Hello Marmoteers!
We have been quiet the last couple of weeks, but we have not been idle. We have been working on a lot of the back-end processes and have made quite a bit of progress. We are not yet in a position to release everything, but a lot of it is in the polish stage and will be public fairly soon. We have now successfully tested our on-chain storage and provable uniqueness mechanisms and are confident we will be able to meet our stated commitments.
Art
Drew has been hard at work on the Marmots, backgrounds, accessories and weapons and we have produced enough to begin experimenting with combining them automatically. We are going to continue to produce art assets through the development period and won’t be producing the final Space Marmots until much closer to Minting Day so we can have the most assets and variations available as possible.
Community Building
We are going to start running giveaways for the rest of the SM1 Marmot coupons shortly. Our goal is to have them all distributed well ahead of Minting Day so that all 300 holders can get in on the action. Because of that we are also announcing the Marmotverse Social Club which will be a private community available only to owners of Space Marmots or other Marmotverse NFT properties. Initially this will take the form of a private Discord community, but membership in the Marmotverse Social Club will also bring with it early access to future projects and services, direct access to the team once the community has grown as well as discounts on Marmotverse Merchandise. That’s right, we are also announcing work on the Marmotverse Merchandise shop.
The Marmotverse Merchandise shop will offer a selection of high-quality collectibles and clothing that we are planning on offering in two flavours – Generic Marmotverse images not tied to any particular NFT as well as custom prints for Marmotverse Owners of their specific NFT. You will need to own a Marmot to order merchandise with that Marmot on it. This is going to create some unique technical challenges so it will likely launch in two phases. Once we have secured our supplier and are happy with the quality of the merchandise, we will announce more details on the shop.
Technology
Speaking of technical challenges, we have the section we have done the most work on so far – the technical products. We have a lot of updates here. First, we have developed a “raw data explorer” that will allow Marmotverse owners or potential buyers to query the blockchain for the launcher ID of the NFT to read the image data directly off the blockchain. This is currently working against Testnet10 and we are currently just polishing up the code and developing WAF rules before launching it publicly. We have also completed development on our Random Marmot Generator that will combine the image layers randomly along the rules we have set. This has been tested successfully and there are currently 100 proto-Marmots in existence that will never see the light of day. We have also mostly completed the Unique Marmot Naming Generator. That’s right. Each Marmot will carry a unique name that easily identifies it that will be part of the Traits.
We are also currently hard at work building our Automated Minting system. This should allow for both SM1 and new Space Marmots buyers to submit transactions to for their NFTs without waiting on the Marmotverse Team to do each one. We are still going to be available for support, especially at the beginning but because we have made the commitment to service the existing SM1 owners before new sales, we would obviously like that process to be as smooth and seamless as possible on Minting Day.
And finally, the Discord verification system. Originally, we had only planned on announcing and opening the Marmotverse Social Club when minting was ready and we could verify ownership of the NFT itself using Chia native DID tools. But we think we have developed a similarly robust system for verifying ownership of an SM1 token before we have even opened minting. We have some strict requirements for the Social Club, in that it does not distract from the primary objectives of having on-chain NFTs available on Day 1 but also that ensures that only current Marmotverse owners are represented and that checks are in place. Because we think we have a working plan and we are ahead of our technical roadmap we have begun development on that solution. Once this is done you should be able to verify your ownership of your SM1 tokens without having to send a portion of it away. We will have more updates about this in the very near future.
Conclusion
As you can see we have been hard at work, and things are starting to pick up. We will probably be providing updates on each of these items independently over the next couple of weeks so stay tuned, especially for the SM1 giveaways coming up. If you have read this far, you should know that the first one planned out will be open to farmers on XCHPool in partnership with them, so if you are looking for a pool to join right now that might be a good call.