Welcome to Part 2 of the introduction to The New Explorers Club!
Check out Part 1 here: https://medium.com/@portals_/the-new-explorers-club-intro-part-1-cf96bb254c39
This Medium post (Part 2) will go into more detail about:
- The Robot
- The Pod
- The Club
- The Treasury
The Robot
The idea of The New Explorers Club was originally kickstarted from a community wish around having a PFP and internal discussions about having a community-focused PFP/Avatar project in Portals. So from the very beginning, we knew that we wanted to do 3D Avatars. However, one of the first questions we had to answer was…
Should it be a humanoid, animal, or what kind of character?
We didn’t think a human/humanoid would give us the flexibility, fun, and awesomeness that an animal or another character would be able to give. “Human” avatars will most likely be taken over by Avatar platforms like Ready Player Me and major brand projects like Nike’s RTKFT. It can also easily cost millions of dollars to get and do “human avatars” right and future-proof them in 3D (ReadyPlayerMe just raised more than 50+ million dollars for this). Especially since our brains are hardwired to compare to how people look in reality (different from robots and animals).
Long story short, we didn’t feel like a human avatar was the way.
So how about an animal? Another long story short (and no worries! we’ll cover it in more long-form in upcoming podcasts and Twitter Spaces)… then we did not think it would make sense to come up with an animal for the Portals PFP and The New Explorers Club.
Then we started thinking… how about a robot? It would fit a great narrative (robots exploring and building the future of the Metaverse and the internet in 3D), it would be fun, it could have a lot of use cases in Portals, and so much more. A Robot character it was!
3D, before creating dedicated 2D PFP Art
We knew that the 3D Avatars would be important, so we started conceptually in 3D and leaned on our first Portals robot as well:
This is not The New Explorers Club robot/PFP in its 3D avatar form, but it greatly influenced the original New Explorers Robot's design. We are still exploring various elements for the final 3D versions (size, chest, arms/legs, etc.).
After settling on the concept, we then went into 2D and invested a lot of resources in creating dedicated 2D PFP Art (versus just providing renders of the 3D Art). The image/2D version is designed for classic PFP use, as in Profile Images on Twitter, Discord, etc.
Summary (Robot)
From owning a The New Explorers Club NFT, you’re getting essentially two robots:
- One dedicated to 2D PFP
- One dedicated to 3D Avatar
However, if you wish, you’ll also be able to use the 3D Avatar as PFP!
Another cool utility is that you’ll be able to program your robot to chat in a Portals space when the feature is ready in Portals. This means that if you have visitors for your Pod or Space in Portals while you (or your project/company) are not there, then you can program it to interact with visitors and reply to simple questions (via chat trees).
The Pod
By owning The New Explorers Club NFT, you’ll get access to your own Genesis Pod! Your own personal space in the Portals Metaverse. It’ll be available shortly after the mint ends.
Genesis Pod utility will increase over time, but right now, you can already invite over a couple of friends, voice chat, display NFTs, and add items from the inventory to the space. Everything is browser-based.
We’re working on making it possible for you to utilize and display different kinds of items that you can find and gather in Portals too!
The Club
Events
For all holders, we’ll be doing exclusive events with Metaverse/Web3 industry leaders, partners of ours, and many more. For this, we’re also creating an amazing The New Explorers Club HQ in 3D, in Portals!
Community
We already have a great community with Portals and believe we can take it to the next level with The New Explorers Club. In terms of 3D experiences, then it’s our goal to use The New Explorers Club both as a flagship (using our own platform) and also to experiment with the newest features and opportunities.
The Treasury
As you might have read in Part 1, then The New Explorers Club is a 10000 NFT Collection, but with a capped supply of 5555 ever reaching the open market. The remaining 4445 NFTs will be kept by the Portals/TNEC treasury.
The reason is, that the collection was originally offered to Portals Genesis Citizen Card (a 10k collection) holders if they burned their Genesis Card in return. For this reason, it became a 10000 collection.
When we a couple of days ago knew the final amount of The New Explorers Club NFTs that would be burned/claimed via Genesis Cards, then we could decide on the final active supply (5555). This means that 4445 of The New Explorers Club NFTs won’t reach the open market. To be totally clear, this means that 44.45% of the supply won’t be able to be listed at all times.
This has been pre-planned, but we did not know ahead of the mint if the treasury would end up with 6000, 3000, 1000, or 250 NFTs.
Burn or Utility?
The big question was then whether we should burn the ones that were not claimed or seek to provide value and utility for collection holders. We choose the latter.
Creating the most loved collection (and floor)
One of the most important goals of the collection has always been to make sure that anyone can find one or more robots that they love, either in 2D or 3D (or both).
It’s always been aesthetics/love > rarity for The New Explorers Club. We even have some traits that could easily have been ultra rare with 50 or fewer in the collection, but since we knew some of the traits would mean a lot to many (like the Builders Hat), so we didn’t make them ultra rare. Sometimes in some PFP/Avatar collections, people are forced to buy floors (the cheapest priced) that they don’t really love or connect with. We want to avoid this, while still having very rare and unique PFPs in the collection.
We made a crazy amount of rules for aesthetics before generating the collection, but in the end, there are still a lot of randomnesses, and there might be some traits or combinations which for a few will be their “forever robot”, but that many might not like or prefer at all.
To balance this, we would have to create a mechanic that both makes the floor more likable while at the same time not burning or excluding a lot of traits and trait combinations (because if we did so, we would also lower the diversity and uniqueness of the collection).
Our solution:
Trading with the Treasury
For a least a limited period, then it will be possible to trade with the Treasury NFTs.
Who gets to trade? Who gets priority?..
The answer to this lies in the tradable utility NFTs we’ll be airdropping and giving to holders over the next two months. This is also the airdrop that the people who were a part of the first wallet snapshot on September 22 will receive.
There will be an auction where anyone can bid x amount of the airdropped utility NFTs to win priority in trading. We’ll announce the auction day and time well in advance. We expect the possible 1/1s and most rare NFTs in the treasury will be traded on this day.
Once we’re ready, publish a full post on the utility NFTs, treasury trading, and upcoming auctions, including a highlight of some of the rarest robots from the treasury.
Summary
- The New Explorers Club is a 10000 collection
- Only 5555 NFTs will ever reach the open market
- The Portals/TNE Treasury will hold the remaining 4445
- There will be opportunities to trade with the Treasury
- E.g. you swap “1 TNEC NFT + an amount of airdropped utility NFTs” for a new TNEC NFT of your choice from the treasury.
- Priority for trading will be based on airdropped utility NFTs.
FAQ
Let us know in the Portals Discord if you have questions, and we’ll include the most frequent ones here in the FAQ section.
Mint is finishing today!
The New Explorers Club mint for those who were whitelisted in burn window two is finishing today at 7 PM UTC! After this time, the mint will be officially closed!
Come join us in the Portals Discord or follow along on Twitter today!
— The Portals Team
