ZENFTs – Building a Metagarden for the Metaverse

Jaskirat Singh

August 30, 2021

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ZENFTs – Building a Metagarden for the Metaverse

ZENFTs are 8888 unique, beautiful AR & VR bonsai NFTs on Ethereum, designed to soothe and calm. The project was made with the idea of creating an environment where the community would focus on calming thoughts & a giving mentality.

So What Essentially Is A Bonsai?

Well, as Wikipedia mentions – Bonsai (‘tray planting’), is a Japanese version of the original traditional Chinese art penjing or penzai. The Japanese “bonsai ” attempts to produce small trees that mimic the shape of real-life trees.

Bonsai plants are known to be great stress relievers, hence people often keep them in their offices and home, and similar to a lot of plants, they will make you patient and physically active, as it requires proper care, watering, fertilizing, and pruning. It gives one a chance to learn life’s most important lesson — work hard, be patient and it shall bear fruit for you.

Bonsais can be lifelong companions as when properly cared for a bonsai can live for decades. Now imagine owning a Bonsai living on ethereum, which can be put into your metaverse or as a display in your home/work station.

The Project – zenft.xyz

Bonsais were distributed on a flat distribution of 0.08? on June 1, 2021. All 8888 sold out in 58 minutes, 38 seconds. The gardeners set out to create a community emphasizing mental health, charity, and mindfulness.

The Gardeners(creators of the project) decided to introduce two more things into the project i.e.,

Flat Pricing: We have seen a lot of projects where the launch pricing is programmed with multiple complexities making it difficult for people, who get to know about the project late, to own a piece and as a consequence a lot of projects have lost the steam.

So, the Gardeners went in with flat pricing viz selling each bonsai for 0.08ETH

Commercial Rights: As the Eternal Caretaker(one of the creators) mentions on a BanklessHQ discussion, “We wanted bonsai holders to have commercial rights to their art because we want collaborative creativity to be a major possibility in our work. We are less concerned with owning the trees as we are in creating a movement of inspiration. We are seeing tons of art being made with the trees, and some people are even starting side businesses and Patreons creating art for others using the trees”

Caretaker(one of the three creators), an artist who has worked in design for video games and other NFT projects, like Crypto Kitties, carefully constructed the bonsai trees, adding flowers, birds, and other imagery that draws on Hokusai’s woodblock prints. “There was a lot of quality control making sure each of the 8,888 looked good, making sure certain attributes didn’t spawn together,” Caretaker said.

Talking about charity, the gardeners chose to donate 8% of all proceeds to La Via Campesina: The International Peasants’ Movement.

The holders of Bonsai get access to the gated community that offers some interesting perks like:

Access to exclusive areas in The Nemesis, The Sandbox, and Decentraland Metaverses
Giveaways and competitions only for bonsai holders
Full commercial rights to your bonsai
Access to Merch drops
Weekly claim of $WATER token
Early access or discounts to future drops

Partnerships & Collaborations

The gardeners partnered with Looking Glass, a Brooklyn based company that makes 3D holographic displays, to offer Bonsai holders a discount on their displays
In partnership with Nifted displays, they gave-away one Nifted wall screen display for NFTs
The project secured a spot in the Avatar Land shop plaza of Landvault, which is trying to be the backbone to metaverse
Zenft also partnered with TheNemesis to build their first metagarden
The project recently launched an AR viewer for Bonsai with Treasure Vault(here’s how Bonsai holders can view their tree in AR – link

ZENFT also introduced $WATER a token that currently does not have details on its utility but the project’s plan with the token is as follows:

Bonsais emit a flat amount of $WATER for 888 years
Each bonsai accrues roughly 21.6 $WATER/week
Total supply of $WATER is 88,888,888,888 (approximately ~88.888 billion), beyond which no more $WATER will be minted. This will take at least 8888 years.
0.8% of $WATER will be deposited to the community fund in a multisig

The Water Token Project: A Cryptocurrency Basic Income Proposal — Products of Design | SVA

They are also coming up with branded merchandise like t-shirts & hoodies.

Bonsai NFT Stats

Using an on-chain data analytics tool like Covalent(the best one IMO) for data analysis on the Bonsai(0xec9c519d49856fd2f8133a0741b4dbe002ce211b), here is some interesting data I found: