An update across all things good and wonderful @ BearX Labs!
Overview — Generic boring intro
We wanted to take this time to thank everyone for an incredible first year! From the artists, degens, mods, community leaders, and you — you helped make this an incredible experience for so many, and we hope you stick around for the future!
The past
As we celebrate 1 year in the NFT space, we want to bring a brief roundup of our history and what led us to where we are now, for those who may not know. In short, almost exactly a year ago to this day, we pioneered many of the most original whitelist games in the NFT space (before we was in our prelaunch phase almost every WL event was based around invite contests. Some of the things we done included drawing competitions, and time based quizzes with winners getting spots off the back of it. The launch was planned to be fun and fun only, with inspiration from Cyberkongz in terms of the artwork, but completely unique in every other way. It set a tone for what we wanted to be known for and what (we hope), people would appreciate about BearX — an innovative, experimental brand that challenges the status quo and narrative through original products. But, more on this later….
We then (literally a few days out from launch), suffered a devestating hack due to one of the moderators being compromised. This lost over $250k in community funds, and shattered our growth plan upon build up to launch. It was something that was rife back then, so much so, (literally), every day a large project was being hacked. Most projects ended up closing its doors before launching, but we decided to use this as fuel, as did the amazing community too, who showed how strong they are when facing adverse negativity as we did in that time. Due to the loss, we hosted a poll of whitelist holders on increasing the mint price slightly, or keeping it as it was. It was unanimous to increase the ETH mint price, as we did, and we went ahead to launch. Important to note that our net mint price was 0.019 ETH to us on a 3700 collection size. This remains the only time (to date) that we have gained any funds from the community from any mint or product launch..
Beyond this we done some cool things, including growing our team to 20+, done multiple activation partnerships (like treasure hunts IRL), and began our second product offering rollout: MiniBearX. This was essentially spawns of Genesis Bears. We decided to not charge for this, besides a small token amount of ROOTx (which all Genesis owners would have had a comfortable amount of by this point). The minibears were a roaring success and if anything, we had to halt minting due to the time limit being reached at the time.
Due to seeing so much forks, derivatives and no innovation, we then went into quite an exciting experimental phase, whereby we trialed an approach where staked bears can yield not only one of our tokens, but also the relative value in ETH. This was sought to bring a game changing utility as to how value prop works with staking. This, ultimately failed because of a few reasons:
- There needed to be more requirements, cliffs, vesting in place to minimise dumping en masse by ‘casual’ investors
- There needed to be a substantial build up in the LP prior to launch, with significant reward structures built in during the process
- An offsetting burn cumulative / relative burn event which continuously cut the supply of the token during the yield + dump process many investors went through.
- The contracts were inherently not optimised, and full of bugs due to us having to build through a proxy, since the original contract was flawed at the time.
This essentially crushed a momentum, whilst the bull market started to colour itself red in the summer. In hindsight, we could have of course just gone for the easier option (launched another 1–2 collections, released merch blah), but we wanted to be known for less of the same, more of what matters), so, we took the chance.
We then turned our attention to BearVX, agreeing a massive deal with Binance to be the first ETH project to launch globally across their launchpad. Ironically, we put this on hold first off, largely because we didn’t want to just launch another collect which charged people, without the collection having the reason it existed, ready first. In short, we wanted to ensure the game was made first (or at least in beta).
During this process, we then caught wind in the summer that Mojang (Minecraft, the game engine we were building on), stopped all access to NFTs, abruptly. It was not only senseless, but a total shock to the wider community including ourselves, essentially destroying over 10 top projects plans instantly including Llamaverse, and NFT worlds. For us, we pivoted to the Sandbox, which we will explain why further below.
At this stage, the market got worse, particularly in NFT volume, and since Sandbox delayed even their beta launch significantly, Binance and ourselves came to the agreement to wait until the market recovers before progressing any further.
Since then, we have continued to innovate, launching Notes of a Bear, alpha groups and fresh partnerships and builds with the likes of Sandbox. This has led us to Q4, where, we are due to launch our 1x1 beta plot experience in Sandbox, alongside BearVX (dependant on market)
Company identity
What BearX Labs is: Its important to understand what BearX was and what it is (and probably what it always will be). Early newcomers to BearX would know that it was ALWAYS an experimental, fun project, which famously championed the roadmap ‘no roadmap’ mindset — with our roadmap originally being all but 3 lines of writing to start with.
Our additions to the roadmap has been due to our decision to bring more value to users, but its important to note that none of this was ever promised outright, nor was it demanded at the time. Essentially though, BearX Labs is an experimental, innovative NFT brand, who challenges the narrative of product and how NFTs are used. This is our value prop.
What BearX Labs is not: BearX Labs is NOT a meme project, so, we aren’t going to go on Twitter spaces making animal noises for 5 hours. We also will not be sitting on twitter writing 20 posts a day teasing things that we find is nonsense, just to ‘pump ones bags’. We aren’t going to engagement farm, do spineless posting for no reason or do any cheap tricks to reel people in, only for them to be disappointed later. If you want any of the above, there is plenty of projects that offer this which are great — happy to recommend. We have no hard feelings about these types of projects, but its important to understand that there are different categories across the NFT space.
Products
A list of our main products (currently) active:
Genesis BearX: Where it all started. 3,700 bears that brings a series of utility opportunities.
MiniBearX: The limited MiniBear collection that was redeemable by Genesis Bear holders earlier in the year.
BearVX: The long awaited voxel collection. Set to launch on Binance launchpad, bearVX is the most animated, customisable, coolest avatars in the metaverse.
ROOTx: The primary token in the ecosystem that yields 10 ROOTx a day for every Genesis Bear that is staked.
SROOTx: The secondary token in the ecosystem, used as a collectible which will be tradeable for ingame items or opportunities relating to the metaverse.
Notes of a Bear: A NFT series which is claimable for free by Genesis Bear holders, and has power if collected as a set. At the time of snapshot, by owning a full set, holders has chance of earning rewards such as having their bears written into a TV series — which pays them directly.
Alpha Club: A club for holders which is currently yielding 0.5–0.75ETH on average per holder per month profit.
Golden Bookmark: Coming soon
Golden Axe: Coming soon
A key note to be made that NONE of the above has or will cost any holders a dollar. Everything since our initial mint 1 year ago has been free + gas to holders.
Token Utility
Our tokens our of course in need of some much needed utility — so this is what we have coming. In short, all of these will be relatively high burn amounts in light of there being a greater than expected time to accumulate. In short, patient holders should now have big bags.
-Golden Bookmark (more here: https://bearxnft.medium.com/notes-of-a-bear-explained-the-media-frontier-4a6a77cc8158)
-Burn for other token airdrops (raffle weighted airdrop opportunities with partner brands for large holders)
-Limited series rewards (such as first 10 burners gets XXX)
-On chain advertising space — burn tokens for advertising space for any product you may have / want to promote (w/ Script Network)
-Crypto / Equities trading advice
-Purchase real estate, items and products in game (SROOTx)
We will be holding votes to holders (unfortunately only picks up unstaked holders :/) to vote on utility for ROOTx and SROOTx going forward also. As per our original roadmap 2.0 — the aim was always to give more (if not full) control to the community long term in this regard anyway.
Challenges
We have some challenges certainly in the company that we constantly aim to address:
Lack of volume: This is something that certainly matters to holders, and we appreciate this. To counter this we are exploring a series of incentives, such as reward pools to traders (buyers) during set time periods.
Royalty fee changes: As you have heard in the marketplace sphere, the market is moving towards a 0% creator fee economy. Whilst this is great for traders, this is of course a big hit to projects, given that most, if not almost all projects are sustained through revenue (however small or big), from the sales. That said, our growth goes beyond this. For example, the off chain partnerships to fractionalise assets, or through the mini series build and payout streams through advertising.
Expectations: We believe one of the hardest things in this market is managing expectations through issues, matched to market sentiment and relative views from the community. We plan to appease this through realistic goal setting and expectations, but through a more mutual understanding of the process and challenges (when such), that the company faces.
Marketing: As the space essentially gets smaller (newcomers who lost money / wasn’t really interested has left), and there be a near zero influx of new users, this has led marketing to ultimately fail across most projects over the last 6 months. Largely burning cash, because influencers, social media companies etc all push more fees (probably to offset losses they felt in the market), but the impact of the marketing is little to none, since those who engage with ads are usually newcomers (see above). To offset this issue, we felt the best way to build is sideways, largely through acquiring or working in sync with other projects, ultimately leading to communities being merged, which realistically is what makes most sense in this current market we feel.
Relevant Current Partnerships
Wicked Bone Club: Mutual goals and a great refined team. WBC are ideal partners to help grow the business case within NFTs, with innovative plans on creating real value to web2 businesses within web3. Check them out here: https://mobile.twitter.com/wickedboneclub
DskDAO: One of the most exciting anime projects that is due to launch very soon. Working with WBC and ourselves to build out an elite Sandbox experience in 2023 and beyond! Check them out here: https://mobile.twitter.com/_dskdao_
Script Network: Script Network is a layer one video protocol, brought to you by some of the team that build BearX Labs. Its main user product is Script TV — a watch to earn live tv platform, where users gets rewards per block by chatting, watching TV and upgrading their NFT (ScriptGLASS). Check them out here: https://twitter.com/script_network
When we platform launches, airdrops will be carried out to those who were eligible at the time of the snapshot (the snapshot has not happened yet at the time of writing). This is always STC, but more here:
Some more partnerships here too (map to be updated!)
Growth
Acquiring of Solana Vegas Club. Full statement here:
We are actually due to announce another tier 1 partnership too — please watch this space!
And based on the above, BearX Club was born.
What we are excited about
To name a few? Sandbox, Notes of a Bear, BearVX, more significant partnerships, and real innovation in the NFT space.
Conclusion — our thoughts
The market is down bad, but the bigger issue is the lack of innovation from NFT projects, and the lack of relativity given across the board with projects in general from both holders and creators.
This leads to popular threads like this being made daily:
The push to a 0% creator environment is not great news, but will hopefully lead to more innovation, and BearX Labs in the meantime will continue to go from strength to strength, and ensure that valuing the current community is the most important thing long term. Important to note that even in our roadmap, we make no promises, we aim to do everything planned, but we always ask holders to do their own research and always understand that this is a business at the end of the day. What we can say is that we feel we are lightyears ahead of almost all projects in terms of IP and tech, but time will tell how this plays out (rather than we speculate).
