DOGAMÍ – Hidden gem or set of red flags?

TL;DR

• Dogami has completed an extended seed funding round of $7M led by XAnge (in addition to the previous $6M)
• Community size and community engagement does not seem to align properly
• NFT trading activity seems low for the most recent announcements
• There is little to no market response on announcements
• The DOGAMÍ whitepaper goals have not been met (yet)
• XAnge might have invested in a new timeline with new goals yet to be established
• DYOR before making an investment decision, further investigating potential red flags

DOGAMÍ’s Extended Seed Funding

DOGAMÍ recently published their 4th community update, informing the community of the 4 total CEX listings, the new community council, the availability of the game (Doga House) to NFT holders and completion of a $14M seed round. This seed round has been completed by acquiring an additional $7M in funding in their extended seed round led by venture capital firm XAnge. This follows their primary seed round of early 2022, where they secured over $6M in their initial seed round, with Ubisoft being one of the core stakeholders. In addition to this, DOGAMÍ announced they will be spending this additional funding towards:

• A new game — the concept of which we will present this year
• Marketplace improvements UX improvements and features such as breeding
• Onboarding (the focus being on developing new onboarding processes and facilitating the creation of wallets to make it easier for web2 audiences to enjoy our NFTs and Web3 tools)
• Partnerships (both physical and digital)
• Creation and launch of a DOGAMÍ comic book

With this being an exceptional achievement, the market does not appear to be following the same positive trend. With such an influx of investors, the market's token price, market cap, and daily traded volume should reflect this. Despite Dogami's recent launch of a new website, there appears to be a total lack of market response. To investigate the discrepancy between such announcements and the current market reaction, it appears that diving deeper into this project is desirable to identify potential red flags and make a properly nuanced investment decision.

To familiarize yourself with DOGAMÍ prior to reading this article, it might be advisable to read the extensive Balthazar report on this project.

DOGAMÍ Stakeholders

Diving deep into DOGAMI starts with a closer look into its stakeholders. They demonstrate an impressive set of partnerships, as displayed on their website.

To validate the stakeholders in their funding rounds, Crunchbase is the main source to gather financial data. Visiting the company profile of DOGAMI, Ubisoft and XAnge are indeed listed as stakeholders. One connotation to take note of, is that data for seed funding rounds is often self-reported on Crunchbase. The question arises to what degree this data is verified.

DOGAMÍ can be found on the official portfolio page of XAnge, and multiple posts on their investment in DOGAMÍ can be found on LinkedIn. There is no content originating from Ubisoft itself concerning the investment in DOGAMÍ, but this Twitter post concerning a quote by Nicolas Pouard has shared by DOGAMÍ. Therefore, the actual role of Ubisoft in partnership with DOGAMÍ is unknown.

To strenghten the story behind DOGAMÍ funding, a request was sent to both Alexis Du Peloux (representative of XAnge) and Nicolas Pouard (representative of Ubisoft Strategic Innovation Lab) for their validation of these investments and their opinion on the future of DOGAMÍ. Unfortunately, neither of them has responded to this date.

DOGAMÍ Socials

DOGAMÍ proposes an extensive community on their website, with 40 full time employees, 200K+ followers on social networks, 50K+ discord messages per month and 24K NFT’s sold out.

Discord | Twitter | Instagram | Youtube | Reddit

To validate the actual size of the proposed community and the actual community engagement, an analysis of the available DOGAMÍ platforms gives us the following statistics:

There is a significant disparity between the number of users/followers and their interaction on all platforms. Without implying the presence of bots, this raises a potential red flag regarding community size and engagement.

NFT Engagement

DOGAMI’s NFTs can be accessed at either their own marketplace or at Objkt.com, with the total collection being comprised of 12.000 NFT’s. The daily traded volume is approximately 2160 Tezos (XTZ), which translates to roughly $1700. This daily traded volume is not representative for the community size and recent annoucements that DOGAMÍ has made. This low NFT engagement could indicate another potential red flag concerning this project.

Google Trends

Over the past year, the Google Trends data for DOGAMÍ shows a strong decline. Comparing the data to other popular NFT Metaverse games such as Phantasma shows additional declining general interest.

Market Response

The Tradingview daily chart, going back to March 2022, shows a significant decline over the course of a year (based on the Gate.io price). The price went from over $0.50 in March 2022 all the way down to $0.012 now. This confirms a decreased interest for this project over the year.

DOGAMÍ posted the news article mentioned earlier, informing the community of the $14M total funding received after closing the extended seed round led by XAngi closed for $7M on December 13th, 2022. According to Dow Theory, the market should reflect this significant accomplishment, but the only response in the chart is a short-lived pump (one-hour candle) followed by a further decline in the price. The weak response to such news is another indication of a possible red flag.

Market Statistics

According to CoinMarketCap, the token price at time of writing of this article is $0.01221. The current market cap is unknown (due to the circulating supply being unknown). In addition to this, the daily traded volume is only $10K. This volume seems exceptionally low and does not seem to be in line with such positive announcements and the proposed community that DOGAMÍ has. This could further strengthen the previous suspicions of potential red flags.

Verdict

According to the DOGAMÍ whitepaper, the following goals should have been achieved last quarter:

The Petaverse is all around us—Q4, 2022

• Launch of immersive social experience
• Launch of first PVP experience
• Introduction of selective cross-breeding
• Introduction of geospatial gaming features

So far, these goals have not been achieved. Additionally, the goals for Q3 2022 state that DOGAMÍ mobile games would have been released. Momentarily, the only game available seems to be Doga House, which cannot be found on the App Store or Play store and seems locked behind owning an NFT (which makes it unable to determine the current user count at this time).

To summarize the findings, there are a lot of potential red flags on this project:

• Misalignment of user/follower count and community engagement
• Low NFT trading activity
• Little to no market response to significant news announcements
• Declining token price over a substantial period (one year) and low daily traded volume
• Unmet goals in whitepaper timeline

There remains to be a significant discrepancy between the current Dogami token price and the amount of funding they have secured. This might mean that XAnge has invested in an extended timeline with new goals yet to establish. This project could seem to be a hidden gem waiting to explode when they set up and accomplish new goals shortly, but these indications of red flags should be considered when such plans get published.

Please keep in mind the findings above to make a nuanced investment decision on DOGAMÍ. And as always: DYOR!

Written for Flagship by Luuk van Driel