As you already know, the NFT is ready, and the team completed the designs back in February, but since Paul (Marketing) left us back in March due to some personal reasons, we then faced issues with the marketing of the project. This has led to some mismanagement in marketing the ICY PETE airdrop. We essentially want this to be an event where we get responses from the Solana community and start onboarding the SOL community. We admit that we failed to do that.
We have hired a new marketing person, Alfred John, a highly experienced professional in marketing. He holds a Mechanical Engineering degree and MBA in Marketing and comes with over ten years of marketing knowledge.
We previously faced issues where we had to support the marketing team on technical aspects of the project since blockchain marketing is very different than traditional Web 2 marketing. The strategies and audience are different in the Blockchain ecosystem, and we wanted to give Alfred an in-depth insight into the product and the overall landscape.
We do not want him to jump into a volcano of information on day #1. Alfred onboarded on April 1st, and we are still working with him to provide as much information as possible.
We can still move forward with the 10th April snapshot, but we as a team do not want to do that since it feels rushed, and we essentially want more people to know about the airdrop. We want to move the snapshot date to 20th April and open the platform on 25th.
This is where our team had a lot of discussions and debates. As a co-founder, I want the investors to get the feel of the platform on the launch day, and I want everyone to come and mint their NFTs. As you probably know, Solana will charge $1-$2 per mint, and you need to have SOL in your wallet to mint these NFTs. You won’t be paying for the NFT, but you will pay network fees. Now, if you are holding 1 or 2 RICH NFTs, you do not have to worry about this as it’s an ignorable amount, but we have members who are holding more than 200+ NFTs, and in fact, no other ICP project has such a high number of holdings/individual at the moment. It is an issue if you are minting 200 NFTs because you will end up paying $400 in-network fees (Depends on the value of SOL you mint)
The solution for this is to reimburse the network fees with MCAKE, so if you have spent $2 in Solana for minting, we will refund the same amount with MCAKE or even with a bonus amount of MCAKE.
The other method is to airdrop directly to your Solana wallet, and in this scenario, we will bear the entire cost of the airdropped, including the mint fee. We are happy to do it if the community wants to go this way. We want to take a vote on this and then move forward.
Our team is working hard on UI/UX. The major challenge here was to align the idea of a social platform and the marketplace. We are delighted with the new User Experience of the platform. The devs have completed the backend development, and most of our work is now focused on code quality. The front-end team has started working on the design, and we expect them to complete it within the timeline.