Silence in The Realm

It has been silent in The Realm. Some of you raised some concerns and questions. Rightfully so! One of the prime concerns is silence. What is the team doing, what have they been doing since mint and what does the future for Akuma Origins look like? Let’s dive into it a bit deeper today.

A decentralized dream

As many of you know, Akuma Origins is a registered company in Belgium. This means we have to abide by Belgian laws. Or rather, the lack thereof. Akuma Origins is the first big NFT project to exist in Belgium and we quickly noticed why that's the case. This results in difficulties finding financial institutions as partners, troubles with taxation, going through the legal pipeline multiple times, and other legal hiccups. Being a pioneer comes with a set of obstacles, hurdles, and mountains to climb.

This has been a very frustrating - both mentally and physically - and intense journey so far. We never expected such drawbacks and resistance in creating our company. This significantly slowed down the growth of Akuma Origins and our roadmap. While aiming to be a decentralized WEB3 brand, we are still confined to a centralized and highly regulated WEB2 space. Unfortunately, this is something that is out of our control.

However, we want to assure you that we are committed to ensuring the stability of our company even if that means relocating to a different country. We are sincerely looking into other options for more crypto-friendly environments.

Market downturn

While Akuma Origins’ goal is to be fully market independent, it is no secret that we were also affected by the market downturn. Resulting in a handful of WEB2 and WEB3 partnerships being canceled or put on hold. Furthermore, tasks taking longer to complete, reduced activity from people we were counting on, etc. This resulted in partners and team members getting frustrated. We have learned a lot during this period and will continue to work with the people who stayed and carry Akuma Origins within their hearts. Our team is highly motivated and determined to turn this around.

We acknowledge the concerns within our community and are committed to doing everything in our power to keep the trust. Akuma Origins is a project that Mateo and Gatekeeper care deeply about. It has been 8 months in the making and we still work around the clock to ensure our company is a healthy entity and we can fulfill the roadmap. We expected this to be a smoother process than we have experienced but are determined to continue pushing forward.

Recently, we have assembled a board of advisors consisting of experts in both WEB2 and WEB3 alike. People who have been in this space for a long time providing different insights from ours. One of our community’s biggest concern is communication. Something we admit needs work. Starting today, we will improve our communication towards the community with frequent development and progress updates, communicating hiccups and hurdles we are facing, and improve the team’s way of communicating overall on our platforms. We have created an internal roadmap and issued targets to achieve to improve our communication. We have onboarded a social media manager and are committed to up the amount of social media posts. Furthermore, we are actively looking for new partnerships in the WEB3 space and more conventional WEB2 fields. Lastly, hosting more community driven events to onboard new people to the Realm.

The Little Devils and the development cycle

Our small team never stopped creating and working on Akuma Origins since mint. Creating art, sketching, and designing traits takes time. So does developing smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps). Quickly after mint, we started playing with the idea of a companion drop. This is where The Little Devils were created and a bunch of idea’s started flowing on how we could integrate them into our ecosystem.

I’m excited to tell you that the design process of The Little Devils has been finished. All the traits are finalized and the 1/1’s are being created as we speak. The accompanied DApp and smart contract are in development and testing the DApp has given us some very interesting results. During this winter we have been expanding our (technical) knowledge.

We have been refining the Devils’ algorithm in conjunction with the traits as they grow. With the artwork nearing completion, we need to go through a few contaminations and the algorithm for the art engine will be complete. The Little Devils are looking like they are going to be as varied as the Yokai they are shouldering on!

Locking up The Little Devils

While the information on staking is far less plentiful when compared to creating a collection, we have had great success creating a proof-of-concept (POC) for locking up The Little Devils. Currently, a working DApp is complete with the all-important rewarding mechanism in place! However, it is important to note that there is a difference between a test-and-learn POC and a production-ready solution.

Community vote

Lastly, we would like to hear the voice of the community. We’d love to push the companion drop as soon as we possibly can. However, the staking and reward DApp is still in development. This is something we do not want to rush.

Our team cares deeply about Akuma Origins and The Little Devils, hence why we are very careful in creating the next steps. We are playing with the idea of releasing The Little Devils and introducing the staking DApp a little after the Devil drop. As stated before, we aim to be market independent and not take the market into consideration making decisions. However, we fully realize that this is not possible (yet) and we would be missing out on opportunity.

We would like to hear your opinion about releasing The Little Devils before the staking DApp goes live and releasing this collection in a market like this.