The Chia NFT space is starting to stretch its legs

I haven’t been as focused on the Chia ecosystem in the last couple weeks due to some family commitments and a general need to get some stuff done. But the Chia ecosystem certainly wasn’t waiting for me because the developments coming out of the Chia NFT scene – even before there really is one – are simply amazing. We are even getting a rebrand on a gallery that hasn’t even launched yet, with XCH Gallery announcing a name change on Sunday’s Chia Twitter Happy Hour to Mint Garden.

Here are a couple projects that I am definitely going to be checking out in more detail, and each of them deserves its own post and in depth look, but I want to highlight them now in case it takes me a few more weeks to get to those posts. When Space Marmots and Marvelous Marmots announced their NFT projects, and then a number of other projects started to materialize it was looking like the Chia NFT space would be launching in a very similar way to other ecosystems, with club membership images and rare profile pictures. And this will still be a big part of it. But if you look closely, even right from the beginning, first with Marmot Coin and with Space Marmots pledge to donate 10% of proceeds to the Marmot Recovery Foundation, charitable giving has been a major component of the Chia NFT space in way that I haven’t seen before. And at least one new project is taking it one step further.

The first NFT project I want to highlight is Green Wings Compassion. This is a pure charity / not-for-profit organization that is building a number of programs in the Bay Area to help underserved communities of vulnerable people. The programs they offer are very eclectic and I’m actually not sure which ones are underway right now and which are in-progress, but it really is a great set of plans. They are currently gearing up to solicit donations and offer something called their Compassion CATs as a thank you in exchange. They are also planning on exchanging those for NFTs and have a WebGL preview of a possible game you can check out in your browser right now.

This is actually really neat, and when their fundraising campaign opens on April 22nd I plan on making a donation to their cause. I highly encourage everyone to get check this out and show them some support, either when that campaign launches or right now. This project requires a lot of trust and faith in the project team, and so a little while ago when this first came on my radar I had a brief chance to speak to their CFO and Co-Founder Danielle and get a sense of what they are trying to do.

They have a number of real world problems to solve in the State of California that have requirements like verified 3rd party identification that they think can be solved with a blockchain, such as connecting medical cannabis suppliers with registered patients. These solutions, once developed, should be expandable to other areas of interest to them such as pet care and felon reintegration. Honestly, its some really hippy stuff but you can tell they are really passionate about the possibilities. And they have put a TON of work into so far.

I’m not a particularly charitable person, nor am I all that creative so I can’t tell you for sure if these solutions will work, or how the NFT game they are developing will synergize with their charitable aims but it really is a different approach to the entire NFT and CAT space.

Another really interesting project doing things very differently that I want to highlight is the Catmos project, which I have been watching from the outside to see what it turns into into. And it hasn’t stopped changing and developing since. While only tangentially NFT related, he is developing an NFT but that isn’t the purpose of the project. What is that purpose? I am not sure, but a bunch of really creative stuff has already come out of it.

First there were his events. I didn’t get a chance to participate in any of them due to the real life stuff that has been going on for me, but I am told they were really well executed and all very unique. These events leveraged CATs and Offer files in very unique ways to gamify some of the technology coming out of Chia Network. I would love to show these off, but unfortunately they are not accessible on the catmos.io website anymore. Josh, if you’re reading this, a historical record of your events would be great. Where the NFT comes is in an NFT launch event held by Catmos where people were (from what I can tell) able to exchange their CATMOS tokens accumulated and used in the other events to pre-purchase a Cat NFT as seen in their gallery.

This is a really unique take on the CAT for NFT process that we started with Space Marmots and I’m a big fan. Unfortunately because of those family things previously mentioned I don’t have a supply of CATMOS, so I haven’t been able to check any of this out first hand yet, but I would love to get some feedback in the comments.

There is a lot more going on as well, with a number of NFT picture projects having CATs floating out there and making big promises, so I fully expect that when the NFT standard is released by Chia Network that we are going to have a flood of mints. its hard to tabulate all the open promises made right now to the Chia community, but a rough guess would suggest many thousands, and getting bigger every day. From what I can tell when the Chia NFT scene launches for real it is going to be looking very fleshed out right out of the gate, similar to how many pools where available at launch.