Bear market schmear market. We’re still out here, heads down, building.
I want to give you a candid update about what’s going on with MicroMiners NFT, take you into some of the developments we have had over the last 7 months since we began ideation, brand development, research and connecting with people, personalities and projects in the NFT space.
I will take you into our project’s NFT Product Plan, deeper into our vision with our official project Roadmap and— and officially debut the new website.
I’m one of the founders of the MicroMiners Group, which is the entity that owns the MicroMiners brand. I have worked in consumer goods, fashion apparel, marketing and digital media for the better part of the last 15 years, and now transitioning into Web3, crypto and NFTs over the last calendar year.
We have a big vision. We’re going to need your help. We talk constantly about building connections and trying to find like-minded folk who share our values. We look forward to building community and meeting the individuals who will become the important future leaders of the MicroMiners brand.
Blockchain Lifestyle
In December 2021 a bunch of my colleagues and I started talking about what we were seeing in the emerging NFT space. There was a pivotal moment where we all decided to begin ideating around launching a DeFi-focused utility project into the NFT market.
Early on, I saw that many brands, teams and concepts that were popping up in the NFT space, even ones that were minting for the equivalent millions of dollars, would not last the test of time because there was no long term brand vision. I wanted MicroMiners to be different. I started referring to it as a blockchain lifestyle brand, not an NFT project.
2018 was the year that I began thinking in much broader depth about decentralized finance, cryptocurrency investing, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Our creative team at New Copy Media has increasingly worked with fintech and financial services brands and startups over the last seven years. It was through this lens that I started to learn more about digital financial models, self-custody, trustlessness and the growing case for blockchain technology as a layer for personal and enterprise finance.
It began to become clear to me that we find ourselves at a moment in history where most of us are asking for expanded, unfettered ownership over our personal data — and control over our own financial services.
However, we are all still tethered to the centralized banking system, the traditional financial power structure that has governed the Western world for the better part of the last 400 years.
The crash of the central banking system in 2008 was a cataclysmic, destructive economic event that caused many people to suffer, lose their wealth, and in some cases even take their own lives. The original whitepaper for Bitcoin could not have been more clear in its vision. The first digital currency was created as a decentralized money system, not intended to be controlled by any one government or banking system — but instead controlled by “the people” using blockchains.
Decentralization is the core thesis underpinning blockchain technology.
DeFi — Decentralized Finance
Traditional financial sector activities, concepts and entities such as lending, borrowing, derivatives, insurance, stock exchanges and currency exchanges have all been reimagined on the blockchain in the years since 2008. What were once activities executed by brick-and-mortar, physical institutions are now being replaced with software code and web applications. This digital financial infrastructure is what is now generally called “DeFi.”
DeFi essentially refers to a collection of software projects that run on the blockchain and enable a host of digital money investment activities. In DeFi, the markets are always open, and no centralized authority can block payments or deny anyone access. Services that were previously subject to human error are now safely automated, governed by code that can be transparently inspected and monitored.
There are two main promises that underpin the thesis of decentralized finance:
a) Trustlessness: In a perfect world, there is no apparatus or system that need come between two transacting parties. There is no requirement for a bank or institution to extract wealth and lessen the value of transactions between people or businesses by needing to be an arbiter of trust or verification. Transactions essentially become “trustless”
b) Technology: There will be greater financial inclusion for everyone and a democratization of economic access unfettered by institutional gatekeeping. This is made possible by the continual and exponential improvements and advancements of blockchain technology
There is little question that a decentralized financial future is a core vision and dream of the crypto community. People are imagining a future where large swaths of the current financial system will be replaced by DeFi apps.
Ethereum & Web3
Ethereum is now the frontier of DeFi — continuing the work that Bitcoin began. While Bitcoin was the OG DeFi application because it allowed people for the first time to independently store / send digital money, Ethereum expanded on Bitcoin’s original thesis, allowing digital money to become programmable through the use of smart contracts.
It’s hard for Bitcoin maxis to admit, but Ethereum is now the oxygen of the crypto world. Other blockchains might be faster or more technically scalable, but most of the crypto world has come to the consensus that Ethereum is the blockchain to build on top of. Ethereum underpins over 90% of NFTs, DeFi and Web3. Honourable mention goes to Solana, Polygon, and Tezos — but NFTs live on Ethereum. ERC-20, ERC-721, ERC-1155 — all top NFT token protocols — are all built on ETH. Uniswap, OpenSea, Compound and countless others — all ETH based.
It was for these reasons that our technical team ultimately chose Ethereum to be the blockchain that we build our NFT products on top of.
MicroMiners is an ETH-powered DeFi startup deploying NFTs as a community-building and capitalization model. We are a Web3 company, focused on creating products that enable people everywhere to become active participants in the emerging blockchain economy.
We say this over and over again in all of our literature, in videos and on Twitter Spaces because it’s so important for even people new to the conversation to understand: when we say Web3 — we are talking about the stack of protocols, networks, frameworks and standards that allow developers to build decentralized applications.
MicroMiners Group currently mines Ethereum using POW (Proof-Of-Work) GPU miners. As Ethereum gets ready to move to POS (Proof-Of-Stake) — our team is transitioning to building the long-term infrastructure for a token staking ecosystem. Our tech team is also building a suite of DeFi education tools, entertainment & media, games, micro-services — and a metaverse marketplace.
MICROMINERS NFTs
MicroMiners NFTs are digital collectibles and artworks that allow holders tiered access to monthly rewards from our mining farm and staking ecosystem. NFT holders directly benefit through project governance powers, voting monthly on how best to allocate the accumulated ETH and crypto coins in the community rewards wallet.
MicroMiners NFTs also provide holder access to:
- Expanded lore artwork airdrops
- sector education / alpha
- exclusive access to token-gated community experiences such as MicroMiners metaverse and marketplaces
- contests, giveaways, IRL events, meetups
Founders Club Tokens
We have made 1,024 Founders Club Tokens available as we launch our community building efforts in Summer 2022. This will be an ongoing live mint.
The MicroMiners Founders Club Token or FC token as we internally call it is an NFT that grants holder’s expanded project governance voting power and recognition. It’s the initial entry-point into the MicroMiners product universe, a way for us to recognize early adopters and ambassadors, champions of our brand and vision who were with us from the early days.
We liked the numerology behind the number 1024 and wanted to create a vehicle for a project “braintrust” — a collective of veteran NFT collectors, new NFT enthusiasts, artists, investors, thought leaders and social activists that come together and act as an unofficial advisory board with great impact on project governance and brand direction. This token also acts as your presale or access list to the NFT collection mints. This is subject to change, but currently the only way to gain access to our presale list is to be a Founders Club Member and a holder of a Founders Club NFT token.
In the long run, we intend to merge the Founders Club membership with the leadership / structure of the future MicroMiners DAO.
Genesis & Exodus NFT Collections
MicroMiners NFTs are pfp avatars (like WoW, Azuki or BAYC) and 3D isometric worlds (like Otherside, Lyke Island or NFT Worlds) that feature characters, objects, locations, themes and stories from MicroMiners lore. We have had so much fun building out this fictional world and characters, with so many story arcs and reveals yet to come. For now, we are happy to finally debut the MicroMiners adventure story and IP.
50,050 MicroMiners NFTs will be made available across two collections — Genesis and Exodus.
10,026 MicroMiners Genesis NFTs will be made available for mint this fall, and 40,024 MicroMiners Exodus NFTs will be available in 2023.
That’s a lot of NFTs.
I have been criticized for wanting to be so public about the number of NFTs we are planning to bring to our ecosystem, and also for ignoring the “Floor-Price-dilutive” potential of making a large collection of NFTs available.
I will explain in some depth where the number 50,050 came from, and why we have chosen to commit to this number.
Micro-Economy: we are very attracted to the concept of creating alternative economies. We are manifesting MicroMiners to become a thriving, engaging and in-demand ecosystem of Web3 products and projects, powered by a loud and proud NFT community of fifty thousand diverse voices.
Inclusion: diversity, equality, access to opportunity, and economic inclusion are huge parts of our DNA. In that vein, we have been deliberate from early on that we want to go the opposite direction of the typical 5,555 or 10k PFP offerings— we want to make more NFTs available so more people can enter our community and engage in the economy of the project.
Lore / Story Product: MicroMiners is a classic good versus evil story — with themes of diversity, freedom, perseverance, and discovery. It is inspired by classic adventure stories such as Harry Potter, The Avengers, and Star Trek. Basically, in a galaxy in the metaverse, 1000s of elfishly cute little humanoids called MicroMiners live on an industrial mining planet. They continuously battle against an annoyingly persistent baddie named Dr. Time, fighting to find freedom, discovery and adventure. The MicroMiners persevere through obstacles and challenges, launch spacecraft and make contact with other micro-beings in their metaverse galaxy — MicroFarmers, MicroPirates and the MicroBuilders. With tens of thousands of characters featured in core MicroMiners lore, we want our audience to find themselves immersed in a deeply rich and detailed tapestry of character traits, attributes, variations and themes.
Price Strategy: deferring back to access and inclusion, it seemed straightforward to us that, at least in the early months and years of the MicroMiners project, we could create opportunity for more people to ape into the project, to purchase a MicroMiners NFT and possibly own their first ever truly utility-enabled token — by making more tokens available — with added supply creating an artificial drag on price point until the market catches up to the value of the NFT.
First Principles Thinking: we want to have outsized impact and become a big player in the NFT space, to be a project of impact and a coveted NFT in any collectors wallet. We went back to first principles big business thinking and it just seemed common-sense that having more products and more SKUs available wold have long tail effects that would dispel any sustained supply-induced suppression of secondary market pricing. More products equals more touchpoints, more sales, more trading and hopefully — more market value.
Expanded activations and gamification are on the horizon for the MicroMiners NFT product universe: collectors can search for characters with unique, rare and legendary traits; holders can create /customizing unique 1/1 character of their very own with a token-gated digital character builder; and a robust expansion of our proprietary currency and token economy, DeFi staking ecosystems, marketplace and metaverse.
Project Roadmap
We are finally going public with our roadmap. We call it in our ecosystem a vision map. Why?
Because it maps the vision of what we want to achieve with the project. We are no fools. We have been around for a long time. We have seen things change dramatically, and pivots become required. With a big vision, we expect criticism and FUD to come with the territory.
We are in the process of building our Web3 creative product studio and content strategy. We are also huge nerds who are 100% serious about attempting to release animated cartoons, videogames, a marketplace and a metaverse. We are breaking ground on partnerships in each of these areas.
I personally can’t wait until cute cuddly MicroMiners are prized jpegs in peoples crypto wallets, dolls and art toys on peoples desks and artwork festooned all over hoodies, hats, lunch boxes and phone cases.
Btw, does anyone out there think they can help our creative team build a commercially successful action-adventure video game inspired by my favourite game of all time, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time?
We are well aware of the blowback that comes with any team’s vision including a video game. Successful video games take years of development, millions of dollars in budgets and millions more in marketing. Nevertheless, it remains a top priority for our expanded vision for the MicroMiners characters and brand.
Website Launch
We are finally launching our project website. It is still a work in progress, and we are undertaking the mindset don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. We need a project home and a place for people to reference and read up on the MicroMiners vision.
Be patient with us — several sections are still in flux: the Gallery page notably does not yet have a list of NFT characters / artwork (we are still pre-collection mint); we will be adding a media / content section; and yes, we will be adding an actual list of songs to the music player ;)
We Need Your Help
We are a small team of hardworking creative professionals with unique experience building products and communities. Conversely, everything has changed in this age of Web3 — vibes, authenticity and vision rule the roost, creating relationships and lending support to people inside and out of your own community is paramount. We are committed to learning in public, being transparent, taking responsibility when we make mistakes and trying to do better. Access and inclusion remain key flashpoints in the underlying sociology of this emerging economy of just under 2MM NFT collectors, traders, builders and investors.
We basically are trying to build the next Disney, Marvel, Bloomberg and Doodles all wrapped into one powerful branded ecosystem with the capacity to onboard millions of people into crypto and NFTs over the next decade.
Our ambitions are clearly larger than the team we currently have — we are going to need your help in refining, executing and bringing the MicroMiners blockchain lifestyle brand into existence.
We can’t wait to meet you.
