Please describe your proposed solution.
<u>Our solution:</u>
Organize local workshops in which artists minting on Ethereum are presented with all the good reasons to mint their art on Cardano.
Artists that are minting on Ethereum will be invited to a venue. Here a video presentation will be shown that illustrates and explains the properties of the Cardano blockchain in general, and those regarding minting NFTs on Cardano in particular.
A comparison will be made between what the cost is to mint on Ethereum and on Cardano. Then a visualization of Cardano wallets. The artists that are enthusiastic will be helped there and then to create their first Cardano wallet. Lastly they will be invited to join our NFT platform, The Art Suite.
We will team up with existing art project workshops to be able to share infrastructure and local knowledge. One such possible partner is Controforma (controforma.camp)
It will take time to reach out to the many artists that are presently minting their art on Ethereum, so a long term vision is required.
The long term vision is to keep doing these workshops in as many countries as possible, once we have established the proof of concept and ‘how-to’ guide that can be used to help others in their local contexts.
Financing is needed to organize the Ethereum-Cardano workshops (in different countries) for a period of about one year. After that we should have standard educational material and refined procedures to bring costs down to a point that our NFT platform, The Art Suite, can take care of running expenses. At the same time, we will also be looking to develop partnerships and sponsorships in this period.
$3.5k was spent for the event that we hosted in Barcelona, out of pocket. In this proposal we are not talking about events but rather about workshops, where we can apply the lessons that were learned during our prototype event.
We estimate that with 2000$ USD we can finance a very well organized workshop in 4 different cities in Spain, over a period of 4 months, so the average cost of a workshop would be 500$.
The first such workshop will take place again at Hotel Ginebra, our venue, to keep costs to a minimum. We already have a strong presence and reputation in the Cardano ecosystem, as well as Barcelona. We are the first business in the world to accept ADA as payment, since 2017, and we wish to expand our positive impact and influence by helping to build bridges between other ecosystems and Cardano’s. We have been active on this front, and with the help of Catalyst funding, and community support, we can have even more of a positive impact locally and beyond.
<u>Environmental impact</u>
Ethereum as a blockchain is not environmentally friendly, quite the contrary: “The way Ethereum keeps your funds and assets secure is currently energy-intensive” and “So yes, there is a carbon footprint associated with creating blocks by mining – and this is a problem for chains like Bitcoin too”. - <https://ethereum.org/en/nft/#ethereum-and-nfts>
Cardano has been designed and optimized to be friendly to the environment and carbon neutral through collaborations with projects like Veritree <https://ito.veritree.com/>
This has been studied and further catalyzed by impact fellows and researchers from the Climate Neutral Cardano Group - <https://twitter.com/CardanoCnbg>
This distinction has been made during our first event and will be elaborated in future events and workshops.
<u>Why is it important?</u>
What we so far have noticed in the course of the prototype event was that nearly all artists that are selling their art on other blockchains and in this case on Ethereum, have absolutely NO IDEA about the technical properties and general advantages of Cardano. Although they all seem to be complaining about their experience on Ethereum based platforms such as OpenSea, nobody knows about Cardano. Artists are not necessarily technical people.
Cardano does not have enough outreach to automatically penetrate into the art world so we need to push for that to happen.
We have also learned that there is a conception in artist communities, especially among those that have not yet ventured out into creating NFTs that NFTs have a bad impact on the environment. In fact many artists do NOT WANT to create NFTs for that reason. When we explained that the Cardano blockchain consumes as much energy as a couple of households, they were relieved and positively inspired to learn how to create NFT collections on Cardano.
Energy Consumption per Transaction source: Blockchain Learning Center
Some statistics for context:
The NFT market on Ethereum is enormous and dwarfs Cardano by comparison. When you read “Ethereum NFTs” you should read “NFTs not yet on Cardano. Since the Cardano technology is vastly superior and easy to demonstrate, it is easy to see how the potential for bringing over artists (and consequently nft buyers) from Ethereum to Cardano is enormous.
From https://nftnow.com/culture/nfts-in-2021-by-the-numbers/ :
$14.6 billion – OpenSea’s total sales volume for 2021
OpenSea continued to break records month after month in 2021. With Dune Analytics reporting a total year-to-date sales volume upwards of $14.6 billion for the marketplace giant — in 2022 it’s likely we’ll see more of the same.
Note: OpenSea is to date the largest NFT platform that exists
<u>How big is the potential market?</u>
Still by far the biggest market of NFTs in the world is on Ethereum. Think OpenSea as shown above. There are many other marketplaces that are built on Ethereum all the more potential to transit artists to Cardano.
Think OpenPFP, X2Y2, LooksRare and GEM (<https://thevrsoldier.com/top-5-most-popular-nft-marketplaces-built-on-ethereum-may-2022/>) , all with very large trading volumes.
<u>What we have already accomplished and how much has been spent out of pocket for example prior to the proposal?</u>
We have come to identify the problem with the prototype event that we held at our Cardano Hotel Ginebra.This prototype event was self financed. We spent between 4000 and 5000 euros on catering, marketing, photographs, video crews, and the creation of educational material.
<u>Why is the problem solvable?</u>
The problem is solvable because it is just a matter of getting into the artist communities and doing the marketing from the inside out. We will for example not only invite individual artists, but also artist collectives, or their leaders. By doing a workshop with the right ten people, you indirectly reach hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands
<u>What would the world look like if our team solved it?</u>
Artists that are now struggling to sell their products on Ethereum based platforms will be able to enjoy the experience of using Cardano technology, which for one is much better for the environment.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
<u>Why is it important?</u>
The NFT markets are possibly the maximum expression of activity on the Ethereum blockchain. To enter and transform that market to a more Cardano oriented NFT environment, will give a push to artists that mint on Ethereum as well as NFT lovers who purchase on Ethereum to migrate over to Cardano.
<u>What does success look like?</u>
With the workshop already hosted by Hotel Ginebra Barcelona, The Art Suite is well placed to continue onboarding and educating locals in Barcelona, and visitors from around the world about the benefits of migrating from Ethereum to Cardano.
This will particularly be facilitated by the tooling and platform being developed into a fully automated platform and supported by our affiliate proposal found at
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
The risk of not being able to deliver this successfully is very low.
We have gathered enough information and experience from our prototype workshop to understand that there is a great hunger and desire in the artist communities, to learn how to mint their NFTs in ways that are better than their current experience on Ethereum.
In fact, we were astounded and overwhelmed with the number of artists that expressed such interest at our prototype event.