Project Ark Will Use Chainlink to Build Dynamic NFTs That Support Animal and Environmental Conservation
Born out of a collaboration between Carbonbase and World Wildlife Fund Panda Labs, Project Ark is a social impact blockchain project that allows users to purchase rare digital NFTs to support animal and environmental conservation. As part of our initial funding campaign, we will use Chainlink Verifiable Random Function (VRF) — a secure oracle service that generates and delivers applications a verifiable source of randomness — to randomly select winners of limited edition conservation NFTs.
As part of our longer-term goals, we will also use Chainlink to access wildlife conservation data. This external data will be used to create dynamic NFTs, which change and/or react based on how successful a conservation effort becomes, such as fluctuating in value, triggering tiered rewards systems, determining the outcome of prediction markets, and more. The goal is to correlate and create closer connections between on-the-ground conservationists and financial supporters and artists from around the world through gamification and digital art campaigns.
Powering Our Conservation NFTs With Chainlink Oracles
Project Ark is an online marketplace for rare digital and NFT collectibles that users can purchase to directly support conservation projects across the globe. The greatest conservation challenges we face today include climate change, environmental destruction, loss of biodiversity, and the extinction of animals. Our platform is designed to automatically donate a portion of each NFT sale directly to one of these important causes so that frontline organisations around the world have more access to funding in support of eliminating these problems.
Throughout many conservation projects today, there is almost no direct connection between one’s monetary contribution and the actual project on the ground. When someone donates a certain amount of money, the person usually receives a physical item in return in the form of a shopping bag, plush animal, or something correlated to the project at hand.
With the upcoming Chainlink integration, we envision a connected effort between purpose-driven individuals, artists who want to contribute to something meaningful, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) giving their sweat and blood to save endangered animal species and at-risk areas. The closer connection between these three parts can be achieved by connecting the actual outcomes of a conservation project to a smart contract that generates a certain type of outcome such as minting an NFT reward.
For our first collaboration, Project Ark plans to use Chainlink’s Verifiable Random Function to embed a random element into our current funding campaign, giving participants a chance to receive an additional limited-edition NFT reward!
Cultivating community conservationists, the first official campaign launched in collaboration with WWF Romania and features a set of four different tiers of 3D audio NFTs that represent the Romanian centuries-old tradition of decorative eggs. The campaign will send the majority of the proceeds to the project on the ground. Buyers of the Egg NFTs will have a chance to receive a surprise NFT, that dozens of artists and designers contributed to create. The campaign will also sell select copies of the artwork individually — so that collectors may be able to support the WWF conservation cause directly.
When the campaign is over a request will be sent to Chainlink VRF to randomly select which contributors will receive an additional surprise reward. On a technical level, Chainlink VRF works by combining block data that is still unknown when the VRF request is initiated with the oracle node’s pre-committed private key to generate both a random number and a cryptographic proof. Project Ark’s smart contract will only accept the random number input if it has a valid cryptographic proof, and the cryptographic proof can only be generated if the VRF process is tamper-proof. This provides users with on-chain verification that these limited-edition NFTs were distributed to contributors in a provably random process.
Chainlink’s tamper-proof and verifiable entropy solution will allow for even more engagement from purpose-driven NFT buyers since they are incentivized to spread conservation campaigns to receive extra bonuses and rewards once campaigns are fully-funded. For the long run, our intention is to integrate Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network to create dynamic NFTs that automatically update according to different conservation outcomes. One example would be to correlate and incentivize positive action on campaign efforts using contributions from buyers and artists to create dynamic NFTs that update according to the level of funding reached.
Visit our website for more information about Project Ark and our first initial funding campaign!
“The integration of Chainlink’s industry-standard oracle network into our digital NFT marketplace has the potential to transform the animal and environmental conservation industry, closing the gap between frontline efforts and off-site contributors using digital art and fun gamification. Instead of cheering for your favorite team, you cheer for your favorite NGO that has achieved a milestone in endangered animal conservation, species repopulation, or coral reef restoration. We ultimately want to create global connectivity between the supporters of these campaigns, and the positive impact that we want to create in the world.
— Max Song, Project Ark founder
About Chainlink
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About Project Ark
Project Ark is an innovative new blockchain-powered conservation platform built in partnership between Carbonbase and the leading international organization World Wildlife Fund Panda Labs. We are creating an online marketplace for rare digital collectibles which directly fund animal and environmental conservation efforts around the world.
In the long run, Project Ark seeks to apply Elinor Ostrom’s theory of preserving common resource pools to address the “Tragedy of the Commons”, in which individuals neglect the well-being of society in the pursuit of personal gain, leading to overexploitation and ultimately depletion of the common resource to everybody’s detriment. Project Ark seeks to encode Ostrom’s theory of preserving the commons by creating the world’s first Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) to manage digital endowment funds that protect large-scale conservation efforts of the world’s most important natural resources. Follow our social and stay up to date with our impactful projects and announcements.
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