Newsletter #3: What things should I consider to buy or early mint an NFT project?

Hello, Folks :),

Hope everyone had a great weekend, here again for our weekly newsletter. This week has been full of learnings, thus there are some things I wanted to share with the community.

The first announcement I wanted to make (that you might already have noticed) is the fact that we’ve migrated all our newsletters to medium. This change will eventually give us more visibility and will give value to the community.

Via this channel, during the first part of the upcoming newsletters, I want to talk with you about what things you should consider when buying your first NFT.

The second part will be focused on some details of our project and the things that have happened so far.

Q: What things should I consider to buy or early mint a project?

I have changed my mindset since the first NFT I’ve minted. As many of you, I have been disappointed by some projects and sad about others that ended up being a rug. There were a lot of things I wish I could’ve known when I started buying my first NFT, so I’d like to write some things that we should always take a look at.

1. Discord member count doesn’t matter: This is a fact that I learned late, but you should always consider that you can easily buy fake accounts and reactions. As a tip, you can always start picking random users in the discord server you’re in to see how “fake” the profile looks and see how many of them you can spot randomly. If it’s something recurring I’d advise you to keep your distance. The way I see it is that we should always be as transparent as possible, especially to your holders.
2. Keep an eye on servers where you level up for writing: This is a red flag for me because a project shouldn’t force someone to spam something to get a whitelist. This fake sense of winners can lead to scams when you mint too early.
3. Think always twice if you would give your money to a completely anonymous discord profile: Most of the things I ask myself as a self-review after losing those mints is if I was dumb enough to give my investment to a team that wasn’t capable enough.
4. DEV TEAM IS KEY: I am not saying this because I am a dev, I am saying this from a project management perspective. The most important part of a Blockchain project is its engineers. Engineers will know what is achievable and whatnot, and given its capabilities, your money is at a higher or lesser risk. Development in the blockchain involves a lot of risks because contracts are not mutable (they cannot change). For that reason techniques such as Multi-Sig wallets to protect the admin keys and Timelocks to avoid losing assets if an account is compromised are some of the techniques that can be applied to those contracts to safeguard their holders. There are some techniques such as bounty programs for your contracts and Audits before release that can lesser risks before a project launch.

These were some of the things I wanted to share with the community that I think would have been helpful. The goal of this project is to also educate the community and contribute towards a safer crypto environment.

In this second section of the newsletter, I wanted to talk about our game. Most of you haven’t heard much about the game, and this is because I wanted to be conservative when saying something (and making sure it’s achievable). My designs are always in sync with our capabilities and restrictions, given the blockchain to apply game mechanics.

The game will be an Auto Chess NFT Strategy Game with some board games mechanics on it. Users will have to buy their units to build armies that will fight to rank up the leaderboards.

Units are uniquely generated and will define your class and race. We will have Orcs, Dwarfs, Undeads, Humans, and Elfs, with classes such as Warriors, Mages, Archers, and Assasins. Your units will fight in a hex-map where you will fight automatically in rounds against your enemy army. Users will be able to use a limited amount of consumables between rounds to increase the interaction and strategy needed in our matches. I’d like to point out that we will be the first on-chain game that will implement this kind of mechanics. We already have a lot of development done, however, I will be conservative and work hard until I know everything works well before launching a thing.

All the good practices mentioned before will be applied in our project (and some others we will discover along the way), meaning that our main objective besides being transparent is to protect our community from the people we hate most, scammers.

I won’t give more details about the game at the moment because I don’t want to spoil things that are still in progress but be sure that I, as a gamer, will make this game for gamers by gamers.

My main objective is to create a decentralized NFT board game that can be played on-chain and also offline without risks. A game where gamers are the real owners. I will let everyone know the dates once the whitepaper and the websites are ready to be released.

Many thanks to everyone supporting us. We will keep working hard to teach, build and protect everyone who would like to be part of our project.

Tons of love and good vibes,

Giuseppe Marotta
Discord: https://discord.gg/PkZCq4jNDe