EarthNatives

What does Institute Ecoterm Modular mean to you? Probably nothing. Well, today we are proud to be able to highlight this wonderful group, and by the end of this feature, we're confident that they will mean more to you than you could have expected. Their admirable work echoes Cardano's own ethos of "Changing the world for the better" and this same soulful energy has enabled them to create a truly original narrative for their NFTs. Let's find out more, about the Earth Natives!

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Maker Review (MR) Intro: Hello, and welcome to THE MAKER REVIEW. The purpose of this interview today is to examine your project launch so that artists, developers, and future teams can learn from your challenges and journey. We are so happy to have you as our feature this month to highlight everything you're doing, and fortunate enough to have so many of your team join us!

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MR Q1: Let’s start off the big question; Can you tell us why you chose Cardano? What is it about this blockchain that convinced you it was the place to launch your NFT project?

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Earth Natives' Kristy (Kr) Answers: There were a few reasons as to why we chose Cardano. One being that we have always been Cardano supporters and only ever bought NFTs from this blockchain. Another is the amazing Cardano Community, it is unlike any other community we have seen and is just so welcoming and proactive. And then the most important reason is their proof of stake making the blockchain more sustainable in comparison to others and as we are trying to raise awareness about building a more sustainable future it really was the only choice.

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MR Q2: How big is your team and what are the key roles? Do you have in-house artists/designers?

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Kr: Our team is made up of 5 members spilt between Australia and Brazil, however all of us are friends and some even family!

João is our artist and well-known in Brazil for his cartoon strips and illustrations. Rafael is our art director, Keith is our developer and also stakepool operator of Power Stakepool, Thiago is the project manager and CEO of Institute Ecoterm Modular and I, Kristy am in charge of communications and social media.

We all are inspired to make change, better our environment and have fun while we are at it.

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MR Q3: When and where did you hear about NMKR Studio for the first time, and what were the reasons that attracted you to the platform?

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Thiago (T) answers: In June, we were planning to launch a collection of mineral cards and started to research online a way as to how we could mint them which is when we came across NMKR Studio. We minted one of these NFTs in July and found that it was very straight-forward and user-friendly, then after hearing Patrick (Tobler) present at the Cardano Summit, we knew this was the platform for us when launching our Earth Natives project.

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MR Q4: So, you’ve chosen NMKR Studio, fantastic! Please explain what your NFT project is all about! What are the utility, rarities and the USPs? We know our readers would love to know from the people who created it!

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Kr: Behind the scenes of Earth Natives is Institute Ecoterm Modular, an institution devoted to teaching how to build with earth and encouraging a more sustainable future. As Ecoterm is always seeking ways to increase knowledge about the earth and its properties we were very excited when Cardano introduced a more sustainable blockchain as we saw it as an opportunity to use NFT’s as a means to educate others and help give back to the community.

The story behind our CNFT’s is based around climate change issues and the need for more sustainable answers. Each character of the Earth Native’s collection wears a mineral, defined by its name and Mohs scale of hardness (look that up!). Every single character has their own mineral and their own uniqueness. This in itself is makes the NFT’s very rare however we have opted out of having a rarity chart as we wanted to focus more value on the artwork as a whole and let the community decide on what they consider to be rare. Please note however that no rarity chart doesn’t mean there are no specials NFTs in our collection.

As we appreciate that everyone supports NFTs for different reasons, we have made sure that our artwork is of top-notch quality, thanks to our friend and well-known cartoonist, Joao Montanaro. We have also written an introduction to a graphic novel that will continue throughout the project to please those who are a fan of the characters journeys.

We will be giving full rights to our holders, including the rights to the surprise music that we attached to the NFTs. We will also plan on holding a presale for holders when it comes to launching season 2 as well as incorporating benefits such as designing your own NFT and being able to mint a comic poster of the 3 Native species in action.

Part of the sale of the NFT’s will go towards building and donating an ecological house in Africa and in Brazil and the whole journey from laying down the foundation to handing over the keys will be filmed and shared with our community.

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MR Q5: Tell us about your experiences in using NMKR Studio. What was the platform like to work with in practice? Did you have any challenges when building the framework?

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Keith (Ke) Answers: The platform was easy enough and new features are added continuously. We had a minor issue with metadata containing square brackets and some being minted without with metadata during testing. But the NMKR team was very helpful in rectifying the issues. Overall, we were very satisfied with the service.

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MR Q6: Which front-end functions and back-end infrastructure for dealing with customer payments did you implement and why?

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Ke: For better security we implemented Cloudflare DDOS Protection, CAPTCHA to protect from bot activities and a HTTPS web page. For our vending machine we implemented QR code for continence of the payment and also displayed the NFT live when payment was made.

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MR Q7: Can you articulate how you formulated the user interface and experience of your website and why you decided on this final design and functionality?

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T: We designed the interface in a way to be simple and attractive while still being informative. We worked hard at making sure the look of the website replicated the story behind our project and enabled users to be a bit interactive.

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MR Q8: How do you feel about your launch? Is there anything you would do differently next time?

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T: In terms of the actual minting our launch was very smooth and faultless. We did closer to the launch time change our transaction limit from one NFT to two and would do this again next time.

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MR Q9: What’s next for your project? How do you envision the evolution of your NFTs?

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Kr: Earth Natives is set out over 3 collections, Armadalus which is the one we just launched, followed by Adants and Meerkadas, both to be dropped at a later date. While we sell our NFTs and build the sustainable houses, we hope to continue to raise awareness and unite communities. We already have another project in the pipeline and are always open to new ideas as they come along and become possible for us to turn them into reality.

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MR Q10: Any final words of advice for the readers who may be planning their own NFT launch?

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Kr: Make sure to understand the current market, aim for something different and always listen to your community.

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We have greatly enjoyed learning about the bigger picture that inspires this very cool project and really appreciate you all for taking the time and giving us the privilege of highlighting your amazing efforts. We’re confident that your experience, ethos and work ethics will inspire future teams to produce more original and constructive NFT creations. Thank you again, and we look forward to seeing those houses built and so much more from you guys to come!

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