After a little bumpy launch where the map didn’t update correctly and many people tried to purchase the same pieces, about 25% of “world in pieces” has been sold within a week. While some people call it a success we feel that we fell short of our goal, especially if you compare it to other NFT projects which were sold out after a few hours or even minutes. Furthermore the sales stalled and people started to sell their pieces on the secondary market with loss.
We have a lovely community which believes in the project and in us, so we owe them a statement where we have to reflect the previous events, the current state and give them some insights into the future plans.
Reflection on the past events
In retrospect we would’ve done things differently. Although certainly not the only reason but still a great factor of successful projects is the lottery mechanism where people buy NFTs without knowing yet which one they get. It’s like the good old days where you bought baseball card packages or Pokemon card packages, hoping there are some super rare pieces in. We in contrast decided to let the people choose their favorite pieces directly on the map which resulted in a fast sell out of desirable pieces like small countries, islands and valuable countries in general like the US or countries in Europe. In combination with the $PIECE bonding curve where first buyers would get more Tokens it was probably inevitable that the sales would stop as it’s simply not desirable enough to buy some pieces of Congo or Russia.
Well, we can’t change the past anymore.
Instead we tried to collaborate with other (successful) projects which would set up their base on the world at different places to make the surrounding area interesting again to generate more sales and to fill the map. While it worked out well with the Gutter Cat Gang (shout out to the people who made it possible) because it was at launch, the collaborations with other projects after the launch just didn’t help much. We only attracted people who were after the giveaways but not interested in the purchases.
Revision of the old Plan
I want to be honest with you. Our project stagnated. We can’t change the past to correct some mistakes. The 25% of the World that we sold were the best pieces. So if people are selling these below initial price on the secondary market we will never sell out the rest of the map. Even explainer videos and a lot of marketing won’t help much. Because people who are selling their pieces on the secondary market know very well about our idea. But they’re still selling because the excitement about the project is just gone. People are already jumping on the next „hot shit“.
Going forward with the idea to create 100 further artworks like the world doesn’t make sense if we can’t even fill the first artwork. It’s a sign for me that the idea of a dynamic artwork with thousands of contributors is not attractive to the people. Instead they love buying avatars like apes, cats, pandas, bulls or whatever with some story behind it and a lottery functionality where you might be the lucky guy who ends up with a pretty rare one.
If we can’t fill the map it’s a sign for the people that the project is stuck. If we move forward as planned the people are going to dump their PIECE tokens after the airdrop so the price will go to pennies. And if the price of a PIECE Token is just a penny, no artist is going to collaborate with us if we promise them 1000 PIECE in return for collaborating with us. Further more, after the PIECE airdrop people don’t see any value in the segments of the world either, so they will dump them as well…It’s just a downward spiral we are in right now…If we can’t work with artists on further projects the PIECE Tokens have no value. It’s like a self fulfilling prophecy. If no one believes in the project, it’s worthless.
So, going on with the old plan doesn’t make sense. No one wants to ride a dead horse.
I was brainstorming with the team about what would be best in the current situation to:
a) getting the map filled
b) compensating the people who believed in the project
c) making the project attractive again
(Re-)Birth of the NFT World?
As described in the previous chapter, the past plan is doomed. So what are we going to do now?
- We have to fill the map, otherwise it will stay an unfinished work. The idea is to do it the following way:
- We pretty much sold exactly 2500 pieces on the map.We are going to airdrop 5000 pieces of land to current owners as a 2/1 ratio -> If you own 1 segment of the world you’ll get 2 additional pieces airdropped. If you own 10, you’ll get 20 airdropped etc.. The airdrop will be random. In that case people paid 0.0333 ETH / piece effectively which is fair in my opinion because compared to other projects, our NFTs have at least some utility except from just being an NFT image. Giveaway winners won’t participate in that airdrop.
- That move will fill the map directly to over 75% which could lead to a kind of renaissance of the project.
- The last 20–25% (depending how many left) we will sell for 0.03+ try to hype the project up again through giveaway campaigns.
2. As described in the previous chapter, the original idea for the $PIECE tokens doesn’t make sense anymore, because creating further artworks while even the first didn’t get filled is just pointless. But we know that many of you got into this project only because of the promised tokens. Therefore the utility and distribution of PIECE Tokens is not fully discarded, but yet in discussion. Instead of using them for further artworks their use case should remain in the NFT world, though. In this case we can focus 100% on the world, add more features and utility and maybe create some form of economy, where the $PIECE tokens will be used as a kind of “in-game” currency. But as said, we have to discuss that with the team. Suggestions from our community are highly appreciated.
3. While the name “MillionPieces” did fit perfectly into the old idea it doesn’t fit for the new one. So we bought the domain nftworld.com (Cost us a lot of money) and are going for a rebrand.
nftworld.com just fits 100% to the new idea. It’s easy to remember, anybody can relate to it and it’s a good foundation to build upon. nftworld.com can be used for just everything related to NFTs, so it still allows us to play around with ideas. And nftworld.com has much more potential to be a top visited website for everybody who is interested in NFTs where millionpieces.io was not. While owning a spot on millionpieces.io wasn’t that cool, owning a piece on nftworld.com is just more appealing and could raise the value of your pieces by a lot.
By shifting the focus towards the world we can concentrate our efforts to make this NFT world a masterpiece where everybody wants to be a part of.
Next steps
- In the next days we are going to launch the merging functionality, finally.
- We will improve our discord channel, especially the collab.land integration. I’m not yet familiar with all the functionality there but with your help we will setup it right. I want to highlight owners of whole countries and “land lords” of many pieces.
- We minted a giant area (16x14 pieces) in pretty much the center of the world map. This area will be used for games, giveaway campaigns and as an temporary advertising spot for collaborating projects and artists where we either get NFTs which we share with our owners or generate some revenue for future developments, marketing and giveaway campaigns.
3. We are going to prepare the airdrop of the 2 additional pieces for each owning piece to fill the map. The date of the airdrop has yet to be determined. The development will take us around 2 weeks.
4. Besides the airdrop of the segments the next big step is to improve the performance of the map and prepare it for live updates. While we use simple svg functionality right now we will switch to a framework with a higher FPS and rendering (probably pixi.js). It’s a big task and will take several weeks. You can see some benchmark demo here: https://benchmarks.slaylines.io/pixi.html
5. We are going to migrate the website from millionpieces.io to nftworld.com and have to do the rebranding, which also will take some time.
6. The future about nftworld.com and the PIECE tokens has to be discussed and we are open for suggestions by the community.
Our community is very important to us and it’s really hard for us, seeing other projects flying while ours is stagnating although we put in probably way more money, time and energy. But there is still hope. So let’s create together a wonderful NFTworld where everybody wants to hang around.
