Cronos Ecosystem Spotlight: Mad Meerkat NFT

Read on to find out more about Mad Meerkat NFT, their experience on Cronos, and its upcoming product features roadmap.

In Q2 2022, we kicked off the Cronos Ecosystem Spotlight Series — a series of interview articles covering projects that are building on the Cronos Chain.

Today, we are excited to feature Mad Meerkat NFT, one of the earliest OG NFT projects that launched on Cronos in December 2021 who has now built out an ecosystem of gamified on-chain experiences.

Let’s dive right in!

Can you share more about Mad Meerkat NFT and the team behind the project?

For the Makers. Adventure. Daring. Or in short, #MAD4LIFE. This has always been our values from the day Mad Meerkat NFT was born.

Hey #crofam and CT - Sequence and Canvas here, founders of Mad Meerkat NFT. We’re a brand that has been around the NFT space for just over 2 years since inception. We started this project when Covid just hit everyone’s lives, and many were, by choice or circumstance, living their lives through the Internet.

As people who have been financially and emotionally invested in Crypto since years ago, we found NFTs to be the perfect medium to create a community and deliver experiences. Everyone knew Bitcoin, Ethereum, and BNB, but there were little visual cues that allowed people to bond together until NFTs became a hot topic. I (Canvas) quickly got on with a team, and roped my good brother Sequence in shortly after.

In short, we’re a team that believes we have a good understanding of the industry at its current stage, and we want to bring people along this journey through a suite of expansive products. These products can be built in-house or through partnerships and collaborations, and they always have a little bit of madness incorporated into them. Our courage to pursue all things madness has never changed since Day One, especially even more so now that we are ever more serious about building a brand around it.

You guys recently launched Raids, can you share more about this recent development?

Raids and chance passes staking are our first endeavors to pursue the delivery of a fun social experience that moves away from Defi. Traditionally, a lot of attention for the MM Ecosystem has always come from MMF, our Defi counterpart. This has been a double-edged sword, giving our NFT arm a lot of attention, but also a lot of that being solely investment-related. While this is unavoidable, we have never sought to build a project around speculative gain (or rather, that is the by-product that comes with the space). Thus, we wanted to dive into something madness we can call our own.

The Mad Merge has always been designed since its inception, where we knew there would be a case of influx of NFTs from various chains from our expansion plan. It was also the perfect conclusion to our Journey 1.0, and the result would be a core collection that holders can truly feel belonging to, made up of traits, memories, and even experiences that they can call their own. However, we realized that we wanted to give the active participants a little more fun, and something they could partake in. Welcome, raids.

Raids are a little game we designed where holders can use a chance pass, earned by staking a meerkat in a burrow in madmeerkat.io/burrow for a week, to try and obtain an airdrop pass to our next collection, or better yet, a limited edition trait held in a capsule. You could possibly lose the pass without getting anything, but if you do, it is something that is rare or limited edition. We hope to incorporate thrill and fun through a simple-to-understand mini-game.

And if you’re less active or not keen on raiding, you are all good. Just continue staking them and getting the chance passes. You’ll need them when potions drop to allow you to merge.

A final pointer, is that this is not to say that we are abandoning Defi, as we do believe that there are core products that work in different markets. But it is clearly important to expand on different features and provide a more holistic digital experience for all Mad Kats out there.

What interesting ideas will you guys be further exploring down the line?

We feel that the Raids experiment has been quite a success in its own right thus far, with over 300,000 raids at this time of writing. That’s 300k clicks of a button by the community to try their luck. That’s just mad.

Down the line, we will release the merge in different ways. We know people have been anticipating this for some time now, so we are always committed to looking for more ways to surprise our holders, either by learning what other projects are doing out there and/or introducing it in conjunction with collaboration partners that we have successfully established a partnership with. We want the merge to be an initiative that makes people excited every time, rather than a once-off feature that people quickly love, and then quickly forget. This will potentially include other “side quests” such as PvP to win one another’s traits, and the incorporation of Mad Sacks into the merge… hmm.

On another note as well, we are also looking to expand the MM Ecosystem in two other ways:

• Introducing new types of tech in new products. AI has been a big part of our research in recent months, but it is far more important to make sure we understand how it works, and how we can successfully apply it in the context of MMB. Should we find an angle that works, holders can expect to be exposed to this tech within the MM lore.

• Must it be a meerkat? This is a question that the team’s been asking ourselves lately. We have been very lucky to form our community and personality around the meerkats, but more so around our M.A.D values. This means that we should not confine ourselves based on what we currently have. What if something cuter is what works? (Think Pudgy Penguin). What if a more familiar art style appeals more to people? (Think Azuki and anime art). Or what if some type of human still works best? (Think Degods, punks). These are the important questions to ask ourselves. We believe it is always possible to bring in new IP as a sub-brand, and promote the meerkats to different tiers of benefits to these sub-brands, or even something with intrinsic value in the aspect of historic provenance.

Whatever the case is, one thing’s for sure - we learned a whole great deal the last cycle, we will work our asses off to pursue all things mad, and hopefully not commit the same mistakes as before. Can’t guarantee no new mistakes because that’s the risk with trying something new, but where’s the fun in it if we don’t, right?

How has your growth on Cronos been and why did you choose Cronos as the chain to launch Mad Meerkat NFT?

It has been no secret that our expansion to Cronos from Ethereum was one of the best moves we have ever made. In a time where adaptability was not necessarily valued in the NFT Space, we made the tough decision to halt our Ethereum mint, keep the prime collection to a size of 777, and expand on Cronos where we felt there was immense potential. Some of the reasons include:

• EVM Compatible

• Huge onboarding of retail investors through various initiatives

• Growing NFT Scene

• More reasons can be found in the thread here: https://twitter.com/mad_canvas/status/1691451342068555777

Our growth has been - literally - full of ups and downs, but there’s no denying that the #crofam gave us a lot of trust and opportunities from the beginning. It seemed just yesterday that we hopped into the few discords in Loaded Lions and Cronos Chimps (projects that we still highly respect) and asked for support, till today where we have a core group of people who remain steadfast in their belief. We have also been one of the early ones who created history - top in volume, breaking the chain, just to name a few. These are all shared experiences among everyone in the burrow and crofam, and inspire us to create more of these in time to come.

One thing we are very appreciative of is the recent support from Cronos Labs and fellow projects. This puts us in a good position moving forward, and we also try to pay it forward by giving them some form of support whenever we can.

For a user new to Mad Meerkat NFT, where can they learn more about your project and join your community?

The website should definitely be a starting point, but I would say it lacks an update on recent events. It’s where you go to stake your treehouses for burrows, and it’s where you get the landing page that leads to all other links, but it can still be relatively confusing. An update and overhaul is in the works.

The best ways are actually to hear from a Mad Kat in our discord, read threads by Canvas (https://twitter.com/mad_canvas) and the community members, and our medium. We are really big on community sharing because nothing beats having someone who shares the same passion as you to help you along the way. One thing we pride ourselves on is that nobody is too ‘big’ for others, so we also try to extend a reach to help everyone new personally, even with other things on our plate. We hope that this act of kindness spreads, and these onboarded Mad Kats echo our movements and spread the word.

Once again, we’re #MAD4LIFE. If you’ve read this, you’re a real one. Follow our account socials and our founders, and we might just be giving you a little something this period!