Terra Virtua — Telegram QUIZ & AMA — December 07
By: Gains Associates
Tags: Nft, VR, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Gainsama

Product

Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: Please tell us more about Terra Virtua. What is it in a few simple sentences?

A — Gary Bracey from Terra Virtua: We believe we are the world’s first immersive digital trading platform, where you can share, trade, showcase and do so much more with collectibles all within a unique ecosystem built for the true fan and collector in mind. Our platform allows you to store, display, interact with, and show off your NFT collection.

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: The mission is to bring in the mass market, converting them to crypto users, in an intuitive way, and about the experience.

A — Gary Bracey from Terra Virtua: We believe everyone is a fan of something! Our key goal is to bring NFTs mainstream and allow users to have more than your bog-standard static images or a digital equivalent of a trading card.

Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: Are you better than Opensea then?

A — Gary Bracey from Terra Virtua: Not better, but very different.

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: Well, Opensea is a different beast. We work with them and like the guys a lot. We are a full-connected ecosystem: trading, web, mobile, 3D, and even VR.

Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: Do you see them as competitors? Can you trade NFTs on Opensea?

A — Gary Bracey from Terra Virtua: We’re working together as we both have a common goal which is to expand the market. They focus on the core NFT user base, whereas we have positioned ourselves to attract a more mainstream market.

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: That’s why we have run and will continue to auction on their platform.

Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: How many users do you have?

A — Gary Bracey from Terra Virtua: Our user base is around 20K. We only recently closed our fundraising and we are about to invest in marketing to the mainstream which should dramatically see an increase in our audience.

Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: How can someone get started with Terra Virtua? Do you have any guide that players can refer to?

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: No, we’ve focused on super ease of use. Sign up here to see how simple it is. Our key objective is to bring NFTs to the mass-market and we begin by making the onboarding as frictionless as possible.

As Gary has built games and I’ve been building mobile apps and software for 20+ years, we know how to map out a smooth user onboarding. If you don’t know about crypto, it doesn’t matter.

Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: You also talk about “players” instead of “users”. How can people play there?

A — Gary Bracey from Terra Virtua: Gamification rather than gaming, strictly-speaking. At some point, we may incorporate actual games but right now it is the more subtle ‘gamification’ we are focussing on. So not users or players, but a community!

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: Well, the idea is “come play in our world” and by that it means to immerse in the different ways you use the NFTs.

If you get a robot lost in space, you can view it on the web, make a movie with it in AR, and place it in your 3D room.

Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: What is the token use case? How did you make sure it captures the value of the ecosystem you’re building?

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: There are a bunch, but the main focus is about participating in our rewards program, being part of a DAO and ambassador program. Check out our article.

There will be multiple levels of benefits from holding them. They will be involved in a bunch of DeFi products that are being worked on, including staking, lending, borrowing and even holding vaults of assets.

We are opening up the ecosystem to other teams to build NFTs. That will require a holding — but 3rd party teams will be able to build assets for major IP. With our guidance as a company, we can only handle so much in-house.

Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: There are probably 20 new projects every day that want to do lending, borrowing, staking. What makes you different?

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: We have an ecosystem that will appeal to the mass market, and institutions that invest in art, just as we have taken mainstream IP. We have some interesting traditional tie-ups coming with a hedge fund-like aspect. Not the typical money circle we see.

A — Gary Bracey from Terra Virtua: Genuinely, I believe we have put a slightly different spin on our strategy. We’re integrating the benefits to genuinely yield many great advantages that aren’t just ‘tacked on’ to justify the token but yield significant features.

Q — Twitter user @MagnatSV: What is Terra Virtua’s strategy to improve the quality of your NFTs to be head and shoulders above the competition? How do you see the collaboration of Terra Virtua with major brands and famous artists?

A — Gary Bracey from Terra Virtua: We are working with several large Hollywood movie companies plus some of the biggest names in music, comic books (for art), sports, and videogames. We have a pretty interesting pipeline over the coming 12 months.

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: We are all about making incredible stuff. If you look at our NFTs like the Phoenix bot, it’s composed of over 1m polygons, with multiple rigging points, all in 3D. There’s nothing like it in the market.

We are working with top comic book artists to make unique animated NFTs. Thats the issue about movie IP’s. The special effects models are huge, it takes a lot to make them usable. We are working with crypto artists now, as mentioned, we will be expanding it out to teams, ie. imagine a new movie launching in China and local artists making localized merch, officially endorsed.

A — Gary Bracey from Terra Virtua: The mass-market now has certain expectations regarding the fidelity of digital products. They will expect something at least on par with some of the big videogames out there. We are delivering to that quality but never complacent. If you look at our earliest 3D NFTs, they looked great and were very different from anything else, but if you check out The Phoenix Robot from Lost in Space, it takes our stuff to another level. And as for the forthcoming Pacific Rim models, just wait!

To remain competitive, we are constantly trying to improve, whether it be the fidelity of the models, the animations, or just creative ways to allow interaction with them. Our roadmap is very long and increases daily!

Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: A while ago, I saw a device that projected NFTs in some kind of holographic way. I thought it was very cool because it allowed you to display 3D NFTs to your friends, physically, rather than just on a screen. Bragging online is cool, but both online and offline is better.

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: Definitely. We have it working on a holo lens in our office. It looks insane but the market isn’t ready yet.

A — Gary Bracey from Terra Virtua: VR has always been a high item on our roadmap too.

Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: Can I get an invite one day to see it? Maybe we can make a contest here and invite another lucky winner.

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: You need to see the VR fan cave. You pick up your NFT and it changes in your hands. It’s with oculus for approval. We want to make it so you can do more with the NFTs. We feel it’s about socializing, sharing, and even bragging.

That’s why we have things like the art gallery with 3D Hi-Resolution. We are now running exhibitions of people’s wallets so they can see and enjoy the art people have collected. Right now, they are wallets gathering dust. We have an event coming up with Gabby Dizon where he has got some top crypto artists to talk about their art and walk through the gallery. This is to service the community and provide value to the community.

Q — Twitter user @AndryZara: What is your strategy for building a strong and global community? What incentive programs for TVK token holders will work on your platform?

A — Gary Bracey from Terra Virtua: We want to engage with our community as much as possible, and we are off to a great start with the Terra Virtua TG group.

We make it clear — We need your input, your feedback, your constructive comments. We want to know what YOU want and how we can improve our platform. We need to understand if and where we are going wrong and how to put it right. This is intended as a collaborative process and we encourage your involvement as much as possible.

Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: Will you be using their layer-2 scaling solution?

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: Yeah, we are playing with all the features but Matic is best placed to help us grow. They are a great team, great tech, and also key for us — their solution allows provenance transfer.

Q — Telegram user Deleted Account: What genres of NFTs are you mostly focused on, or are there any limitations with these? How do you plan to cooperate with some influencers within sports and art for example?

A — Gary Bracey from Terra Virtua: Mainly entertainment-based: movies, sports, games, etc.

Q — Telegram user Emi 💌: As for the Terra Virtua Digital Art Gallery, can Terra Virtua community users with artistic skills contribute and add their art there?

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: They will. We intend even launching a DAO style academy program.

Q — Telegram user Deleted Account: It’s respectable that you’ve been building the backbone of the project for three years. Can you share some of the difficulties that you’ve had during these years and why launching just now at the end of 2020?

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: We started with a big VR focus, and we had to pivot into all tech which people use today. We launched on 3 platforms at the same time. That took a lot of development and planning. No one has done this and generally, it’s not done anywhere: AR, 3D, and web on the same day at launch.

Q — Telegram user ⫷Ａｂｒａｈａｍ⫸: Will the seller be able to see the highest bids? Do you have a buy now feature?

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: We have both coming soon.

Q — Telegram user Jesus Freites: Terra Virtua began as an idea at a Starbucks. Since then, what goals have you set to become an iconic platform in the world of blockchain and DeFi?

In what areas of the arts, TV, and sports have you worked to improve?

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: The platform is launched in 4 different ecosystems. We have signed and gained the trust of mass-market brands. They are supporting us in the mainstream — look at Paramounts Godfather Twitter.

We have great support from our partners but have sports, gaming, and music coming at you very very soon.

Q — Telegram user ★ Egor Dubinin ★: Is it possible to conduct virtual reality tours in Terra Gallery?

A — Gary Bracey from Terra Virtua: That’s something we have planned for the near future.

Q — Telegram user $ Matvey: Is there a deflation mechanism inside Terra Virtua? How will your NFT be different from what we’ve seen before?

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: We want rare, high fidelity, but also want to see price points which are great for fans too. Art is getting too expensive in my opinion.

Mass market fans especially want to participate but maybe not be so focussed on collecting.

Q — Telegram user Melissa: Regarding the distribution of the TVK token, 20% is destined as ecosystem reserve. What would this reserve be used for and in what case?

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: Marketing, license acquisition primarily, which will drive in more users, IP and feed the token.

Q — Telegram user Waybe Suricata “Chiliz Alliance”: As you know, it is very important to get the support of the community in the projects. Can you tell us the most important reason for supporting your project?

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: That we want to grow the whole space, and bring 1m, new users, into NFTs. That’s our mission for phase 1.

Q — Telegram user Infinite Crypto: Art is sometimes subject to copyright and intellectual property. In Terra Virtua, are these aspects also considered, or is it an open world just like the internet itself?

A — Gary Bracey from Terra Virtua: We are taking a lot of legal advice on this as we want to protect ourselves, the artist, and the buyer. One issue, for instance, is that ‘anonymous’ artists are unable to copyright their work, which means anyone can replicate and sell it. This is a problem for all parties, from a legal perspective.

However, we are trying to make everything we do as legitimate as possible. Blockchain already has a negative rep ‘out there’ so we don’t want to give people any more reason to be distrustful.

Q — Telegram user El Padre: Can users create their own NFTs through your platform and have them listed on Terra Virtua’s Marketplace? What kind of requirements are needed for this?

A — Jawad Ashraf from Terra Virtua: Yes, this is the art case, but it’s only certain artists for now. Curation is the thing with us. It’s less of a free for all, as too much now is just a lot of content. We want to focus on great stuff and good selection.