DireMint & Beyond

This article is not only meant to showcase the first major product that we will bring to market, but also allow the reader to see how our cohesive vision leverages Direwolf DAO in not only voting but coordinating the success of all other initiatives through organizational excellence.

NFT’s can have a wide variety of uses including gaming, real estate, and much more. The real public demand at present is simply to sell pictures that are avatar friendly as an NFT. These NFT’s are not items that are used in the games but are something entirely different.

The DireMint project will launch within approximately the next 30 days. It is entirely different from the gaming marketplace and instead focused on artistic NFTs. This initiative is about creating loveable art that can be sold as NFT’s no different from Bored Ape Yacht Club, Crypto Punks, and similar NFT art projects.

From the earliest days of Direwolf Token the project has been planning to make an entrance into the NFT art space. Through patience and not rushing we can now position Direwolf as a quality partner and provider of artistic/collectible NFT’s right out of the gate. Too many projects out there have NFT’s listed on their roadmap, but they are mostly lacking substance or a real plan to help the project in a meaningful way.

Bruce Lee once told the world that you should train to make every punch you throw, be capable of a knockout or it was basically not worth throwing. This is our mindset with all the divisions and initiatives that are built under the Direwolf brand. We might move slower, but we aim to have much more substance strategically than our competitors with what we are doing. Each new project we release to the community moving forward is meant to be capable of being enormous by itself. Just like Bruce Lee, we do not want to throw lame punches just for show, there must be real power behind them. There are countless other projects out there that just release NFT’s with no long term vision or outlook on how the NFT’s will remain in demand from ongoing development and creative methods of providing the holders of the NFT’s unique benefits and perks. We aim to differentiate ourselves from that mentality.

Commission Art, Incubate Artists, & the Long Tail

Direwolf is positioning itself to incubate smaller unknown artists to enter into the blockchain art space, providing all the services and support they need to succeed in this niche. We will strategically partner with larger projects and artists to build as well as maintain a following. Though our real long-term play here is to go after the less well-known segment of artists who are not capable of publishing NFT art and managing their own projects. We seek to provide a turnkey solution by doing everything except for the art itself. Our concept is highly unique and meant to follow our motto of “Rise by Lifting Others”. In this case, it is really helping the smaller artists around the world, while simultaneously building a business service around the idea. There are almost no other projects taking this approach to make NFT art within reach of all artists around the world. Not only will the artists be new to the cryptocurrency space but so will their current following. We aim to monetize the sales of their art pieces to the current buyers in the NFT art space, but also be the first experience for all the artists followers in the cryptocurrency world through this model. We are killing two birds with one stone with our approach.

History of Artistic, Avatar, and Generative NFTs.

NFT avatars, a generative art niche within the artistic NFT world, blew up in 2021 with projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club and Crypto Punks NFT’s selling for millions of dollars. The market itself is an intersection of the traditional art scene, decentralized finance, utility tokens, and meme tokens all pouring their money into the NFT avatar space. Think of this as a transition from physical art that is purchased in an art gallery to a digital form that can be proved as an original through the blockchain and shown off to the world. Instead of sitting locked away in a stuffy room, no one will ever see, people show them off in their wallets or use them for avatars. These digital art pieces have become the status symbol for people who have made money in the crypto world and recently have become mainstream with influencers as well as celebrities pouring enormous amounts of money into the segment. This has trickled down to the everyday users using those images for their avatars or profile images across different social media platforms. It is kind of like jewelry that you can swap out for your profile picture and show off as you travel the digital world.

Many people think that you can just make some art, publish it as an NFT and you are rich overnight. The truth is that these NFT art projects are full-fledged “experiences” for their owners. There is much more to it than most people realize. Each “run” or collaboration with an artist is like a mini-project within itself. It requires building a community, building an entire movement around that specific batch of NFT’s. They need their own roadmaps, future plans to keep them relevant. These projects aim to have their own comic series, minigames, book deals, merchandise, and so much more. The experiences include easter egg hunts where surprises are around every corner meant for the community and users to discover together.

How does this work?

NFT Avatars can be broken down into three basic areas to become successful: Art, Developers, and Community. If you look closely at the most successful projects that don’t turn into a pump and dump of NFT’s you will see that these projects are fully active communities. They have unique lore and storylines for their NFT’s and a long-term vision to give value and greater purpose to the NFT’s. There is a large effort placed on branding and community that is required to make these really take off.

Generally speaking, there are a few different people who ultimately will team up to make these projects because the artists who make the graphics cannot write all the smart contract code or deploy a front end which allows for the minting of the NFT’s themselves. There is a requirement for artists to launch these sorts of generative art projects which require a great deal of technical expertise from a coding standpoint. On top of that, it requires a lot of business and marketing acumen which most of them do not want to handle themselves. The team ultimately recognized that we had all the expertise within our teams and partners to launch our own incubator for these sorts of projects.

DireMint seeks to help artists, graphic designers, and other people who do not have the technical expertise to code everything and the resources to market or maintain a community by providing them with a turnkey solution from which they can make money by just sticking to what they are best at which is making the artwork and mingling with their fans on social channels.

So you might be wondering, isn’t this just another thing for the team to worry about?

DAO, not just voting, a decentralized workforce

Many people may remember the meme coin days of Direwolf where the community would spend their energy trying to create “pumps” through actions like getting us trending on Dextools or similar actions. The mindset was if everyone does a little bit of work daily, then the project will have more chances of succeeding. The problem with this is that the group was spending their time on nothing that added any long-term value to the project. There was no real substance or strategic coordination to really grow the equity of the project.

What if there was a way to coordinate that community energy into a more constructive form?

…D̶u̶h̶ DAO, there is ;)

This will be our first demonstration of an angle of the mighty Direwolf DAO not discussed in the previous articles.

Voting is great, but our DAO’s purpose is not limited to a bunch of people sitting around voting hoping for the project to magically become popular overnight. The Direwolf DAO is the coordination of ALL resources. Each and every member of our community has unique skills, if we harness those skills in more meaningful ways, imagine the power we would have collectively. There is nothing an army of our wolves cannot accomplish if they are properly organized, working together. Some of us help with twitter raids, some of us make posts on Facebook, some just like to chat online, some of us like to lead, some of us are aspiring developers and our DAO aims to harness all of it in a more constructive manner.

Imagine that, we just found a way to add value to Direwolf by having some users just sit around and chat with others online.

We will lean on our holders and community to assist in building a following for each of these art projects, assist us in keeping their Discord channels active and so much more. Think of our DAO like a concentration of expertise, not just a group that votes, but a group that can actively use their own individual skills to help grow the Direwolf brand through their small actions within the initiatives like DireMint.

Our first collaboration, Untamed Isles!

TO BE CLEAR, THESE NFT’S ARE ARTISTIC AND DO NOT ENTITLE YOU TO RECEIVE A TAME IN THE GAME. UNTAMED ISLES AND DIREWOLF WILL ISSUE A JOINT ANNOUNCEMENT REGARDING THIS COLLABORATION IN THE NEAR FUTURE.

The Untamed Isles team has been working on a cute, fun, and loveable idea related to a specific Untamed Isles tame that will be minted as artistic NFT’s for anyone to purchase, trade, and much more.

Our collaboration with Untamed Isles on this initiative will help to propel DireMint to a much larger audience rather than starting with an unknown artist and allow for us to work with other artists by leveraging our brand equity obtained from this initial NFT launch. The team has gotten some sneak peaks at what they have been working on and we are very excited because we really feel that the Untamed artists have done an incredible job designing the assets.

Think like Bored Ape Yacht Club, but instead of an ape there was a cute tame instead!

Which tame did we select? You will have to wait for the official announcement to find out. The beauty about working with an already trusted partner on this new initiative is that they check so many boxes that make these sorts of projects successful, it was a no-brainer.

For example: Most of these projects will have a roadmap where they will later create lore, and write a book about the NFT art project. Untamed already has the lore completed and they have a book that is about to be published because of the game.

Direwolf holders do not receive free NFTs, Direwolf holders do not have any advantage or special pricing, this collaboration is meant to be pure and fair for all to establish market share. We are building a long-term model, this cannot be all about Direwolf.

We are not providing specifics in this article about the total number of NFT’s that will be minted or the pricing. Everyone will have to wait for the joint announcement or be on the lookout for leaks that could come from either project prior to the official announcement.

NOTE: Gold Farm participants will still receive an NFT, but it will be given out in a future collaboration. Our intention is to grab market share and not give any single person an advantage or free NFT’s to uphold the quality of our first collaboration. In doing so we hope to establish a track record that can then be used to mint NFT’s for the community and Gold Farm participants when it is strategically advantageous to do so. Simply rushing a random Gold Farm NFT as our first launch would not be viewed favorably by the art community and look like a joke compromising the entire initiative. We want to first establish ourselves and then produce these NFT’s which we have mentioned when we have a following and demand for our productions.

If you are wondering about any surprise NFTs for the OG Direwolf holders…well we are going to keep you guessing. Loyalty rewards should always be a surprise and not a trick to force people to buy or hold a token.

Keep an eye out for…

This is the last article before we publish the Direwolf version 2 whitepaper. Take note that this particular initiative allows us to more heavily involve the community, harnessing the decentralized workforce in a more meaningful way that adds long-term benefits to the project and not just temporary pumps.

Instead of being a project where the community must sit by and wait for updates, we have developed a cohesive strategy to not only innovate within the blockchain space but also let our community more actively participate in the long-term success of the project. The synergy between all of the initiatives listed in the whitepaper allows us to follow this strategy of not just engaging the community, but developing a system where everyone can contribute in a more meaningful way.