Hi Team,
- Introduction
Since the last update, a lot has happened as always, but the space continues to grow and we continue to grow with it. This time around I had the opportunity to fly to Amsterdam to meet with our developers about the design of the app. About 12 months ago this type of trip was not in the spectrum of possibilities due to the size and budget of the company. The city was beautiful and chatoicly- organized, meetings were in a small town near the city and they went great, we got to discuss internal down the road development problems that could come up with the development of the app. I got to learn a lot and clarify my view of the project in general. Here is a cool pic from one of the bridges connecting the city.
Since the original post of the new NFT collection, a lot of things have changed on the technical side for the app, impacting the Ludus Ecosystem in ways I could not think were possible when we started this NFT journey.
So let's start from the top, why are NFTs so important?
Yes, NFT stand for a non-fungible tokens, but what can they do?
NFTs can interact with smart contracts, meaning they can be part of a set of rules in a smart contract.
Now we can program the rules within the contract to do what we want, like giving instructions to a coffee machine for a cappuccino(more info about nfts and smart contracts).
2. Recent developement
2.a How did it start?
Some of you might remember that I told you a story about my cool cat here minted 142 days ago.
When the journey started I decided that I would not make any sales and will study their process from development to community, and I learnt that transparency and giving back to your community is the best thing you can do to your project. I am not assuming we will have the same success they did, but I can assure you that success does not come by accident.
So we decided to use the Athlete NFts as fuel to burn the supply of our tokens and allow a fair distribution to the people that have been supporting us since the beginning by holding our Ludus and Genesis NFT supply.
2.b How will the burn work?
The burn can be initiated with either of our set of regular ERC-20 tokens (Ludus) or with the ERC-721 NFTs (Genesis Collection).
A simple diagram of the process looks like this:
The burn contract that will receive the burnt tokens will be locked for a 6 month period.
After the lockup period is completed, the Ludus Foundation will be responsible for distributing the tokens with small constant unlocks towards the already pre-determined artists and developers.
A more in depth table to be shown with the release of the new whitepaper which will contain the most important funding of all, the development of the Ludus App.
2.c What is the exchange rate?
The exchange of Athlete NFTs will be possible in two different ways: Genesis NFT x Athlete NFT and Ludus x Athlete NFT.
Genesis (old) NFT x OG Athlete (new) NFT
2.d Ludus x (new) AThlete NFT
The next problem to solve will be the price of Ludus for one Athlete NFT.
The biggest reason we chose to distribute the new collection in exchange for Ludus is that we wanted to achieve a fair distribution within our holders while maintaining a fair sale for the rest of the new users.
The highest bid auction mechanism allow us to achieve this goal.
With a high starting of Ludus per NFT then decreasing as the end of the auction and the NFTs run out. This will maximize the deflation feature within the token during the sale, burning thousands of tokens in the minting process.
It will decrease supply, while the sale of the NFTs and marketing will increase demand.
2.f What can the Athlete NFT do?
The main utility of the NFT is that it will be used as a premium user profile inside the Ludus App.
Meaning it will unlock all the premium features in the app.
Users will also be able to stake their NFT in the upcoming Ludus Income pools with the release of the application.
Another cool feature that your NFT will hold will be your ELO rating as a trait that will be autamically updated after a match on the Ludus League inside of the Ludus APP.
You will be able to see your NFT in your Ludus wallet.
3. What is the current status of the NFT design?
Since the original post, there has been an immense amount of effort and progress by everyone working behind the project.
However, the main goal of creating a character that represents our platform in the best way possible has not changed, here the progress we have made so far:
Working with a professional artist like Roberto has been an incredible experience that has taught me a lot about art.
This were some of the first backgrounds that he came up with after the first meeting and teaching him about NFTs and how the blockchain worked.
Then after showing him some other collections and the general idea we got our first digital drafts that were looking something like these:
Though it started to look great at the close, when zoomed out it started to lose meaning because of the amount of small detail around the head.
So we decided to try again and evolve it to a simpler version, check out the first result:
Then started with some traits and adding colors, it started to look something like these:
Add some more traits…
Started working on different details and lines:
3.b Ludus Roots
However, at this point, we need to make a choice:
We could have continued with this design but there was a feeling that we were losing the roots of the artist along the way, and feared that we ended up with a simple but soulless design, which would not be any different from the rest of thousands of collections out there.
Hence we decided to take a step back and choose a new direction from here.
We went once again back to the drawing board and started to analyze where along the way we lost it, where did we lose the main essence of the character?
After discussing it with the whole team, we went back to the roots of the character and the artist said that he could work on some new drafts and new art to use as a reference:
This time a character with more defined lines and a closer look, with a different side profile from the shoulders up.
More in depth shadows and color work
More creative traits
as well as different angles and different perspectives
more traits and even masks
4. Conclusion
Where does this leave us?
TLDR:
We have decided to push back the launch for 3 more weeks as a consequence of the art improvement and consideration for bringing the more value to the current holders, with a new launch week date of 12/12/21.
There will be more updates to follow regarding the 2.0 version of the Athlete coming tomorrow, with the new version of the white paper that will shine a light on the technical details of the distribution and more.
To conclude:
The main goal is that the sale of the Athlete collection will fund the development of the Ludus app which will start the distribution of the Ludus foundation towards the development of the app.
It has been nothing but growth the past quarter, but with growth comes change, and the dream for Ludus slowly but surely starts to become a reality. The amount of smart and caring people behind the project is what has kept this project going as it continues to grow through the hate and difficulties that the space can bring. One step at a time.
-jose
