Eduardo Sanabria, a visual 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 so because now, unlike the traditional way of exhibiting art, it is possible to tokenize their pieces, market them and exhibit them in a fully digitized environment.
Chigüire Land is a project that includes a collection of 3993 NFT, based on the pixel art technique, the same as the famous CryptoPunks. The designs of these chigüires have several layers that provide them with specific characteristics, related to the head, body, eyes, hands and backgrounds 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 Amazonas digital art gallery, which will be located on land number 66, 45 of The Sandbox metaverse. With this, they intend to become the first Venezuelan initiative of its kind to have a presence in one of today’s most popular virtual worlds.
In this way, every creative who owns a Chigüire Land NFT will be able to choose to show their art in the Amazon gallery. And the way things are going, it is possible that, in the future, each piece of this collection will become a card that identifies a Venezuelan or Latin 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 chigüire? many ask, and the answer of its development team is that this rodent, the largest in the world, is as beloved in social networks as cats or monkeys.
“The chigüire is one of the most charismatic animals in the world,” says Di Caprio. And it turns out that characteristic is something they share with Venezuelans, a population that has become known around the world for its good sense of humor.
Un capibara-chiguire no preguntes porqué solo hazlo y disfruta la experiencia @ChiguiLandNFTs pic.twitter.com/X56DAHUOmR
— Osman | CGC (@osman_frontado) May 10, 2022
That good sense of humor is also associated with another project that carries a similar name and that all Venezuelans immediately associate with Chigüire Bipolar. It is a satirical journalism portal launched in May 2008 by Venezuelans Elio Casale, Oswaldo Graziani and Juan Andrés Ravell, creators of the animated series La isla presidencial.
But chigüires are not only from Venezuela, they are also known as capybaras or capybaras in other regions of Latin America. And with the ChigüireLand project, these rodents want to become famous in Spanish-speaking countries.
Its development team believes that they are on the right track to achieve it, since so far there are owners of the chigüire 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 the latter country, famous for its raucous Carnival festival.
So far, anyone who wants an NFT from the ChigüireLand collection must “mine” their token. It means that they must “mint” or issue their cryptoasset, like someone who goes to a bank, only in this case they must go to a platform where they can do so, such as OpenSea.
So once he requests the issuance of a new token, each user must wait days or hours for the characteristics of his character to be revealed.
In that sense, each chiguireland will have a different object in its hand, which will be a weapon or a tool and which will also determine its ability in the play-to-earn game that is also in development.
So the members of the ChigüireLand herd will have two possible ways to earn. One will be through the sale of their own art pieces, and on the other, they will be able to acquire knowledge, skills and other abilities while they develop in the ChigüireLand metaverse and therefore in The Sandbox.
A play-to-earn metaverse: will you earn cryptocurrencies?
“Not everything you can win in a metaverse are cryptocurrencies”, Di Caprio clarifies 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 world’s largest rodents.
I see that the metaverse of ChigüireLand is more play and earn, because it is not planned that this project generates a kind of salaries 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 with 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 stuck all day on the platform working, as Axie Infinity demanded. – Antonio Di Caprio, co-founder of the NFT ChigüireLand project.
From his point of view, the greatest value proposition that the digital chigüire project has is to change the perception of winning that many people have when dealing with the world of cryptocurrencies.
“We are not making promises that the investment will be recovered in 15 days or in the short term because we have to understand that this is more long-term. We have to take it on like the entrepreneur who set up a bakery and understands that he will not recover his investment in less than five years,” Di Caprio explained.
For that reason, the project has an exclusive space where owners of chigüire NFTs can enter to receive guidance on investments with cryptocurrencies. Also, advice for their own digital collectibles project or any other topic related to the cryptoassets sector that the community finds interesting. “That is the real concept of winning that we want to promote, to start relating to that idea in another way,” he pointed out.
Nos vemos en un ratito…
Las posibilidades en #TheSandboxGame son geniales!!! #Chiguires al poder ! ! ! https://t.co/kZDRNdvxOK pic.twitter.com/gnuNMco7xG— ajdicaprio.eth (@ajdicaprio) April 5, 2022
He assures that while NFTs are mined and the community continues to grow, his development team is working with 3D modeling to make the chigger avatars work in The Sandbox. This means that they will be able to move, walk, dance, among other things, guided by an augmented reality viewer.
A virtual world within reach of all chigüires
“We want our metaverse to be within everyone’s reach,” 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 collection’s NFTs will have access, as if it were a passport.
His idea, and that of founder Kevin Hernandez, is that the virtual world they are developing will have users from all over South America. That they be of all ages and have any profession, “because this initiative is not only for creatives,” they said.
“Because of our determination 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 require high costs like Ethereum,” explained Di Caprio.
In that sense, each chigüire NFT currently has a value of USD 20 in Matic, the native cryptocurrency of the Polygon network. At the time of writing, more than 1,400 NFT of chigüire had been sold, and it is expected that in another week or two they will all be minted. Subsequently, the secondary market will be opened.
That ChigüireLand is based on the Polygon network seems like a good sign, as interestingly enough, projects developed on this blockchain are gaining great momentum. They have reached the figure of 11,4000 digital wallets per day connecting to their platforms during the first quarter of 2022 and 173,000 during the month of March alone.
The presence of chigüires in The Sandbox metaverse could give greater visibility to the project, however, everything will depend on the creativity of its developers to maintain an active community. It will grow permanently, without users becoming disillusioned, as has happened with other projects that have become a desert.
