The Fat Cats NFT Project creating a community first membership Club
Creating NFT collections and immersive experiences for The Catalyst Gallery in the metaverse.
The founders of the ambitious Fat Cats project wish to remain anonymous for now. As one of the first collections built on the Flare Network, the genesis Fat Cats collection of 1000 NFTs was within the top 200 NFT projects all chains by volume traded. The second drop in the Fatcats project of 3000 NFTs titled the Fat Leopards sold out in 50 minutes on April 30. I sat with one of the founders to find out what this project is all about.
A number of the NFT projects that you stumble upon today are missing one key ingredient, the community of collectors that are actively seeking access to new NFT artists. The Fatcat founders are working with artists and collectors at the same time. They spotted a gap between the NFT space and the real-life art industry so they began connecting the important pieces of the equation to bring the FatCats collection to life. The collection is a series of four NFT drops which leads to tiered membership of a high-value Web3 club.
“I got in touch with two friends with complementary skill sets, we have someone who is just completing their PhD in artificial intelligence and we’ve got someone else with architectural backgrounds and design skills. And I personally have been in the startup industry for a while, so the kind of venture capitalist side. We got together and started to create this collection, which is essentially a series of four drops, leading to people having memberships of different tiered levels,” says the Anonymous Co-founder that prefers to go by the name of Catticus for now.
I am assured that all will be revealed in the not-so-distant future.
“The point of the memberships is to belong to a club and to help create the Catalyst, which is an online 3d Art Gallery, where we will be able to bridge the two worlds, which is what we’ve started working on. So the kind of the overall point of it is to bridge the high-end established art place to also provide a spotlight for up-and-coming artists, and to connect with the NFT space and web 3 and actually utilize that to expand the market.”
What are the four Fat Cats NFT drops?
The first drop is the original Fat cats NFT collection. The second was the Fat Leopards. The third is the Fat Tigers and the final in the series is the Fat Kittens, which I imagine will be very popular among those of us who watch cuddly kitten streams on a regular basis. The playful idea of The Fat Cats is a play on the idea of being a Fatcat and being quite successful. As the initial supporters have done very well from the Fatcat’s first drop “It’s a big group of fat cats in Web3, and having kind of gone against the system in a way so it’s sort of a joke on that but so all of these collections are part of the overall fat cats club,” explains Catticus.
The Fatcats team is also working on a longer-term vision to build the Catalyst Gallery, giving access to unique NFT collections and immersive experiences. I asked Catticus about their latest venture which is working to create an immersive tour of Malcolm X ancestral home. This is a national heritage site that has been used for many events in the past and for starting political movements. This is a charitable project that the founding team is bringing to life. With the right connections they were able to do a 3D scan of the home to create an exact replica and using Unreal engine they are creating a high definition virtual version of this home that people can walk through, see artifacts, personal items, and educational pieces.
“We’re working with the family so that you can discover things you might not have known about and actually interact with the family at times as well. We had the first interview with one of the family members last week or a few days ago. We’re trying to use Web3 in a way that connects people in a way that provides benefits to everyone.”
This project and others, it will bring people together from all over the world to have unique interactions in virtual environments. It is the first wider experience with a broad purpose that the Catalyst is doing.
Developing the Fatcats collection on the Flare Network, the team felt that they could build from the ground up with fewer barriers to entry. Catticus is quick to convey his excitement to be sitting on Flare with such a large, open market to tap into and a strong ecosystem that spawns growth at every turn.
Creating an online gallery in a virtual world
The idea of the Catalyst, the Fatcats long-term vision, is to create a 3d Gallery with a central unit and have branches of it to offer unique exhibitions using the advances of virtual economies. The Malcolm X immersive experience is the first branch that the team is working on. “The aim is to bring maximum utility using the power of web three, and to demonstrate what The Catalyst can do.”
The Fatcats club members will get a number of benefits in terms of what they’re able to experience such as whitelisting and access to exclusive airdrops and other features. “Something that people are getting quite excited about as well is that they get 10% of the profit profits that The Catalyst makes. So that all members get a little kickback for taking the risk and putting their trust in us.”
Educating and informing the community at all times is crucial
The founding team understand the NFT space from the inside and this allowed them to conjure up the idea that created the base community and validated the value that they can bring to their community. When determining the value of a piece of art Catticus says
“You may not be the most interesting person or you may not be the collector of that particular piece. However, the transition from that piece of art into this community due to the fact that the community is small relative to the real world and the niche area of interest makes it difficult to communicate the value of these pieces in the traditional art world, people are not the same. This is where we come in, we need to educate, we need to have an audience listening, and in return, the community needs to listen, understand, and then validate. The kickback for, that is to say, thank you for listening and understanding.”
When it comes to members say in the types of NFT collections created by The Fat Cats the founders are taking a leaders approach. The primary idea is not about creating a big gallery that is governed by the community. “This is about having the gallery leading the way, leading the space and curating it and ensuring that the quality is very high at all times and delivering something that is very hard to replicate below as well as as well as that we are going to absolutely have a sort of focus on up and coming artists.”
For up-and-coming collections, Fatcats will have a dedicated space and there will be much more community engagement when we’re looking for yet to create this interactive sort of buzz that can come from that.
Lisa Gibbons is the Editorial Director at Grit Daily.
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