Editor’s Note: This is an article published in full without edit from Andreas Greimel, who goes by Acevail on Discord. I believe Marvelous Marmots is a viable project so in order to prevent a conflict of interest with my project Space Marmots I have offered this team, and any other serious NFT project the space to promote their project.
We are proud to release the first roadmap to the Marvelous Marmot Kingdom. In this article, we want to explain where this project started and what our future plans are. Please feel free to provide feedback and ask questions on Twitter or in our Discord.
The nameless road in the west
This is where the Marvelous Marmots project started.
It all began with a tweet by Chia’s @mouthy, where he expressed the wish to have his own Marmot NFT. Thomas, now the Royal Artist of the Marmot King, created the following first-ever Marvelous Marmot!
Since people seemed to like it, we started a Twitter account and shared some random marmots there. Our most successful tweet to date is our marmot astronaut, awaiting the arrival of the Space Marmots.
It was always the plan to bring them on the Chia blockchain as NFTs, but since the Chia NFT standard was far out, we didn’t develop a detailed plan.
Golden Marmot Ticket Offering
The release of CATs and offer files on Chia just two weeks ago made us think of the possibility to issue tickets that could be traded for a Marvelous Marmot NFT as soon as they could be created.
Thus the Marmot King, 1028th of his line, issued a limited number of 100 Golden Marmot Tickets on Jan 16 and accepted offers through a custom inbox on marvelousmarmots.com two days later. After five days, all 100 tickets had been sold.
We were often asked why we picked this form of accepting offers:
It was possible, it sounded like fun, and we didn’t know what price to ask for anyway.
In hindsight we realized that this form of token offering resulted in some scrutiny and questions whether this project was trustworthy. So we would probably not use it again in the future.
The First Edition of Marvelous Marmots NFTs
As stated above, the first edition of Marvelous Marmots NFTs will comprise 100 pieces, one for each Golden Marmot Ticket owner.
We plan to release it as soon as the Chia ecosystem allows that. Our current target is around April 2022.
First Edition – Theme
We decided to further explore the possibilities of the Marvelous Marmot kingdom.
The marmots of the first edition will represent society in this Kingdom, including nobility, knights, (DEX-)merchants, craftsmarmots and (Chia-)farmers. Our goal is to offer a variety of marmots while maintaining style, diversity and cuteness factor.
The marmots will be assigned to one of the 4 major factions/houses, each one inspired by a different kind of real world marmot. These houses will be represented by color scheme and iconography. This provides the opportunity to find your favorite faction but also might be the basis for different events or special editions in the future.
But keep in mind, while there are different factions, the overall unity of the marmot kingdom under its benevolent king is never in question, the houses competitions always marked by goodwill.
First Edition – Minting
We plan to use a fair queue based minting process.
- We will queue up all ticket owners in a random order. When it is your turn, you get an offer for a random Marvelous Marmot
- If you are happy with your drawn Marmot you can accept the offer
- If you are unhappy with your draw or hope to get a better one, you are free to skip. If you skip, you will be placed back to the end of the queue. When it’s your turn again, you will receive a new offer.
The details are not fully fletched out. But we consider this process fairer than a first-come-first-serve or a random draw.
For the people who purchased a golden marmot ticket, but are unhappy with the direction the first edition is going, we have the option of an alternative queue with a few everyday/modern marmots, as they decided to support our cause without knowledge of the choices being made afterwards.
The Second Edition of Marvelous Marmots NFTs
You will surely agree that 100 marmots is not enough for world domination. Therefore, we plan a Second Edition somewhere around in the summer of 2022.
The exact number of marmots still has to be determined. We will discuss that fact with our community to meet your expectations here.
We would also love to extend the Marvelous Marmot Kingdom into an even richer marmot society, from the highest lord to the lowest peasant.
But two things are for sure:
The First Edition will always be visually special, so there won’t be any confusion regarding its rarity. Also, owners of the First Edition will get early access to the Second Edition, be it by an airdrop or some form of exchange mechanism.
Final Remarks
Since our Marvelous Marmot Tickets have already been sold out, we can’t give you access to the first edition if you’re not already a Golden Ticket owner.
But if you are interested in the second edition, feel free to follow the progress of the Marvelous Marmots on marvelousmarmots.com, on Twitter or in our Discord!
This used to be a good blog, now all we get is nft Ponzi schemes 😞 Sad.
Yes. Since Chris joined the SM1 team everything seems to be focused around that. Frequency of article releases has also gone down by quite a bit in the last few days.
And “Ponzi scheme” describes exactly what I am thinking about it. There will be lots of tears all around once reality settles in. I hope Chris can recover from that.
Would an article addressing my reasons for joining Space Marmots be a good idea? Mostly I feel the same way as you about the vast majority of NFT projects and I wanted to see how hard it was to do one where you actually deliver what you promise. But I could address that directly if its a good idea.
I think the best idea is to return to the technical grassroots and focus on what’s happening at Chia on the business and technological side. Every article about Space Marmots feels a little bit like a commercial, even though objectively it may not be and you surely don’t intend it to be. Maybe a little less focus on NFTs would be a good thing – there are certainly lots of things happening at Chia.
I would be interested in a comparison of the different DEXs. What are the pros and cons of hash.green and offerbin. Hash.green seems to have quite low trade volume. Offerbin seems to have more, but they are not that transparent about statistics. Get both of them to step up their game and close those gaps.
As for NFTs, I’d really love to read an article about NFTs, their perceived value and their real value. By real value I mean the actual value they are contributing to something (like MRMT was sponsoring marmot NGOs). You might also call that utility. Right now it seems the community mistakes scarcity for value. If I mint a new coin with a cap of 50, it’s a scarce resource. But still it doesn’t have any real value. Discord and social media activity may raise the perceived value (by coin/NFT creators shilling them), but does it also raise actual value or does it just create a giant bubble? Unfortunately due to your Space Marmots involvement I don’t think you’ll be able to objectively do such an article yourself, you may need to get someone external to write it.
Those are both excellent suggestions. I agree about the conflict, and that was my main concern about joining the project. But I didn’t think I was able to objectively cover NFTs anyway because after months of reading up about it, even owning one, I still didn’t get it. And I’m not sure I do now, but at least I’m talking regularly to people that do.
I do want someone to write an objective piece about NFTs for the site, but I’m honestly not sure there is anyone objective who actually understands both the technology and the people who are interested in them.
I’m not sure there is anyone on this world who really gets NFTs yet. They are still something new and it remains to be seen what their real use will be in the long run. 😉
What protections do you have in lace for liability?
If this is a question for the Marvelous Marmots team then that would be best asked in their Discord server I think. If its for me, then my plan to avoid liability is to do everything I promised exactly as promised.
People crying about NFTs and perceived value and so on are highly underestimating the intelligence of Chris and this team. You’re not enlightening anyone with your droning on about value and yada yada yada… Chris is covering all he can in Chia. Guess what? CATs are hot and exploding right now. We need NFTs covered because their can be scams out there and having a source to look deeper into who, what and when of these CATs is good to see. Don’t like this article or ones like it, just read something else. Sheeeeshh, instead people cry and moan and attempt to make their opinion more Valuable than it really is…. now that is some fake value being pumped as real value.