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This week’s guest on the Cardano NFT Column is a project banking on web3 creators to lead the digital renaissance and inspire the art of tomorrow: The Art Bank.
The previous guest was a project that will be launching a collection of 10k NFTs which represent crowdfunded partial ownership whiskey casks.
This initiative is a point of reference for NFTs on Cardano and every week or two we will invite someone to answer some questions and give us an update directly from within the Cardano community.
Considering that many of our readers are new to the crypto space, we will have a mix of simple and technical questions.
Cardano NFT project: The Art Bank
Hey, thanks for your time. Please introduce your team, where are you from, what are your backgrounds?
“The Art Bankers” are a group of intrepid entrepreneurs and art aficionados that have 50+ years of combined experience in the finance, marketing and design industries, having worked for prominent companies in the US, UK, Hong Kong and China — where our core team originally crossed paths some 15 years ago now.
Today, our global team is located in Singapore, Australia and South Africa with a big focus on hiring up local talent in Africa to support Cardano’s mission of growing their footprint on the continent.
What is The Art Bank? What are you bringing to the table for the Cardano Community? And tell us about your Rarity Dawg NFT collection.
The Art Bank is banking on web3 creators to lead the digital renaissance and inspire the art of tomorrow. Having invested in creators early on in the space, we have acquired a selection of digital artworks exploring a diverse range of artistic concepts with the aim of amassing the largest digital art collection in the world — a collection celebrating the finest creative minds on Cardano.
Part of collecting and promoting new art means working with creators to expose their creations to the masses. We support creators by assisting with the online marketing, distribution and sales of collections to our growing community, giving creators time to focus on what they do best – creating!
Rarity Dawg is a collection of 1541 NFTs that celebrates the greatest NFT projects on Cardano by incorporating the rarest traits found in these collections, with the ultimate goal of becoming the “rarest” collection in its own right that is backed up by real utility.
The Art Bank built several innovative tools including our NFT recycler that provided this utility for collectors before we even launched Rarity Dawg. This was in an effort for us to turn the traditional model on its head and reward collectors with tangible value by supporting our project early on and using NFTs to complement all the tools in our ecosystem.
Today, Rarity Dawg holders enjoy token rewards boosters by using our recycler, NFT auction discounts, additional rewards with our stake pool claimer and many other special perks lined up for NFT display tools that are being released this quarter.
Let’s talk about your NFT Recycling tool. What is it? What does it mean to recycle NFTs? And why would people do it?
Our NFT recycling tool is in essence a token rewards distribution mechanism that incentivizes collectors to get rid of their unwanted NFTs, clean up their Cardano wallets and ultimately become better collectors.
On the recycling side we help collectors recoup some of their initial investment for rugged projects or those that have fallen out of favor by rewarding them with Cardano native tokens from active projects that are leading the way in our collective ecosystem.
On the distribution side it’s all about partnering with creative token projects that want to help build and sustain a thriving community, secure targeted token distribution to real collectors that value our service and incentivize the creative economy on Cardano together.
Since August 2022, we’ve managed to rack up 16000+ recycles, a bunch of it from abandoned or fly by night projects, but with countless others still holding real value as the market continues to ebb and flow. Our recycling bins are burgeoning with every kind of NFT category you can think of, and Dawg holders get to cherry pick NFTs that have been haphazardly discarded.
Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, and the recycler gives our community the opportunity to take pride in what they hold, get compensated for investment mishaps and provide real utility to the collection experience.
What can you tell us about the future of The Art Bank? Where do you envision your project in the next few years?
Right now there are so many different initiatives that The Art Bank is working on for creators and collectors, both online and in the real world, and this next year is going to be positively massive. We’re incredibly excited about our Catalyst funded Cardano Center that is going to open in Cape Town in the next couple of months.
The Center is going to be a hub for creators in Africa that aims to onboard local artists into the ecosystem with training on how to launch and market their own collections on Cardano. Outside of this, we’ll be looking to use the space as a modern café to host Cardano events, trial crypto payments for real world goods and launch a digital gallery to invite the public to learn more about blockchain and digital art.
This will serve as the springboard for other art initiatives we are working on to promote Cardano to the masses by providing creators with the opportunity to recreate their digital art on physical murals in Cape Town and other parts of South Africa with the help of strategic partnerships locally.
The idea is to create an open-source business plan for the Center to roll out in multiple locations throughout Africa and the rest of the world over the next few years, collaborating with the best projects on Cardano to provide access to education and help creators generate new streams of income for their work.
Awesome. Any final words? Where can people learn more about The Art Bank?
The Art Bank is always looking to collaborate with established and up and coming creators as well as partner with creative NFT/token projects and stake pools to stimulate the creative economy on Cardano.
We also have our own stake pool (TAB) that we invite stakers to join to help further decentralize the blockchain and support creators on Cardano.
We welcome anyone that is interested in learning more to check us out on our website, follow us on Twitter and join our growing community on Discord.
Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the people interviewed are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation or IOG. Moreover, this content is for educational purposes, it doesn’t constitute financial advice.