Chill & Shill RealBirds AMA Recap

GM NEAR,

Thanks to everyone who joined the recent conversation with Real Birds to discuss if birds are real and their omnichain contract. Congrats to the winner of the NEAR giveaway.

You can listen to the recording here. On stage, we had Real Birds, AGT, and Elijah.

Can you give us an introduction about yourself and Real Birds?

Real Birds: Real Birds is four months old now, it was a free mint, and we were the first NEAR-native NFT project preparing preemptively to go omnichain by working with Layer 0. Omnichain is an infrastructure that’ll be the future of multichain as we see it. It’s a way to keep NFTs in the same collection and supply while making them available on all integrated chains. The users can then transfer tokens different from bridging, and you get all the best features of each blockchain ecosystem.

It’s still very early days, and we made it more complicated by minting on chains that aren’t integrated with Layer 0 yet, but we’re excited to make it happen. We’re set up to be one of the most game-changing projects, and it will be a really cool experience looking back.

How has the journey been since the mint?

Real Birds: We actually did a thread about that yesterday. We received a foundation grant which enabled us to offer a free mint; that was when the NFT volumes were really down in NEAR. So we wanted to give people something exciting, and it was a very successful experience. It’s been an incredible journey ever since. It’s all been memes, fun, and building together. All about positivity.

Our goal was always to do these mints on various chains, with the understanding that the NFTs would be integrated with Layer 0 and available on all those chains. I think NEAR has a lot to gain from that, and then we’ll see liquidity flow to where it’s most appreciated. And after integrating NEAR, we’ll work on making it happen with Solana as well.

Users get to hop across chains and experience the trade-offs and benefits of each first-hand this way.

So there is no roadmap as collections normally do?

Real Birds: I’ve talked about this before, but I feel that roadmaps and utility for the sake of it are just bull market things that we’re now phasing out. I think we had many examples of that. This is such a new concept that it’s really hard to accomplish roadmap items. We’ve seen that play out in many projects. We prefer to work in the background and then announce accomplishments.

The main thing you focus on is building this tech to connect chains…

Real Birds: Yes, that’s a huge part of our thesis. Recently we announced migrate labs, giving us a short and long-term time horizon. In the short term, we can offer development services to onboard new projects (the first client was Mara); many other clients we talk to are also NEAR-based. And in the long term, we’ll be able to work on our own projects. Eventually, this hopefully turns into a revenue stream holders can benefit from.

Migrate labs popped up, if you want to put it that way, as our utility driver.

So is Migrate Labs where projects go if they want to build omnichain or, more generally, for blockchain dev?

Real Birds: That’s what we specialize in. We’re unique in that we’ve partnered with layer 0 labs for months and are well-connected with many omnichain projects. It’s very complex, and we’re able to specialize in that. But for anything else in the web3 and crypto space, we have years of experience as well. So we can build them. An example of that is our recent partnership with Trove Labs, the entity behind Jump DeFi. They offer a lot of NEAR-native services and will have a great launchpad set-up as well, and we can then support projects to launch there.

Real birds, what made you pick that name?

Real Birds: Cause birds aren’t real. That’s our starting point. And we want to raise awareness for that. When someone sees a meme, they might look twice next time they come across a bird. And when people look at our traits, and one of them is a security camera, they start questioning, are they joking, are they serious? We’re just trying to wake people up and staying humble.

Are all birds not real, or are some real?

Real Birds: Have you ever seen a baby pigeon? No. So I don’t know what people are eating on thanksgiving, but they might have to think twice.

What about chickens?
Real Birds: They can’t fly, so maybe they are real.

The initial purpose of the space was to talk about omnichain, but it seems we now are discussing the much more important question of if birds are real.

Real Birds: Bird truthor, that’s the term.

What was your experience building community on NEAR?

Real Birds: We had a good experience. I think the best communities in the NFT space are those that are fun, memeable ones. All my previous experience comes from the Ethereum space, and I think some of the best projects there have been Pudgy penguins, cryptoads, and sappy seals. They’re just good at being genuine and authentic. I always liked the idea of building community brands. That’s something I can get behind in the bear market. This is the kind of stuff that sticks for years.

Being genuine goes a long way.

What sets apart omnichain from other bridging solutions?

Real Birds: It’s just a matter of time. We’ve had very productive calls with the Pagoda team and Layer 0 labs. Building on Rust, for example, makes it a lot harder to create an endpoint making it interoperable with other chains so it is not as simple as it might look from the outside.

What’s your take on the royalties discussions?

Real Birds: I’m a big fan of show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome. With royalties not being enforced at the smart contract level on certain chains, it was just a question of time. Marketplaces want to increase their share, and users want to pay less. So it’s not surprising this happened.

To keep up with the RealBirds, check out their website and follow them on Twitter.