What’s next for finiliar?

It’s been almost a year since we started working on finiliar. During that time, we’ve grown an incredible community who’ve shown excitement and support at every stage of the process.

With oracle connectivity and dynamic animations launching next week, we want to thank you all by sharing some details about what the future holds.

Our initial promise was simple and ambitious: an NFT collection consisting of 10,000 adorable creatures whose emotions correspond to the ups and downs of different crypto coins.

finiliar are a radically new proposition in NFTs. Cute, fun, and useful, they’re digital companions that keep you up to date with the things you care about.

We've been hard at work since launch but have kept very quiet. Let's run through a few things that we've got in the pipeline:

Oracle connectivity and dynamic animations (short-term)

Next week, we’re connecting all 10,000 finiliar to price oracles for their underlying coins. From that moment on, finiliar will spring to life, their emotions nourished by the fluctuations of those coins within various durations.

For example, if you own a Daily Ethereum finiliar, the smart contract will constantly compare the price of ETH at that moment with the price of ETH one day ago, and your finiliar will jump for joy or bury its head in sadness depending on the difference.

Our website (short-term)

Shortly after the animation release, we’ll launch a new website with its own discovery experience where you can watch your finiliar emote in real time.

Since most marketplaces are designed with a one-size-fits-all format, and since finiliar is no normal NFT collection, we’ve built our own so that we can have more control over how the collection is displayed. Expect higher quality animations, live updates, aggregated listings via the Reservoir protocol, and more.

Note: We expect the OpenSea experience to be very good, but perhaps not perfect. While we’ll be doing our absolute best to keep token metadata up-to-date on Opensea, factors such as rate-limiting and file compression mean that we can only do so much.

Our app (medium-term)

In the coming two months, we plan to launch a v1 of our mobile app, giving all finiliar fans the ability to bring their favorite finis with them wherever they go. The app will be available to everyone, holder or not.

Every finiliar on the app will be animated and consistent with what you see on our website. You’ll also be able to wear them on your Apple Watch. More on this later 😉

Metaverse assets (long-term)

finiliar are fully-rigged 3D models, processed in the Unity game engine, so they’re innately equipped for integration into virtual environments.

The only thing that’s stopped us from releasing our models so far is that they’re currently too detailed to be compatible with most crypto-native virtual worlds. This means that we need to optimize the polygon counts of our models before releasing them.

We’ve had a lot of exciting conversations over the past year with many of the leading metaverse projects in the crypto space, and we’re really looking forward to seeing what people build when they get their hands on their 3D finiliar.

Physicals (long-term)

Since 2016, finiliar have lived on both digital devices and as physical sculptures. We’re currently in the early stages of prototyping new figurines, but in the meantime, physical finiliar will continue to appear in art galleries and other, unexpected places all around the world.

Our overarching goal with all of these developments is to turn these finiliar into companions that have a real presence and purpose in people’s lives. Most NFT collections are only ever experienced on social media, if they’re experienced at all; for the most part, they’re buried on the blockchain, stumbled upon every now and then in the depths of someone’s OpenSea account page. We don’t think that’s good enough.

Now, you might be thinking, this all sounds great, but can they really pull it off?

You’ll see next week with the launch of animations that we can and we will, but we thought it might be helpful to share some background on the team as well. So first, the four co-founders:

Our team

Ed Fornieles (artist & creative director) has been an internationally acclaimed contemporary artist for well over a decade. Represented by Carlos/Ishikawa gallery in London, he’s previously exhibited work at world-leading institutions such as the New Museum, the Serpentine Gallery, and the Palais de Tokyo. He’s also collaborated with some of the biggest fashion houses in existence, including Balenciaga and Gucci.

Jake Allen (engineering & product) was formerly Head of Product at Cameo as it grew 1,000x to become a billion dollar company. He’s a highly proficient Javascript and Solidity engineer and brings over a decade of start-up experience to the team.

Sam Spike (operations & strategy) was until recently the Creative Director of Fingerprints DAO, where he chaired the curation committee, as well as a co-founder of JPG, the NFT curation platform. Previously, he worked at various major art organizations, including Sotheby’s and The Met in New York.

Dollar Monopoly (community & growth) has been dabbling in crypto since the early days. He’s worked as the project lead and community manager for many NFTs projects, and most recently was the project lead at Fingerprints DAO, where he led the development of Arihz’s Avid Lines, Gremplin’s The Jims, and Aaron Penne’s Within/Without.

Working closely with our founders, and just as essential to the project’s success, is the rest of our team: Jakub, our Unity wizard; Art and Core, our Houdini magicians; Fafan and Haunt, our brilliant animators; Osama, our magnificent 3D artist; and, finally, the great Lomell, the modeler and artist who designed the original finiliar back in 2016 and who has been an absolutely critical contributor to the project ever since. And of course our wonderful community moderators: Migge, Peter, and yoon.

Many of these talented people have been working on finiliar for almost a year now. The detail and care that you see in the models and animations are all thanks to them. They’ve accomplished feats that many large studios said were impossible and created a world unlike anything seen in the space before. We’re so grateful for their work and can’t wait to share more about what we’re building together.