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Today on the Pudcast we chat with the guys from LunaKiddy.art! My apologies in advance for the audio quality. For some reason V’s connection wasn’t doing that great. Hopefully it’s not too hard to understand. I typed out a little of the conversation if you would rather read instead.
The gen 2 collection will launch November 26th on Knowhere.art.
If you would like to join the LunaKiddy team, they are looking for a developer. Check out the job posting at Intern Capital or hit us up!
And now, part of a transcript…
F: Tell us about the next generation of LunaKiddy!
Vin: Collection two launches November 26th. If you follow us, you’ll know the first collection was 256, and collection two will be another 256 NFT’s. We are very excited about it. There will be some slight changes to collection two. The way we launched collection one was based around the rarity concept. We figured that we have a very small collection and every kiddy is unique, so we did away with the rarity concept.
F: The whole LunaKiddy story is cool, tell us about that.
Vin: The whole LunaKiddy story was fun to create something cute and something to do with the moon and the Luna ecosystem. There weren’t a whole lot of cute family kid friendly nft’s so we decided to make something kid like. So we were thinking Luna, and kid friendly, and came up with LunaKiddy. Then we took it a step further and came up with Lunakiddy trying to get to the moon.
The second collection will have to do with the things the LunaKiddy finds once they get to the moon. There’s some aliens and all sorts of other friends the LunaKiddy will meet that continues the story.
F: I like the idea of having a second collection and being able to switch it up and not be tied down to a rarity thing. That can easily turn into a convoluted mess sometimes.
Vin: In speaking about rarity, it makes sense in a 1000 or 2000 piece collection and you give them an element of surprise every time they mint and incentivize people to want to mint them all. But with LunaKiddy each one is being drawn manually, it’s not a generative piece of art. So if we only have 256 pieces, then everyone is unique.
If we release 256 and only 128 get minted and most of them are common, then we are restricting the art. If we want to put certain features on a piece but can’t because it will then change the rarity, we feel that is restricting the art and the artist. We feel it’s better to make use of the 256 and release them this way rather than repeating our mistake from the first mint.
We didn’t want to repeat our mistake in collection one. In collection one we said common would be 50% of the mint, and the commons don’t have a lot of accessories, which resulted in a lot of plain kiddies. We don’t want people to feel that their LunaKiddy isn’t interesting, and each kiddy is drawn by the artist not generated, so that’s what we’re going for with collection two. We’re not going to be restricted by worrying about the rarity.
F: How was the initial mint experience using the Knowhere candy machine?
Vin: We were one of the earlier mints on the candy machine so it didn’t have a lot of features. At the beginning we did a one hour whitelist then a public mint. There was a 15 minute blackout period with some issues, but the knowhere team got it fixed and then everything was pretty smooth. It was overall a good experience with them.
F: Is it just you two or are there others involved on the team?
BossLee: We have four, it’s listed on our site. We have a couple community members and a couple artists.
Finn: You are based out of Singapore and Malaysia. They seem to be pretty big in the NFT game right now, that’s awesome.
BossLee: I really like the concept of NFTs right now. It allows a lot of digital artists to showcase and sell their art. One part I would just like to add is a lot of our friends are getting into NFTs. They aren’t doing large collections, or even small collections like ours. They are doing 5 pieces of fine art drawing where they do it digitally on illustrator and put it up on Open Sea or any other platform.
I was telling them that in the past they might find it hard to get their work into galleries, but right now the galleries are now online and they can be certified real they can sell their art. NFTs are changing the game of the whole landscape. Now NFT getting tacked onto DEFI is making it more exciting.
F: The underlying technology of NFTs is game changing. It’s way bigger than what we currently see.
Vin: For me as well before this I wasn’t even into the whole crypto space. I like that NFT is a way of giving recognition to artists. It’s a cool concept to put art on the blockchain and give recognition to the artist and they can get royalties from some of the work they do and I thought that was really interesting. Then I started to do a lot more research. BossLee is sort of the local crypto influencer here in Singapore.
So I connected with him and we started the whole LunaKiddy thing. Before that I didn’t own any cryptocurrency. So Luna was my first cryptocurrency. I’m quite glad I got into it. I think the NFT concept actually brings a lot of new people into the space. For people like me, I’m not very technically savvy, but the nft concept is something I can understand fairly easily. Now it’s about going down the rabbit hole and trying to understand what’s going on with all the new stuff coming out.
F: That rabbit hole goes very deep. I’m jealous you didn’t have to deal with eth gas fees. You are super lucky you didn’t have to deal with that stuff. Luna is so much nicer compared to other blockchains.
BossLee: That goes both for the supporters and the artists. When you list art you are paying a lot for gas fees on eth.
F: BossLee, what was your first crypto you got into?
BossLee: I got my first bitcoin in 2015. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I bought it because I was in silicon valley and they told me you could pay for things with this digital currency. So I bought one to move around and try to buy stuff with it. Later on, I didn’t really do anything with it, then in 2017 there was a boom, and I sold the bitcoin. That was a terrible decision.
Then fast forward to the beginning of this year, there was a lot of hype again, at least for the early adopters. People in the tech scene started to get more involved. So I got some Dogecoin. Bitcoin was my first, then Doge, then I got myself onto some centralized exchanges, and that’s when I discovered Luna. It was my third cryptocurrency, and I went deep into it. I started to learn about how the Luna supply works together with UST and how it intends to be the decentralized stablecoin. I thought this was amazing, stablecoin really changed the game for a lot of us.
I went deep into the ecosystem and ever since I’ve been a big Luna fan. When we were coming out with the idea to do something in the NFT space, the first place I suggested was Terra. Specifically for anyone coming onboard they will say they saw this news about Open Sea, should we go there, and I would tell them no that’s not the place to go, the gas fees will kill you, go to Luna.
There’s a strong community there, and even if it’s a small collection, many will support us if we do a decent job. We always put the community interest up front. We share our wallet address and tell them each step of the way these are the hurdles and we are going to overcome them by this and that. So everyone knows what we’re doing. You can let us know what you would like to see in our Discord server, and we will always take that into consideration.
Vinn: Initially we wanted to go with Talis. They were the first ones to tell us they were going to launch an NFT platform first. Knowhere was quite responsive. At that point and time Knowhere was getting a lot of projects on there, so we decided to go with Knowhere over Talis. I think we’re quite happy that we went with Knowhere. They gave us a lot of support from the beginning. Once they fixed the verification it was good to go.
F: The rest of the audio should be fairly understandable. If you have any questions or comments for LunaKiddy, make sure to pop in their Discord and join the community!