Can an NFT go beyond a piece of collectible art into a collaborative work? That’s what Matters Lab, the creator of the hugely popular decentralized publishing web3 platform, Matters.news, sought to find out with the experimental project, Traveloggers.
On November 2nd, Matters Lab launched the first and only NFT social media avatar artwork–Traveloggers–that will expand private ownership with collective creation by allowing each successive owner of the NFT to record a message. The preorder has sold out in 10 minutes and is now available for a limited time on OpenSea.
With every successive trade of the NFT, the new owner of the avatar not only owns the artwork, but also the collective messages left on the logbook from past owners. The message can be text, a multimedia webpage, or anything in between. Through the medium, successive owners can collaborate on a novel, a journalist report, a manifesto, or something to-be-defined. This turns the trading of avatars into a mutually beneficial collaboration between content creators and collectors.
When a new collector buys the avatar, they will be able to locate the previous owners’ logbook content. This means that the owner of a Travelogger avatar will not only own the right of the artwork but also the collective messages with every successful trade of the NFT, as well as leave a new message. Traveloggers can also be used on the owners’ social media profiles.
“We love the idea of developing NFTs because its application truly empowers creators by offering more autonomy for earnings and content rights, which has proven to be a wildly successful idea to grow Matters.news into a decentralized autonomous organization of 80,000 content creators,” says Guo Liu, co-founder and engineer behind Matters Lab. “What is also exciting is the unpredictability of a decentralized autonomous organization. We don’t know what our community will do with this unique form of collaboration, but it won’t be boring.”
Matters.news is by far the largest blockchain (IPFS) content publishing platform powered by Web3 technology and the first entry point built by Matters Lab. With 6 million page views from the Chinese-language world, Matters aims to empower content creators by offering a decentralized trading platform where they have complete control and autonomy over their earnings and ownership rights.
To thank Matters’ users for their support, we will airdrop 300 Traveloggers to Matters’ users who have connected their Ethereum wallets. The airdrop will take place in batches based on the activity level of Matters’ users who have connected their Ethereum wallets. Traveloggers will also be available for sale on OpenSea, with details at the end of the article.
The story behind Traveloggers, a Matterverse
Far away in the galaxy, a revolution led to a journey away from home. The Matterverse was born.
Traveloggers is the 1500 NFT avatars issued by Matters to mark the identity of a voyager to Matterverse. Owners of these avatars will have access to the most revolutionary experiments in Matterverse.
Matterverse was born from the co-creation of the Matters community. Since its founding in 2018, Matters has grown to more than 80,000 writers and is the largest creator community in the Web3 world.
In October 2021, over 100 members of the Matters community put their creative juices together by co-creating a serial origin story for Matterverse: what challenges did the galactic universe face? Why did Matterverse come into being? How can these people overcome their challenges and create a new paradigm? Where are we heading in the Matterverse? Read the full story on our Traveloggers website.
The first experiment that traveloggers can participate in is to record their journey on NFT and pass the logbook to the next traveloggers.
Each Travelogger avatar comes with a unique logbook, on which only the avatar’s owner can record their journey. The owner of Traveloggers can log in to the wallet on this page and complete their logbook. When your avatar is passed on to the next owner, the next owner can unlock your log content.
Introducing our NFT social media avatars
We have created six basic characters for voyagers with character designs based on six aspects: value orientation, philosophical proposition, creative temperament, way of thinking, creative habits, and personality. Each Travelogger is unique with its own creator attributes.
Traveloggers, Matterverse, and Web3
The voyage log is part of the identity of Traveloggers, as well as the key to the collective memory of the Traveloggers’ owners.
The inhabitants of Matterverse believe that Web3 is not only about the protection of digital assets and the rights of personal data, but also a revolution in the public governance of the Internet. Owners of Traveloggers have full rights to utilize Matters’ community, and can also enjoy:
- Full Copyrights and Logbook Co-creation: Owners of Traveloggers not only have all copyrights of the NFT avatar, but also the collective memory of the logbook co-creation.
- Exclusive Personal Page: An exclusive personal page that has a Traveloggers avatar, a logbook, and a collector’s medal.
- Story Co-creation, Airdrop Benefits: The Matterverse story has just started. The future direction, construction of the universe, character building, and different storylines will all be co-created by the owners. Owners of Traveloggers will have priority to participate in it, and will receive airdrop benefits in future NFT plans.
- Ticket to Ecosystem Co-building: Traveloggers is a ticket to Matterverse’s experimental governance in Web3. Owners of Traveloggers will have priority to receive opportunities to participate in public spaces, issue governance tokens, and participate in defining a new digital ownership.
Public sale on OpenSea
Traveloggers are NFT social media avatars generated based on ERC-271. A total of 1500 Traveloggers, each with unique attributes and characteristics, will be released on the Matters.news platform in the form of 300 pre-orders, 300 airdrops, a small amount reserved for the Matters team, and the rest will be available for sale on the OpenSea platform.
Pre-orders for Traveloggers will start from the 5th of November 12:00 noon and end on the 11th of November 12:00 noon (UTC+8:00). The price of each pre-order is 0.03 ETH and each pre-order is 300 in total.. Each account will be eligible to purchase up to five Traveloggers. You can purchase Traveloggers by connecting your Ethereum wallets to your accounts.
Traveloggers will also be available for sale on OpenSea starting from the 15th of November to the general public.
More experimental NFT projects
Other exciting NFT applications are in the pipeline, including NFT content that can be crowdfunded, tokenizing topic tags on Matters.news, and The Space Project, which applies blockchain to radical economic models like the Harberger Tax and Universal Basic Income (UBI) to solve the dilemma between public and private ownership.
The Harberger Tax is a clever system to optimize the distribution of public resources with the power of the market to increase the general welfare of society. Although widely discussed and admired, it has so far no real implementation with real users.
Our upcoming The Space Project will be the first large-scale experiment of the Harberger Tax. Combined with the idea of the Universal Basic Income, it transforms the community into a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) with minimal rules. Stay tuned on the development of this project by following us on Twitter, which will redefine “public” and “private” in Web3.
With Traveloggers and The Space, Matters Lab is creating entrance points into Matterverse, our Web3 universe, with the goal to usher in a new era of the Internet with a freer and fairer digital economy for everyday content creators and collectors.
To learn more, visit: https://traveloggers.matters.news/, join our Discord here, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter
