Next-generation NFT Chain for Kusama and Polkadot
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Welcome back OIG family! We are excited to have with us today @AlexanderMitrovich (CEO / Co-Founder) of Unique. The Next-generation NFT Chain for Kusama and Polkadot.
Thank you for stopping by today Alex! Can you please introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about your background in tech startups and blockchain?
Alex: Hi again, sure
I’ve been working in tech and IT for over 20 years, so I’ve always had a passion for technology and innovation — especially with emerging platforms. One of my most proud career experiences was building Luxoft.com from a little under 30 employees to over 2000 employees. I love seeing platforms, and ideas, grow from something small into something big and impactful. As far as my journey into blockchain, I owe a lot to our Chief Architect and CTO Greg Zaitsev, who has over a decade of experience as an Enterprise Architect and an equally deep background in blockchain. He was the one who first helped me transition from Web2 to Web3.
Saigon 💎 | OIG::You bring an incredible amount of depth and experience to this space! We are excited to see a project with someone like you leading the charge!
How did you end up founding Unique Network? What inspired you and what problem did you want to solve in blockchain and NFTs?
Alex: In 2019, Greg and I worked on a few NFT projects on Ethereum, and then later that year started digging into Polkadot via a few infrastructure projects — the last one being the NFT Palette. Our thinking at the time was that Substrate could be a good chain for NFTs, but only after we made the palette did we realize how strong it was. While working on it, Greg came up with some of the key innovations and strategies that we now have in Unique — natively doing all major NFT transactions — minting collections or NFTs, re-fungible tokens, etc. But most importantly — we realized Substrate can support native sponsoring of transaction fees, allowing freemium gaming on Blockchain for the first time. That’s when we decided — “this is it, we’re going all-in’’. From there, Unique Network was born. For us, accessibility and affordability were always priorities for us. We saw many roadblocks in blockchain and NFTs and wanted to build an infrastructure that would democratize the space so more people could contribute to it. Based on our continuous work on these areas we have received and delivered 5 Web3 Grants. You can read more here: Unique Network’s Deep Polkadot Experience (https://unique.network/blog/deep-polkadot-experience/)
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Incredible work! It’s clear that you have done a ton of research and work within this space to recognize where the next tide is flowing to be able to seamlessly switch from the Ethereum network to Substrate built on Polkadot!
Let’s talk a bit more about Unique Network. Can you take us through the advanced features and what makes them…unique?
Alex: My favourite topic 🙂 Several things:
Flexible Economic Models: By building your business on Unique Network, we allow you to choose how your customers interact with your platform and NFTs via the sponsored transaction fees (a first in crypto), subscriptions, and scheduled transactions. Flexible Economic Models: By building your business on Unique Network, we allow you to choose how your customers interact with your platform and NFTs via the sponsored transaction fees (a first in crypto), subscriptions, and scheduled transactions.
Complete Customization: Our solution allows clients to design a completely customizable marketplace tailored to end customers’ experiences. We provide a suite of white-label options for NFT galleries, markets, wallets, or simply minting. From top to bottom, we’ll provide you with the tools and expertise so your NFT marketplace can truly be a representation of what you’re building.
NFT to NFT Interactivity: This is something we’re super excited about.. Any NFT minted on Unique Network can actually own other NFTs, and communicate with one another across chain. This creates a whole world of multichain NFTs interacting with each other, picking up new properties, and expanding their potential. The future of the metaverse is multi-chain.
Scalability: Built on the Substrate, Unique allows you to launch your NFT platform without worrying about network congestion, number of users, transactions, or high transaction fees.
I can go on 🙂
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Amazing! The idea of NFT cross-chain interactivity is very intriguing! This can bridge the gap for a lot of platforms and offer a solution to the current scattered state of NFTs.
You recently announced Quartz. Tell me about what it is and how it will benefit the community in NFTs and blockchain.
Alex: Quartz is our new chain for the Kusama community, which helps unleash Kusama’s shape-shifting set of options for increasing your levels of experimentation, discovery, and new models of creation. As our canary network, Quartz gives you quick and easy access to the full spectrum of essential and advanced NFT Tools, accelerating your journey to building your marketplace quickly, efficiently, and affordably.
Quartz also offers minimal gas fees while maintaining the maximum opportunity for builders and customers. Quartz will also have staking options available for app promotion staking, smart contact endowment, reputation staking, and vote staking. We recently won the 14th Kusama parachain auction and crowdloan for Quartz — we had 8874 network stakeholders vote with over 54000 KSM total. So lots more to come there 😉
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Yes! Incredible job with the auction and crowdloan. There is a huge demand for this product right now, and we are happy to see it is being built with the right hands!
Can you tell me about the Unique Token and the public sale! What should we know?
Alex: UNQ is the utility and governance token of Unique Network, the NFT chain for Polkadot Network. It helps deliver the most advanced, scalable, and powerful NFT features made possible by our infrastructure.
UNQ token will facilitate exchange of value between Users, Treasury and the Unique Protocol. Utility and governance in the ecosystem is delivered through the dual roles of UNQ. We break this down into two buckets: Payment for Transactions (NFT transactions & Smart contract transactions) and Staking: App Promotion Staking, Reputation Staking, and Vote Staking (Governance).
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Very well built out utility for UNQ. This provides tons of value for token holders.
Can you tell our community when the token sale will take place?
Alex: mid-December, 2021 — THE EVENT IS CALLED DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH it will be executed in two rounds: a whitelisted round that will be for people who have participated in the Quartz Crowdloan or have applied to be an Ambassador on or before Friday, 26th November, 10 a.m. UTC — also those who own a Chelobrick or a Substrapunk at the time of snapshot on Monday, 6th December, 2021.
Then we will have a public sale round, for anyone who is not eligible to be whitelisted can participate in the public sale round. This round will commence after the first round of token sale is over. It will be conducted on a first come first serve basis. So keep an eye out for the announcements!
You can find all details here:
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Diamond in the Rough. If there is one thing that is always on-point with Unique, it is the branding and marketing! Good job on this! We highly encourage everyone here to check out the article for further details!
Speaking of the community, tell me about what’s happening with the Chelobricks and Substrapunks marketplace rewards?
Alex: Thank you, we are proud of our Marketing!
Great question — this is a fun one:) This was a big move for us in rewarding our community and moving more towards decentralization of our marketplace. Everyone who owns both a Chelobrick or a Substrapunk with Polkadot are entitled to royalties. They were our first NFT drops in partnership with Kusama and Polkadot and they helped kick off the early iteration of our marketplace and vision. In September, we airdropped .062 $KSM to each owner of both a Chelobrick and Substrapunk. This time the total KSM to be distributed is over 260 KSM, around $0.15 per account.
We have already taken the next snapshot and will announce soon!
. Make sure to follow us on Twitter and Telegram to stay updated!
https://twitter.com/Unique_NFTchain
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Amazing rewards! This was such an incredible incentive program for your users! And we read about the amazing feedback from it already.
You’ve had some impressive use cases so far on Unique Network. Tell me about some of the most innovative projects building on your platform.
Alex: There is so much innovation in the NFT space, and that makes it very exciting! We are proud to work with some of them:
Digital Art for Climate, is our United Nations-associated climate action-awareness NFT initiative with UN Habitat and IAAI Glocha Youth, and had the opportunity to present the partnership and the initiative at COP26
Then the next is Vernissage — a community-focused marketplace and then Artpool which is a really comprehensive Art Discovery platform
SupraOracles is an oracle platform that brings enterprise-standard oracles to the Web 3.0 ecosystem. Through their innovative technology, SupraOracles empowers the developer community with a novel oracles toolset that efficiently creates, deploys, and manages data applications..
Our partnership with SupraOracles will combine Unique’s white-label NFT technology with SupraOracle’s novel oracle toolset to improve the composition of the dynamic NFTs that we’re nurturing through our advanced tools, marketplace, and platform.
Forever has Fallen — very interesting and innovative multi media game, encourage all to try it — lots of fun!
RMRK App: We partnered with RMRK to build composable, forever-liquid, multi-resource NFTs
Seedify: Incubated projects and/or IGOs on Seedify can create a scalable tokenized game ecosystem, eliminating the need for freemium ad model strategies, build NFT interactivity and flexible in-game economies, mint their NFTs on Unique, and create custom marketplaces.
These are only the first ones — lots more in the works!
Saigon 💎 | OIG: This is an incredible list of partners! We are very excited to see what else you have cooking up in the near future!
Alex: Me, too!
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Can you tell us about the tokenomics for Unique?
Alex: We’ll have a total supply of 1,000,000,000 UNQ, with a circulating supply at Genesis of 67,770,563. As far as inflation, it will be 10% in year 1, decreasing consistently to 4% by year 10
We sold 20% in private sale and are allocating up to 8% for the public sale
18% goes to team and advisors
Remainder is for Treasury, and Polkadot crowdloan specifically
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Wow. These are incredibly favourable metrics! It speaks a lot to the thought that has gone into this project to ensure the long-term security of the token!
Alex: Yes, we are careful about tokenomics to make sure only valuable inputs are rewarded
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Well @AlexanderMitrovich! At this point I’d like to turn it over to the community questions on Twitter where we had an amazing turnout for Unique Network! We had some amazing questions and we were able to pick three great ones that were highly engaged! Are you ready for our Community Questions? 🙂
Alex: Absolutely
CommunityTwitter Questions:
Question 1)
Alex: Quartz is our new chain for the Kusama community, which helps unleash Kusama’s shape-shifting set of options for increasing your levels of experimentation, discovery, and new models of creation. As our canary network, Quartz gives you quick and easy access to the full spectrum of essential and advanced NFT Tools, accelerating your journey to building your marketplace quickly, efficiently, and affordably.
Quartz also offers minimal gas fees while maintaining maximum opportunity for builders and customers. Quartz will also have staking options available for app promotion staking, smart contact endowment, reputation staking, and vote staking. We recently won the 14th Kusama parachain auction and crowdloan for Quartz — we had 8874 network stakeholders vote with over 54000 KSM total, went live on November 27th and are preparing for the big forkless upgrade for next week to enable all our great features we developed over the last 2 years.
For developers and innovators — i’d encourage you to go to our github and get started with our docs and tools. And when you will be ready to deploy — Quartz is the right choice! 🙂
Saigon 💎 | OIG: You are DEFINITELY selling Quartz as the next chain solution!
Question 2)
Alex: With the funding we have received so far and the amount we raise during the upcoming public sale — we have 3 key priorities to focus on:
- Win the Polkadot Crowdloan in the first half of 2022
- Expand our development team — which is already quite big (30 people). The amount of projects we have in pipeline — we definitely need to scale
- Launch grant and funding programs to scale development on Unique Network
We’re also working with some of our investors on the Ecosystem fund
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Wow. So tons of backend building in terms of team and infrastructure, and community engagement programs as well to onboard developers and investors! Great stuff Alex!
Alex: Thank you!
Question 3)
Saigon 💎 | OIG: I know you touched on this a bit earlier @AlexanderMitrovich, so perhaps another chance to talk more about your favorite topic!
Alex: Ha ha
What you see today in NFTs is just collectibles. Make a file, mint it & sell it. The next huge wave of innovation in NFTs thats coming needs much more. All the advanced features we offer is what is Unique about Unique 🙂
We are working on enabling much more advanced and demanding use cases
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Agreed, the next wave of innovation for NFTs is coming and it is happening quickly! Unique is truly at the forefront of this!
Alex: Working hard on that
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Well @AlexanderMitrovich! That about sums up our time here at the OIG Main Stage! Are there any final words you would like to leave with our community?
Alex: NFTs are fun, come and join us having fun!
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Love it Alex! We encourage everyone to check out Unique! They are doing amazing things and OIG is excited to be here from the start!
Alex: Thank you, great to have you!
Unique:
Website: https://unique.network/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Unique_NFTchain
Telegram: https://t.me/Uniquechain
