.gems Monthly Vol.1 Issue #1

February 2021

Connecting Creatives & Collectors

Today we’re introducing dotGems Monthly, a digest of all the excitement coming up for the dotGems collectors and creatives, published each and every month both as part of the EOS Hot Sauce, and as a standalone publication. 

Our dotGems Monthly publications will offer an overview of recent, upcoming and noteworthy NFT activities related to dotGems. You’ll hear about our events, sales, challenges, collaborations, featured artists and more.

dotGems’ mission is to build a community of collectors and creatives that are active in the world of EOSIO based NFTs. While we’re advocates of blockchain interoperability and have huge respect for all the groundbreaking innovation that Ethereum developers have contributed to art on the blockchain, we can’t ignore the crippling effect rising GAS prices have and therefore believe that NFTs on WAX and EOS offer tremendous value to both creators and collectors and will have a very bright future in the years to come.

Creative experimentation drives this space forward and we believe that nearly cost-free minting and trading are essential to get NFTs ready for prime time and onboard the masses. However, we’re still early and if you’re reading this article, consider yourself a pioneer and early adopter. The hype around NFTs is just getting started!

We’re also happy to see household names from the NFT space, such as DCL Blogger and Pranksy, realizing this potential and making a move to check out the EOSIO NFT space. Pranksy even became a member of the WAX Advisory Board

There’s going to be so much happening this year in this space and we couldn’t be more excited to be part of this.

Vancity Outbreak and the Humans vs Zombies NFT Battle

As our first commercial project, we helped the artist, Reid Lucier of Whiplash Comics, to explore innovative ways to sell his works via NFTs. The result was a graphic novel sold exclusively as a NFT collectible series, which we believe was a first in the space. Episode 1 was released on Halloween in 2020 and episode 2, released in January 2021, saw a 4x increase in sales volume. We brought more innovations for episode 2 which included our first VR showroom in the Cryptovoxels metaverse and introduced the battle.gems smart contract, which brought further utility to the NFTs of Vancity Outbreak.

After 10 days of a fierce Human vs. Zombies battle we have the following results to share:

Total kills: 2,873 🗡
Earnings per kill: 5.38 $WAX 💵
10,919 #NFTs burned!🔥

1st Place: larosenonaka 🥇
2nd Place: kouqw.wam 🥈
3rd Place: frzau.wam 🥉

Congratulations to the winners and all participants in the first of many epic NFT battles. As a tribute to our 3 best warriors, we’ve updated the leaderboard in our Vancity Outbreak showroom in Cryptovoxels.

Engaging With the Community

Besides the battles, another new and interactive feature of Vancity Outbreak Episode 2 was the user-generated weapons activity. During the promotion for the sale, we asked members of the Vancity Outbreak Telegram Channel to send in pictures of nearby objects. Objects that they would use in case of a sudden Zombie Attack. 

From all the daily submissions, the community chose a winner via Telegram poll and the winning pic was sent to our Vancity NFT Armory, where it was minted to become a part of the Vancity Outbreak Weapon NFT Set.

And honestly, some of those customized weapon cards became our favourite pieces of the whole collection such as Bitcoin Bro’s bong and the Love Lube. 😂

Engaging with our community on this level and exchanging ideas with other creatives and collectors is a big part of what makes working on the dotGems mission so interesting. We believe that exactly this kind of open and collaborative spirit is one of the major drivers that make the NFT space truly unique and incredibly exciting.

Moving forward we’re excited to continue to integrate our community into the creative process and offer each of you the opportunity to be featured in our upcoming dotGems NFT collections, such as the EOS Fan Art Challenge!

dotGems EOS Fan Art Challenge - 7 Sides of a Chestahedron

We’re happy to announce that our next NFT release will be happening on the EOS Mainnet and for this one, we came up with a concept that allows you to participate by submitting design proposals.

Let’s go back to the origins and pay tribute to what brought us here. 

The Chestahedron rose to be the sign of the EOS Community shortly after Block.one announced EOSIO and the EOS token sale. Soon a large community formed around this symbol, inspired by the amazing concept that was titled “the sacred geometry of the heart.”

Since then, EOS has taken on many shapes. Together we can look back to many memories and together we are full of excitement for EOS’ time to shine and “PowerUp!” 

The Chestahedron will be the central object for our upcoming release and we want to invite each of you to submit a design of your own for this amazing piece of geometry.

We’ve prepared a PDF with detailed instructions for you to learn more about how you can participate. Download it here.

From all submitted designs, we’ll pick the most interesting and turn them into a special 3D NFT collectible. All artists that are chosen and included in the EOS Fan Art Collection will earn a share of the total profits made during the sale.

Important Notice: While this is an open call for artists, and you are free to contribute whatever you like, we do want to highlight that only submissions that follow our instructions will be considered for the official EOS Fan Art NFT series.

EOS Fan Art Submission Instructions

In order to participate, we kindly ask you to download the EOS Fan Art Media Pack we prepared. There you’ll find several layouts of shapes, each of them a different version of an unfolded Chestahedron. These shapes represent the various sides of a 3D Chestahedron and to you they become a canvas, a surface to display your vision for EOS. 

All areas within these shapes are your artistic playground.

You can use all kinds of graphic software tools as long as you don’t change the image ratio of the submission form, meaning that you need to maintain the angles of the shapes.

If you decide to work with real pencils and colours, feel free to print the PDF out, work on the paper and send us a scan once you’re finished.

Submissions are open! Download the PDF version of the EOS Fan Art Challenge canvas here.

Preferred file formats are JPG or PNG files and you can email the files to dotgems@protonmail.com.

dotGems Creatives Club

The EOS Fan Art will be the first of many dotGems creative challenges and in order to discuss creative concepts, share skills, introduce tools and foster collaboration we created the dotGems’ Creatives Club, our second channel on Telegram.

Feel free to join if you have questions regarding the challenge or just want to get involved in a conversation around creativity through the medium of NFTs.

Evangelist Series and Battle Gem Drop

Few understand this…

We still have to explain to our friends and family, why owning an NFT is worth so much more than right-click saving a picture from the internet. If you’re the type of person that’s had this conversation before, you’re a true NFT evangelist and we want to reward you for that.

The dotGems Evangelist Collection was created as a special “Thank You” to our early supporters and community members that participated in our sales and other activities. It’s a collection of very special gems, that can’t be bought on the primary market but are instead dropped for free to community members that showed exceptional engagement.

Holders of the dotGems Evangelist Gems have the chance to continuously receive NFTs from the various NFT projects we are working on. The more complete the Evangelist Gem Set in your wallet is, the higher are your chances.  

By the way, we just dropped our third Evangelist NFT, the Battle Gem, to anyone that earned a kill during the Humans vs Zombies Battle. 

Afterwards, we dropped 15 crates among the 29 gem-set holders who currently hold all 3 Evangelist gems. Did you manage to get one? They are currently worth a pretty penny on the secondary markets!

Our Newest dotGems Team member: Jana Schiffer

The Battle Gem was designed by Jana Schiffer, the newest addition to the dotGems team.

Jana previously already helped us with the design of the Golden Chilli Trophy for the Race for Rares Finale and is currently building out the dotGems VR Museum in Somnium Space.

She’s also preparing her own NFT Project, which you’ll probably hear more about in Vol. 1 Issue #2 of dotGems Monthly.

Jana is an absolute OG in the NFT space and brings expertise in VR, 3D modelling and gaming to the dotGems team. We’re extremely happy that she decided to join us. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram to stay up to date on all her latest projects and art works.

#BullishOnEOS Red Envelope NFTs

Last but not certainly not least we want to wish a happy Lunar New Year to our Eastern community. 

In order to celebrate we minted 210 NFT Red Envelopes and started to send them out as gifts to participants of a recent survey as well as various EOS community members that engage with us on social media. Each of those Red Envelope NFTs is backed by 1 EOS Token.

We want to bring a lot more attention to NFTs on EOS in 2021 and the Red Envelope series was the perfect way to kick things off for this new year. To learn more about the #BullishOnEOS Red Envelope NFT series check out this article. Afterwards head on over to Twitter for our retweet contest that could see you winning one of these exclusive Red Envelope NFTs.

Thank you for reading dotGems Monthly Vol#1! As always, we want to reward our most loyal collectors and supporters and that includes you! Click here to claim one of the limited edition dotGems Monthly Vol. 1 Issue #1 Cover NFTs. 

Thank you for joining us on this art-fueled blockchain adventure and we look forward to sharing more exciting announcements and series in the next issue of dotGems Monthly!

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Daniel Keyes

Chief Operating Officer (COO)
Responsibilities include: product management, operations, community
Location: Toronto, Canada

Prior to founding the first EOS community in Toronto and co-founding EOS Nation, Daniel spent a decade in the financial technology industry working several diverse roles. His extensive experience in customer service, sales, sales coaching, agent training, digital marketing, digital process management (lean green belt), and product management (certified scrum master, certified product owner) eventually lead him to consulting for a blockchain dev shop.

Daniel earned a Bachelor of Journalism from Ryerson University in 2009 and worked as a chase producer intern at Global TV.

Daniel lives by the principles of Truth, Love, and Freedom.