SPOt-light #011 [SoccaDoodsNFTs]

With the Euro Cup 2021 soccertournament raging on, we have a very special and especially appropriately themed NFT project to bring to your attention! Its a couple of German Soccerfans that made a surprising effort to put SoccaDoods together. I’ve bought one the second I got the chance, And as th epolicy expires, rarity is going up! lets hear what they have in store for us.

Hello [Doodz] Tell us a little bit about yourself, what are your areas of expertise? (Tech, finance, other), how did you learn about Cardano and what led you to adopt the role you currently play in the ecosystem?

What up Dood – We are a team of 4 spread around Germany who have teamed up to work on our 1st NFT project called the Doodz or to be more specific for this series the SoccaDoodz. 2 of us have been running the ZEITGEIST Pool since Nov 2020. We all work full time as Developers, Designer, Marketing and Project Manager. Cardano has become ever more important to us and we wanted to help improve the ecosystem and create added value for the Cardano Community with our Pool and
now with the launch of the Doodz platform.

So from getting to know Cardano, you now run a NFT website with a special twist. How has this come to be, can you explain the development of the initiative.

Two of us are invested into Cardano since 2017 when it was still just a whitepaper. We have been here from the beginning with all ups & downs. We soon discovered thanks to Alessandro from Spacebudz what is already possible even without smart contracts. Since we always wanted to be more involved in the Cardano Ecosystem, create & add value to this novel blockchain we saw this as an opportunity. We basically teamed up with all the skills needed for this adventure and came up with the
SoccaDoodz accompynied by the EURO 2021.

What is the current state of the project, how is it setup and are there any developments in the near future? How have you arranged the buying process? How is rarity ensured etc?

It’s running. 🙂 24/7 without any downtime and and just minor issues. Nevertheless the devlopement has not stopped. We are closely monitoring the system and continuously making improvements. Be it to improve stability or performance or the possibility to buy several doods at once. Currently we are working an a new feature, that we haven’t observed anywhere else yet. Stay tuned. 😉 The core of the minting engine is a Java Spring Boot application, connected to a PostgreSQL DB, as Doodz repository.

For all transaction and minting handling we do not use any external systems. We run Cardano nodes, Cardano wallets and GraphQL on our own servers. Which is really great, not having to have any external dependencies. We have connected the Cardano wallet API via Rest to monitor the transactions. Building and submitting transactions is done via the Cardano CLI using a small wrapper. To ensure that there is always only one token of a dood, we have two mechanisms: On the one hand, we check if the dood already exists on the blockchain. On the other hand, we mark it as mined in our Doodz repository (with TransactionID constraints, etc.). We would have liked to do without our own DB, but we want to deliver the doodz quickly without having to wait to see whether it has been stored on the chain – or, in the worst case, not.

Were there any problems, obstacles to overcome on the way, and if yes, how did you tackle them, what resources did you use?

Unlike a normal bank transfer, the sender address is unfortunately not (or rarely) in the wallet API. This is the reason why we use GraphQL in addition. Since a payment key has to be stored on the server, there must not be any interfaces to this server. To keep the website up to date (of course it runs on a separate server) we run a broker to inform about the current status of the sale. As a further security measure we try to keep the UTxO always at 0. If someone sends us too much ADA, he gets the difference back in addition to the dood. If we get too little, this also goes back (as far as possible). We have considered some other edge cases, but: Big praise to the community! Everyone behaved really reasonable and didn’t try to bring our servers out of sync. Thank you! 🙂

So, NFT’s are hot topic, especially since last March, when native tokens and that whole section was unlocked. How do you make sure that your project stands out in the midst of the NFT hype?

The market has changed a lot in a very short amount of time. I’ve had a Zoom call with Rick MaCracken (Digi Pool) and we both came to the conclusion that at the beginning people in the Cardano community craved for new technology and features they could try out. Spacebudz who deserved this success as a pioneer sold out within 3 days. Others followed and jumped on the hype train.
Our project is based on the EURO 2021 – it is a bit more niche but in general we have made sure we deliver top notch software that stands up to Cardano. We are about to publish our trading machine where Doodz owner can create their own trading cards. Some of our Legends and Heroes are very rare and this way they can give it away and keep the Original NFT. Many Doodz holders also collect entire teams or want to have 1 Doodz from every country. This way the Original Doodz holder can help others while also increasing the value for his Original Doodz.

Why Soccer? Is it something you felt was underrepresented in the NFT sphere or is there a more personal reason behind it?

We have all been playing soccer our entire lives, we have been big fans of our country and National Clubs. With the upcoming EURO 21 and our Designer having already done some of the Doodz in his spare time we decided to go with the SoccaDoodz. Everybody knows Soccer, everyone loves to support their country at big tournaments. Doing it with a Doodz in your pocket is actually even more fun, because you own the trading and copyrights to it. It is somewhat significant as this trading power has been in the hands of centralized companies such as Panini for the last 40 years. Now anyone can in a very decentralized way.
We tried to give NFT some meaning. There will always be big sports and soccer events for years to come. Any Doodz owner can say I got one of the 1st Original SoccaDoodz NFTs stored on the blockchain forever. Not only now with the Euro21 going on but also next year during the World Cup or many other events in years to come. No matter what – these are the 1st Sports & Soccer related NFTs on Cardano one will own.

The website shows some features involving tokens that can upgrade the SoccaDoods to Trading cards, how does that work.

In order to spend a Trading Card, you must prove ownership of the associated Doodz. To do this, you must either send it to us and we will send it back with the trading card. Or we look in the associated stake of the sender address. However, we then need a way to identify for which dood the trading card should be issued. For example via the dood number in Lovelace. Not final yet. We are trying to figure out what is the best way from a usability point of view. Not having to send dood would be great, but sending crooked amounts is not nice and error prone. If anyone has an idea, or prefers a way, feel free to let us know.

Are you experiencing an increased trading volume with the Europe cup, special requests or more people buying whole teams? And can you see how much they are being traded?

At the moment of writing this the Euro 2021 hasnt started yet but the Sales volume has decreased significantly from the 1st 3 days. We will try to sell more during the next 4 weeks because it will be the only chance for people to get one. Once our policy expires there is no way you can acquire any of these SoccaDoodz from this 1st edition. We will also launch our “Cardano Match of the Decade” in which we included many other NFT projects as player, fans, referees or camera men. It will just be a fun image of 11 vs 11 with all pre-alonzo nft projects included. We will have a 48 hour twitter live update where people can buy this really cool NFT image, print it and hang it onto their wall to always be reminded of this amazing Cardano 2021 CNFT community. It will be an amazing memento for anyone involved during this early cNFT community. All the Gains will be donated to people in need.

What is the most rare SoccaDood, and can people increase their chances of getting one? Why was this one selected?

All our Doodz uniforms, haircuts, eyes, mouth etc & specials are custom made but we also wanted to create some Unique Doodz based on some of the Best Players in the world – We custom made our Heroes (Charles etc.) & Legends (Maradona, Zidane etc.). All Doodz are unique but these Doodz are Ultra-Rare 🙂

Guys, thank you so much for the time you took out of the business of the Euro Cup and your NFT Projects. We wish “Die Mannschaft” the best of luck in their upcoming matches!