t want to understate this, so we will say it straight, this looks fishy and concerning. A picture says more than a thousand words, so here are the last few years combined of RCT AIs’ Twitter statistics: 

When we see statistics like this, it’s hard to believe that these are legit organic followers, seeing as they instantly leave post a spike, and there is a general flatline or large minus of followers on a monthly basis. 

For comparison, here are Illuviums statistics, which we consider one of the social performance leaders in the space: 

Illuvium has had constant growth with some larger growth spikes for the last few years, even though they already have one of the largest GameFi followings in the space.

As we’ve already mentioned, Delysium has had a huge growth in Discord and Twitter followers. Their subscribers on Youtube also doubled in a short period of time. We also noticed a lack of transparency regarding NFT sales, we can’t verify the data presented regarding the sales either. This puts us in a situation where it is impossible for us to either verify or refute this information. However, it is worth noting that the project attended Blockchain Life 2023 and received an award for the best game-fi project. 

Conclusion

It is very clear from the research we’ve done and what we see publicly that there is a very strong focus from Delysium on highlighting and pushing Web 3 functioning AI services and AI implementation in Web 3 games. This all stems from their incubator RCT AI. In many ways, it does seem like this push for AI has a larger priority than the game itself, at least currently. 

The future of Delysium is somewhat unknown, the roadmap doesn’t tell us a whole lot in advance, so we are uncertain about the team’s specific goals moving forward.

It’s worth mentioning that the project had little information about the team itself, and barely any information had been added on the website, whitepaper, and on Discord. Because of this, it is difficult to state whether or not we have faith in the project long-term. However, the project has an actual, playable Alpha battle royale, ehrm, or nearly playable at least. Some game companies prefer to have the game speak for itself, but for Delysium gameplay to stand out, it needs to get to a point where the game is actually playable, which it sadly isn’t  in the current state. 

For Delysium to succeed, it is detrimental that they can onboard high-quality DMOs in order to populate the “multiverse” with communities and content. 

In the future, we can expect more game modes that are more influenced by the users themselves.

Overall, we don’t currently have high convictions regarding the project of Delysium. We hope to see better, and more, communication from the Delysium team, a doxxed team and more info on their relationship with the game development studio, more openness and better information as to what the game itself wants to be and what to expect from it. Getting the game stable and playtable would be a huge step in the right direction as well.

DISCLAIMER: There are several parts of Delysium that we have not been able to verify properly and hence can’t vouch for the legitimacy of; this is primarily in terms of the ongoing DMA sale and the social-following metric exploding overnight. We consider these things red flags, and we adhere to the saying, “Don’t trust, verify.” Delysium has a long way to go in increasing transparency to gain public trust.

We’d love to see Delysium prioritize the game itself rather than it being more of an AI experiment.