Our next interview is with a project that recently made the decision to leave the Solana blockchain and bring their NFTs to Cardano.
We asked the team behind Tamerz, why they decided to move to Cardano, what the project is about and who the team is.
If you want to see any more of our interviews, you can find them here.
Tell us a little about Tamerz, what type of project is it?
F – For us, the team at Tamerz, quality is paramount. We want to provide art, community, smart contracts, and website that satisfy even the largest critics of Blockchain and the NFT space. We are focused on the long term and plan to expand the project further after a successful launch. Much of our goals are still to be set, but in making decisions we are driven by the interest of our community and holders first.
Tell us about the decision to switch from Solana to Cardano?
F – Solana was our first choice, because of the hype around projects on MagicEden and the possibility of succeeding on the platform. As we are focused on providing a high-quality product, we were alarmed by the large number of rug pulls and the centralized nature of the Solana validators. What made us move to Cardano, was seeing Solana’s clock running 30 minutes late for multiple days in a row. Such bugs were not acceptable, as they can cause us to deliver a product that doesn’t stand up to the standards we have set for the project.
M – We have a number of areas we want to take this project into and the six or seven shutdowns that Solana has had, is simply unacceptable. Imagine the chain going down in the middle of the mint. I knew the Cardano community and I knew the chain has proven itself reliable and the best to build on.
How have you found Cardano so far?
M – Well in terms of the community I already knew a bit about it myself, as I own a couple of CNFTs, as I expected the welcome has been warm and generous, one person even saved an ADA handle for us before someone else picked it up. On the development side, there is so much research on Cardano and so much support it really helps the learning curve.
F – What surprised me is the very warm welcome, something we never saw on Solana. It was the tipping point, after which we made the decision to come to Cardano. The community is very bitcoin-like- well-educated people, who don’t fall for rug-pulls and don’t tolerate scams. For me, it seems like it’s still a small community where everybody knows everybody. Learning and discussing with other, much more experienced people has never been so easy on other chains and they are all prepared to take from their time to educate others. There is almost no ego involved and that’s something I value a lot.
J – I’ve heard about Cardano before but never actually made projects intended for this platform only Solana and ETH respectively, this is my first time doing projects on the Cardano blockchain but dang! People are so awesome here, it feels like I found a second home.
Where did the idea for the project come from?
J – The idea of this project simply came from the world of Pokemon and Digimon were masters and monsters fight against another pair, it’s the same concept however Tamerz focused more on the domestications of monsters, the monster get along with the Homies, doing something fun together and so on. Like every story there will always be a dark side, a twist and turns, a hero and a villain, win and defeat, blessed or cursed, power and weakness. It will be a very demanding project, fun and entertaining.
We planned and designed it to be a possible open world game or a novel or a comic based project. The good thing of the concept itself has endless possibilities.
What makes this project unique?
J – Well most of the projects out there were focused on a single character so we decided to do a dual character, one will be interchangeable characters traits with rarity and the other one will be purely rarity based characters, one will be common and there will be an epic, legendary and mythical type but very hard to find, so this will give the community a good descriptions of whether they got the rare or the common one.
M – As John says, in terms of the art your getting two characters in one. Some projects will give you a character as ‘drop 1’ and then promise a ‘drop 2’ 3 months later followed by utility. John has created an amazing style where you get both a Tamez and his Hommie.
What about the team behind the project?
M – I’m Matt, I am looking after the marketing side of the project and have the experience in Cardano, I have even previously released a couple of doodles myself for fun. On a personal shout-out I have a beautiful two year old daughter, who doesn’t have any tantrums at all…….
F – It has taken a bit of time for the team to come together. Before we took Matt on board, we were set to launch on Solana, but he convinced us to try Cardano. I have personally developed projects on a dozen chains, but never Cardano, so this was a huge step for me. Nevertheless, the support we have got from the Cardano community, within minutes of announcing the change, was enough to convince me that we’ve made the right choice.
J – John, before we do this project I was doing NFT projects before, I have made countless of projects for somebody already, meet quite few people on its way, I came up to the point that I realized, I wanna make my own project, so I decided to make a design (not the Tamerz back then) and tried to let people know my project until I stumble upon (F) which is looking for an artist to partner with, I said “i’m also on to my own project so let’s team up and get it done” we got in a meeting immediately and plan everything from scratch. Then we got Matt to be in this project since he was the dude with Cardano in his DNA and that really gave us a better path for this project.
What got the team interested in Blockchain and NFT’s?
F – Around 2014- 2015 I first saw Bitcoin and the infamous by that time Dark web markets. Until 2017 I was only lightly following the space. During the ICO Boom of 2017 I started learning more about the technology and a year later started my coding journey. As I’m pretty confident with Solidity and Rust, Cardano represents a big change and a challenge for me, since the whole technological paradigm is very different than the most prevalent EVM chains and Solana (think native tokens, sending transactions, etc) but I look at it as a great opportunity to learn. Although Cardano is very different from all those chains, it can very well become the leading chain of the future.
M – Cryptocurrency I got into in 2017-18 where I decided to buy at ATH and watch in despair as it dropped…I decided to write it off as a lesson learned but then a few years later discovered it was all on the rise again – I won’t lie…this naturally got me interested again, but last year I started taking it more seriously and learned the actual real world benefits of the blockchain. As for NFTs, last year I was browsing twitter and heard about some project called Cardano Bits releasing a project on google sheets and knew I had to join the mayhem.
What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far with this project?
M – On my side, I wouldn’t necessarily call it a challenge, but there are so many projects released daily – it’s surreal. We need to make sure we can get seen, and show the community that we are not an eth copy, but have a unique concept and actually want to develop benefits so holders never want to sell.
F- Definitely the Plutus Haskell development. Native tokens and Smart contracts are very different here than on the EVM chains, but I believe this to be a good thing and actually may very well be the right approach.
J- well the real challenge in this project is how to get everything right. Artistic side in this project is like a face of a person, the programming is the organs within the body, the marketing is the voice, without one, others surely won’t work, each one is very important. As the lead artist the challenge is surely making sure that the art is good, the concept is catchy, the overall design appealing And how to incorporate every stories and connect it with one another since we’re building a universe here, everything needs to be right.
How do you see the NFT space evolving over the next few months?
M – Metaverse, Metaverse, Metavarse…. That seems to be the trend at the moment and no coincidence that Facebook changed their company name to Meta.
F – The whole Blockchain space will most probably stagnate for a couple of months. I don’t see rising market caps at least in the near term. Like all “crashes” in the last years, a bull run will inevitably follow. We are definitely optimistic about the long-term future of NFTs and even more optimistic about the blockchain space as a whole. A lot of bright people are working on improving it.
Do you guys collect NFT’s? Favourite?
M – Yes I have a few including an old CardanoBit and an Onboard Furble, their art is beautiful. I also like some more smaller collections such as Julie Louise Cryptodelic Art.
F – Before meeting John, I have been developing non-art applications of NFTs- like tracking drug authenticity or ticketing, since I was never good at drawing. With John and Matt, we are entering a space full of scams and rug-pulls, so a big challenge will be to develop a beautiful, innovative project and convince people we are not in it to make a quick buck.
J – Actually I never collect any since I make them. I do have every piece of NFTs from other projects I made which are not to be disclosed here. But my favourite NFT is Tamerz, of course, since I put my best in this (so far), other than that none.
If you would like to learn more about Tamerz you can follow them on Twitter.