On Oct 10, Echo, co-founder of Nervape, was invited to attend the AMA hosted by Nervos Nation, answering questions gathered from several community channels.
Q1: What was the inspiration for Nervape’s design?
Echo: Members of the Nervape team are fans of anime, movies, and games. Some of our inspiration comes from popular films and games such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, One Piece, Jojo’s bizarre adventure, Death Stranding, and Warframe…
The Nervape story is about the first Nervapes who long to find their way to the Third Continent. It is a reflection of the journey of real-life web3 explorers who are from different backgrounds, races, and occupations. This also includes many contributors in the Nervos ecosystem. Many stories are inspired by real events and real people around us. If you are interested, you can read the ongoing stories here: https://www.nervape.com/story. You may find a familiar plot where you can fit in.
Q2: What is the biggest difference between nervape and other projects？
Echo: I think the most significant feature of Nervape is storytelling, customizable, and expandability. Just like superhero characters in Marvel Comics can have their own IP and related products, any character in the Nervape story has the opportunity to generate a game, a movie, or even a new Metaverse project.
Many projects are now gradually transforming into 3D or adding the narrative of NFT to fit the Metaverse, but Nervape has grown up with stories and 3D genes since the project’s birth. We launched Nervape as an experimental on-chain story+art+game back in Dec 2021. As far as I know, Nervape is the first and only project that is story-driven and features customizable 3D NFTs. We’re proud of that.😎
Q3: For community co-creation, how do community members participate in Nervape’s story, and besides participating in the story, is there anything else Nervape can do for the community to participate together?
Echo: There are two parts in Nervape’s Community Co-Creation. First, a secret character will reveal an extra chapter about dreams. In this dream chapter, Nervape Character NFT holders will have the opportunity to influence the whole story by holding, staking, burning their character NFTs in our voting and content-creating events. They will influence the story’s direction and also affect character NFTs’ rarity.
Second, Nervape holders can truly decide what their Character NFTs look like by equipping or unequipping item NFTs from the character NFT. Therefore the general look of Nervape NFTs will be the result of Nervape community co-creation. Beyond that we’d also like to explore the possibility of having Nervape NFTs designed and created by the community or via collaboration with artists.
Q4: Why are Nervapes designed with no face?
Echo: It’s a quite interesting question.
It has become widely accepted that PFP or character type NFT is a significant part of Web3 users’ identity. We agree with that, but we want to take a step forward. Most PFPs currently in Web3 are designed by the team. Users have very limited freedom when choosing their avatars. These avatars are users’ virtual identity. They should not be defined by anyone but the users themselves.
YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN DEFINE YOURSELF. This is one of Nervape project’s core beliefs. Users are supposed to be able to choose their own identities, appearances and apparels. What we’ve been doing is providing backgrounds and characters with different personality traits. The stories we publish will provide the backstory of each character. Hopefully our users can find a character they identify with. Then they can build their Web3 avatar based on the character. The avatar will truly belong to them.
Character NFTs that have been released by Nervape can be disassembled and reassembled into different combinations. You get to choose the job you desire and all the apparel assets you want your avatar to wear. We didn’t give the Nervape any facial traits on purpose, so THEY CAN BE ANYBODY, AND ANYBODY CAN BE THEM. We really wish to see the community flourish. We are excited to see what Nervape will evolve into with the influx of the community’s creativity.
Q5: Please explain in simple words how will the apes be customized and how will this effect the original NFT after customization?
Echo: In the near future, we will release 4 types of NFT contracts: Character NFTs, Item NFTs, Scene NFTs, and Special NFTs.
A customized ape is a character NFT with metadata that records its special equipments (item NFTs) and what the ape is wearing. We will provide a platform for holders to equip or unequip item NFTs from a character NFT. Every time you complete customizing an ape, our contracts will update the character NFT’s metadata, lock equipped NFTs, and unlock unequipped NFTs. A locked item NFT will become untradeable, while an unlocked NFT will become tradable.
Here’s what will happen to the original NFTs:
Once the customization function is launched, all original Nervape character NFTs will be converted into customized character NFTs equipped with what they possess in the original look. That is to say, an original NFT will turn into a character NFT wearing item NFTs. And of course, you will be able to unequip these item NFTs, list them on secondary markets or use them to customize other character NFTs.
Q6: Nervapes character NFTs will have unique tools that corresponds to their jobs, will all jobs be minted equal or some jobs will be more rare than others?
Echo: We have 20 characters in the prequel, and they all have different backgrounds, jobs, and skills.
When launched, every character is equally rare. They each have 256 identical NFTs.
Holders will have the opportunity to affect the rarity of these characters when participating in a special Nervape co-creation event. For example, after each chapter is released, holders can vote to decide the direction of the story by staking their character NFTs. They will gain the opportunity to burn the staked character NFT for a unique character NFT, which will affect the rarity of the original NFT.
Q7: Do you have plan to create PFP related NFTs?
Echo: We didn’t have plan to create PFP NFT at first. However, we do listen to our community. We learned that people wish to have avatars that belong to the Nervape community. It is a cool idea, and we want to let the community know that we heard them. The next thing that will happen is we will release a 2D PFP collection in November. We’ll provide more detailed updates soon.
One of the points I want to emphasize is that there is too many avatar NFTs on the marketplace, and most are just slightly different in visual style. We want to take it one step further. We plan to launch a 2D PFP customization platform that allows users to create and mint their own Nervape PFP NFT. It will be done by the users, not by the team.
In other words, we create the assets and users make customization choices based on their PFP preferences. The choices they made will further contribute to the rarity of different elements of the NFT. This is PFP NFT conformed to Nervape’s style. It’ll give everyone an opportunity to be in our community. They will have the freedom to decide how they want to flex their identity in the metaverse.
Q8: Will Nevape have plans for related games in the future?
Echo: Stories and games are the most important elements we want to incorporate into web3 adoption. We’ve always had the vision to make a Nervape game. But be aware, we won’t make those GameFi-type games (which we don’t recognize as “games” 🥲). We aim to create a more playable, immersive, and expandable game.
We are currently composing backgrounds, designing characters’ traits and skills, and even organizing the metadata of our NFTs. These are all in preparation for the ultimate goal of transforming the Nervape world into a game. Beyond making an entertaining, playable game, we are interested in collaborating with brands and granting in-game assets that will have real-world utility.
We aim for our project to attract professional game developers to create games based on Nervape’s background story. However, there are difficulties. For example, how do we flatten the learning curve for inexperienced users to use crypto apps? How do we increase the performance of blockchain networks to meet the standard of online games? The future is uncertain and nothing is guaranteed, but please be assured that making a Nervape game is a goal we’ve always had in mind and are working towards it.
Building an authentic, immersive gameplay experience in web3 is not easy, but it’s essential. In our story, the Nervapes have to overcome numerous challenges to get to the Third Continent. It’s the same for us in web3. We’ll keep building and we will get there.
Q9: Why choose to bridge NFT from Nervos L1 to Godwoken? How will this affect the nervos ecosystem?
Echo: The initial set of Nervape NFTs has several unique properties. For example, they are 3D for real and there’s minimal transaction fee. We could do it because the NFTs were minted with mNFT standard in Nervos layer 1. However, Kollect suspended the support to mNFT after their April upgrade. Our community could no longer list their NFTs on the only secondary market on Nervos Layer1.
We would never sell NFTs that can’t be listed on secondary markets. Neither would we abandon the NFTs we’ve sold. As I mentioned before, all NFTs published by Nervape have their own functions at a later stage of the project. That’s why we shifted our focus from releasing new NFTs to solving this dilemma in the last 4 months.
We took the opportunity to also look for solutions that will improve user experience, game properties, and storytelling. We’ve always wanted to find a way to address problems such as: How to achieve an affordable gas fee? How to maintain the flexibility to migrate to other chains? How to ensure compatibility with the ERC721 standard? After tons of meetings and research, we believe that migrating to Godwoken is the best solutions for our project and our community at this stage.
Regarding how this will affect the Nervos ecosystem —
We got a lot of help from the Nervos developer community to develop and design Nervape bridge. Without their help, we couldn’t have achieved this goal. Nervape is a part of the Nervos ecosystem. We are aware that some NFT projects in layer 1 have encountered similar problems. We‘d love to help them to solve their current predicament. With all the different projects growing and becoming better, the Nervos Community will flourish. Nervape Bridge will be an open source. Any NFT project in Nervos ecosystem can use it to build its own bridge from Layer 1 to Godwoken.
The development of Nervape bridge is almost done, and we will have beta testing on next Monday. Anyone willing to support Nervape or Nervos is welcome to sign up for the public beta testing here:https://forms.gle/oJHfo1RJjekKCkNg8 . We’d love to know your feedback!
Q10: Besides the story, can you announce the progress of other product development?
Echo: Yes, sure!
The Nervape Bridge will go live in two weeks. The customizable 2D PFP collection I mentioned before will release in November. The new 3D Character NFTs in Nervape saga’s 1st Chapter are expected to be released in December. These are the projects that will be launched in the near future. Follow Nervape’s official account to get the latest updates.
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