#2 Mid-Monthly Newsletter, September

Originally published on September 15, 2022.

An update on the September changes.

Mid-monthly newsletters are to provide a glimpse into what’s been happening behind the scenes, address any major questions and provide updates, if there are any. Please keep in mind, monthly newsletters will contain the bulk of details and substantial changes — these are just a peek at our backend.

Updates on Prior Newsletter Actionables

Treasury Management

• We’ve made the conversion of 25.553 ETH to 40,000 USDC.
• Smooth-lining the fundraising process
• We’ve already mapped out the architecture for this. Initially, we were going to build it out using the old site as a base, however, we’ve decided against this. Read on to find out why.
• We are still on the expected timeline for this task.

Website Revamp

• This is currently in the works. Once we went deeper into the Ethlizards branding/design, we realized we needed a complete re-touch of everything. Currently, we don’t have logo/branding assets to share with partners, let alone banners or animations.
• We’ve outsourced a popular marketing firm, No Standing to help us with the initial branding strategy and direction. You may know them for their amazing work with Illuvium and their help with other Ethlizards marketing.
• On top of that, we are bringing on another designer to move the design process in-house. We felt like this is necessary as there are a variety of features coming out in Q4, and we needed a designer to facilitate this extensive process.
• We expect our revamped branding to be done by the end of this month, with the website shortly completed a week after.

Lizard Deal allocations

• In talks with 2 companies right now for funding. Both would be around the 50,000 dollar mark. A 3rd deal we’ve committed for and currently pending legal work from their side, should be anywhere from 30,000–50,000 USD. Not able to release any details yet, but it’s an interesting Meta/NFT-Fi project at low valuation.

Lizards holders obtaining direct deal flow

• Muse pool went live a couple of days ago, and SeaGolem posted a great LIP for us to work off. These are happening, and will likely be integrated inside the staking interface/update.
• We secured a deal already to pass down to individual investors. It’s a later stage game-studio that is doing a round 2 of their Series A for an additional runway and would be a great company to pass down to the lizards.

Council Re-work

• Governance changes have been pushed back whilst we work on other tasks at hand. We are going to take inspiration from Synthetix + Illuvium’s structure for our own, with multiple councils. ILV’s structure is currently being developed and we’ll likely be using some of their resources to expedite the process.
• As for the 5th seat of the council. A LIP will be up by the end of the week.

Marketing & Branding Efforts

• Already briefly touched on branding in the website portion; this is the number 1 priority for us and is blocking a lot of other changes from being made.
• Some contributors have already seen some early design iterations and we’ll finalize them by the end of the month.

Staking WIP

• It’s happening! We spent a lot of the last week looking at solutions from VCs, Defi protocols, NFTs and other crypto gaming projects and came up with a blend of benefits for staking.
• We are looking to have a LIP detailing advanced architecture and timelines around the first week of October. The base ideas are here, it’s just going to take a lot of time to make it easily understandable, and also think of any potential bugs/issues.
• Psst… If you want a sneak peek at what’s being proposed, there’s some alpha in a thread under #governance-talk.

Merch

• It’s happening as well! We’ve drawn up some base concepts for plushies and these are being worked on as we speak. Excited to say, these are going to be the most unique plushies with the best unboxing experience one can imagine. Actually got a beta design back from Rogier a couple of hours ago.
• As for additional merch, our main line targeted at our holders is being developed by No Standing. We’ve seen some designs, and they look great — but have put this on the backlog for now as we focus on our revamped branding.
• We briefly touched on this in the AMA, but the way we want to target merch is 2-pronged. We want to have a line of clothes that appeal to the traditional NFT holders and regular investors, however, we also want to explore using merch as a way to attract additional members and interesting faces. Our very “memeable” brand of art vs commerce definitely can be made mainstream and fits the style of a lot of streetwear artists out there. Artist merch collaborations are something we really want to explore.

Additional Updates

• In the coming weeks, we are going to organize our collections, launch the giveaway lizard and clean up the discord (channels, roles, etc). We want to bring more value to our contributors so we will be launching a special collection to celebrate them for their work in Q4.
• Early access. This as mentioned before, and we won’t elaborate on it because we haven’t had the time to flesh it out, but, this is happening, and we are bringing cooler stuff than you can imagine. Ethlizards should, and will become the premier NFT to rock if you’re into crypto gaming.

Additional Content

• In the upcoming months we are going to start producing a lot more content, crypto-related, but especially focused on crypto gaming. We’ll release more details following the October newsletter.

Roadmap

• Coming out in the October newsletter. We are still preparing the details to give a decent estimate on timelines.
• Better docs & content
• Coming out with the new website.

Expense Update

• So far, other than the ETH to USDC swap, only 1 expense has been made!
• Upfront payment for design services to Kawpuccino. He’s the designer we are looking to bring in in-house to develop the website, staking, and various other interfaces.
• Come October, there’ll be a lot more expenses made and we’ll have them report these as well! Expect a lot of payments to occur on the 29/30th of September.

Community Questions

Would love to get an idea of how often Liz community investment opportunities might pop up, so we can start to pre-plan leaving X amount of liquidity spare each time to take advantage of those opportunities — from NewToItAll | WolvesDAO#6812”

Hard to say really. Currently, most deal flow is pretty erratic, and mostly from Kieran. Once we have better branding in place, clear value ads and a variety of features, we’ll be able to clearly evaluate and plan for the future. As for now, we don’t need to act.

An opportunities sales funnel would be good for transparency too. Number opportunities brought in by advisors, number converted, number dismissed, number TBD — from “gobi#1545”

Happy to integrate this into our newsletters when we launch our new website & funding/application process alongside it. Probably won’t be doing this for collab requests though, I get a lot of them to sift through, and it would be a waste of everyone’s time to record and tally them up.

More to come next time,
Ethlizards