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✨ Stargaze: the Interchain NFT Hub - Interchain Jam #23
Recorded: May 30, 2024 Duration: 1:02:01Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent episode of Interchange Jam, the discussion centered around the growth and innovative projects within the interchain ecosystem, particularly highlighting Stargaze's evolution as a leading NFT platform. Key topics included the successful launch of the Bad Kids collection, the introduction of the Pixel Wizards, and strategic partnerships aimed at enhancing cross-chain NFT capabilities.
Full Transcription
Thank you. everyone just a couple of minutes we're waiting for the guests to arrive. Nice, I can see Shane is arriving.
Welcome to Interchange M, Shane.
Hey Rob, how's it going?
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, pretty good.
It's quite a chilling day in the Interchange.
Nice to see also Bernie that just arrived and I
think it's also Cortland from Bad Kids is here. I assume it will join with the Bad Kids
Twitter. Welcome everyone.
Hi, how are you guys doing?
All right, I'll start with a brief introduction to the episode. I am your host, Rob Stach, and today we will dive into a new episode of Interchange Jam.
For anyone that is new here, Interchange Jam is a space series that covers interchain project
and builders leveraging the interchain stack.
This is a very exciting episode because today we have probably one of the projects that has been
the most fun during the bear market, and I'm talking with personal experience,
because when I was in the early 2022 and 2023,
definitely Stargate has been a great companion for the entire inter-chain community
and actually shaped a lot the culture of this ecosystem,
also with Bad Kids and all the great collections that he had.
And before actually starting, let me tell you one last thing,
which is actually Stargate brought also Cosmos,
one of the key components of the Interchain stack,
to really the entire user of the Interchain ecosystem,
and probably showcased how it is good this platform
to enable a great user experience.
I will start by asking our guests to introduce themselves, starting by Shane.
Hey guys, how's it going? Yeah, I'm Shane, founder of Stargaze.
I've been building in Cosmos since 2018 or so, and I was also in the founding team of Cosmosm and yeah have been working on
Stargaze since 2020 and it changed shapes and transformed a bunch but it
slowly evolved into what it is now and happy to go in in deeper and share more parts of the story and stuff.
Yeah, I think that not many knows that actually Shane was one of the creative minds that participated in creating Cosworths in one of the very, very early academies, if I'm not mistaken.
But that's definitely a very part of the history of this ecosystem.
In the meantime, also Bernie and Cortland, feel free to introduce yourself.
Sure. So, hello, I'm Joe, also known as Cortland.
I'm the creator of Bad Kids, and I'm a designer and artist.
artist
hi guys my name is bernie i'm headmaster of pixel wizards and also a stargis on dev
yeah i built pixel wizards and some various other collections and uh it's been fun writing the nft
space so far yeah thanks for being here and uh i have to say that I see many bad kids in the audience. I
wonder why today. But glad for everyone to be here. Let's start by introducing Stargates. So
if Shane can provide an overview of Stargates and how it fits in the ecosystem, especially right now when it is positioning as an interchain NFT app?
Sure, yeah. So Stargaze began life as a chain that focused on consumer and retail applications
of crypto. And since it launched in 2021, it kind of launched at kind of the peak of the kind of NFC hype cycle in 2021.
And then we did a very large airdrop. And I think at that time, the airdrop was worth something like
250 million. It was insane. And all these users just flooded into our Discord. And we were actually initially building something
that was a bit more like Farcaster
or like a decentralized Twitter kind of thing.
And we realized that the native content type was NFTs.
And NFTs weren't really a thing in Cosmos at that time
outside of Terra.
And Terra wasn't really IBC connected.
So that's what we initially started focusing on.
We started building a marketplace.
And then all these users that were coming into a Discord were telling us other stuff that they wanted.
For example, they wanted an NFT launchpad because you can't really have a marketplace
unless you have a launchpad first.
So we just kind of took in all these feedback
and we started building.
So that's kind of how it happened.
So we did the launchpad first.
We launched in March of 2021.
And we had something like 11 to 12 Genesis collections,
of which Bad Kids was one of them. And then we launched the marketplace in May. And since then,
Stargaze has kind of turned into, has become like kind of the canonical NFT platform in Cosmos.
It's kind of the canonical NFT platform in Cosmos.
And we're not stopping there.
But yeah, that's where we are at now.
Yeah, I'm glad that you mentioned that initially it was this kind of social media
because I actually tried that platform in the very beginning.
And it was very good to see how it is started to transform it into a very different thing
but still provided an amazing
user experience, especially in the very beginning, because it's not easy to launch a platform
that is already ready for users.
And actually, the user experience in the very beginning was definitely one of the best in
the ecosystem, I would say, and now it just keeps improving.
ecosystem I would say and now it just keeps improving so this is very great
So this is very great to see.
to see. Going back to Cosmosm, how Stargates leverage Cosmosm and what kind of
application you look to see on the Stargates developing? Yeah so one of the
things that kind of really really drove me to kind of you know try and push the
adoption of Cosmosm is because normally when you develop
developing Cosmos, you have to build SDK modules, right? And SDK modules are in Go.
And if you need to add any functionality, you have to upgrade the chain, right? And that's
kind of a very cumbersome process. You have to get all the validators to kind of coordinate.
process, you had to get all the validators to coordinate and the chain has to be paused
until you upgrade it and stuff.
And Cosmosm enables any developer just to upload contracts to the chain.
And also it's in Rust, which is a bit more of a modern language and a very safe language.
So it's really good for financial applications.
And also it enables you to iterate really fast.
So for example, the first version of Launchpad
was built end to end in two months, right?
So, and then the first version of Marketplace was shipped and was built end to end in two months. Right.
So and then the first version of Marketplace also was built in two months.
And even with like EVM and Solidity and all the tooling that Ethereum has,
like still I think it would have been very hard for even a really great team
to kind of ship what we shipped in that short of a time. So yeah,
Cosmosen just enables kind of teams to like iterate fast and ship really fast,
which is, which is really important in when you're,
when you're building anything that's like consumer and like retail facing.
Right. So, so yeah, all the pretty much all the main applications
on on Stargaze is built built in Cosmosm. Of course, the Cosmos kind of like
core modules like staking and, and chain governance and so forth, are still still uses the SDK, but like kind of all the application
level stuff is in Cosmosm and it just creates enables more composability.
And it's also really great for developers coming from Ethereum because the design patterns
match a lot more with how it works in Solidity and EVM.
So if a developer is used to building NFT contracts on Ethereum,
they will feel very much at home also with Cosmosm.
Yeah, so those are kind of the main reasons.
One example I'd like to use is a lot of designers use Figma,
which is kind of like the de facto kind of like design tool now.
And the reason Figma is so great is because it was written in Wasm
and it was like a step above what you can build in like
CSS and HTML, right? So to me like
Ethereum and like EVM is like CSS and HTML and then like Cosm Wasm just enables like a
much richer developer development environment.
Yeah, I think this is a great analysis and actually shows definitely your knowledge of
CosmoASM.
And I think that I would only add that probably Stargates was one of the first to showcase
that CosmoASM can be used also for the AppChain thesis rather than a platform to launch basically
permissionless smart contracts, which was the first to showcase this kind of use cases.
And I think has been working quite well so far.
And I think that this connects perfectly with my next question, which will be,
what are the biggest challenges in Stargate phases?
And what are the lessons that you have learned during this journey in the last two years?
Oh, OK, that's a good question. I think the biggest challenges...
Well, first of all, I think this is true for any startup. I think the biggest challenges we faced
weren't any kind of technical issues or anything like that. It was more like,
you know, more like maybe like personal issues and stuff. You know, I'd say the kind of lessons learned there is to, is very, very important.
I mean, not only in crypto, but in startups in general to like really, really trust who you're working with.
You know, like really have to have like known your co-founders for a long time and maybe have worked with them in the past and stuff like that.
So I mean, yeah, our biggest issue is, yeah, I mean, we pretty much had a co-founder start
another chain behind our backs.
And that set us back for a while.
So it's really important to kind of know and have a really solid team kind of early on.
Yeah, I will say that it's definitely interesting that your main challenge wasn't the development side, but the human side, which is, I mean, it's still an aspect of a startup, as you said, so it's completely fine.
So it's completely fine.
I will change now topics and go to interview our NFT collection at Tariere,
which actually there are real humans behind.
I'm sure that no one assumed that Bad Kids is actually a Bad Kids.
But anyway, Cortland, I'm sure that initially you weren't expecting all the success that Bad Kids had,
especially because I was there during the time of the launch,
but actually Bad Kids was one of the slowest mint.
I remember that I was there and I was watching your NFT art,
and I said, yeah, maybe I'll mint some, but I'm not that convinced.
And that's actually probably because it was that successful,
because it's the kind of collection that you don't see it coming because it's actually different.
So it takes some time for the audience to digest it and to realize that there is actually something special there.
So I will just ask you what inspired your creation of Bad Kids and how you did develop this art style.
Okay, yeah. how you did develop this art style okay yeah so um well i was you know when nfts kind of were first
on the rise on ethereum i was kind of like watching from the sidelines you know just to kind of like
i wasn't sure this is the thing that was going to be around for a while um I think Bad Kids kind of came about in part to like, you know, in response to
what I was seeing on there, like, you know, I would see things like, like Bored Apes got really
popular. And, you know, they kind of seem to infer this kind of coolness on the person that had them.
But then I would see things like someone would get their wallet drained and, you know, would be like tweeting about getting the FBI involved to get their board
aid back.
And it just felt like it was, there's like such a, such a disconnect between like what
the image was saying and how the person was behaving.
And I kind of wanted to make a collection that was sort of, you know, much, much more, much less serious.
Like, I don't know, NFTs seem like they've gotten really serious.
And kids art is fun in that it's, you know, like pixel art also has this quality where it's sort of expressive.
Like you can look at a pixel art picture
and you can like see a lot of different people in it,
you know, a lot of different faces.
I think kind of like kids art being really like loose
and sort of like, you know,
having like a bit of wonkiness to them,
you know, also kind of like allows you
to see a lot of different faces in it.
So it's like a fun medium.
And it's also just, you know, it's not serious.
It's not pretending to be cool.
It's not pretending to be like,
like it's going to be super valuable.
So in a weird way, it was kind of like
going against the grain for what was expected of,
you know, PFP collections.
So to me, that was just, you know,
it's just fun to play around with that stuff.
Yeah, and I think it worked very well because one of the things that happened is that people in the ecosystem actually started to recognize themselves in some of this picture.
Because really right now some of the prominent people in the ecosystem, I really visual them
as bad kids rather than the real person which is uh quite insane and at the same
time special because it shows how this nft collection actually start to become part of our
culture and actually contribute to this culture and in shaping this uh different idea of the
ecosystem where we can be something else and in this case bad kids I would say but yeah very
cool initial story
I will go to Bernie because also
Pixel Wizard was quite
an innovative collection because
if I'm not mistaken was the first
to be interactive and actually
contrary to bad kids
I personally
aped directly to Pixel Wizard
because I said okay this one is definitely very unique
and I definitely want to have my Atom Pixel Wizard as app.
Unfortunately, I didn't go in the mint,
but still it was a great experience.
What was your inspiration behind Pixel Wizard
and why you opted to launch on Stargate?
Yeah, thanks for the question.
And unfortunate that you didn't get your Atom Wizard.
So, yeah, basically it all started out with my journey onto crypto,
which was basically 100% Luna.
And then some other friend that was hanging with friends
and one of them was also
more deep into crypto and he was
also really deep into
Cardano and he said
he talked about an NFT
project that's doing something really unique
and I was looking
at them and also minted one
and I was like, hey, this is kind of fun.
Those were ghost kind of
nfts and they could tell the the system time uh the local time and i was like hey this is this is
really cool like this is this pure innovation in terms of bringing fun utility and all that kind of stuff to the nft itself and not to side hustles like you usually
see which i thought was like hey let's let's let's me try to do something as well like i came from a
web development experience and worked a lot with svgs and with a small design background and
and with a small design background.
And yeah, that opted me into making pixel art
as well as being this fun and easy to animate version of art
that can do stuff.
So basically then it all started making sense.
And I was thinking about a theme,
like what kind of theme would fit nice.
And then suddenly I came with this idea
that because at the peak of the bull market,
I think most of us know that every day
we're checking prices and all that kind of stuff.
And I was like, okay, let's make an NFT that can tell you the price of a particular token or maybe one token.
And then I opted into what kind of theme would fit it.
And then I really liked to play games back in the days and still do some time.
games back in the days and still do some time. But I always pick the mage and always pick a
sorcerer kind of character, which I really like. And I was like, hey, there aren't many
wizard themed NFT collections out there. So I was like, okay, let's make something that
is also not very much seen and let's make them interactive and animated uh through uh through
javascript and uh css animations so basically that ended up being pixel wizards and yeah i was about
to launch on stargaze for on terra first but then the whole terra collapse and i was like okay um
i'm quitting crypto and not going to do this anymore and all although
the collection was almost fully done but then there were a few people that that that reached out and
that I reached out to and I was like hey is there some kind of new marketplace I was looking for
like I really wanted to launch this collection, like trying to earn
some of my 100% Lunatic losses back.
So that basically ended up telling me, yeah, you can launch on Stargaze.
They even have a what's now called Stargaze Studio.
It's an interface where you can easily upload and create a collection and
it's it's like i was like okay that's that that was the big choice for me to launch there and then
eventually i blended in with the with the community and uh yeah and so far has been great um
i think uh that that will most mostly cover cover the the reasons reasons why I thought it was like doing Pixel Wizards.
Yeah, that's a cool, interesting story.
And I think that you actually captured the fun part,
because I can speak for personal experience.
Me and Zoltan, which is my colleague, and it's also here in the audience,
in the first week we basically spent time playing with the keyboards and seeing if there was any hide-head move that this pixel wizard has.
So even that discovery, because actually there was some hide-head move that this wizard could do, was a very fun and cool experience,
especially because it was the first kind of this experience uh into stargates so
going back to bad kids i i think that we can assume for sure that uh it's the main collection
of stargates because if i think of stargates i think of bad kids and i don't want to dive of
course with the recent uh i would say drama with salestine's lot with the best collection, etc.
But I would definitely say that Bad Kids has been the most impactful since the launch of Stargates.
And in what way do you think the community actually shaped the direction of Bad Kids?
Because for context, I remember in the very beginning one of the first
person that was speaking about the Bad Kids was Josh from Kepler then I started
to see Don Kryptonium and then many other people and that's kind of shaped
what the Bad Kids was so how the community actually influenced the direction
of your collection?
Yeah I think well early on I think, well, early on,
I think the community that formed around Bad Kids
were, you know, like, I think,
because there was other collections early on
that were, you know, promising, like, a game
or, like, some sort of metaverse integration
or, you know, other things that were coming,
and I was, Bad Kids were making absolutely zero promises,
and, you know, there was no roadmap, nothing
like that. So the community that came to bad kids were people that weren't taking NFTs super
seriously and were able to see the humor in that. So I think it was a pretty laid back
So I think it was like a pretty laid back crowd to begin with.
But then also like a lot of, you know, big people in Cosmos,
like, you know, like Josh Lee and others were, you know,
using it as their profile on Twitter.
So, you know, and the terror crash happened actually, I think, like maybe a month or two after, you know, the initial collections launched, the Genesis collections launched on Stargaze.
So it was, you know, we kind of entered the bear market pretty quickly after the launch.
So I think, I mean, what was nice for me was, you know, the, like, just hanging out
at, like, the Bad Quartz Discord.
You know, there would be, you know,
creators and developers and people from Cosmos,
you know, just hanging out there.
And it was, like, nice to see that there were still people
that were building, you know, stuff was still happening.
You know, a lot of people were still just going to make
their stuff regardless of whether it was a bear market or not. And that was kind of encouraging like that, that, you know, made me want to keep going.
and adopt bad kids.
And it kind of grew through that.
A lot of people who had it going way back
were people that were building through the bear.
And I think now we're kind of seeing
that sort of like paid off in a way
because projects will launch,
they'll want to do an airdrop.
And now bad kids are trying to get included in airdrops
because other developers
that respect people that have bad kids or people that are bad kids themselves are part of a team who's launching something.
And so, yeah, it's just been it's been really cool to see see the community that kind of like grow into something much bigger than anything I could have anticipated.
Yeah. And I mean, even Shane were a bad kids. bigger than anything I could have anticipated.
Yeah, and I mean, even Shane were bad kids. I even remember Shane wearing a star shot
that I still have nightmares sometimes.
But yeah, I definitely agree with what you said.
It's absolutely true.
So on the Pixel Wizard side,
I want to go back a little bit on the interactive side, because
this was actually one of the first user experience on Stargate that was interactive when it comes
to NFTs.
So how did you come up with these interactive elements and there was some challenge in implementing
it on Stargate?
Like what was your overall experience?
Well, I think the overall experience has been pretty good.
Like I came with this idea and then eventually I picked Stargaze
and then reached out to the team and talked about, like, I have this idea.
And would it be available on the front end?
And can stuff be done like this?
And will it work, et cetera.
And luckily Stargaze has an amazing test net,
which allows you to just test it, if it works.
And eventually with some help of Jorge,
he also the co-founder of Stargaze,
we launched the Pixel Wizards with
their full interactive capabilities,
which has been pretty amazing
because
like if you look at a bad kit,
for example, like it's really nice art
and you can wear them
perfectly as PFP, etc.
that's it.
That's where it ends and that's with most NFTs.
But with Pixel Wizards, the funny thing is there are interactions built into your wizard.
And there are different types of interactions. Interactions that are based on user input
and interactions based on events
like certain dates and stuff.
Um, so for the interactions based on a user input, like, um, it could be, uh,
pressing, uh, the Q W E and R and the one, two, three buttons on your keyboard.
Um, for example, pressing the E button, uh, will tell you, tell you the price of of the token that is bound to the
pixel wizard for instance if you have a stars wizard which in the metadata it will show you
that its token is stars it will tell you the stars price but it won't only tell you the stars price
it will also tell you by a little icon
if it went up or down in the last 24 hours.
And if you use the buttons for one, two, and three,
then it can also tell you the highest price
within the 24-hour range,
the lowest price within the 24-hour range,
and also the percentage change.
Like, you can actually see how much it has changed over the past 24 hours, which is kind of fun.
And I think one of the biggest challenges was to make it also work on mobile phone.
Most people are using their mobile phones either to view their NFTs or do whatsoever.
Watch on Twitter, mint NFTs or doing all sorts of stuff.
So I think mobile device is one of the key things that should be available.
So I was like, okay, basically the pixel wizard is a web page that's loading your wizard
but you can also save that web page your basically your wizard to your mobile phone
which allows you to use it as a progressive web application so you've probably some of you
have been probably seen it multiple times that I share on
my Twitter feed that I open my mobile phone, then I click my
wizard app. And then for all kinds of wizards that I want to
see the price on I, I can just do the interactions and stuff. And
yeah, it's the kind of kind of fun fun feature and the way my idea behind it was how far can I push innovation
and also interactions and fun into the NFT itself.
And I think I went far and beyond what I could imagine that could be done.
Yeah, I think that the success of what you have developed actually reflects on Stargate.
This is the beautiful part of this NFT ecosystem
because the value that the collection brings,
it's also reflected to the brands of the marketplace.
And now Stargate actually is transitioning to something very unique right now because
it's pioneering ICS 7-to-1, which is the start of the Interchain NFT.
So literally right now we have a concrete example of NFTs that are traveling from one
chain to another.
And I want to ask to say in like a brief
introduction to the inter chain if the standard and some example of collection
that right now are basically flowing to stargates from other blockchains yeah
sure so the interchange nft standard I see a some21 is pretty much the NFT version of ICS-20.
So basically the way it works is it locks an NFT on one chain and then mints a synthetic
version of it on the other chain.
So this is just very similar to, for example, if you have like, if you're transferring like
Atom from the hub to Osmosis, it locks it on the Cosmos hub
and then it mints a synthetic version of it on Osmosis.
So it's pretty much the same kind of format.
The important thing, though, is that it tracks, it includes a path,
it tracks kind of like the history and all the transfers of the NFT.
So you can always trace it back to the original one.
Before ICS721, what a lot of projects used to do if they wanted to kind of like move
to another chain is that they would like burn it on one chain and then remint it on the
other chain.
And then when you do that, you kind of like lose the provenance,
you lose the history of the NFT. So the main thing that ICS-Centorio provides is that it lets you
keep track of the provenance of the NFT, which is kind of one of the most important
features of it that gives NFTs their value. So yeah, we made a Cosmosm implementation of it
along with ARC protocol. And one of the first uses for it was the mad scientist collection.
scientist collection. And MadScientist was first minted on osmosis. And it was a collaboration
with, I think, Backbone Labs and ReckNang and a couple other people. And then after
it was minted on osmosis, there wasn't really a way to trade it.
So then we kind of deployed ICS-1021 on Osmosis as well, and then enabled people to transfer
it over to Stargaze and trade it.
And now you can also transfer it back to Osmosis.
So this was like, yeah, it was like a great kind of initial kind of use case for it.
And this is just the beginning.
ICS-721 is just like a primitive and we can build like all kinds of things on top of it.
If you can imagine, like, for example, let's say there's like a lending and borrowing protocol on some other chain.
Although Stargaz has NFT lending now, too.
But if you want to use a protocol on another chain, you can now easily transfer it over and they can transfer it back.
Yeah, I think that you made it very simple,
something that is incredibly amazing
because we are basically witnessing
what was ABC for token transfer all over again,
which is an incredible innovation
that right now you can really see only on this ecosystem
and probably an advantage for all the NFT marketplace
building with the Interchain Stack
because they
can truly experiment sharing on value through NFTs through multiple chains, which is quite
incredible. It seems almost that it was impossible when a couple of years ago it was first announced
the concept. But now, as you said, it's literally happening and there was also a collection that literally
minted on osmosis and fly it all over to Stargates where it's definitely a better home being
really becoming this central hub for Interchain NFT.
How do you see this innovation like the Interchain NFT standard, but also the outpost strategy
impact the Stargate platform?
Yeah, so when it comes to Outposts, so Stargate has to expand and it has to go multi-chain. And
a lot of the other chains in the ecosystem and also outside of the ecosystem want to kind of play around with NFTs.
They want to have NFT trading.
Sometimes even you'd have like maybe a DeFi protocol that has, you know, might use NFTs as a primitive.
you know, might use NFTs as a primitive.
So building a marketplace is actually a ton of work.
At Stargate, it's like a lot of, you know,
I would say over 90% of our code
is actually not a chain or contract.
A lot of our code is like backend,
like indexing and front end. And there's so
much that's involved with like image processing and image caching and lots of like stuff behind
the scenes to like clean up metadata and like stuff like fixing spelling and metadata and all that kind of stuff.
So there's a lot of other things that goes on behind the scenes
that takes a considerable amount of time
and resources to build an NFT platform.
It's actually more work than DeFi
because of all the images and all the, because it's very media heavy, right? It's not just numbers.
So, for example, Blur took like, I believe Blur took like 400 days to launch their V1.
Magic Eden took like a year, a year and a half.
a half and uh now there's several other chains in cosmos that are trying to build entity platforms
and they're kind of learning the hard way that that it does uh take a lot of resources um so
that's why we can now offer uh stargaze to these to these other chains um And we can have like more of like an outpost model
where they can now use Stargaze
and kind of use the marketplace
and use the UI and all that kind of stuff
and kind of benefit the whole ecosystem.
So that's the main kind of goal there.
Yeah, I think that's actually, this is exactly the kind of use cases that facilitate the
growth of the ecosystem.
So it's definitely interesting to see it played out, especially having adoption in this first
experiment, especially because right now the technology is a bit still in its early stage.
So in the future, all of this will probably a lot more smoother
and facilitate the adoption of the ecosystem.
On the bad kids, I actually have one question that I was always curious about
because still when I see some people in the ecosystem,
I really can't find a difference between them and the bad kids feature,
which lets me to think if
you actually talked to some real person before painting some of these characters, like is
Bad Kids inspired to some real personalities or it's basically just unlucky shot. I wasn't necessarily trying to capture any real people with it, so if it
did end up looking like someone, that's good. I mean, I did want it to be able to look like
a lot of different people, but I wasn't necessarily trying to get anyone specifically I mean there are you know some of the the more unique one-of-ones
have like stories behind them but the the regular artwork itself is just you
know meant to be as as broad as possible to capture a lot of different types of
people yeah and actually remember some of the community members inventing stories about
their bad kids, like inventing the background and kind of inspiring the story that led the
bad kids to have that specific vibes.
And I think that's actually one of the, probably the that that bad kids had to witness this imagination
in the people that were holding it but actually i also think that some some some bad kids is really
like the real person like i would make many examples which is which is very fun on the
on the pixel wizard before we switch at the to Stargates, actually you were saying, Bern, something very interesting regarding the interactive part and how it could have future applications.
Because actually Pixel Wizard is developing also game applications for their NFTs.
So can you provide some example of like the token dwelling game or other things in development?
Yeah, sure. It's always been an interesting feature having gamification of NFTs, which so far to me has been more like an idea than something that's very feasible.
than something that's very feasible.
But with the coming of Pixel Wizard Sprite Sheets,
which basically is a one-on-one version,
a sprite sheet version of your Pixel Wizard,
which allows easier gamification of wizards as well.
gamification of of wizards as well um but it all started out with with the with the token dueling
game which was an idea of a community member and also a collaboration between a developer and
myself um which which basically is importing your,
like the game is called token dueling,
which at the moment is not available due to some technical issues.
But when it was working,
the main thing was,
because each wizard has their own prize,
you basically bet prize action against wizards.
And I wanted to have a kind of Pokemon-style game
where wizards are put up against each other
and just battling it out,
which one is more wiser than the other.
And that one will then take the bet of both people or parties so but it
was was the first step of like okay what what can i do with svg based nfts because what's kind of
funny is that that an svg is just basically a piece of computer code which you can import anywhere so basically what you do is just import that svg
for that specific wizard and then you can even make adjustments to it which is kind of fun
so you can import them into your game then have them set up against each other
and and that's kind of a of anything you could do with with the
with the normal version of pixel wizards and then of course the the sprite sheeted versions of
pixel wizards came it was just a an airdrop like bitkits were for bad kids and those were were fun as well, because a sprite sheet is a primary game asset for a 2D pixel art kind of game. X-Word Games, they're all powered by spritesheets, which basically is each image,
when you put them behind each other,
you'll get an animation.
Like for walking animations,
it takes three to four pictures.
And if you put them behind each other,
then the wizard will be walking.
And all that kind of stuff
basically ended up
in the sprite sheet
so I'm currently
working with someone else on a
prototype
where I'll be utilizing
those sprite sheets into a
into a funny
game which people can
play with their wizard and
we'll see how far it goes
it's always been my dreams to
yeah, make a game out of it
there are more options
as well
yeah, some things are just
ideas for now
yeah, I think that
definitely wizard can suit a lot. Yeah, I think that definitely
Wizard can suit a lot of games.
So in that sense,
you can definitely use a lot of imagination.
And it's very cool to see
that you're already thinking
to some of these applications.
And I think this is also
connected back to Stargate
because I want to ask to Shane
how all these Stargate creators I want to ask to Shane how the all these Stargate
creators but also the stakeholders community influence the platform
development because for example even in this core that these stakeholders can
participate to what a specific collection to go into the launch but so
there is actually a lot of involvement within the community so how do all of
this influence the development of stargates
yeah so stargaz was always very community governed from the very beginning um for example even even
the stargazes airdrop was was voted in through governance right um so there was no like points
program or anything that was like controlled by the team um it was all all voted through governance, right? So there was no like points program or anything that was like controlled by the team.
It was all voted through governance.
And still to this day, everything,
all the parameter changes and stuff like that
go through governance.
And yeah, we have a community vote program
where people can go into Discord and they can vote on collections
that are going to be featured.
We paused the program for a while, but we're bringing it back soon.
And it's going to be part of the loyalty program too that I can talk a little bit about and
Bernie can talk a little bit about that as well.
But yeah, I think we really pride ourselves in Stargaze being very community governed,
especially in blockchain world where you have sometimes you have like founders who are like, oh, we're just going to do it my way and I know everything.
Right.
Well, while Stargaze takes a bit more of a Web 2 approach where we listen to the
community and we kind of build what the community wants. And that's kind of always been our
model, even to this day, as we continue to expand and build.
Yeah, that's very cool. And I can tell that you can see this from how involved is the community and how active is the community. Because you can see that there is a real community behind Stargaz and it's quite active and they engage and they are actually had a lot of fun during the entire the bear market when
stargates was actually a way to fight the financial depression of this period
and and it's actually provided that for the entire community so i would say that
we as a as interchannel community are definitely thankful to stargates for the amazing service that
they provided to the ecosystem now i i definitely want to hear more about what you mentioned,
the NFT loyalty program.
So if you want to share more about that, I would be curious.
Yeah, sure.
So when you use centralized exchanges,
they often have something where you can get like a trading discount or something.
you can get like a trading discount or something.
For example, if you like, you know,
own like the exchanges token or something like that, right?
And one of the great things about an app chain
is that as a kind of app chain development team,
you have control over the stack.
You can kind of affect prices and development team, you have control over the stack, you can kind of affect
prices and gas prices and so forth. So one thing we can do is we can offer trading discounts for
people that are stakers and people that have been using the chain and the platform for a long time.
So we often hear from users that NFT holders get airdrops and they get, you know, all these benefits.
And they're like, what about the stakers?
Right.
What about the people who have been staking since like day one?
Right.
So we wanted to kind of build something for them.
And that's what the loyalty program is.
And by the way, that's not like that name might change but that's the the name we're going with going with for now um but the way the way it'll work is that um based on based on how much
uh you have you have staked uh it'll meet to nft and this and this and this nft will uh uh keep
track of um how much you have staked and for how long you have staked for.
And then it puts you in, I think, four or five different tiers.
And then based on those tiers, then you get training discounts.
You get to participate in raffles.
So it's kind of, yeah, it's going to be the loyalty program of Stargaze.
And then actually Bernie's working on it.
So maybe, is there anything that I missed there, Bernie?
Anything you want to add about the loyalty program?
It depends on how much we want to spoil already.
Yeah, I'd say maybe not spoil everything, but maybe if there's anything,
like one or two things you can add that would be...
Yeah, no, I think you summed it up nice quietly.
There will be five tiers
based on the amount of stars you're staking.
And it's kind of funny, kind of cool
because it's a dynamic NFT that will update itself
once you stake more
or when you undelegate,
which we hope you do not,
it will decrease your uh
tier as well and also will change the appearance of your nfp as well which is kind of cool uh
feature uh to show off and then yeah we just tie a lot of nice features towards the the tiers um
that people can receive um and it's not only about trade reduce trading fees but it will
also unlock some cool features which can only be accessed by participating in the loyalty program
well I'll try to to be neutral not too excited because while you were explaining how this works, I was actually getting a lot of excited.
So I'll try to be more neutral.
But as someone that, for example, has been a user and stakeholder since the very beginning, I'm really curious about to see what will be my rank in this new format.
And it's definitely something that brings more,
actually, a checks experience.
Like, it's more a Web2 experience in this case,
because this kind of loyalty program,
usually you have it on centralized exchanges
or a Web2 platform.
And it's actually quite new on the on-chain,
because this is literally loyalty program, but on-chain because this is literally a loyalty
program but on-chain so there is a lot behind like it's not just a concept that is easy
to materialize there is a lot of effort behind so I'm definitely very curious to see how
this will play out and looking forward to seeing production.
In the meantime I would like to see what do you think of Stargate's production in the meantime i i would like to see uh what do you think of targets
evolving in the next few years because some of the things that you shared in this space are
extremely interesting because uh you you basically shared how targets is expanding through the outpost
how interchain nfts are starting to be a thing so this of course will play a big part in the future
of targets so how do you see's positioning in the interchain ecosystem landscape?
Yeah, so I think people can kind of maybe extrapolate from some of the hints who and the philosophy of it is to kind of enable these like sovereign chains and sovereign apps, right?
And I always kind of saw Stargaze as something that will, you know, eventually kind of grow and be available in other ecosystems.
and be available in other ecosystems.
So, for example, recently we just announced a partnership with Union,
which is going to enable ICS721 on the Ethereum side.
So soon you'll be able to transfer Ethereum NFTs to Stargaze and Stargaze NFTs to Ethereum,
which I think is going to be very cool.
And also there is significant NFT volume on Bitcoin, right?
So I do think it makes sense for Stargaze to enable, you know,
both Ethereum NFT trading and Bitcoin NFT trading.
So that's something that is kind of in the
pipeline. I can't give any, maybe, yeah, I mean, I'll just leave it at that. But we're not going
to be ignoring what's going on in the Ordinals world and so forth. And it does make sense to bring the Stargaze experience
to other ecosystems as well.
And it can kind of stand on its own
as a kind of a sovereign app and product.
Yeah, I mean, taking the market of Ethereum and Bitcoin
from an NFT perspective is definitely
an ambitious plan, but it's also in the picture of what is the interchain ecosystem, because
the idea of the interchain is actually that Ethereum is also part of it.
It's not like a different ecosystem because it will be interconnected in this case, as
you mentioned, with the union example.
And so actually what you're
seeing it's uh definitely a possible future i i will definitely look forward to see how all of this
uh uh all of this will play out because it will be definitely a very interesting development
i because yeah like um i i just wanted to add uh you know, I'm in Austin right now for ConsenSys and meeting a bunch of Ethereum folks, and they're all a bit worried about all the L2s and all the fragmentation. experiencing uh like some of the issues that cosmos had like two two years ago right and now
they're starting to think about like uh like interoper uh interoperability between between
the l2s and stuff like that and uh it's just kind of it's interesting to see how like ethereum is
like discovering cosmos on its own and and uh uh know, trying to solve some of the same problems.
And, you know, Cosmos and IBC Tech, it's just, it solved a lot of these problems a long time ago.
And even Vitalik, just a few months ago, wrote a spec that looks a lot like ICS-721.
a spec that looks a lot like ICS721.
So, you know, I don't know if he was like inspired by it or he came up, you know, with
it on his own.
But it's just very interesting to see kind of, you know, Ethereum kind of like almost
get like absorbed into the interchain.
Yeah, I think that you don't need to reinvent the wheel since I'm already here, especially because one important note is people can definitely try to emulate what this ecosystem has been creating.
But by the time they create their own production or emulation, this technology will just go in to keep getting forward and being more user friendly.
So I will definitely suggest to all these Ethereum developers, hey, join us.
It's the fastest way.
And actually being interconnected is a lot of fun.
And you can get listed on targets as well in the future using all these international NFT capabilities.
all these international NFT capabilities.
I would also ask to Bad Kids, Cortland and Bernie,
because we have here not only community members,
but also NFT collection, what is your recommendation
that you want to share to some of them,
and even for people that are looking
to create their own collection,
based on your experience on Stargates?
I guess I can go first.
I mean, I, you know, I don't,
I guess the best advice I can give is, you know,
make something weird and original
and don't be afraid if it fails,
you know, if you're making, if you're putting time into something that you'll be proud of
in the end, like that, that hopefully should be, you know, enough to fuel you to keep going with
it. Um, you know, I think, I think a lot of the stuff I'm seeing in NFTs that don't really take off is, you know, people are trying too much to anticipate what someone's going to like or trying to, like, build in a lot of functionality to give it a selling point.
And, you know, that's fine if that's, you know, what you want to build.
But I think just getting more weird original stuff on Stargaze is going to be awesome for everyone.
Also, Ben, agree to share your recommendations.
Yeah, I agree with those points as well.
What I would like to add to it is like create something
that you really love yourself
and also brings joy
to what you're doing
because you're going to,
if you're serious about it,
you're going to do it
for quite some time.
And if it's going to be a success,
then it's going to take
a more serious amount of time,
as I can say from my experience, especially if you're a solo artist or with just a few team members, like doing community, doing sort of marketing, but also doing the art and innovating and talking to people it takes a serious amount of time and um it's well worth the effort i must say like it brings me where i am today
um building fully in web3 um having an amazing having amazing few collections
meeting amazing people um so uh if you if you do something that really
is you
then you'll probably
be in for a good ride
the best advice I can give
don't just launch
like I have my collection
now put it up for Mint and hope it will
sell out.
Now take the time to reach out to other communities
and other creators to get yourself known.
And if you be genuine, then people will love you
love you and and we'll welcome you with open arms
and will welcome you with open arms.
yeah i think that this is the perfect ending for the space and i want to thank
to all the guests today for joining and uh especially cortland and uh and bernie i think
that you guys provided an amazing overview of what it means to launch an nft collection in the
ecosystem and also inspired a lot of the
people watching the space today and the same for Shane that I think that we need to say a lot of
thanks to Shane for the amazing platform that he created because has not only been bringing a lot
of fun in the ecosystem but he's actually pioneering a lot of the interchain stack innovation like Cosmon,
especially by really pushing forward all this technology with this knowledge.
So we are definitely a lot thankful for the amazing development
that Sargent has been doing, and I'm sure that the interchain community
today has appreciated this call, and thanks everyone for joining.
Thanks a lot, Rob.
Yeah, that was awesome.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Rob, for hosting your space.
It's been fun so far.
