It’s been a crazy week, and we hope you all enjoyed our special genesis mint event. Thank you to everyone who has supported us through our Elixir sale and/or picking up an avatar from the marketplace. We are humbled and grateful to have such awesome fans in our community.

Time flies so fast in Web3 that we felt the need to take a moment to celebrate our accomplishments:

• Our pseudo-public mint sold out in 44 seconds

• We shepherded many people through their first SOL or Web3 mint ever

• And we provided a unique mint & customization experience that brought smiles to many new faces

Our vision as a studio is to equalize opportunity for all through games. Everseed’s mission never was to cater to existing crypto users, who represent only 3.7% of the world’s population, but rather onboard the next billion people to Web3. From seeing which of our early Rangers are the most excited, it’s clear to us that Everseed’s creative “hits different”—and that excites us because it validates our long-term vision.

Ever since Everseed was teased publicly for the first time in January, we have tried various ways to slow Web3’s breakneck pace down and nurture patience with our community: asking members to apply to chat, releasing weekly newsletters instead of a whitepaper all at once, drawing out our mint process over a week instead of a day, etc. However, despite these efforts, there are still many in our community who continue to place too much emphasis on “metrics” that meaninglessly fluctuate minute by minute based on irrational sentiment. So as much as it pains me to have to write about this, let’s talk about the thing that I’m sure is on many of your minds: floor price.

Amihan is a game studio, and our job is to design and develop great games. Game design is not rocket science; at its core, it is simply problem solving. The first step in any game design process is to understand and define the problem.

In my opinion, there are several things unique to the Solana ecosystem that cause it to be disadvantaged versus Ethereum with respect to floor price:

• Transaction fees on SOL are only mere fractions of a penny. On ETH, it costs users $XX+ to list or delist an NFT. Because of gas fees, users are forced to think twice before making any transaction. With SOL, because there are virtually no fees, this actively demotivates users to passively hold their NFTs.

• OpenSea and Magic Eden, who are each by far the dominant marketplace leaders on ETH and SOL, respectively, have created vastly different user behaviors with respect to listings because of the product design choices they made with their platforms. On OpenSea (ETH), a user does not need to list an NFT in order to still receive offers for it, so much less NFTs are actively listed. On Magic Eden (SOL), a user does need to list an NFT in order to receive offers, so the mechanism design incentivizes users to list instead of hold.

Because of the above two issues, in order to survive & thrive in Solana, many projects resort to tactics to try and disincentivize holders from listing. For example, DeGods, the highest “market cap” project on SOL, has employed both staking and a “Paper Hands B**** Tax” (33.3%) as mitigation tactics.

Our purpose in sharing all of this is not to say that we are going to copy Frank (DeGods’ founder). Instead, it is to build trust and confidence with you, our community, that we deeply understand the problem space. Moreover, as experienced game developers, we are also already ideating on innovative and, more importantly, fun design ideas to solve this problem for Everseed in a way that is consistent with our values.

Finally, this brings us full circle to the title of this blog post: floors, rugs & carpets. So far we’ve identified a problem with the floor. The problem is a systemic one that penetrates broadly across the entire house of Solana. This gaping hole cannot be easily covered by a small rug like a Twitter raid, whitelist giveaway, or whatever knee-jerk reaction to try and pump the price in the short-term. No, this hole requires an expert carpet company to come in, take measurements, order the right materials, rip out the old floor, and on hands and knees lay down, staple, and install the new carpet in place.

We at Amihan are your carpet company, and Everseed is here to stay. Show this blog post to anyone who tries to FUD us for being a rug pull. Stop asking us about the floor, and wait for the carpet to be installed. Here are the upcoming benefits you should expect as an Everseed Ranger:

• Staking-inspired rewards

• Collectible airdrops

• Prototype playtests

• Community events & rewards

• Weekly/biweekly dev blog posts & AMAs

• Avatar re-customization options (aka “Avatar Parlor”)

Aside from working on our version of staking, we will also soon add our collection to OpenSea and use Matrica bot for wallet verification in our Discord. Going forward, we will likely publish a lot less openly, so the only way to get access to our updates would by being an Everseed Ranger (aka NFT holder).

To close, I’d like to share the thank you note I wrote to our seed round investors when we secured venture funding for the first time last summer. I hope that by reading this you all can understand what our truest motivations are for Everseed, and with whom our loyalties lie (spoiler: you).

Hi all,

I wanted to take a moment to express my utmost gratitude for the commitment and responsibility you have entrusted to our team.

Money is just the means—much more important is the meaning that you have now imbued to our animation each morning we wake.

Thank you for the highest gift of self-actualization, an opportunity to become the most that we can be, no matter the circumstance by whence we came.

Your pledge we hope to repay in kind to all of humanity: to provide anyone anywhere the means by which they too can self-actualize, and have fun while doing so.

You have redefined the meaning of work for us, and now it is our turn to do the same for the world.

Thank you for the privilege.

Yours truly,
Kenny

*“An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being”
*—Bertrand Russell