#citizencosmos

  • Episode link: https://www.citizencosmos.space/orbitalapes

  • Episode name: CO, NFT, gaming & validating

Transcript of the Episode:

[00:00:00] Citizen Cosmos: Hi everyone! Welcome to our new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast! Today we have with us CO, the Community Overlord from Orbital Apes. Hey! Welcome to the show!

[00:01:42] CO Orbital Apes: Thank you for having me here, excited about it!

[00:01:45] Citizen Cosmos: Glad have you. You guys have probably the current biggest NFT project in the Cosmos ecosystem. I would love to talk all about it. Do you want to introduce yourself and maybe talk a little bit about Orbital Apes and what you guys do?

[00:01:57] CO Orbital Apes: For sure! So me, I run the social media marketing and part of the business side of the of the collection. So Orbital Apes started as NFT collection, it's relatively simple to just create the art and push an NFT collection so we decided to take it one step further and pack it like with as much utility we could give it. So that's where our idea for the market place started and we decided to create a validator in the Evmos chain and we're currently building a game for Evmos as well, so we're tying all of these different aspects to the NFT collection so as a holder of the main collection you get a piece of everything we’ll build in the future, so all the Orbital Apes NFT holders get 50% of our validator management fees. They get 20% of the marketplace fees and they're going to get a free airdrop for them to maintain the new collection for the PvP game. So with all of this we're trying to tie up the different aspects and everything we develop in the future into the main collection so holder from now we'll get access to everything we build.

[00:03:08] Citizen Cosmos: You just answered one of my next questions but it's good! So you have a lot plans, we'll talk a little bit about them later as well. I'm going to start with obvious questions. Why did you guys decide to go anonymous?

[00:03:24] CO Orbital Apes: For us this is just a matter of privacy, we don’t have any problems with sharing our identity, but if we don’t need it, we want to have apes as the core image of our brand. We’re dogs with the Evmos team because we have to go through full KYC for one of the projects we're running on Evmos, so they've seen our faces, we're in constant communication with them but for the public itself maybe in the future we would have plans of not being anonymous but for now it's just a matter of privacy. People can reach out directly to us on social networks but for now we don't feel identity is the most important thing.

[00:04:08] Citizen Cosmos: i absolutely agree with. It's just interesting that you actually had to go through a full KYC the team and here you still decide to stay anonymous but in my opinion it might be a little bit better for the team to be anonymous because that way you strip down the persona behind the person who creates the project and you concentrate on the project. What do you think about having to go through the full KYC? Were you okay with it?

[00:04:37] CO Orbital Apes: It's just a part of the process with one of the projects we're working on, so not a big issue for us.

[00:04:45] Citizen Cosmos: What's with the nicknames? Share the story! man i love the nicknames community overlord

[00:04:52] CO Orbital Apes: It's just pretty much fun names we came up with as we were looking for our nicknames. I'm using my actual nickname, people called me CO in real life so I went with that.Then, Mr. Sir is something we say a lot,we often refer to each other like that. So that's how that came up. People just chose whatever they felt was cool.

[00:05:36] Citizen Cosmos: Before we go more into Orbital Apes I was going to ask why and i've seen this a lot, 10.000 NFTs? I guess 10.000 is a kind of nice round number which makes sense psychologically I guess. But still, why?

[00:05:52] CO Orbital Apes: So 10.000 has become pretty much a standard in NFT collections. We know it's a big number and in the current market conditions it's been a hard push to reach the full mint but right now we're 8000 minted, so it's already 80% and we plan on pushing even more so I think it's a realistic number for what we're trying to achieve. Also in the scope of our project it was better for us to split, to have a lot more NFTs because this would allow more people to get into the ecosystem because for example the game in the future we're going to want a lot of users so if we have more holders we are already preparing a large user base for for the game. Also for the market place and a validators’ fees that are going to be distributed are significant and are going to continue growing in the future so it we felt it was better to split it between a lot of people instead of going the smaller collection.

[00:06:47] Citizen Cosmos: Makes sense! I do have one more intro question. Why Evmos? We also validate Evmos so we also on the same side but I would love to hear your opinion.

[00:07:10] CO Orbital Apes: We've always been big fans of the Cosmos ecosystem, we think it's amazing how everything is connected, how easy it is to move from one place to another but our experience is in solidity and then EVM, so as soon as we saw Evmos, this massive project coming to IBC we felt like that was the right way for us to go because it combines everything, like all of our experience in the EVM side with the interopperability of Cosmos. So it was perfect match, so everything we've done in the past because our team has experience in solidity could be translated directly into Evmos so it was perfect for us.

[00:07:54] Citizen Cosmos: You mentioned twice having experience in solidity. Do you want to expand on that? Did you do any projects already in Ethereum that we can talk about?

[00:08:02] CO Orbital Apes: Sure. So our teams is half devs, half designers and the devs they all worked in Silicon Valley companies like Google and Slack, and part of their coding experience comes from there. The team also worked in worked as freelancers for several EVM based projects, so that's how all of us got acquainted to EVM and all of this but this is the first time this team gets together to a solo project like not working for anybody else but this is actually something we own and we're running ourselves so it's pretty much our debut as a team.

[00:08:38] Citizen Cosmos: It's a big debut you made! A good entrance for sure and now you're saying that you guys have quite a lot of experience in big companies. Why did all those people gather together and decide to make a game? what was the idea? Why not anything else but a game?

[00:08:56] CO Orbital Apes: We've all been into blockchain and cryptocurrency for a long time so we've been looking at the type of projects that are successful, the type of projects we wanted to work in and first of all the NFT collection was like an entry point, it was a way to create a brand, to create community so this is why we chose that as a centerpiece of everything we wanted to build. And then we're all gamers, we’re super passionate about it so it was fun to see how much we could experiment because you can see other games like Infinity, for example, that started in Ethereum but that's not viable, they have their own subchain but with gas feeds it becomes impossible to do. Then we've seen several other games and other chains that as they grow like gas feeds can become expansive or the network becomes clogged so they also slow down and fade away, but we saw Evmos and the way it interacts with IBC and everything like much more solid place to develop. Everything matched perfectly, so what we decided to go for it and games are a super fun way to interact with a community and to grow a brand, so this is our path.

[00:10:08] Citizen Cosmos: I agree about gaming and interacting but let's talk a little bit more about all the things you mentioned in the beginning. You guys have a validator, let's start talking about the validator. So the idea from what you said is that the people who are community members and owners of the NFT get part of the commission that the validator earns. Is that correct?

[00:10:30] CO Orbital Apes: Yeah exactly. Through marketing and through community engagement we managed to get our validator to the top one spot in Evmos which was a massive surprise for us. It also required a lot of effort so we're happy with a result we got. So from that validator there our users stake with us because they trust the brand, they know how we operate and the reward system we've created for them, so all of the holders are getting the 50% of the management fees sent to them daily. So at the current rate I think the Apes are getting around 1.3k Evmos daily split into all of them, so every day the collection is getting some rewards. So right now if you go to mint on Orbital Apes instead you still pay the 60 Evmos mint price but as soon as you mint, you can go claim the rewards that have been staking since release. Right now they hold around three most inside so the real price you're going to pay is 57. So this is a cool system because in the future if enough time goes where Apes are not minted they're going to become free at some point or if people mint now, they're going to recover the full price of their mint. So it's sort of self-balancing system. If people invest early they're going to get their rewards and if it's going to be paid off so they can just continue getting rewards or selling it in the future or when the game releases, so it's pretty cool. Apes are always going to be generating rewards and validator right now is the main source of it but also we run the largest just NFT marketplace in Evmos and the holders are also collecting rewards from that so right now since we launched our collection, the traded volume for the apes is about 90.000 Evmos so it's significant right now and we expected to continue growing as more and if the collections come to the market place. Now have some excellent NFTs approaching Evmos so it's pretty cool, we’re excited to see how much the volume increases in the marketplace and all of this is going to benefit Ape holders in long term as volume increases, their fees increase.

[00:12:49] Citizen Cosmos: So basically what other parts are there to the economics? So you have the marketplace which generates a certain revenue and are there other parts to economics apart from being an NFT collection and being scarse which is I can guess can also be part of the economics. Are there any more things that week can say that's part of that?

[00:13:10] CO Orbital Apes: So for now things with actual monetary value are just these like this is where we're assigning value but we also have like a reward sort of reward points for people who delegate to us. We created this token OAV so people that stake with us get a monthly airdrop of the OAV token which is not something that has value in itself but it's something that people can use in the OAV store that we created. So the whole purpose of this store is to give some incentives for people and rewards for people that delegate to us and that have been loyal to us and we give something back that they can use to further engage with the brand so the OAV store contains some exclusive NFT designs they're all erc 1155 so it's shared ownership but people can use the tokens they got from staking to mint these new Apes. All of these are limited edition Apes so they're going to be there for one month and then they're going to disappear forever so you can use the OAV tokens you've got from staking with us. To mint these Apes you can use it as a profile picture, you can trade in the marketplace, and we're creating a system of scarcity by making them time limited so early stakers who minted one of the current Apes are going to have them but in the future these are going to be impossible to get unless you buy them of secondary. So its this scarcity system we created to reward holders, early holders especially because they're the only ones with access to the early releases of OAV.

[00:14:45] Citizen Cosmos: Could you kind of summarize that the NFTs in this case are a gateway point into the system that you're creating?

[00:14:54] CO Orbital Apes: Yeah, exactly. So if you own an Ape you can be sure that you're going to be part of every single project, and you're going a get rewards from every single project we build.

[00:15:03] Citizen Cosmos: If you don't mind talking about what other projects do you want to talk about? The other plans that you guys have?

[00:14:54] CO Orbital Apes: Right now the game is something where dedicating our full time right now because it's pretty complex task to achieve we've seen games, we've seen how successful they are on bull run especially once the game is new it continues to the tokens associated with the game continue to go up like crazy but this is from history we see that this is not sustainable. Pretty much every play to earn game that has released eventually collapses so this is something we're really trying to avoid. Of course like teams that release a play to earn game can get a lot of capital quick from the increase of the value of the token but then in the end you're still responsible for your community, for what you promise to the people. Having a token falling in price is not something we want to give to our customers, so we're taking our time we're trying to build a more sustainable play to earn tokanomic system so this is why we're going to continue taking our time for the game, make sure to release it once it's perfect and also one of the important things is to release it under a better market condition because even if you have the best game in the world you really do have to wait for for a good market condition for it to be truly successful if not lunching something that's not going to take off immediately is going to make it way harder to push it in the future, so we're trying to wait for every factor to align itself. Everything has done until now for collection so that's when we're going to release that's also going to be part of the reward system for the holders.

[00:16:50] Citizen Cosmos: You mentioned two things: market conditions and games failing. Let's talk a little about the games failing. First, why in your opinion, most of the other games fail? We’re talking blockchain games of course.

[00:17:04] CO Orbital Apes: The thing with blockchain is that most games have been pretty much just another way to invest. We've seen idle games where you just click send your players to do some activity but you're not really engaging with the game. So this lack of entertainment in the game is what will determine its lifespan. So as long as the tokenomics inside the game continue increasing and people are making money then it's going to make sense to play but if it's not entertaining and the rewards start decreasing that's where a game fails. Right now the key thing we're focusing on is making a game that someone would play on its own even without a reward system because we believe this is the key. This is the only thing that's going to make any game sustainable because if you purely rely on tokenomics, it's just like releasing a new DeFi protocol, not an actual game. So we're not going to go that route, we're going to make something actually fun for people to play.

[00:18:04] Citizen Cosmos: This is an interesting point. I would love to expand on that. Let's talk psychology a little bit. You say that you want to make a game which will attract people to play without having a monetary reward. I can understand that you probably have a lot of things that you're trying to avoid because of the like the things that you haven't released yet but can you talk a little bit more like in general psychology wise, what in your opinion makes people play a game in the first place if it's not receiving a reward?

[00:18:35] CO Orbital Apes: For anything you're going to need a reward. So in games for example xp systems are a pretty good expand levels are a pretty good incentive so people have leaderboards, you get to level a hundred and you're in the top. So you're competing against other people, people can see your name, people know who you are, and your NFTs are linked to you. So you're online your block chain identity goes with you into the game and you get some recognition if you do well with the game but this is one sort of reward this is purely on an entertainment and recognition level we're also going to do a full tokenomic system but by combining these two and making sure they interact properly with each other we're going to make it sustainable in the long run. Because only when you achieve a true balance in this the game can succeed. So it's going to be both like a social factor, a rewards factor and something that will keep people engaged.

[00:19:29] Citizen Cosmos: What would you say from the outside of the blockchain world, which successful games can be an example to what you're building?

[00:19:40] CO Orbital Apes: I mean we can see probably that the biggest game right now by user base is probably Fortnite or World of Warcraft and all of these games where you create an online persona and your avatar becomes an extension of you. So, for example, in Fortnite you buy some skins, WoW you can buy different cosmetics and all of this is important because you create online persona and you pretty much decorated so you get new items for people to see who you are online, what new thing you have and all this so this is important thing like the social factor combined with cosmetics you can apply. This is what creates a successful game so if a lot of people are playing and then you have the new most exclusive skin then people are going to give you some recognition for that so this is sort of the system we are going to strive towards. We're testing out with the OAV Apes because all of these are limited, they're only going to be there for one month so people are actually rushing to buy the Apes because they know if they buy this now, they're going to be the only one to have it and this is something people actually cherish.

[00:20:52] Citizen Cosmos: You mentioned market conditions before a couple of times. Would love to hear your thoughts in general. So are we in a depth of a bear market, in terrible market conditions to relate things? if you can talk more about it, I would love to hear your opinion.

[00:21:08] CO Orbital Apes: So right now everybody can see it's not the full green candles every day as we experienced in past years, but in Evmos I feel like we're in a secluded place because Evmos keeps growing. More people get interested in the coin, they're coming to the ecosystem, they're seeing their reward, all the useful features you can have when you combine EVM with IBC. So right now Evmos is in a pretty good spot, it's getting a lot of attention as the chain keeps growing. It keeps proving people what the possibilities for it are so right now like we're waiting also for the use surveys in Evmos to increase as well because it's getting a lot of attention but it's still very small compared to the potential it could have in the future. I think that after some months we're going to have a lot of people really invested into the entire ecosystem and that's when it makes sense to do something truly big. Even in these market conditions we managed to sell 80% of our collection until now in a couple of weeks from launch and it looks like we're going to fully mint out in a couple of weeks as well. So it's not terrible but if you have a solid product it will do well even in not the optimal conditions.

[00:22:28] Citizen Cosmos: For your team and for you personally, what would be the 1 market event that would trigger you?

[00:22:40] CO Orbital Apes: I don't know if it's going to be only one event. We have to see continuous growth throughout decent enough period of time because that's the only signal you can have of improving market conditions because big green candle for the month is not an indication of anything. You have to see how people are engaging with Evmos, for example. How many more wallets are created in the chain? How many more DeFi protocols exist? What kind of brands it's attracting? Right now this is not directly related to Cosmos but dYdX is building their own Cosmos chain, so this is something huge for the cosmos ecosystem and this is the sort of thing we like to see when when we're dealing with Evmos that's fully integrated into Cosmos and having these massive protocols migrating into Cosmos seeing the value. That's very good signal of what's to come in the future. So as we see more protocols migrating into Cosmos, and more people discovering the potential of these chains, that's where we can find great signa,l not one specific market event but a series of them for a sustained period of time.

[00:23:48] Citizen Cosmos: So I guess we're talking more fundamentals than technical analysis. I have a couple of questions which I'm going to look at because they were from our various chats from community members and then I also have some more questions but a little bit different. So one question was on Twitter. What are the current difficulties in the cryptoworld and the business in terms of like launching your own project in general, and maybe both the market conditions being not in the best situation?

[00:24:53] CO Orbital Apes: We've been in in crypto for a long time so we have seen projects become successful and fail and we determined what makes a project be successful. So I remember there was a point in time where any NFT collection you just had to release it and the floor price went crazy and everybody made money on that. So it was a period where people just continue to buy mint every collection and the demand for them was crazy. But right now I think the market is more mature so people know where to find value, how to determine a successful project from one that's going to fail, so right now it's not enough to just release a profile picture collection but you actually have to give the user something that they will recognize value in. Now every user is marked, people know how to do their research, they know what works and what doesn't so if you just try to launch very simple project, it's not likely to be successful so that's why the Orbital Apes a are full ecosystem. So we have different aspects that hedge the performance of the NFT collection so the validator as long as we remain in a good position is going to continue generating for our our project. The NFT marketplace we’re fully into this industry so if the NFT industry within Evmos continues to do well as our NFT then we're going to continue getting benefits from that by combining this having multiple sources of rewards and incentives. It's much more complete package for collection so I would say right now if you’re going to launch a project, make sure something unique and that has true value in itself regardless of market conditions. Something that can endure a bear market, something that can help you push through that and then of course in a bull market it's going to be amazing but you really need something that can withstand any conditions. So that's how we built the Apes, and that's why they made such a loud noise right now even with the current conditions.

[00:26:59] Citizen Cosmos: What was the most difficult thing though for your team to overcome and apart from the market conditions obviously? What was the one thing may be drawing the Apes thinking of the collection or maybe launching the validator?

[00:27:23] CO Orbital Apes: I don't know if it was just one thing. We had multiple roadblocks like the validator, for example. We started it as soon as the chain restarted so for that we had to make a pretty expensive investment into Evmos when the price was 6 to get into the active set and that was of course a completely different price than right now. So right the start our cost was massive, and then we saw all of that investment go down quickly because we wanted to be there from the start, then we had to run the valley data for OAV, a month without any rewards active because inflation was not active in Evmos so that was also an additional cost, and all of the costs of development like the artists, software engineers, and all of these. It was a long period of time where nobody was collecting any profits from anywhere, so it was all our effort waiting for the time to release, and we also ran the NFT marketplace at 0 profit for a long time because we wanted to have everything enabled for the chain to grow, and then for releasing we had to adjust to the timeline of Evmos, not necessarily our own because Evmos was still in the middle of doing upgrades for the Keplr claim issues, so there were multiple factors that had to come through for us to be able to launch. So one of the main things that was preventing us from announcing minting date or a price was the fact the IBC transactions were not enabled to pretty much the largest part of the ecosystem which is Cosmos. It was hard for them to access Evmos directly, so we had to wait for all of these, endure the cost and all the time we spent, just being patient until all the factors aligned and then we could release and it was the right choice to wait even though it was hard and even though we hit many roadblocks, it was the right choice.

[00:29:21] Citizen Cosmos: So huddling works, right? I have one more question here which was sent privately. Why did you only self-bond 0.008% of the stake? Is this okay for network security?

[00:29:40] CO Orbital Apes: That was the initial self-bond that we had to buy when Evmos was at 6 and after that instead of self-bonding more we just staked 10% of the Orbital Apes mint into the validator so this s a bit more secure for us, gives us more flexibility. Pretty much every validator keeps a really low self-bonded amount because of this. It gives you more security, flexibility but it it's just like that. We want to keep the fund safe so from anything in this way by just staking to the validator, we can do that and all of our wallets are public so people can see that we're not only staking 10% of the main funds to our valudator as we promised but right now we have around 300.000 Evmos stake to smaller validators in this page so people can go to the addresses that are connected to the validator there and they can see how it spreads. I think we're currently staking to 15 other validators, maybe the list has grown but this is pretty much our way to support the ecosystem because we did realize our validator grew to a pretty large size. So initially our plan was to stake with Evmos to continue growing but right now we don't feel like that's the most responsible thing to do, so everything we earn from all the rewards are staked with other people. We choose to stake with validators that are providing something to the Evmoschain, to the Cosmos ecosystem. So for example, a big part of our stake is with ecostate that created the restake tool that a lot of people use, then we deliver it to several other validators. This is something pretty cool for us because we get to engage with a lot of teams so whenever they've come to us sometimes people need a little bit of help to remain in the active set so we discussed the project, and then we know what they're going to be adding to the Evmos chain and it's amazing to be in this position where we can help others and we know what they're doing to help the chain so it's perfect. We love supporting other people because we really get to see inside of everything that's being built for Evmos.

[00:32:12] Citizen Cosmos: I love the answer, thank you! I think you guys are doing a very cool job to decentralize the stake. I have a couple of questions, it's going to be harder to ask you since your team is anonymous but I'm still going to try. You did mention that your team has worked with Google and Slack, but how did you resonally get into crypto?

[00:32:47] CO Orbital Apes: I think all of us got into crypto in a different period. Me personally, I started in 2018. I started with Bitcoin, that was my first purchase and then as soon as you're invested into something that you keep track of it and you keep looking for more about it so I think that was my entry and then I started looking into other protocols like getting a load to DeFi into NFTs. So by investing in them you get to engage in a much deeper level than people just read the news because you have something and you have a stake so it's important to you and this is pretty much how all of the team got involved. Some have been in crypto from like 2015 so they're much more experienced. We're all pretty confident in the crypto space, we know what's going to be the key success factor so it's pretty cool to also have a full team of people that you can talk to about different strategies, about different events because everybody has experience. Combining all of this experience into one project has been massively useful for us.

[00:34:06] Citizen Cosmos: What's your personal worst buy so far since 2018?

[00:34:10] CO Orbital Apes: I'm not sure what was the worst buy. Right now everything is pretty toughbut I don't think there's been one complete fail. You can always pull out. We had some UST, luckily we were able to to sell it quickly as soon as it broke back. We were also actually huge fans of Luna before but luckily we didn't hold it at the time of the crash.

[00:34:54] Citizen Cosmos: I guess UST was one of the worst hits for everybody. Personally, it was a big hit for our project, we had five years worth of money in UST and then it was a big hit, so I totally understand. What was the internal motivation behind creating Orbital Apes?

[00:34:06] CO Orbital Apes: So a lot of the team worked as freelancers for other people and we saw how their projects were becoming super successful and they grew into actual companies in the cryptospace and all of this, so we wanted to be able to work on what we really wanted. So the Orbital Apes is a company like every other business where we're using our skills what we have to provide value to people and we’re running a company around this. We're going to continue pushing our skills to anything we can do, maybe we get into the maybe we get into DeFi, maybe validating other chains. I wouldn't say it's something novel, something that will change the lives of people but at least right now we're doing our responsibility of keeping the network, secure in helping decentralized although we do take a big chunk of the chain, we’re doing efforts to decentralize, we're supporting other teams and just yesterday on the upgrade it was completely smooth, the V6 of Evmos happened and our validator there was up and running perfectly on time, we didn't miss a single block in there so it's perfect. It makes us feel better to see that we can prove to people that their funds are in a safe place, that we're going to have one of the best up times in the network and that's part of what we're doing for the people. This is a business, this is our baby and we're going to continue running it as a business and growing it as much as we can.

[00:37:45] Citizen Cosmos: I think it's a very great and fair answer! I'm going to ask one last question to you. What keeps you personally motivated?

[00:34:06] CO Orbital Apes: I would say running an NFT collection is pretty tough. At some point you have to be constantly engaged with community, constantly developing new things, you’re pretty much in the hands of how the market is behaving, how market psychology works so it's tough but once you have success in a collection that's more than enough to keep you going because if you know you were successful in this than you know what else to do in the future. And it's also pretty fun. I run the community so getting to interact with a lot of people in Discord is super fun. I know a lot of the people that are in the day score and there's some that are pretty much there 24/7 so talking to them, getting their feedback about the project, listening to suggestions is also super helpful because even though we are a big team it's super useful to hear the the ideas of the people that are actually using our product and are invested on it because first of all, they give us a lot of different ideas of what to do in the future. We've taken a lot of their suggestions and we actually implemented them for the whole ecosystem and you also see when when people react positively towards a new update that you did to the market place or towards a new Ape design that you're released in the OAV store. All of this is super rewarding and fun, it's super fun to see the reactions of people when you release a new snique peek or something like that. Working in crypto you have all the freedom and flexibility you want.

[00:40:37] Citizen Cosmos: To be honest with you I don't get many guests who are so business driven and I love that because it's a motivation in itself to succeed. I think success is a very good motivation. Thanks for the conversation, it’s been a huge pleasure!

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