1 Year of Kalao — A Recap
What a year!
We never could have imagined this in our wildest dreams when embarking on this journey. And what a journey it has been!
We met many great artists and collectors
We grew together with the Avalanche community
We saw NFT volumes explode — and fall
We are still here. We will continue building
A big thank you and warm hugs to all the artists, builders and users that supported us and kept us on our toes. It’s awesome to see the growth the NFT community on Avalanche has achieved, and playing an active role in it.
Creating immersive NFT experiences
The mission we are working towards is a suite of products that allow users to experience NFTs in new ways. For this, we are building at the intersection of NFTs, VR and the metaverse (or how we frame it — social gaming) to drive immersive experiences.
Kalao Marketplace
- Collection offers
- Property offers
- Add-to-cart feature
- Advanced analytics
- Rarity Rankings
- Creator profiles
- English auctions
- & more
Kalao Go NFT Launchpad
Kalao Go is our free launchpad for artists to get their NFTs into the hands of the community. We support fixed price and free mints, as well as Dutch auctions. We help artists with smart contract development, marketing and advisory.
Our launchpad already hosted 100+ successful mints.
Kalao Vision
Kalao Vision allows you to create your own NFT gallery and share it with friends and the broader Avalanche community. You can also stroll through the virtual galleries of others and buy the showcased NFTs. Kalao Vision is available for desktop and VR headsets.
Kalao Citadel
The Citadel is Kalao’s Metaverse platform — a place for you to meet other players, chat via text and voice, explore NFT galleries and interact with your favorite Avalanche protocols. It’s the perfect location to have community (or private) events, showcase NFTs or to just socialize with others.
As explained before, the Citadel is ready but we decided to delay the launch because of market conditions. The Citadel is inherently a social experience that lives off of interactions between players. Without it, it can’t showcase its full value. BUT: we continued our work on additional features which we believe can help onboard a critical mass of users to make the Citadel a success. (We may drop some alpha later in this article 👀)
Our journey — building up the NFT ecosystem on Avalanche
Some of our highlights during Kalao’s first year. What are we missing? Let us know on Twitter!
March 2021
Idea gets born 💡
June 2021
Kalao is announced.
Fun fact: In the early days, we supported NFTs on the Avalanche X-Chain as we weren’t sure where most of the activity would take place.
September 2021
Fundraising successfully closed
November 8th, 2021
We are live! Kalao launches on Avalanche
December 2021
Kalao Go, our NFT launchpad, goes live
The Firat collection launches on Kalao Go. The first big collection, minting at 0.75 AVAX and going up to a floor price of 20 AVAX a couple of days later.
January 2022
KLO staking goes live.
Stakers also got the chance to participate in the fractionalized sale of Banksy’s famous ‘Love is in the air’ piece, a collaboration between us and Particle collection.
Kalao releases a sneak peek of the Citadel
Kalao reaches $10m in trading volume in January 2022 🎉
February 2022
KLO stakers vote on a proposal to revamp tokenmics.
Ryu and MadSkullz launch through Kalao Go
March 2022
Kalao attends the first Avalanche summit in Barcelona, meeting up with other builders, partners and users, as well as the Ava Labs team.
April 2022
New KLO tokenomics go live, supported by 87% of stakers.
May 2022
We reveal Kalia, our mascot
June 2022
Dutch auctions go live on Kalao Go
July 2022
Our series “Behind V2” gives insights into the development behind the big V2 upgrade of the Kalao marketplace, leading up to the launch of Kalao V2.
August 2022
Kalao V2 launches
September 2022
The Metamorph community, which is home to many artists on Avalanche, launches its first community collection on Kalao Go.
Kalao launches collab between TapTabKaboom and RaptOriginZ
October 2022
TapTapKaboom sells the last 10 Doodleverse pieces through a series of English auctions on Kalao. The final artwork sells for 100 AVAX.
Learnings
Giving is better than taking
Throughout the months, we met many awesome builders and projects. Showing empathy for their point of view and genuinely wanting to help others because you like them as a person and are curious about what they are building goes a long way. We are still early in the grand scheme of things, but the reputation someone builds in the early days among the early adopters echoes throughout the next waves of adoption.
Building a company is hard
Building a project is hard. Building a company is harder.
There’s a big difference between the two. While a project is something people do part-time for themselves, or even full-time, companies build products that require a full team behind it. A company needs an organizational structure, internal culture, a functioning business model, strategic direction and long-term defensibility.
Others don’t see what’s happening in the background. The product people use is the end result of everything that’s going on behind the scenes.
Communication and transparency are key here. Explain to users why a product release has to be delayed. What went wrong. What you are doing to prevent it from happening again.
Tip for builders: Summarize problem and solution in the first tweet to calm down the situation. Otherwise most people will only read about the problem.
Example: Our reaction to the PineappleAVAX mint
Example II: Delaying the launch of the Citadel
NFTs are a blue ocean
It may sound cheesy but we are still early. NFTs have seen their first (or first two depending on how you see it) wave(s) of adoption. But the market is still small. Looking at NFT prices can be irritating to evaluate the stage of adoption. User numbers paint a clearer picture: At its peak, Opensea had 50,000 daily traders (Source: Dappradar).
Strategically speaking, this means it’s better to cooperate with other players in the industry to grow the pie together instead of fighting for a small crumble. Therefore, the focus should be on your own strengths, your strategy and how to make it a reality, instead of looking too closely at competitors.
The road ahead
We are continuing to push new features to our marketplace.
Kalao Vision will soon receive a new big update which brought customization options, a seamless integration with our marketplace, and multiplayer.
Then there’s the Citadel. We are currently working on minigames to fill our metaverse with life. Keep your ears and eyes open for an announcement in Q1 2023.
