Animaliens – Cardano NFT
A project with the purpose to promote education, among its community, by supporting their current or future educational paths.
Concept
Animaliens is a project of inspiration, motivation and self-improvement. Likewise, it’s a project that wants to be known as one of the developers of the Cardano ecosystem. But, let’s break it down, so that everything makes more sense.
Education
The Animaliens team call it “The Tuition Drawing” which is in fact a raffle system with the sole purpose to help one lucky participant with his education. In order to participate, you will have to own a project’s NFT and the prize can be used on one of the following:
- a tuition payment
- a student loan
- or funds towards educational purposes
The choice is all yours as long as it involves your personal development.
Additionally, there is a hint in the project’s FAQs that point to a constant educational raffles, whether it’s for tuition payments or other educational products. Therefore, solidifying their claim to the whole concept.
Education is Key
– Animalien’s Team
Development
What is the best way to promote development? By having a usable product in the market right? In our case, we have a product in the form of a dApp – in other words The Nebula Store.
In particular, this dApp is a built-in store where holders can:
- buy raffle tickets (tuition/debt, NFTs etc.)
- buy a plethora of other products (educational programs etc.)
- participate in auctions
- stake their NFTs for the project’s native token ($IEN)
- and trade their Animalien NFTs
*The store will support purchases in $IEN in the future
Now, I agree that most of the above points we have seen already in multiple other CNFT projects. However, we can all agree that the start has been made and many innovations can derive from it.
On top of that, The Nebula Store will offer 0% transaction fees and a smart contract which will automatically split the royalties in three different wallets.
- 50% to the holders
- 25% to the project’s development
- 25% to the team
*Note that The Nebula Store is in the development phase with tests being made only in the raffles system so far.
Team
The team has one characteristic that unites them under the Animaliens project and that’s their life changing experience from education. They now seek to impart this experience to as many as possible with a meaningful mission behind their project. Will they succeed?
On a further note, all of them are transparent enough, which gives me hope for a bright future. For instance, they all provide their Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles from which we can derive quite a lot of information. Needless to say that their profiles look very real.
So, let’s find out more about them, shall we?
First of all, we have Ramiro, the co-founder and artist for Animaliens. Ramiro is an architect graduate of Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico with his work displayed in both LinkedIn and Instagram. Next, there’s Zame, Saucism and Jeanmeme (personal website) – marketing, developer and collaborator respectively. (Note that they are all co-founders in the project with Ramiro) . Finally, we have Montse and Kevin, who are responsible for the general design and community respectively.
Below you can find the team’s Twitter spaces and learn some more information on the project from the mouths of the founding team,
Community (Discord & Twitter)
In terms of community, I can see that the project was building it for quite some time now (from Q4 2021). Meaning that the team is in no rush to launch and they want to promote their mission as much as possible. As a result, they gathered a large following (Twitter & Discord). However, I believe that some improvements need to be implemented in the engagement part. Of course, I know that low engagement is caused by the current market conditions but still. In conclusion, I would like to point that I see a lot of collaborations with multiple project in the form of giveaways (mainly) and even trait additions. Something which I consider very welcomed, bonding and positive overall.
If you want to follow Animaliens social media you can check here:
Artwork
I could refer to the artwork to that of the doodles style, which follows hard outlines and bright colors. Not bad and definitely the prototype different in general. To be precise, we have a mixture of an alien species with a chameleon. The sneak peeks depict a distinct range of colors giving the impression that they are able to shift in different hues and brightness (like chameleons). On top of that, the team prepared a special feature for us all – “Secret Traits” they call it. But what is it? In brief, each NFT will have an encrypted trait in the metadata. In order for you to unlock it, you will have to travel to other planets. Now how they will implement the travels, I don’t know yet but it sure is an interesting feature.
You can see some examples of the artwork below:
Website
The website has two color tones of black and neon-green and is presented in a dynamic way. Specifically, the result is somewhat appealing but could definitely use some improvements. In terms of information, I’d say that whatever the team wants to reveal, it does in the website in an understandable way. Finally, the most interesting part is that a prototype of The Nebula Store is already running and we expect a lot of additions after the mint.
Roadmap
The roadmap focuses on 2022 (particularly Q3 & Q4), which I consider the first phase of everything. In these quarters, we have the release of the collections, planet migration, staking and an improved version of The Nebula Store.
Closing Thoughts
Animaliens is definitely not the first project that touched the educational concept, but I sure hope that they are the ones that actually deliver on their promises. As you may know, education can be very hard to reach in some parts of the world (even in developing parts) and maybe their solution will help quite a few.
Let’s take for instance this loop,
You invest a small amount of money in the purchase of the Animalien NFTs, then you stake them and start earning your $IEN tokens, which finally you can use to purchase educational products from The Nebula Store. Ain’t that something?
Furthermore, the project has a team that has been very transparent so far by providing every possible information about themselves. And based on that I must say that they seem quite professional as well. Also, the project’s community is quite large with an engagement rate being in the low levels. On the bright side though, the team is trying to expand by collaborating with other CNFT projects. To conclude, the artwork has some interesting features to offer us but the how remains a secret thus far.
