NFTs are dead, long live NFTs?

Intro

When we started envoverse earlier this year, the whole crypto scene was in spasmodic emotional overdrive. The BAYC craze was peaking and the ETH coin was at $3,000. Before that, NFT projects like the Pudgy Penguins or the CryptoPunks ranked in millions of dollars in only a few days.

We knew, that we were not deep enough into the scene and a little bit late to the game. Also, our goals have been different from the beginning.

We put emphasis on the utility and focused on that: “Raise money to fight climate change“. Our co-founder and ubergeek Danish designed a nice Blender 3D character for the Metaverse – the ENVO – and we sketched our first draft of the whitepaper. When we were ready, Russia invaded the Ukraine and the coins started to go downhill. Crypto shifted, together with the stock market, within hours to a lower gear.

So, dropping 10k characters for the Metaverse led to around 300 mints and we decided to limit the over all amount of ENVOs to 333.

Now we are preparing our 3rd NFT drop after we did some technical testing and smaller art projects to get deeper into NFTs and the crypto space altogether.

What is an NFT really?

An NFT is an entry into the public database (ledger) of a blockchain. As a non-fungible token, that is stored in public, non-fakeable and capable of carrying information, it was (in our understanding) abused from the beginning by the marketing machines out there. So we coined the phrase: “the NFT is not the art, it is only the certificate that you own the art”.

In that manner, we do think that NFTs are just starting out as a technology and that the cleansing of the past weeks will trigger better implementations of it.

Our take on it remains: NFTs are a great tool to hand out receipts for payments. On the long run, they might be used by the tax authorities for exactly that reason: not fakeable, hard to loose.

New round, new blockchain, less carbon

The upcoming NFT on METIS is now our (small) next step to implement more of what we learned since the beginning of the year.

So far, we have:

1. Defined the purpose of the NFT (aka. utility): save the world!
2. Donated money to an Ukrainian artist, who then made us an unique picture for the drop
3. Created a smart contract, that works on the METIS chain
4. Coded the pages that will start the minting process
5. Moved some money to METIS, just so we can test our own food

Additionally – and I think that is the most important learning so far – people will not just mint, because your utility is good (there is no better utility, that saving the planet, IMHO), but because others will recommend the drop in their channels.

Marketing is everything (if you have solid artwork)

With successful drops in the past few weeks, we see a common denominator in getting your crypto project out to the world: the opinion leaders (or at least some of them) out there must recommend it and even buy into it. Strong wallets buying your NFT or using your service, analytical minds with strong follower numbers mentioning you… activities like that must take place.

We have seen it in goblintown.wtf and even borderline rug-pulls like azuki.com – great art, but more importantly promoted by strong names. That second part is now our task for the next days to come.

By choosing the layer-2 solution $METIS, we also take a little risk, because it takes some dedication to integrate it into your wallet and it requires trust into the team of that layer-2 chain – but it was necessary. METIS is using so much less carbon, that we had the feeling we need to go that route.

In order to reach new audiences we have now teamed up with cool names in the crypto scene to help us get the word out. This is the first milestone of prepping an NFT with the help of partners on the marketing side:

Especially METIS experts like the UnderworldDAC or PEAK Finance are crucial this time around. We are now creating traffic and educational content like this to get your eyeballs and your brain on this coming drop.

We are also thankful to our small, but strong community on the envoverse Discord, that supports us every step of the way – to name a few:

The second part will be coming soon with more marketing analysis.