Elderly Ape Retirement Club — Q1 2022 Recap
It’s hard to believe it has been a little over three months since our project minted out! All the while, our team here at EARC has been hard at work, building with the intent to bring as much value to our holders as possible. As we prepare to release our 3D collection, we wanted to take a moment to reflect back on this past quarter and celebrate some of our achievements as a community.
For those of you who are just now hearing of us, Elderly Ape Retirement Club (EARC) is a 5,000 piece NFT collection of Elderly Apes. The collection was created with a few objectives in mind:
- To share with the web3 community unique, quality art with a healthy dose of humor
- To cultivate a fun, tight knit community, brought together by art that parodies the fact that the NFT space really ages you
- To give back (more on this objective below)
Our EARC collection minted out on Dec 23rd, 2021 during our public sale at a price of 0.055 ETH. Leading up to mint day, we hosted several bingo games with our resident bingo caller Herbert, where players had the chance to win Golden Bingo Cards — their ticket into the Ultimate Bingo Game that took place on mint day. Ultimate Bingo granted winners a total of 2.5 ETH in prizes and was a creative way for us to introduce pre-mint utility.
Not long after the collection sold out we released our updated roadmap (what we refer to as our retirement plan) to expand upon our objectives, and we’ve been hard at work on it ever since. We post weekly updates every Monday in our discord to keep our holders up to date, but in this article we will lay out all of the details and progress to date. Let’s jump in.
One of our most important objectives noted above was “to give back” by developing a strong relationship with an Alzheimer’s organization that we could support in an ongoing manner as a community. We were able to connect with the Alzheimer’s Association and establish relationships with key individuals from multiple departments at their organization.
Our first major collaboration with them is a donation matching campaign this month (April 2022) in which EARC will match donations up to $50,000, giving us the potential to raise $100,000 for the Alzheimer’s Association. We’re also working with them to establish future plans, including organizing a longest day campaign and helping their organization establish a deeper integration with web3.
We are excited to see how this relationship continues to develop over time and to see the impact we can have towards ending this tragic disease.
Charity Highlights:
- Developed relationship with the Alzheimer’s Association
- $50,000 donation matching campaign with potential to raise $100,000.
- Future plans for The Longest Day Campaign and deeper web3 integration
The partnerships portion of our roadmap is an on-going commitment to seek out strong partnerships in the web3 space and beyond to help further our brand and deepen our relationship with like-minded communities. Some notable partnerships to date include the Bored Breakfast Club (the world’s first web3 coffee subscription service, which will include EARC “Elder Decaf”) and The Red Ape Family (where two of our NFTs play the parents of the main character of their animated TV series). We also regularly secure allowlist spots for various projects for our holders and host regular twitter spaces with other communities, including our weekly space called Monday Market at 9pm EST on Mondays.
Partnership Highlights:
- EARC x Bored Breakfast Club Coffee Drop
- The Red Ape Family Animated TV Show
- Regular WL opportunities for Holders
- Regular Twitter Spaces with like-minded communities
Next up on the roadmap is our community economy, which allows holders to accumulate reward points (bingo balls) to redeem for items in our EARC shop. With the current iteration of our economy, holders can earn bingo balls inside of our discord through claimable daily rewards or by participating in contests and games.
Bingo balls can be redeemed for some really neat prizes including: NFT Airdrops, 1/1 Honorary NFTs by our project artists, and even physical rewards like Merch, Ledgers, Oculus, and so on. Here are some of the honoraries we’ve created to date:
We’ve loved watching our holders earn some amazing shop items this quarter and have big plans to expand our economy to include new rewards and even more ways to earn!
Economy (Rewards Points) Highlights:
- Holders earn reward points (bingo balls) in various ways
- Bingo Balls can be redeemed for Honorary NFTs, airdrops, and physical items
- Future plans include additional ways to earn and more items to redeem
In February we launched our own ‘always on’ merch shop, which offers community members a large variety of high quality merch options. Unlike many merch stores you’ve likely seen, where you’re limited to items with the NFT’s logo, the EARC merch shop also allows you to customize your merch with YOUR NFT on a variety of different products including coasters, mugs, t-shirts, and sweatshirts.
We believe merch should be a holder benefit, not another way for a project to profit, so we made the decision to keep prices as low as possible for our shop, holding very minimal margins. For any profits that do come in from the shop, 90% is reinvested back into the project with the other 10% going to our charitable initiatives.
We will continue to add new collections to our merch shop over the course of the year and already have some fun things in the works.
Merch Highlights:
- Affordable, high quality merch
- 90% of profits are reinvested into the project
- 10% of profits are set aside for charitable initiatives.
- Additional merch drops will happen throughout the year
We’ve always wanted to continue innovating through art and technology, and one of the way’s we’re doing that is through our EARC Closet. Holders can connect their wallet to our website, search their elder number and change out their NFT’s traits with custom traits our artist, Richard Hsu, has designed. Traits have ranged from seasonal traits for Valentines Day and St. Patrick’s Day, to traits that demonstrate our support for Ukraine.
Our closet technology is a first in the space, as it completely updates traits rather than just stickering over them. For example, if you have a croissant mouth but want to wear the face mask, our closet mechanism actually replaces the croissant trait with the mask trait as seen below.
From there our holders can download their new image to use as a profile or in our themed community twitter events.
Closet Highlights:
- Replaces traits rather than stickering over them
- Ability to change out the background
- First of it’s kind mechanism in the NFT space
- Traits are added to the closet regularly
Simply put, we LOVE the community that has assembled at EARC and have made it a priority to hold regular community events. Right now we are in the middle of our bedrock bingo series where we host several games of bingo per week. Winners receive a bedrock bingo card NFT airdrop that will give them a free mint in our upcoming 3D travels collection. Other community events have included movie night, poker, twitter spaces, and even an IRL meeting at NFT LA. Oh, and contests of course — which is where we’ve seen the community really shine! Our contests have ranged from GIF only conversations to elaborate scavenger hunts, and each time one theme persists — our holders BRING it. Take a peek below for some of the notable submissions from our last scavenger hunt:
- Nifty Ninja telling mom that he was retiring
- Tattoo submissions from Zalas and Stoned P
- Junglewass singing an EARClub tune as Xeroxmandela orders and Elderly Ape Cola
Events Highlights:
- Regular (weekly) community events
- Bedrock bingo where holders have the chance to win a Bedrock Bingo NFT, which grants them access to a free mint of our second collection
- IRL Meetups
- Contests and Giveaways
This brings us to the 7th item on our roadmap, which in January we just called “Time Machine”…but it is no secret now that this was a reference to our second NFT collection called Travelers. We have the great privilege of on-boarding studio concept artist Tully Summers into the NFT space — a quick scroll through his IMDB or portfolio will tell you all you need to know about the quality of art he will be able to deliver for this 3D collection. Why Time Machine, you may ask? Well, stick around, since we’ll be releasing our lore in the coming weeks and we guarantee you’ll be hooked! If you’ve been with us for a while and keeping up with the H-Logs, you’ve already had a sneak peek.
We’re also happy to share that current EARC holders of two or more EARC NFTs will have the advantage of minting at least 1 Travelers NFTs for free, as every 2 EARC you hold grants you 1 free Travelers mint. In addition, holders of our original Golden Bingo Cards from pre-mint will be able to mint 2 Travelers NFTs for free and holders of our Bedrock Bingo cards will be granted 1 free Travelers mint.
While we’re hard at work on delivering a quality second collection, it’s important to note that our priority has always been to continue to innovate on how we add value that benefits our original EARC holders while also considering future Travelers holders. As you may have noticed, we like to think outside of the box and can’t wait to share our plans with you as we finish out this current roadmap as well as some other exciting “off-roadmap” initiatives we’ve been working on in the background.
More alpha will be dropping soon — so be sure to stay tuned to our discord and twitter to stay in the loop.
-The EARC Team
