Russ the main dev and Samantha their artist of PetitePlanets, dropped by to talk to kahoobb about the exciting stuff they have been working on and to take some questions from the community. To celebrate the AMA, five members from our community who took part in the questions-and-answer segment at the end were selected to win 100 CRO.
If you would like more information about PetitePlanets, please visit their twitter at: https://twitter.com/PetitePlanets
PetitePlanets Interview
kahoobb: Welcome everyone to our PetitePlanets AMA
I would like to welcome @RussDaBus & Samantha
Can you give us a little summary of what your project is and what your role is in it.
Russ: Welcome everyone to our AMA hosted by The Cronicle!
Petite Planets is one of the first NFT projects that launched on Cronos on Nov 8th.
We came to the new chain because we wanted to deliver original art, with a low mint cost, that is a sustainable way to continue donating to eco-climate and aerospace charities!
Samantha: My primary role is the artist, so I work with Russ and our community to come up with ideas for new types of planets, satellites, etc. and create them from concept sketches to final assets. I’m also working on a spiffy new next-gen generator in Python to give us a bit more creative control over fancy layering and such for Gen 2 🙂
Russ: We’re a two person team, I handle the smart contracts / front-end / blockchain side and the talented @charlatan_of_doom handles all the fancy art 🙂
Samantha: Russ also does a lot of community management and marketing, since I’m basically a hermit.
Russ: Our Generation 1 of Planets had sold out 200/200 in 3 days but we’re here to discuss our future plans and also the floor price we’ve seen, and also collaboration projects we’ve done!
kahoobb: Great introductory. And wow eco-climate and aerospace charities, sounds pretty cool. Also congratulations on being sold out for first Gen!
Samantha: Thank you!
Russ: Thanks!
kahoobb: So what IS the inspiration behind the planets? Why planets specifically?
Samantha: Russ actually pitched the idea of planets in general to me – and we wanted to do something that would support some green charities, so the theme felt like a good fit! As for the individual planets, we kind of had this idea that they’d be “small” to have exaggerated features like big mountains, clouds, etc. so a lot of the ideas for planet types came from blowing up features like distinctive ecologies, rock formations, etc.
Since our initial launch, we’ve had some feedback from our community on the types of planets they’d like to see as well, so we’ve got some more tech-oriented scifi inspired planets planned for Gen 2 🙂
And I think that just about covers it unless you want me to engage “never shuts up” mode so I’ll say done haha.
kahoobb: Haha! Yeah definitely a perfect fit theme, I personally like the uniqueness to petiteplanets, not just another copycat, If I am correct, petiteplanets was the first cronos NFT to have Generations. Which is really exciting.
Samantha: Man, I didn’t know that, that is pretty exciting XD
Russ: Yup! We decided to start small compared to larger 10,000 releases because we wanted to gauge the community’s reaction and also ensure a good start to the project and our DAO community
And with the feedback from Generation 1 we’ve put our heads together to brainstorm cool new planet types and colorways to make Gen 2 something fun that people will want to look forward to!
kahoobb: Yeah that makes sense. Smart move! I am pretty excited for Gen 2 myself.
Are you planning to release collections on other chains? And if so, will they be unique on each chain? or will a same exact looking NFT be over on the other chain aswell?
Samantha: We are looking at that yeah! And they would indeed be different – we might have some overlap in terms of things like planet types (we don’t want to deprive the Solanians of octopus planets as that is objectively cruel), but there won’t be any duplicates. We’ll also be doing some chain-specific goodness in terms of colours for backgrounds, special satellites, etc. to make the different collections feel special. You can expect an…Avalanche…of distinctive bits *badum tss*
Russ: Because Cronos is an EVM-chain, we’re able to deploy the NFT’s as ERC-721 standard, which means that each token is verifiably unique with their own traits and edition within that Generation, and thus, can even be transferred eventually to OpenSea on the Ethereum Mainnet or other cross-chain NFT Marketplaces.
kahoobb: Yeah those octopus planets are pretty cool! And sounds great, it will definitely be cool to start seeing PetitePlanets everywhere including big NFT cross-chain marketplaces such as opensea!
Do you have plans to add future underlying utility to your Planets?
Samantha: We’re currently doing a split where 25% of the mint and 25% of all royalties will be held in a wallet split between the Smithsonian and Clean Air Task Force. For CRO in particular it’s really nice that the coin has gone up so much since that’s going to result in a pretty hefty donation when we convert out to donate! Of course we’ll be double-checking at the time, but afaik right now both Smithsonian and CATF only do fiat donations.
So essentially half of the charity share for aerospace research and half for helping to push us towards green energy and lift up our collective efforts to fight climate change 🙂
Russ: We’re also considering some of the community ideas such as staking your NFT Planet for a special token, and the liquidity for that token could be provided from royalties and portions of the mint of future generations.
However, I want to be careful not to overpromise as we decided that the origin of the project should be focused on beautiful original art to own, and supporting these amazing charities.
In addition, we want to build a true DAO community like those behind BAYC and Thugbirdz, following in the steps of these Bluechips will be a great goal, so in the future as we expand across the generations and stars to other ecosystem chains, you never know what the community will vote for and act on.
kahoobb: Wow! Very generous of petiteplanets! ❤️ Sounds like a lot of things are currently in the works, and some cool future utility will be coming, that DAO sounds pretty interesting.
So other than what you’ve mentioned so far, why was there only 200 first generation planets? Maybe to help investors with floor prices to support early adopters?
Russ: Sure! So we looked at what was available and successful on other chains, with many thousands of derivative art projects based on the original Punks and Apes, and we wanted to stand apart from the crowd with our concept.
We decided that a small supply of well-priced NFT’s would be a great way to introduce ourselves to the community and as well as the ecosystem (which Cronos is not even a month old yet!), and this also allowed us to do a free Airdrop of Governor’s Medals to thank the first 200 collectors of our planets. Which would have been so difficult if we launched with a 1000 or 10,000.
Samantha: Another thing in our consideration was that this is the first foray into creating NFTs for both of us, and we wanted to keep our scope small to ensure manageability in terms of creating enough art to keep things feeling distinct, being able to address any concerns or problems from the community early on, and just making sure to prioritize quality over quantity as we had a lot to learn along the way.
Russ: And to your point about the floor price, we also thought about the exclusivity of owning one of the first NFT’s ever on the Cronos chain and also the lowest supply of any NFT project on Cronos. The floor price from our community has reflected our confidence in our decision because as of today it’s sitting at 6-10x our mint price!
kahoobb: That’s awesome, great to hear that you both take your community and investors into great consideration when making decisions! That airdrop was pretty cool as it was tied to our planet NFT, Glad to be a part of that haha. Having Generations seemed to be a really successful move from petiteplanets!
Lastly, can you give us some details on what the “Planet Killer” is? This concept seemed really interesting to me and I think we all would love to know how this works and what it exactly is.
Russ: Absolutely, Planet Killer is our cheeky name of the burning mechanism that we have. Portions of the mint and royalty will support the wallet for this burning, should the price floor change dramatically, Planet Killer will swoop in and sweep any planets and burn them.
The goal is to increase the value of the remaining planets while reducing supply of those traits and overall number of planets within that generation.
kahoobb: Great! Before we go to the community’s questions, would you like to share with us your social media links, website, etc.?
Samantha: You can jooooiiiiin uuuuussssss on discord here: https://discord.gg/jpA6p9GF
kahoobb: PetitePlanets is also listed in our project directory, if you’d like to support them, you can go give them a vote, comment etc.
I will now unmute the chat so the community can ask questions, Russ & Samantha, please go ahead and choose a total of 5 questions you’d like to answer, and those will be the winners of the giveaway today! PetitePlanets is sponsoring the giveaway and our winners will receive from the prize pool of 100 CRO!
I’ll then mute the chat back up for you to answer their questions!
Once the 5 questions have been answered, feel free to stick around and chat with the community if you’d like, we’d love to have you here!
Russ: Sure thing! We just created a new Telegram : https://t.me/PetitePlanets
You can check out the various planets and their rarity here: https://petite-planet-nft-viewer.herokuapp.com/
Our mint site URL will be announced closer to Gen 2 to give everyone a chance to purchase them fairly too!
kahoobb: When asking your questions, please put an 🌎 earth emoji, any of the earths 🌎 in your question so we know you aren’t a bot. Thanks!
Chat is opening up now!
Community Question #1
Mueng Josip: Currently NFT is developing and becoming a new innovation in the Blockchain world. However, many Artists/Creators still don’t understand how to create NFT. Do you have plans to educate about NFT to Artists outside of Non-Crypto? What are the measures to increase awareness of your project in non-crypto space?🌎 🌎
Samantha: A winning question – and interesting question, especially relevant since I *was* one of those artists a few months ago – I didn’t even have a crypto wallet. I think this is something we really have to address as a community to be honest. Let’s face it – collectively, the NFT space, and even the crypto space in general, doesn’t have the best reputation in many other spaces. We need to make sure that rugpullers and art thieves aren’t the face of our community to those other spaces. I think we have to be transparent about how things work, bring more awareness to things like more environmentally friendly blockchains (most people just know Bitcoin consumes mucho power and that’s it) and tokens with utility for good causes etc.
For our part, we’re going to try and be one of those voices across our social media/communities. And for artists in particular, I think it’s important that artists are aware of things like royalties in smart contracts etc. and get a fair deal on the projects they work on. We could look at creating some OER (open educational resources) about that as a collective. Maybe something I would look into myself after I’m even more familiar with the space, as I have a teaching background as well. Something for the future!
Community Question #2
John Walfer: When artists display their art, they are able to observe people’s instant reactions to their art pieces through facial expressions, mimics, etc. However, with nft art, this is not possible. What do nft artists feel about it? Because they won’t be able to see these reactions. :)🌎 🌎
Samantha: Another winning question – and you’re right, seeing people’s reactions to your art is a great thing. It’s wonderful to actually meet people face to face, but as a mostly digital artist myself, I’m used to seeing “reactions” from clients and people in general online, so this wasn’t *too* much of an adjustment. I think it’s important that artists are able to participate in the community/DAO around the NFT projects they work on, so they can hear direct feedback from that community on what they’ve created. I know I’m much happier being involved in our Discord etc. than I would be if I was strictly behind the scenes not seeing everyone’s reactions. It’s very rewarding, and it’s also inspiring for future work on those projects!
Community Question #3
Benny N.: Congratz on your great success with your first gen. Unfortunately missed the sale and probably will get a planet on ebisu soon. I’ve heard you guys have partnered up with some cool projects such as Tendies and that there will be some exclusive good looking NFTs coming up and will also benefit charities! Are there already some new partnerships upcoming which you could already share with us? Since I love animals and they are also tied to our lovely planet which you guys want to make better, will there also be charities supporting animal charities? And please do an animal themed planet for gen 2 haha. Thanks! 🌍
Russ: Great question, congratulations on winning 20 CRO!
Thanks for your kind words and support, we’re located on all the major NFT marketplaces available on Cronos (EbisusBay, AgoraCro, Hibiki Finance). We always strive to have a WAGMI attitude with other projects on the chain. TendieFrenCo and PetitePlanets are great frens and we’ve come up with some cool ways to reward a charity initiative that we brainstormed together, to benefit both projects!
Another collaboration that we have coming up is the upcoming Crosmonauts NFT will launch with some unique traits from Petite Planets (and we’re also launching a unique trait from their art) which again reinforces the cross-project support of the Cronos chain and how we want to raise awareness of upcoming projects as a DAO and as one of the OG projects on the chain. We also do tons of giveaways with other projects to support their marketing and to give our followers a chance to win these exclusive NFT’s.
Haha we love animals too, you never know Loaded Lions is doing really well so there could be some Savannah in our future. 🤩
Future generations could be themed around different targeted charities which would then be supported by the sales and royalties from that specific generation. We’re really going for that Pokemon collect-em-all vibe!
Community Question #4
Steven Mook: Love the idea about gobal awareness, ant chance you will partner up with festivals in the same category. 🌎🌎🌍🌏
Russ: Winning question!
We keep up with the news around the metaverse and the public’s perception of NFT’s and the hype around this. I think it’s going to be the next leap forward in terms of how people introduce this complex world of NFT’s to the normies.
Something like partnering with a real-world museum to showcase our NFT art is definitely something that we are considering and that could be another way for the project to support charitable causes.
Also we are always open to collaboration with other projects and if it’s good for us and our community, we’re all for it!
Community Question #5
Goxy Trader: So many projects just like to speak about the “long term vision and mission” but what are your short terms objectives? What are you focusing right now? 🌎
Samantha: Another winner – This is something you could ask about many projects, but I think it’s a good thing to ask in general since most people are used to the “long term goals” thing as a rule. Russ is going to add a bit about his immediate stuff as well, but from my end I’ll give you the super short term.
– Working on sketches for the final 8 base planet types for gen 2 (some industrial/tech scifi inspired and a couple organic inspired)
– Building out a couple features for our new generator that will help us to eliminate the risk of duplication between generations (we’re also doing attribute retiring as well but checking at the generator level as a failsafe) and allow us to quickly make edits to our assets without totally regenerating planet sets
Russ: Just to add on, I’ve been upgrading the smart contract behind Petite Planets to support EIP-2981to support automated royalties from Marketplaces, and also included a new SafeBatchTransferFrom() so that we can easily transfer large numbers of NFT’s if necessary.
Also organizing marketing initiatives like this AMA to raise awareness of our project, as well as participating in Twitter Spaces and building our bonds with other NFT projects on Cronos to raise the tide for all of us!
We’ve even been approached by the Cronos Chain team themselves for more details about our project for further promotion, which is huge for us!
Russ: Thank you for hosting us kahoobb!
Samantha: Thanks very much kahoobb 😀
kahoobb: Great that is 5 questions, you all will be DM’d!
Thank you both so much for taking time out of your days to tell us about PetitePlanets!