We’re excited to kick off our weekly newsletter series highlighting Solana projects, “Solana Spotlight”, with Space Bums! Solana Spotlights will be released every Friday at 8am PST - please DM us your suggestions on who to feature next. Make sure to subscribe to our substack for more content covering the Solana community.
Please note that Solana Spotlights are not an endorsement or financial advice of any kind, always DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH.
Space Bums was the first custom NFT giveaway Solanalysis partnered with back in August, a time where the Solana community was really starting to erupt. The project is looking to send a community member to space on a Virgin Galactic flight and continues to provide high quality community management as well as real world utility for its holders. Fruitmec and CryptoGilfoyle from the team provided their insights into how the project started, what they’re looking forward to in the future and their big picture vision for Space Bums and the Solana community.
Can you introduce yourselves and talk about how Space Bums started?
The Space Bums team is made up of mostly full time team members based out of Seattle, including a full time NFT artist. We have four founders, all with previous NFT project experience in ETH, who transitioned into the Solana community over the summer with the vision to incorporate civilian space travel, a hot button topic during this time. The team wanted to make sure that the project stood out in the Solana community and the way to accomplish this was a real life adventure, geared towards a commercial flight to outer space by a community member (perhaps while wearing Solana swag).
How’s the community and any recent news?
We had a very successful launch (not to outer space just yet!), selling out on mint day. Our community is already maturing, with members creating music, video games, memes and organizing in-person local meetups. We hold weekly town halls to stay organized as well as share project updates and catch up with other community members. As promised, we have opened up our applications for the civilian space flight, with interest forms available for anyone in the community. We’re looking to narrow down the search to ~20 of the most ambitious applicants who are genuine about representing Solana and our community in outer space. The community will vote on who will become the first Space Bum to get out there!
What does Space Bums have planned for its community for the near and long term?
For the near-term, we just released a sample of the Galaxy Mint Pass, a tradeable asset which will be airdropped to 85% of NFT holders to reward only the delisted diamond hands. Since this has been dropped, there has been a significant movement towards delisting in the community. The Galaxy Mint Pass will be redeemable for a future NFT, a rocket ship for the Space Bums to ride in.
As a big picture roadmap for the community, we have three goals: to become a blue chip Solana project and one of the best communities in the NFT space with a strong culture, send someone to f*cking space (we already have the funding and application forms out and conducting due diligence on the daily), and to provide non-stop value for the community. Our team has great pedigree with backgrounds in big tech and finance and we’re not willing to sacrifice quality for a quick buck. We genuinely believe that this community will be around for years to come and look forward to building that alongside our holders.
We’re currently in the process of beefing up our team, hiring more devs and artists and doubling in size over the past two weeks. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the team double again at the size we’re growing and to provide enough support for the community.
100% of our royalties are being used to floor sweep and return the sweeped Space Bums back to those that are delisted, continuously buying back and redistributing the inventory. As mentioned before, we want to continuously build the value stack for the community beyond space flight - we’re in the works of developing a tournament where Space Bums will be able to stake their rocket and compete to earn revenue and equip their ships with space junk to make them stronger. We’re not looking to create an overly complex gimmick or overpromise on a high-intensity video game, but a way for community members to enjoy the Space Bums experience while having the opportunity to play to earn. The game will require staking technology but we’re looking to complete development within the next two months. We truly believe that the “sky is the limit.”
Any thoughts on the Solana community and your favorite projects (besides Space Bums)?
It really hurts to see rug pulls sucking up SOL that could be invested into other cool projects - this isn’t unique to Solana and we’ve seen it happen in ETH too, it’s just an inevitable part of an immature market. We also want the community to note that if we’re able to fund space travel, they should be cognizant of how much money project teams have. Project teams should not get lazy with the funds that they have and actively look to providing value for their holders.
Price floor will go up as long as you maintain culture and community - it’s really important to reconfigure the community mindset to maintain this healthy growth. This is something we felt first hand in ETH, as their ecosystem is a bit more mature than ours, and we like to think of Solana right now as Ethereum in 2019.
As much as we like Space Bums, we’re also big fans of the Cavemen, CyberSamurai as well as the OGs of Solana that everyone respects as the blue chips.
We truly believe that by this time next year, Solana will hit $500 and a limited number of Blue Chip projects will shine and carry the community forward.
This has been awesome - any final thoughts?
We think that the future is multi-chain, but more importantly, we are passionate about extending Solana for people not in the community at the moment. We want to use the epic irl space flight event as a kickstarter for Crypto as a whole and make it super accessible to everyone who wants to partake. Solanalysis has done a great job as the “ultimate aggregator” and we look forward to continuing to build a better future for Solana and our Space Bums community members.
Be sure to check out Space Bums and Solanalysis if you’ve enjoyed the Solana Spotlight.
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So bullish on Space Bums! Devs are amazing and community is only growing stronger.
Great article, Space Bums LFG!