The Seekers 101 (01)
A plain-English guide to what you need to know about the Seekers NFT.
If you’ve just arrived here — Hi.
Welcome to the realms of the metaverse — a series of wonderful, colourful worlds full of engaging stories, cool tech, switched-on people, and unique digital assets.
With the mint of the Seekers NFT just around the corner and a flood of new people joining our community, we thought it was important to put together a beginners guide to everything ‘Seeker’ related.
You will have noticed by now that we love to tell a story…
With storytelling comes mystery, but that mystery (however fun and enthralling it can be) can create confusion… So this guide will be ‘lore-less’.
A no-frills guide to the Seekers project, including who, what, when, where, why, and how.
[If you have the time though, you can check out the lore here. It’s worth it.]
So what are ‘Seekers’ really?
The Seekers are a digital collection of 3D-animated robot NFTs, powering communication and trade across the open metaverse. They exist on the Ethereum blockchain. The Seekers are working with a larger group of projects who, as a collective, are focused on building the future internet — a place we call the open metaverse.
Each project has its own purpose in this new internet and each project brings something unique to the table. FLUF World has enabled us to virtually roam 3D spaces as metaverse avatars. The team behind PartyBears is enabling virtual concerts and metaverse gigs, and the boundless opportunities created by artificial intelligence (and just what can happen when you combine that with NFTs) come from the geniuses over at Altered State Machine.
What’s it got to do with ‘communication’?
As the metaverse grows and more projects join the ecosystem, one thing that is missing is the ability to communicate in a way that is value-aligned with this new world we have co-created.
For us, communication being value-aligned means that it is decentralised, permission-less, community-run, and built in a way that cannot exploit your data, rather than operating on the promise that it won’t (before later changing the rules).
Why is it important that communication in the metaverse is community-run? Because that’s the best way to make it decentralised.
To decentralise something means to distribute control so as to equalise power and influence. In data-rich and data-hungry 2022, we think it’s more important than ever that the future of the internet is something we all have a hand in. We don’t want to see the next generation of the internet (aka Web3) go the way of the walled gardens of Web2 (Cambridge Analytica, anyone?).
That’s why how we build this fundamental layer of the metaverse is so very important, and this new era of ethical comms’ functionality is exactly what the Seekers bring to the table in the metaverse.
And bonus — we already know how to deliver it — it’s via the communications technology that Sylo has already had in development for half a decade.
What is the Sylo Network?
The Sylo Network is a decentralised communications protocol and infrastructure, one that’s already providing services to users all over the world.
Video, text, voice, payments, and other application data is sent every day across the Sylo Network, supporting those who’ve already embraced the decentralised way of life.
And what does this have to do with ‘nodes’?
The Sylo Network is alive thanks to a vast number of ‘nodes’ — a network of community-operated computers running special Sylo-built software that relays encrypted data across the world. Operators of these nodes are soon to be rewarded with payments of the Sylo Token (SYLO) for their work in upholding the network as the incentivised stage of the network rolls out.
Seekers are the digital representations of Sylo Nodes and owning a Seeker NFT will become a prerequisite for anyone wanting to run their own node on the Sylo Network, support the communications network of the open metaverse, and earn rewards. To learn more about Sylo Nodes, read on here.
Running a node at stage one does require a level of technical ‘nouse’.
However, the team will be working every step of the way to continue to make the process and UX of running a node better and simpler over time. In addition, there are also other ways to participate such via delegated staking, which is based on supporting already ‘up and running’ nodes, which we will dive into another time :)
Activating your Seeker by running a node is purely optional and as such, we anticipate only a portion of the supply of Seekers will take part in this. If you’ve got the technical chops and you want to contribute to literally upholding the future internet’s network — go for it.
(But there’s also no need for your Seeker to function as a node if you would rather not.)
There are also plenty of other ways that you will be able to enjoy your Seeker as the metaverse continues to evolve.
You’ll be able to do things like…
- Explore the metaverse as your Seeker — a metaverse-ready, fully-rigged PFP NFT.
- Customise your Seeker with unique attachments, arms, backpacks, propulsion systems, and accessories. With well over a billion possible combinations on mint, your Seeker will be completely unique, and you can work to build the bot you’ve always dreamed of over time!
- Hold your Seekers and participate in the creation of future gen 2 bots as the ecosystem expands…
How to get your Seeker & what is a beacon?
All of the NFTs in our space are created through a process called ‘minting’.
Seekers will be available for purchase during a ‘minting window’ of 30 hours, which will begin at 10am on Monday 28 March, 2022 (NZT) / 2pm Sunday 27 March, 2022 (PDT).
Seekers will cost 0.10101 ETH each, unless you are on the whitelist, in which case they will be discounted to 0.09 ETH for each whitelisted asset you hold in your wallet.
A whitelist slot is a bit like a ‘VIP section’ and enables us to grant special privileges (in this case, a preferential price) to pre-existing members of our community who we would like to reward for their support.
Full whitelist and mint details can be found here.
To purchase Seeker/s, you will need to have sufficient ETH to cover both the minting price and transaction fees, in an NFT-compatible blockchain wallet.
We highly recommend using Metamask to mint your Seeker, or another wallet that provides the ability to vary gas fees (NB: please ‘do not’ use the Sylo Smart Wallet app for this mint event, explainer here).
Upon mint, you will receive a Beacon NFT. This Beacon will change into your Seeker in a number of weeks after the mint date at a time dubbed ‘The Great Return’.
The labels ‘Standard’, ‘Rare’, ‘Mythic’, and ‘Ultra’ are indications of your Beacons likelihood of calling a rarer Seeker upon the Great Return. Your Beacon will change into a Seeker around six weeks after the mint.
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