A herd of capybaras wants to throw a Latin party in the metaverse The Sandbox

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Eduardo Sanabria, a plastic artist from Venezuela and better known as EDO, is one of those creatives who has jumped on the wave of non-fungible tokens (NFT) with the idea of ​​exhibiting his art in digital galleries such as OpenSea or Rarible.

Just like EDO, other creators on a global scale are taking a closer look at the world of NFTs. They see it as that new space where they can migrate in search of opportunities. They do it because now, unlike the traditional way of exhibiting art, it is possible to tokenize their pieces, market them and exhibit them in a completely digitized environment.

That is precisely the approach of ChigüireLand, as the co-founder of the project, Antonio Di Caprio, explained to CriptoNoticias.

ChigüireLand is a project that includes a collection of 3993 NFT, based on the technique of pixel art, the same as the famous CryptoPunks. The designs of these capybaras have several layers that provide them with specific characteristics, related to the head, body, eyes, hands and bottoms that are important to determine their level of rarity.

Antonio Di Caprio, co-founder of the ChigüireLand project.

each NFT grants its owner the right to participate in the Amazon digital art gallery, which will be located on earth number 66, 45 of The Sandbox metaverse. With this, they plan to become the first initiative of this type with a Venezuelan stamp, which has a presence in one of the most popular virtual worlds today.

In this way, each creative who owns a ChigüireLand NFT will be able to choose to show their art in the Amazonas gallery. And the way things are going, it is possible that, in the future, each piece in this collection will become a card that identifies a Venezuelan or Latino creator whose art is visible in The Sandbox.

In fact, the digital herd of Chigüires is growing rapidly, every day there are new members chatting on their official discord or asking questions and participating in the activities that their team carries out online.

Why a capybara? many ask, and the response from its development team is that this rodent, the largest in the world, is as loved on social networks as cats or monkeys.

“The capybara is one of the most charismatic animals in the world,” says Di Caprio. And it turns out that this characteristic is something they share with Venezuelans, a population that has become known in the world for its good sense of humor.

That good sense of humor is also associated with another project that bears a similar name and that every Venezuelan immediately associates with, such as Chigüire Bipolar. It is a satirical journalism portal launched in May 2008 by Venezuelans Elio Casale, Oswaldo Graziani and Juan Andrés Ravell, also creators of the animated series La isla Presidencial.

But chigüires are not only from Venezuela, they are also known as capybara or capybaras in other regions of Latin America. Y hand in hand with the ChigüireLand project, these rodents want to reap fame in Spanish-speaking countries.

Its development team believes that they are on the right track to achieve this, since so far there are owners of capybara NFTs in Spain, Colombia, Chile and other parts of Latin America, including Brazil. This, taking into account that the project was born with the investment of businessmen from this last country, famous for its raucous Carnival festival.

Until now, everyone who wants an NFT from the ChigüireLand collection must “mint” their token. It means that they must “mint” or issue their crypto asset, like someone going to a bank, only in this case they must go to a platform where they can do it, such as OpenSea.

So once you request the issuance of a new piece, each user must wait days or hours for the characteristics of their character to be revealed.

In that sense, each chigüire will have a different object in his hand, which will be a weapon or a tool and that will also determine your ability in the game play-to-earn which is also in development.

So the members of the ChigüireLand herd will have two possible ways to win. One will be through the sale of their own art pieces, and the other, they will be able to acquire knowledge, dexterity and other abilities as they navigate the metaverse ChigüireLand and therefore in The Sandbox.

a metaverse play-to-earn: will you earn cryptocurrencies?

“Not everything you can earn in a metaverse is cryptocurrencies,” says Di Caprio when asked about the similarities between the virtual world of Axie Infinity and that of ChigüireLand.

For him the difference is abysmal because he says that until now he has not known an NFT project that has a proposal like the one offered by the virtual world of the largest rodents in the world.

I see that the metaverse of ChigüireLand is more play and earn (play and win), because it is not planned that this project generates a kind of salary like those of Axie Infinity. In our virtual world there are jobs, but it is because there are designers, developers, community managers and moderators in our team. While the community can earn from the sale of their NFTs in the secondary market, they can earn some tokens, they can even get discounts in some stores with which we make agreements, but to do so does not mean that people are going to be involved all the time. day on the platform working, as required by Axie Infinity.

Antonio Di Caprio, co-founder of the NFT ChigüireLand project.

From his point of view, the greatest value proposition that the The project of the digital capybaras is to change the perception of winning that many have when they develop in the world of cryptocurrencies.

«We are not making promises that the investment will be recovered in 15 days or in the short term because it must be understood that this is more in the long term. We must assume him as the businessman who set up a bakery and understands that he will not recover his investment in less than five years, “explained Di Caprio.

For this reason, the project has an exclusive space where capybara NFT owners can log in for guidance on investments with cryptocurrencies. Also, advice for your own digital collectibles project or any other topic related to the cryptoactive sector that the community considers interesting. “That’s the very concept of winning that we want to promote, to start relating to that idea in a different way,” she said.

He says that while NFTs are minted and the community continues to grow, his development team is working on 3D modeling to make capybara avatars work in The Sandbox. It means that they will be able to move, walk, dance, among other things, guided by an augmented reality viewer.

A virtual world within the reach of all capybaras

“We want our metaverse to be accessible to everyone,” DiCaprio said. That is why he insisted on clarifying that ChigüireLand is not a virtual land only for Venezuelans. rather it will be a world to which every owner of the NFTs in the collection will have accessas if it were a passport.

His idea and that of the founder Kevin Hernández, is that the virtual world that they are developing has users from all over South America. That these be of all ages and have any profession, “because this initiative is not only for creatives,” they pointed out.

«Because of the effort to make our project available to everyone, we looked for the most favorable environment and found that it is the Polygon network, which is one of the cheapest in terms of transaction fees. It does not demand high costs like Ethereum, “explained Di Caprio.

In that sense, each Capybara NFT is currently worth $20 in Matic, the native cryptocurrency of the Polygon network. At the time of writing this note, more than 1,400 capybara NFTs had been sold, and it is expected that in another week or two they will all be minted. And later, the secondary market will open.

That ChigüireLand is based on the Polygon network seems like a good sign, since curiously the projects developed in this chain of blocks are gaining great momentum. They have reached the figure of 11,4000 daily digital wallets connecting with their platforms during the first quarter of 2022 and 173,000 during the month of March alone.

A graph published by the data site DappRadar shows that games based on the Polygon network are constantly growingwith more active digital wallets in the last four months.

However, it should be noted that the network Bitcoin is the one that can allow the existence of the most durable NFTs in all history. In fact, based on it, the first antecedent of the non-fungible tokens that we know today appeared, such as the “colored coins”, which, although unsuccessful, were the first to be traded on the Bitcoin blockchain.

The “red coins” gave way, in 2014, to the birth of a financial platform called CounterParty, which works connected to the Bitcoin network, but as a separate protocol.

The CounterParty initiative was presented as a distributed system, peer to peer, which allowed the creation of new digital assets. And it was like that trading card games and rare meme trades arrived on the bitcoin network. So, an increasingly diverse market for NFTs on the blockchain began to form.

Bitcoin is the only relevant proof-of-work network in the world and is designed to distribute trust based on computational power (bitcoin mining). This makes it the most secure network in the world and practically impossible to attack successfully and, therefore, it will be in this ecosystem that collectible tokens can exist for the longest time.

Why is this important? Because if ever, for one reason or another, the teams abandoned your project, NFTs and their metadata will continue to exist on the public, decentralized blockchain. This allows, for example, anyone to take the code to “recreate” the smart contract and thus revive the project at any time.

In any case, regardless of the network in which they exist, currently collectible projects represent the most productive segment of the NFT industryas we recently reported in CriptoNoticias.

At the same time, the presence of capybaras in The Sandbox metaverse could give the project greater visibility, however, everything will depend on the creativity that its developers imprint on it to keep an active community. That it grow permanently, without users becoming disillusioned, as has been happening with other projects that have turned into a desert.