Peng Family AMA

Having recently launched the PengVerse, Peng Family have been busy building since the launch of their Gen 0 collection which sold out in 8 minutes on Kalao. We caught up with Head Penguin, ThePeng to discuss how the team got here and what they have planned for the future.

How did your team first get into NFTs?

We first started our NFT journey on the Ethereum network, we were involved in some projects and also worked on ETC projects that we then moved to the Polygon network.

What made you create a Penguin themed NFT project?

The first problem we identified is that it is difficult to find all of the different projects and products when you arrive in a new ecosystem like Avalanche. This is what we experienced when we started using Avalanche ourselves. It’s even harder if you don’t have Twitter or Discord.

We wanted to create a project that would solve this problem, inspired by projects on other chains. The Avalanche network presents a great opportunity to create a blockchain experience using NFTs. 

So we created the PengVerse, a retro gaming interface that will now solve this issue and we are very proud of what we have accomplished.

What do you think differentiates you from the other projects out there currently?

The ability to use your NFTs in a real way. In most NFT projects you don’t really use your NFT, but in ours, you can.

How long did it take for the project to get from the initial idea to the mint day?

It took around 6 months to build everything for the mint, we really wanted to give a clear overview of the project and what we wanted to do after the mint was complete. We focused on building and delivering our roadmap.

The mint completely sold out in under 10 minutes, your team must have been very proud and it certainly confirmed that your concept was really appealing to the community, how was the atmosphere amongst your team on the big day?

We were not expecting this at all. Before our mint, a good project on AVAX would sell out in two to five days and all our friends were telling us that records like those seen on Solana or Ethereum were not common on Avalanche.

We were very cautious about different scams that could happen and were focused on preventing these when the mint went live, so we were not looking at the mint page and the first time we checked the progress it was a shock to see we had sold out, it was amazing!

What made you decide to Mint completely through Kalao.io?

Kalao is one of our partners and they offer a really good mint experience, everything is designed to support the project and the buying experience, even when the demand is high. We were really happy that we partnered with Kalao.

The Metaverse is a major part of your project, we tested it with you during the Beta and loved it, how do you see it developing in the future?

We wanted to offer a different kind of experience in our metaverse. The PengVerse is currently live with what we call V1 features. You can use your Peng NFT to interact with the different products of the ecosystem, socially interact (chat, audio & video) with other Pengs and access decentralized conferences. We are also working on some exciting collaborations with other NFT projects as we speak. 

We have big plans for the future, incrementally implementing new features, the next phase will be dedicated to games and we are also working on the metaverse economy, autonomy, overall entertainment and other features and we can proudly say that we are the first Avalanche-native metaverse. 

Our V1 is the first step and just the beginning.

Can you tell us more about the Rooms that feature in the Metaverse, how they may evolve and if you think they will eventually be the main way that the community interacts with these websites? 

As of now, the PengVerse is divided into 4 Islands (NFT, Games, Community and DeFi) here you will find different houses containing the different projects and products. We do have the ability to create even more islands as the ecosystem evolves.

When you visit the AvaxNFT house for instance you have the ability to check the NFT Mint Calendar and the main AVAX NFT website to catch up on the latest articles or just gather with other Pengs to talk about NFTs on an audio/video chat group.

The AvaxNFT team will also be organizing events in their house to promote any new project or feature they want to propose to the community. 

Through these islands and areas, we want to propose a more interactive alternative to the traditional Discord and Twitter channels.

Community is a very important factor for your project, as there are only 5,555 Pengs currently how long will we have to wait for the next generation of NFTs so that more people can access the Metaverse?

Our objective is to have more and more users, creating another collection is an idea that could be a solution for gaining more users, but we are also looking into other options as part of our future strategy.

Every creator has a favourite and we would love to know if there is any Peng that you are particularly proud of, we absolutely love our Honorary Peng #009!
We love all our Pengs actually, before the mint we took a lot of time to check them one by one to make sure there were not any mistakes. My personal favourites are the Peng that have perfect asset matches, for example, a full firefighter, a policeman or an astronaut. They will be really nice characters in the metaverse!

We have our own list of projects that we are interested in both currently and in the near future, could you share some that you personally like or are getting excited for?

I am really excited about the future of Subnets, I really like the idea behind these and look forward to the technology and use cases continuing to grow and build.

There have been some interesting crossovers in the NFT space lately and we know that you have some interesting potential collaborations that have been teased, is there any project that you are really excited to collaborate with?

We did pause our NFT project house collaborations after mint so we could focus on the release of the V1 PengVerse but now that the PengVerse is live, we are working on gaining new Avalanche projects for our metaverse. We are even looking outside of the ecosystem for projects that will bring value to our Peng Holders.

Make sure to follow the #PengFam on Twitter to stay in the loop!

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