Cardano NFT Column: Cardania – The Cryptonomist

This week’s guest on the Cardano NFT Column is a digital world with its own characters, stories and flavor, with an economic foundation that is based on blockchain technology: Cardania.

Last week’s guest was a Play 2 Earn NFT Autobattler on Cardano, reminiscent of the famous Axie Infinity.

This initiative is a point of reference for NFTs on Cardano and every week or two we will invite someone to answer some questions and give us an update directly from within the Cardano community.

Considering that many of our readers are new to the crypto space, we will have a mix of simple and technical questions.

Cardano NFT project: Cardania

Hey, welcome to this column. Please tell us something about yourself / your team, where are you from, what are your backgrounds?

Thanks for having us, and thanks for your own contributions to Cardano. Independent stakepool operators are super important and we appreciate you.

Our team is quite international. We’ve got folks in East Asia, Europe, The US, as well as Australia. It’s quite an interesting assortment of people, from a variety of disciplines – 2D and 3D artists, blockchain devs, web devs, game devs, musicians, and even our mods are from all over the place. 

I’ve got a background that touches a lot of these disciplines, so I’m able to interface with them all with relative ease – It’s been really quite a privilege to work with all of these talented folks to bring this sort of neon fever dream to life.

What is Cardania, when did it launch and what have you achieved so far?

Cardania is a megastructure in space set in the far future. It’s a digital world we’re building with its own characters and stories and flavor, with an economic foundation utilizing Cardano blockchain technology. There’s a lot of facets to it – The stakepool, the card game, the FPS, the Terraforms, Citizen avatars, and even an album. It might look quite complicated at first glance, but really what we’re building is simply a multi-game experience that utilizes a common set of on-chain tokens.

Our Terraforms have been the largest achievement to date, earning us Top 3 most held NFT on the chain earlier this year, as well as a nomination for most long-term utility at the CNFT Awards. We’ve embedded quite a lot of interesting metadata within the land itself, and we’ve pioneered what we call the Living lands formula, which ties the productivity of our digital land to the performance of the SUMN stakepool itself. We feel this creates a really interesting standard for what digital land can look like both in terms of productivity, and as a model for how one might integrate stakepool operations with NFTs. It creates some virtuous cycles which we hope will continue to catch on.

We’ve also achieved quite a bit in terms of raw production – Our artists have recently finished a 360 piece set of card art for the 1st edition of our game, Enter the Ultraverse. This brings full circle the work we started last year and holders of our card packs can look forward to card pack redemption in the rather near future. 

I’m also proud of the partnerships we’ve built with several projects – Stellarhood, Phoenix Arena, and the Monet Society have all had very interesting recent integrations and I encourage folks to check those out. Stellarhood in particular is now utilizing Cardania resources across its play to earn galaxy – A big step for inter-game cooperation in the space.

I’m also quite proud of the organic growth of the community – particularly within the Discord and Twitter. We tend to attract very high quality people with long-term focus, and they’ve really built a strong community around the core concept, with rather little direction from me. It’s fascinating to see it take on a life of its own.

What are your thoughts about the general NFT space across the different blockchains, and how do Cardano NFTs compare?

I feel it’s an industry that is simply in the embryonic stage. A lot of people are just throwing darts and seeing what sticks. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – it’s how creators find their place within the market, and how people discover what they like or don’t like about NFTs. I do feel a lot of it is somewhat shortsighted, but that’s to be expected in an environment of basically competitive hyper speculation.

I’m happy to just focus on making our own ecosystem better everyday, and I am happy to see many creatives thriving within the space. I hope more artists, developers, and investors begin to look at Cardano as a place where quality things are made.

Where is Cardania heading? Can you share your vision? Where do you see your project in 1 , 5 and 10 years?

In one year, I believe we’ll have some strong proofs-of-concept for blockchain gaming and have begun to offer some fun and engaging digital experiences. In that time I’m mostly interested in being able to show a functional model of how this architecture can and will be a revolution for gamers. I feel this sort of distributed ownership, play and earn model will become “obvious” in hindsight, but for now it feels rather niche and most gamers and game industry professionals really haven’t been swayed yet.

In 5 to 10 years I simply hope many people call Cardania home and choose to spend some of their time with us. That would make me quite happy and anything more than that is just gravy.

Great contribution. Any closing remarks? Where can people learn more?

I’d like to thank our core team of artists and developers, as well as our earliest supporters. I’d also like to thank IOG, Charles, and the rest of the Cardano community – This space reminds me very much of the early internet and it feels like we’re all building something with a bit of magic to it. 

As for us, you can learn all about Cardania at Cardania.com, but I do recommend joining us in the Discord – We love welcoming new Citizens and hope to see you there soon!

Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the people interviewed are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation or IOG. Moreover, this content is for educational purposes, it doesn’t constitute financial advice.