Earlier in July, we kicked off the Cronos Ecosystem Spotlight Series — a series of interview articles covering projects that are building on the Cronos Chain.
Today, we are excited to feature Boomer Squad, a fast-growing native utility-focused NFT collection on Cronos with an exciting product roadmap across launching mini-games, a marketplace, and creating unique experiences for its community.
1. Gm team! Please share more about Boomer Squad and how the team conceptualized the idea behind Boomer Squad
As a team, we have a wide range of experience as investors as early as Crypto since 2017. Some on the team were into NFTs as early as Crypto Kitties. As investors, we were exposed to a wide range of experiences from successful projects, flips, rugs, or projects that were running well and made bad decisions that hurt their projects. Being working professionals in a wide range of industries IRL we had always talked about how we would run our own project.
To us, it was easy to see when a project was making good decisions or bad ones. Pointing out what we would do differently. We had started to put together a concept that was Boomers using crypto incorrectly and had taken some steps to explore the opportunity. The concept was simple: launch a gen 0 collection of NFTs that came with an entire ecosystem established to provide rewards to our holders in multiple ways and then from there build an ecosystem of games, events, collections, IRL services, on chain services that all would reflect back to our original holders.
We felt that it would be very important to be flexible if we were to run a project as the space changes so fast. We want to build a solid base that can shift and change with the times, and then launch branches of the project where there is a demand for it. All CRO rewards to the holders are done through our verified distribution contract which allows you to access your rewards without staking. Simply connect to our contract and claim your CRO. We have a community-controlled DAO as well as airdrops, giveaways, free mints, etc. To date, we have given back over 840k CRO back to our holders.
2. Love the backstory. Can you also provide some background regarding the hardworking team behind Boomer Squad?
We are a team of 11 core fully doxed coming from various industries including 4 in-house developers each with at least 5 years of experience. The team as a whole has all known each other for a long time as close friends. Simply put we got really lucky that our core group of friends all have extensive experience in multiple walks of life that when put together creates a strong and diverse set of experience and skill sets to run an NFT project. Almost every aspect of our project is in-house from that core team with the exception of the Artist who was hired onto the project and 21Million who was added to the team to help run our Boomer Radio project.
The strongest part of the team is the access and transparency that we provide to our community. On top of the full access, everyone gets to the team in discord we also provide regularly scheduled updates every week to our community. We have a Monday announcement explaining what we have in store for the week, a Friday announcement to recap the week, and 1–2 throughout the week to update on progress and developments. Our financials are all public and we not only provide a budget for what the revenue we generated from our mint would be used for, but we also provide a financial report 45 days after minting out giving an update of our spending performance to that budget.
3. You have built a strong community in a short span of a few months, can you share with us what were the few factors that contributed to this success?
Building a strong foundation with our community was, from the get-go, one of our immediate goals. We have seen projects rise and fall based on community sentiment. We are confident that our transparency and long-term vision, along with being fully doxxed working web2 professionals, greatly assisted in building up our community. Our holders can see our genuine intentions. They have already seen in action our ability to deliver. They resonate with our strategies and feel comfortable providing their feedback.
Our Social Lead has played a strong part in building up our community and they speak to a few key things. For starters, we say what we mean and we mean what we say. It is a lot easier to handle communication with upset holders or FUD when we have no need to lie or buy time or otherwise circumvent the truth. We don’t need to hire third-party moderators to stand in front of us and take the heat when something goes wrong. We are right there taking the brunt in Discord on the daily answering questions and concerns within minutes. Because we have a solid vision in mind, because we are confident in our ability, and because of the community’s trust in us, we are ready to address anything head-on. Everything is laid out already for any holders and investors to see. Our Social Lead and Project Manager (two of the more active team members in the community) also have a direct line and access to the main dev. Any concerns can be, and often are, addressed and dealt with in real-time right then and there in concert with the front-end team, the user, and the devs.
We are also known throughout the #crofam for our fun community game nights. We have hosted games ranging from real-life scavenger hunts to online BINGO and provide prizes at no fees for anyone who wants to play, not just Boomers. We have also built several community-based hunts for those familiar with our mysterious ‘h’. All of this helps in getting people together and having fun which is an underestimated aspect of project building. The individual experience is important. All the way from Twitter to Discord. From how long you wait, how the experience made you feel, and how you were handled by the team. Our goal which we actively enforce is to make every single one of those steps you take along the way one that you never have to turn around to look back — because you are confident we are leading you in the right direction.
4. Why did you choose to build on Cronos?
Building on Cronos was an easy decision for the team for 2 main reasons. The first is the gas considerations that come with the chain as our ecosystem is more successful less gas has an impact on our community. Our on-chain games for example are transaction heavy and they simply do not work if you are paying too much in gas. The second and more important reason for building here is the state of the network and the relationship it has with Crypto.com. People forget that the amount of people not in the space is exponentially greater than the number of people investing in NFTs.
We wanted to be as close as possible to the platform that we believe will onboard the most people into crypto. Crypto.com and the apps they provide do a great job bringing people into the space in a way that feels familiar. As those new investors get involved in the space they will start to look at altcoins and eventually DeFi specifically on Cronos. We feel confident that once people find our project we will be strong enough to bring a good amount of them into our community so we wanted to be as close to the biggest intake of new investors as possible and to us that is Cronos.
5. What are the upcoming roadmap updates that the Cronos community can look forward to?
The next major item on our road map is our Boom Room drop that is coming in early September. Boom Rooms are the main mechanism in which our utility token $SCRATCH will be distributed. These rooms will be an interactive NFT which holders will be constantly upgrading (and decorating) in order to keep up with their share of $SCRATCH generation. 50% of the mint revenue for the Boom Room drop will be given to our Gen 0 Boomers directly.
An exciting development is also the Boomer Squad Art Collection which will be kicking off soon. It will be a platform based on showcasing NFTs for the art’s sake and rewarding the artists who are contributing their work. We’ve also tied it into our Boom Rooms with the use of Cosmetic items which will not affect any values but simply the aesthetics of the NFT. With the release of $SCRATCH will also come our Pawn Shop and some mini-games where people will be able to spend their $SCRATCH.
Of course, all of this will soon be followed up with the Zoomers and the Playground arena release and further GameFi projects. We still have our free merch drop coming in the near future. All of the projects mentioned here all reflect back to our Gen 0 collection per the design of the project.
6. Where can a user learn more about Boomer Squad?
You can find us at BoomerSquad.io and from there you can link to all of our socials and documentation. Our GitBook is very well documented and if you have any questions or want to talk to the team we are in discord every day engaging the community and answering questions about the project all of the time.
About Cronos
Cronos (cronos.org) is the first EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain network built on the Cosmos SDK, supported by Crypto.com, Crypto.org, and more than 300+ app developers and partners. Cronos is building an open ecosystem where developers can create their own DeFi and GameFi applications, targeting a base of 50+ million users globally. Earlier this year, Cronos Labs launched a $100M Accelerator program to help developers build new projects and the future of Web3 within the Cronos ecosystem.
When developers build on Cronos, they can leverage all Ethereum developer tools (i.e. Solidity, Truffle, Hardhat, OpenZeppelin, Web3.js, ethers.js, ChainSafe Gaming SDK); leading crypto wallets (i.e. MetaMask, Crypto.com Defi Wallet, Trust Wallet); wrapped versions of the world’s top 50 cryptocurrencies; Cronos Play, a suite of developer tools for Unity, C++ and Unreal engine; and inter-blockchain communication (IBC) cross-chain connectivity to Cosmos chains; and as well as a rich ecosystem of composable DeFi and GameFi dApps.
Cronos is supported by Cronos Labs, the ecosystem grant fund, Web3 start-up accelerator, and incubator of Cronos chain.
