Interview with Crowd Creative Canvas: The Github of the Canvas
We interviewed the guys over at CCC who are pioneers of collective artistic collaboration and who describe themselves as the 'Github of the canvas.'
1. How would you describe your artistic style?
CCC is a platform for the crowd and personal creation of collections on-chain. As an open platform on the blockchain, we welcome all types of artistic styles. Our canvases contain various cultural elements, among which Dadaism is the main embodiment.
Our personal canvas is only available through an invitation system (it will be publicly available after a few periods of time), the list of applicants currently contains many artistic styles, such as pop art artist, ultra-realistic artist, expressionism, brutalism, etc.
2. What drew you to NFT creation rather than traditional canvas-based art?
Since the 19th century, the world has been dealing with traditional canvas, which is now exposed to major preservation problems and high maintenance costs. Many canvases are now lost or damaged.
Therefore, we want to solve the problem of creation and perpetuation on the chain through the Internet Computer network, and at the same time, ensure traceability and prevent forgery, which is in line with the development of the current digital age.
3. Are there any artists who have inspired you? What do you like about their work?
We are inspired by the likes of legendary artists like Leonardo da Vinci. We would also be honored to work with new modern artists as we believe that together we can bring their creativity to life and to a wider audience.
We have resources available for thousands of people drawing at the same time.
4. What made you create NFTs?
For our canvas.
First of all, our team includes artists and fintech practitioners, and we are like thinking about how to achieve the perpetual existence of the canvas, how to make the canvas traceable, and how to make people earn money while drawing, the opportunities it offers are endless.
Besides, we have found out that creating artwork on the blockchain is a good way to carry the canvas in a lightweight way, and it can also last forever.
For our zombies NFT.
It is a great way for us to reward our community. More than 1400 NFTs will be airdropped to the community and supporters, and it is also a way for us to enter GameFi. We also managed to find a bright idea of making our Zombie NFTs worth holding through our dividend program.
In other words, whoever holds our Zombie NFTs will be eligible to earn dividends from each canvas bonus pool. That makes us a DAO. The more players we have on a canvas, the bigger the bonus pool to share.
5. Can you tell us about your project?
First of all, CCC is a platform for crowd and personal creation on-chain. We describe ourselves as the GitHub of the canvas, CCC = Paint Hub = IC + Crowd/Personal Canvas + GameFi.
Therefore, CCC does not only solve canvas permanent storage issues but also NFT supply issues. Most NFTs are built off-chain and then uploaded and traded on-chain. At CCC, we use a different approach as the whole creation process is done on-chain, in real-time.
All steps are also recorded, and they can later serve as an NFT themselves. What we mainly want to do is to collaborate with artists, users, and traders in the form of a DAO, so that they can create and trade independently.
Finally, we will integrate GameFi into the canvas and make the painting more interesting through the token economy.
Current functions:
- Crowd Canvas Painting: Global users participate in online painting through crowd canvases. Every time the pixels are covered, they can immediately get 17% revenue.
- Personal Canvas painting: At present, it is under our invitation system. Interested users/artists can check this.
- Minting NFT: Users can get a discount by participating in our Discord activities, giveaways, roles etc. To mint NFTs .
At the same time, community members involved in Discord activities (giveaway, shill, discussion) are also rewarded.
6. How many NFTs will be minted? Can you talk us through the process of how you create the art?
The total number of zombies is 5000, from which 1,000 will be minted.
We have collected different ideas from the team. Our co-founder Jason provided many valuable suggestions; he has got a lot of experience being a product manager as he worked in a company under Alibaba. Under his direction, we were trying to find the best scenario that describes the Covid-19 situation we all live in; from that moment, the idea of making zombie NFTs was born. We sincerely believe that we made a good choice as zombies can still survive even in a harsh and risky environment.
7. Will Your NFT be able to breed, stake or ever be in a game?
In fact, we have already announced that we are in talks with gaming platforms to integrate our zombies. It's a way for us to create utility and encourage our community to hold. Zombies are already designed with superpowers; also, we have the reward program through canvas bonus pool just by holding NFTs. We have around 2,000 users on crowd canvas still growing up; imagine what 100,000 people would generate in dividends.
We do not have any plan yet for staking, but it could be something to consider in the future.
8. What benefits do you think the Internet Computer has over other L1 blockchains when it comes to creating NFTs?
The internet computer completely subverts the characteristics of some previous blockchain projects, such as: reverse gas mechanism, support large amount of data storage, fast block output (27 blocks per second), support of smart contract, no need for users to pay gas fees, etc.
Based on all those benefits, CCC can realize a decentralized real-time crowd creation on-chain. Recording the artwork's evolution from the beginning to the end. The evolution process is recorded so the output can form a video. We can also introduce an economic incentive mechanism through the Motoko smart contract, which encourages various roles to participate.
These are difficult to implement on other chains because some chains are fast but cannot carry storage and calculations and can only be suitable for financial applications. Also, the internet computer can run modern applications.
9. What other art have you seen that excites you in the Internet Computer NFT ecosystem?
We sincerely have an open eye on many projects we like and support what they do as well. Cronic Critters, for example, assigned their NFTs with gaming attributes making it not only limited to trading. ICPunks tested and improved the carrying capacity of the internet computer for NFT transactions.
We also see ICPSquad partnering with an upcoming internet computer project. All working together would not only benefit us but the whole DFINITY Ecosystem.
10. What excites you most about your launch?
With the beta 3.0 upgrade, zombie NFT holders will directly be eligible for the crowd canvas bonus pool, followed by the 1155 standard upgrade.
That new standard will be relevant to our community as pixel holders of the last layer will still own their pixels, even at the end of the canvas lifetime, avoiding loss. They can later decide to trade it, exchange it or hold it.
11. What advice would you give to anyone trying to enter into the world of NFTs?
We strongly believe that NFT should be more than just a picture. It needs to be given value attributes, such as game attributes, collection attributes, celebrity attributes, economic attributes, artistic attributes, etc. So that it can be maintained all the time, the opposite would make it lose its value after the hype dies.
12. Do you have further plans to work with ICP Squad in the future after this initial sale?
Yes, ICP Squad has the largest community within the DFINITY ecosystem. We are thrilled to cooperate with them on a deeper level.
13. Can you envisage a future where the most valuable NFT space is on the Internet Computer?
It’s hard to imagine because opportunities related to artwork creation are unlimited. Although we are looking forward to that day, it would also mean that people worldwide will use NFT. We put ourselves in the range of people who believe everything will one day be NFT.
14. Why do you think NFTs have become so valuable in such a short space of time?
Because traditional artworks are challenging to preserve, have high maintenance costs, many fakes. Some of them are only exclusive to a small circle of wealthy people. Blockchain-based NFT provides the market with a new solution in a short time. A large number of artworks hit the NFT market, letting its instant value bloom.
15. Tell us about your team?
We are an international team of more than five members with several years of experience in the tech and blockchain industry (Leven: Technical Architect and smart contract, Jason: Product manager, Eddy, and Doris: respectively Back-end and Front-end engineer and Faye: Marketing and community operations).
16. What advantages do you believe you have over other competitors?
I believe we have already demonstrated the difference between us and other NFT projects. Most NFT projects have no utility. It's mainly some avatar pictures produced off the chain and then stored on-chain for Airdrop or mint purposes.
CCC chose a creative path, which lowered the threshold for artists and anyone to create unique NFTs. The originality resides in the fact that the whole production process, along with storage and calculations, is on-chain. Another great thing we made possible is the “crowd creation”; as we allow thousands of people to put together their skills and ideas to create something exceptional. At the same time, they are making money.
We made sure to design different ways that ensure our community users would feel comfortable while using CCC.
Advantages are numerous, and we'll keep updating and building more features.
#M-0 first canvas, number of participants: 1800+, below is a recording video of the painting process
- Decentralized storage and computing: which are unique advantages on the DFINITY network, it is difficult for other projects to have both but we manage to.
- Real creation on the chain: many projects are biased towards off-chain creation and on-chain transactions, and it is difficult to truly witness the entire process of crowd creation on the chain.
- Cultural convergence diversity: CCC's co-creation platform accommodates the cultural-artistic part of each and everyone all over the world. And it does not require permission: users are free to draw and let go of their stress and feelings.
- Low threshold: it costs more than a hundred dollars for an artist to upload artwork on the Ethereum network. On CCC, it would cost less than a dollar as users only pay for the number of pixels.
17. Tell us about your partners?
We started our journey with # in its early days, watched how a community of believers and supporters started to build all around. It's not about competing among us but working together, adding value to the work already done. Our team is always open to beneficial partnerships.
We are working with ICPSquad through the Dfinity community; besides, some big capital ventures also have an interest in our project, but we cannot mention their names yet. We also have ongoing negotiations with Entrepot and Fleeklabs. As usual, after any achievement, we'll make announcements.
18. Tell us about the challenge you face while building your project?
Building something different is challenging because it's new; people are not used to it, so it requires time, perseverance, and dedication to persuade and prove to everyone that it's real, it's worth it.
We have a working product, but we didn't build it for us; it's for others to give it a try. So basically, the only challenge we are facing right now is related to getting more exposure.
We spent a long time thinking about economic incentives, how to attach a use case. That is how we came up with the "Play to Earn" idea through crowd canvas, "Bonus Pool Sharing " idea for zombies NFTs holders.
19. What are your short and long-term achievements and targets?
Short-term: to hold a solid spot within the DFINITY ecosystem, collaborate with artists, traders, speculators, art lovers, museums, metaverse games, influencers, etc., produce digital and valuable artworks.
Long-term: OpenSea is currently the world's largest collection trading marketplace. At CCC, our vision is to be the world's largest on-chain artwork creation platform, supporting real-time creation on the chain and recording artworks' evolution from 0 to 1. We aspire for our users to be able to trade their designs at the CCC marketplace.
20. Give us some details about your roadmap?
Our current progress is faster than planned.
Firstly, it is about implementing the 1155 standard. It allows all the last layer canvas painters to have ownership of their remaining pixels, which hold a lot of value (WICP). They can later decide to sell it, hold it or exchange it at the marketplace.
CCC will soon launch the personal artwork creation, which is only accessible through an invitation program to influencers and artists (100 whitelisted addresses).
If an artist is interested in CCC personal creation, please contact us through Twitter , and we will provide some free quotas based on the work.
Besides, we will launch the Zombie NFTs soon, and we will give out some NFT income certificates (similar to equity income). Negotiations and cooperation with gaming platforms are also ongoing.
Check out this link for details.
Moreover, we are also designing a more flexible and moderated social chat where artists, players, and buyers could meet and socialize. Users will have their profile with different progress levels attached, perks, etc.
We would like to thank Dfinity Community for interviewing us – the chance to tell you about us is much appreciated! 😊
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