Is Clay the Way?
Pen Test: Overview of Clay Mates and Clay Nation
Today Clay Nation is one of the most well-known NFT projects on Cardano blockchain. These interesting creatures made out of clay have first hit the market in April of 2021. Led by Isobel Robson and Lenna Onto, Clay Nation has become one of signature NFT collections if not the most well-known collection, associated with Cardano blockchain. But is this NFT project worth your time and money or is it just a relic of the past?
Before we move onto the main plot it is worth mentioning that the team behind Clay Nation was always pro-Cardano, sharing core values laid in the foundation of the blockchain. In particular, prior to launching Claymates, Lenna was a part of a two-men team running a Cardano Stake Pool, so it is fair to say that she had fairly deep exposure to Cardano’s technical side from an operator’s standpoint. After that, she even worked for IOHK as a community coordinator for a short period of time right before opening the Clay Nation chapter of her life. From numerous sources who’ve spoken to Lena Clay in person one can gather the following: she is a humble and down to earth person.
Glimpse of The Past
The story began with a series of peculiar clay animations released in a form of non-fungible tokens on Cardano blockchain. On April 17th 2021 a small team sharing one vision released a limited number of clay animations under the name of Clay Mates. First one of those depicted Charlie Birdkinson — an imaginary clay-character who got their appearance from none other than Charles Hoskinson, co-founder and CEO of IOHK (Input Output Honk Kong), the company behind Cardano blockchain. Unique style of Joe, real clay maniac and a true artist, caught community’s attention. And so Clay Mates found their core fanbase thanks to them being quite unconventional when compared to other NFTs on pretty much any other Blockchain.
After this initial triumph it was decided to carry on with this format, delivering more unique shortcut clay animations. Note, that back in time the team was gradually smaller than it is now.
Eventually the crew behind the project went ahead and adopted a new format, releasing a PFP collection of 10 000 authentic NFTs under the name of Clay Nation. Every single peculiar trait in the collection was obviously hand-made out of clay and every NFT had it’s own relatable look! Original mint price was 38 ADA per 1 NFT and happened on September 9th 2021 (bear in mind, that ADA at the time was considerably more expensive than it currently is). The so-called OG Clays were born.
The mint was a success. Buyers on secondary market were ready to spend huge sums of their ADA on a rare Clay, confirming core holders’ belief in the project and in the team. One of 12 orangutans (one of the most common ones, per se) was sold for 15 000 ADA (approximately $40k at the time). Just imagine, about two weeks after the mint was done, Clay Nation could boast with a dozen 25k+ ADA sales on secondary market, two of which were at least 80k ADA ($212k +). Mind blowing numbers on their own, especially for a ghost chain, don’t you agree?
There is a “The Clay Way” Initiative, which implicates that the team behind Clay Mates makes certain donations to different charities; currently more than $44k were donated to the cause. Part of these donations went on “adoption” of 12 orangutans via projects focused on orangutans’ preservation (Bali, Australia). The donations cover“sponsorship” costs for every orangutan for a year with an aim to readopt them once the duration of yearly sponsorship comes to its end — this involves caretakers’ costs, food, medicine and everything the animal might need. And that’s why among the original 10k Clay Nation NFTs there are exactly 12 orangutan clays.
But it was just the beginning. In the run-up to Halloween, the team managed to land a collaboration with a famous American rock band “Good Charlotte”. On the back of it was created the Clay Nation x Good Charlotte collection, but this time clay characters were depicted in the spirit of the holiday associated wit the release: bloodstains on clothes, straitjacket, pumpkins, bones, skulls and many other sinister features (the original collection also included some of these traits, but the contrast between the collaboration and the pioneer collection was evident). The right to purchase Halloween Clay was granted exclusively to the owners of the original Clay Nation NFT on a 1:1 basis. Some missed their opportunity, which is why the Clay Nation X Good Charlotte collection has 9427 NFT and not that round 10k number we are so used to.
Every Clay Nation / Clay Nation x Good Charlotte NFT has it’s own full body 3D, game-ready models that can be downloaded for free by an owner of a particular NFT. To do this, the owner has to connect to this site with the wallet they hold their NFT in. You can read more on this here.
The next major round of development of the project came to fruition with a bang: the team announced a huge partnership with Snoop Dogg, the iconic American rapper, and his son, Champ Medici, who is actively involved in Web3 space. Even Charles Hoskinson shared tweets featuring OG gangster and participated in Clay Nation’s AMA along with CN’s new partners. It has to be said, that the partnership revolves around Clay Nation metaverse — Clayverse. The latter was announced at the same time as the partnership itself and turned out to be a huge catalyst for CN NFTs.
The Clayverse has three land segments, which in turn consist of Clay Nation Pitches (NFTs). Those segments are:
- Sonic Village (in green), the so called OG-clays’ residence ;
- Underworld (in grey) — area where the CN x GC Clays reside ;
- Baked Nation (in orange), which is, as you can tell by the name, the domain of Champ and Snoop.
32 027 pitches were minted in three different sizes: Large, Medium and Small. There is exactly 9427 underworld pitches in accordance with the number of Clays from CN x GC collaboration, 10k Sonic Village Pitches and 12.6k Baked Nation pitches. As with every other land, pitches’ value primarily depends on its size and location.
For now the Metaverse is still in the development stage, but recent teasers shown during CNFTcon 2022 have become a big hit; you can find a short teaser on Clay Nation’s home page. From those you can tell that Clayverse will be as authentic as are CN’s NFT collections. And as with every Metaverse, Clayverse has it’s own currency — $Clay.
What is $Clay?
Every Metaverse needs currency and in this case that is $Clay. Apart from being utility token it will be also used for governance purposes: “Initially we will run votes on various aspects of the clay ecosystem — with voting weight proportional to the amount of $Clay token held.” The team also disclosed that at some point the token might be used as means of payment for some sort of limited-edition merchandise and that this type of payment will be advantageous when compared to $ADA payment. Other than that it is evident that the team is looking into other possibilities of providing value to the token as well as protecting its holders. Minswap’s Community Zap-in initiative for $Clay being postponed to evaluate all the legal pros and cons is a proof of that. More on the initiative you can read here.
Token overview
First and foremost let’s figure out where do the tokens come from by looking into “Allocation” chapter from CN’s Claypaper. Note, that max supply of $Clay is 2.5 bil tokens. Now let’s examine the numbers:
- Holder (15%) and community contributor rewards (5%)= 20% = 500 mil *All time*
- Land sale bonuses = 10%= 250 mil *All time*
- Development = 32%= 800 mil *All time*
- Team=18%= 450 mil*All time*
- DEX farming and liquidity = 15% = 375 mil *All time*
- Staking = 5%= 125 mils *All time* — rewards won’t be distributed until mid-august
Holder allocation. Every CN/ CN x GC NFT earns certain number of $Clay every day: for example OG blue clays generate the biggest number — 8050 tokens on a yearly basis, while if you don’t “bake” your beautiful NFT you’ll be granted additional $Clay from Booster Pool.
The rest of official Claymates NFTs also get you some $Clay, but in a slightly different manner: you’ll be airdropped about 625 tokens twice a year.
The only exception to this rule is Clay Nation pitches, which were granted a one-time allocation of 5000 $Clay per pitch (happened on 15th of August 2022).
Note, that the Claypaper states that there is a possibility of future land sales, depending on “actual and forecasted growth”. There is also a solid reserve of almost 90 mil. $Clay for this purpose.
What’s “Baking”?
It’s a 14-day process of claiming $Clay from your Clay Nation NFT. The platform built for this purpose is non-custodial, so you don’t risk with your asset when baking it. However, it is worth mentioning, that if you decide to interrupt the 14-day process, a certain part of your accumulated $Clay gets slashed. The size of your loss will depend upon the time you’ve been baking your NFT before the process was terminated (i.e. you’ll get 89% of your tokens for 13 days of baking and so on). The slashed $Clay goes to the Booster Pool, tokens from which will be distributed later on amongst all the unbaked Clay Nation or CN/GC NFTs.
Farming and Staking can be ignored for now. Former is not yet implemented, while the latter is not yet claimable. I can’t seem to find when exactly vesting of Team/Development token allocation starts; my wild guess is mid-April 2023, 1 year after Clay Nation Pitches mint. This lets us ignore this aspect of tokenomics for a little longer.
(CN + CN x GC + Clay Mates) 125 mil $CLAY/year (we are past 1 year already, so the number of available tokens is bigger) + 160 mil (one-time drop to Pitch holders) = 285 mil +
And yet according to https://claybaking.io/ at the moment there is about 264 mil $Clay in circulation.
So why is the reflected number smaller? That’s because a lot of Clays are still unbaked and will most likely be kept that way for a long time. Currently there is a crazy number of 7.6k + unbaked OG Clays , and 6k+ unbaked CN x GC Clays — mind blowing, yet understandable: you treat your NFT as a collectible and you don’t want it to lose its value in any way, while being able to yield rewards from that juicy Booster Pool.
Conclusion
Here I will express my personal perspective and findings. If you ask any CNFT trader about the projects they consider to be the best in the space, you’d most likely hear about Clay Nation. This in itself already tells a lot. Lack of criticism from competitors in a bear market is good for projects’ holders and their mental health. However the project and it’s community has some flaws:
- Clay art is not for everyone;
- the Clayverse is a tough ask, especially when CNFT space has Cornucopias, which has a head start and a way more thorough game plan;
- When it comes to the token, the worst part is “Development + Team” allocations which, if combined, leave us with 50% of total supply. Vesting for those starts 1 year after the project’s launch and goes on for 3 years = 34 722 222 $Clay per month (12,5 mil — Team/advisors; 22,2 mil — Development). In this case it’s fair to say, that one should take in consideration the work the team puts into networking, which is instrumental for an NFT project on a remotely young blockchain, as well as observe team’s vision and actions — overall I think they are doing stellar job.
I avoid talking about community, since every blue-chip project has this status partially thanks to it’s diamond-handed community members, the project’s maxis, that see eye to eye, so this point is extremely subjective and hence is invalid. Reader should understand, that every project has it’s own flaws and that’s how it should be. If you didn’t find any, you’ve probably missed something. Right now I personally remain optimistic about Clay Nation, especially considering team’s ability to land solid partnerships.
And the last thing I wanted to touch upon is that with Clay Nation it’s hard to predict catalysts without any internal knowledge, however right now there is one highly anticipated milestone that the core community knows of: the clay marketplace launch. According to team members it should become available extremely soon, we’re talking days (note, that initially it was expected to be released in October). The marketplace should offer asset packs for pitches as well as different trousers that can be used on your very own Clay Nation/ CN x GC NFT. Right now it’s just mere speculations, but who knows — maybe we’ll be able to see some strange animal-companions or something else, something totally different. And to pay for these you’ll be able to use both $Clay and $ADA. I expect the former to be favored.
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With this my Essay comes to an end. I appreciate whoever reads this and urge you to do your own proper research. The text above is a matter for reflection and is not a financial advice by any means.
Sincerely Yours,
Right Seeker