Project Ark’s Genesis Drop — Unlocking Polygon on OpenSea

Project Ark
5 min readJun 1, 2021

After months of work, we are happy to announce the beginning of our first Wildlife Campaign Series of NFTs on Project Ark. Over the next few weeks, we will be announcing a series of incredible NFTs designed to support our precious planet, and highlight the beauty of biodiversity in collaboration with the WWF Panda Labs, supporting a community-led conservation project (read more on WWF’s website!)

NFTs that don’t harm the environment: Polygon- Opensea Marketplace Enabled!

The concerns around the environment and climate change have reached a tipping point in recent weeks, and NFTs have been at the centre of attention. As many artists noticed, there was a huge surge of concerns around the environmental footprint of NFT and committed as we were to the purpose of NFT’s being used to create environmental conservation, we have spent a lot of time evaluating many possible technology stacks and solutions. After a lot of exploration, we have come to see Polygon (MATIC) as a great ecosystem:

  • It's directly compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine,
  • It is decentralized through a proof of stake
  • It has an expansive community
  • OpenSea has integrated with Polygon to support the NFT launch

However, despite the ongoing OpenSea integration, MATIC smart contracts NFTs do not fully work on OpenSea yet.

If you mint on MATIC, we see This is an example of what it looks like:

Alas, the glory of the Power Bulb NFT artwork shall remain obscured from us!

After a burst of intense work, Taaha from Project Ark has been able to make substantial progress, and solve this problem, allowing us in one of the few teams in the world that can mint NFTs (both ERC721s, and 1155s) on Polygon and have all the meta-data show up appropriately on OpenSea

Behold!

Pick up a MATIC-powered ARK early supporter badge by following the link below:

What does this mean??!!!

Project Ark can now create MATIC NFTs that are:

  1. Super environmentally sustainable (very low carbon footprint)
  2. Have very low creation fees
  3. Have very low transaction and purchase fees

Reduce GAS Fees by 1000X!!!

Test transaction of purchasing a NFT on MATIC! (0.0002 USD of transaction fees)

To celebrate this accomplishment, we have minted our first Project Ark Drop Pieces on OpenSea

With Project Arks technological solution allowing us to properly mint 99% more sustainable NFTs via Polygon on OpenSea, we are proud to announce the first two NFTs released as a part of our Genesis Drop-in support of the World Wildlife Fund Romania. The project has teamed up with Topher Sipes and Allaurus with their piece “Woolly Ridge”, as well as Shawn Barry and Taylor Frost with their NFT “Endangered Spirits”.

“Woolly Ridge” uses the topological data of the Carpathian Mountains to create an extraordinary reminder of the intrinsic beauty found in our natural habitat. The Topographical data is part of the Carpathian Mountain range, containing Romania’s highest peak, which was sampled, isolated and extruded into a digital 3D object, then used to sculpt the bison’s bust. The satellite imagery embedded in the Bison is to emphasize the relationship between wildlife, ecosystems and geography. The original soundtrack titled “The Carpathian Chorus”, has been created by Allaurus using an incredible technology called PlantWave. The song incorporates recorded biorhythms from plants and uses those signals to play the Romanian hand drum. The song also utilizes other local Romanian instruments and is mixed in 8D audio to give the listener a more meditative impact. Be sure to listen with headphones for Binaural Beat effects!

Our second NFT is “Endangered Spirits” with music from Shawn Barry and visuals from Taylor Frost. Shawn is an international music producer and performer inspired to create art and raise awareness to the plight of endangered animals and their rapidly disappearing echo systems. Shawn created The Endangered Spirit Project as an immersive multimedia experience featuring the voices, rhythms and sounds of the animal kingdom. The music is inspired by the urgent call of endangered species around the world.

Check out our incredible pieces here:

Read more of the story of the Genesis Drop here.

For the larger campaign, please come check out and read more about how we are working with Chainlink Oracles to create Dynamic NFTs to react with the environment, and also

Also, don’t forget to follow us on:

Twitter /Instagram and join the discussions on the Discord Server and Telegram

--

--

Project Ark

The Marketplace Using Digital Collectibles for Environmental Conservation. #NFTs #CONSV