NFT drops are getting boring and derivative — it’s time for something new
Voxmon is a new NFT drop that pairs cutting-edge AI, talented human artists, and the composability of crypto, to create a new extensible IP platform for Web3.
Community profile pic (PFP) projects are at the crest of their hype bubble, but there are only so many animals, so many hats, and so many combinations you can look at before you get bored. Unfortunately, we’re at that point now — everyone is grabbing an animal encyclopedia, a Fiverr artist, and saying their drop is worth $4,000,000.
This is, in part, due to a small number of well-connected artists and creators who’re getting fabulously rich (or ludicrously exploited). They’re raking in royalties from value primarily driven by community members, and they’ll likely continue doing that for years to come. Seeing this success, people are racing to create and release their own projects in the hopes of achieving similar results, but instead, they’re just flooding the market with uninspired, surprisingly homogenous work — it all looks and feels very samey.
While we love the excitement and creative energy of a good 1/1 10k community PFP project, we think it’s time for the next round of innovation. The future of community projects we envision has significantly more diversity to create compelling content, and on-chain support for community members to build and extend on the initial vision — blurring the lines between the original and future creators. Just as with memes on the internet, projects should have the capacity to evolve far beyond what their original creators intended, while still being connected on-chain.
With Voxmon, we’re attempting to innovate on several fronts:
- Digital Creatures Generated with Artificial Intelligence, producing significantly more diverse and interesting art than existing community projects
- Combining the Power of AI and the Creativity of Human Artists, investing in the next generation of creators while taking our art from great to amazing
- Leveraging the Community and Composability of Web3, creating a marketplace of on-chain extensions to enhance your Voxmon
Digital Creatures Generated with Artificial Intelligence
Creating 10,000 unique and high quality pieces is hard. Making sure they resemble each other enough to be seen as a coherent project, but are diverse enough to be seen as unique and interesting is even harder. Most projects achieve this by creating a few pieces of base art and accessories, randomizing their way to 10,000. This is great for having the pieces resemble each other but shit for diversity. We want to do something better.
With Voxmon we’ve spent months iterating and training our AI to the point where it can produce a vastly diverse set of high quality unique pieces, while still maintaining a coherent style. We think the results are something truly special, and we hope you do too.
Unlike randomized projects, you can scroll through pages and pages of Voxmon without feeling like you’ve seen them all — that doesn’t mean that there’s no relationships between them though! Voxmon are grouped into species of similar looking creatures, allowing rarity to be defined which increases their collectibility!
We think these initial Voxmon are plenty compelling as a standalone project, but they’re just the beginning! We’re reinvesting the proceeds from our initial mint to create something even more exciting.
Combining the Power of AI and the Creativity of Human Artists
While our AI produces fantasitic creativity at massive scale, a human touch is needed to take the art from great to amazing. Similar to Advanced Chess, humans and AI working together vastly outperforms the best human or AI alone.
The proceeds from Voxmon’s initial mint allow us to pay dozens of talented artists a respectible wage to create hand-crafted 1/1 voxel bodies for every Voxmon. This allows us to spread the wealth from our mint far wider than projects with a more centralized art team, investing in the next generation of Web3 creators along the way. It also allows us to create a royalty share with the individual 3D artists when their pieces are resold, kickstarting the Voxmon economy.
We’ve already started recruiting artists from around the globe. Below is a sample set combined from three of our favourite artists we’ve partnered with so far:
Leverage the Community and Composability of Web3
Art is cool, but the real fun comes from weird shit communities build which we never would have thought of. Just like how the lore of internet communities accumulates through everyone’s contributions, we’re building an Augmentation System that allows anyone to extend the art or functionality of Voxmon. Augmentations can build upon each other and can contain things like alternative 3D avatars, movesets, nametags, accessories, lore, etc. They can be created by anyone and are treated no differently than the initial 3D art being created by us.
On top of using this composability to make our project more exciting, it also explicitly links contributions from the community on-chain allowing royalties to be shared with Augmentation creators.
We plan to launch an Augmentation Marketplace along with tools that make it easy for creators to create their own. More details on this, as well as a reference design, will be released soon.
Connect With Voxmon on Discord to Learn More!
We’re trying to break new ground in more than one direction with Voxmon. While we can’t promise we’ll be successful everywhere, we’re going to try our hardest, and it’s guaranteed to be an interesting journey along the way.
If any of this sounds exciting to you, learn more on Voxmon.io join our Discord, or follow us on Twitter!
We’d love to have you. ☺️
