Welcome to 2021 and already, what a year it has been for the Terra Virtua community. The token is out, the first batch of non-curated artists is live (and selling) and we’re gunning for Openness in Q1, 2021!
All this and more to come and we’re all excited to get you all up to speed on what’s been going on, and what to expect this year!
The Ecosystem
1: The Terra Gallery
We’re so proud to announce the first batch of 11 non-curated independent artists live in the Terra Art Gallery. It took us a couple of months to finalize the artists and content, but we’re glad we did, as it means we’ve been able to connect our community to some of the most sought after artists and art pieces. Many of which, are already sold!
The next batch will be launching in the 1st week of February and this is the pattern we’ll be trying to maintain; a few new exciting artists every week. Look out for our regular live artist spotlights with new artists on our Discord, Twitch and you can catch up if you miss it on Youtube!
Go and check out the “available artworks” section of the Terra Virtua Art Gallery if you already haven’t. For those already using the Gallery, you’ll notice that a new section has been added to the gallery installer, named “Previews”.
The preview section highlights the art that is soon to land on the Terra Virtua Art marketplace, allowing users to preview upcoming art releases.
Choosing an Artist from the Gallery
Choose the type of Exhibition
2: The VR Fancave
Yeah, you read it right! The VR Fancave!
Since the beginning of our journey, we’ve been focused on getting the Terra Virtua ecosystem available on all platforms and VR was always a huge part of that, as it allows users to experience the Terraverse in a truly immersive way. However, since the adoption of VR had been limited we decided to hold this development feature back a little and focus on other streams.
Roll forward a few months (which is a lifetime in dev-land!) and with the wireless Oculus Quest selling over 3 million units and Vive Cosmos also looking promising, we decided it’s finally time for the VR Fancave to come back onto our development schedule! Fancave (Coming Soon)
With our developers hard at work for the last three months, we now have a functional prototype of the VR Fancave ready, going through QA and UI testing and improvements. We’re also actively looking at publishing partners.
You will have to wait a bit to get your hands on this amazing part of the ecosystem – our internal deadline is to hit Q2, 2021. Fingers crossed!
3: The Terradome
Terradome has really taken over as the “home” for all the big NFTs in the ecosystem, and there have been many updates (both back-end and front-end) to take this experience to the next level.
The biggest update we’ve been working on is the corner space enhancements for “bigger” NFTs. The requirement arose when we started gearing up for our biggest rollout of the year in Dec 2020, for Pacific Rim Uprising. The Terradome was big enough for the Jaegers but the monster Kaijus had tails and a different scope of movements. So, as a result, we’ve enhanced the space in two block corners around the stairs to cope up with this tail space requirement, and they look slick!
Pacific Rim Kaiju in the Terradome
If you haven’t bought a Kaiju yet, you should certainly consider getting one and placing it in your Terra Dome to see the magic!
4: The Fancave
Since the launch of the Customization Module in the Fancave, we’ve seen a huge increase in users spending time in their Fancave. Users are not only customizing their fancaves to match their stylistic taste, but they’re also showing off their updated rooms across social media. Due to popular demand, our RnD team is now gearing up for some advanced facilities to allow users to share their Fancave feeds directly to social media platforms, from within the environment. We’re still in the research phase for that, but you can expect this update anytime soon (We’re as eager as you for this!)
Customised Fancave
There is still an ongoing internal discussion on the issue of allowing users to upload their own mesh files to further personalise their Fancave so we’ll see where that takes us. We’d also love to hear your thoughts on this so drop us a line in Telegram or Discord to tell us what you think.
The System
This part of the writeup covers the systemwide important updates happening and scheduled for launch in next 5 months.
1: Terra Virtua Kolect — TVK
Terra Virtua successfully launched its token TVK on Dec 11th, 2020. The token is officially being traded at Bitmax and Uniswap — we are very happy with its performance!
With the token, comes the discussions of Native Staking (external already happening on BitMax), usability cases for the marketplace, Defi products to support the community and we’re hard at work delivering all of them within Q2, 2021.
2: Blockchain Restructuring
As you guys are already aware, we’re hard at work to bring openness to our main NFT contract, to allow users to take their Terra Virtua inventory to external marketplaces to trade/sell.
The challenge is to make this smooth while keeping the interaction of our FIAT user base seamless with the easiest system flow.
For this purpose, we’ve technically divided our Blockchain restructuring into 4 phases, which will gradually open up the system to external trade. Here are some details of the first two phases (for those of you who are interested in technical details like us!)
Phase 1 — Event-Based System — Existing Closed
The purpose of this is to add a script watching layer on our existing contract to be able to monitor “Transfer” events on blockchain for every single NFT minted by us. This would technically allow the system to maintain pastlogs, Transactions Data and status of every item in our DB in runtime.
We’re glad to announce, this part of the transition is already completed, deployed on our development servers undergoing heavy security and load testing, and will soon be opening up to a small group of Beta Testers on staging servers.
Phase 2 — Event-Based System — Existing Open
A step further from above, this will be an addition to Step 1, adding an additional logic layer for open transfers. The purpose is to add a FLAG for any/every kind of payment/transfer request or validation for any internal or external user at runtime.
This also includes maintenance of internal providence records of all sorts of transfers (internally or externally).
The major part of this phase is dependent on relaying our database an accurate and runtime record of all pending transactions (Buy/Sell/Exchange/Transfer/Auction) to/from/for our existing payment and NFT contracts, from both internal and external marketplaces, (and for all FIAT and ETH users simultaneously). This is a big piece of the puzzle and though with all the pieces available, it needs careful integrations and security testing before deployments. We’re hard at work to get this part though, with the help of our strategic partners and the plan is to push this out no later than Q1, 2021
On completion of Phase 1 and 2, every single NFT bought via the Terra Virtua ecosystem will be open to external trades (like on OpenSea) or open direct transfers.
3: Secure Customer Authentication — SCA
As per regulations of the EU (31st Dec, 2020), any eCommerce site accepting credit card payments is bound to provide its users with SCA; a secure method in which every payment call on your credit card is verified by your bank/service provider by their native authentication method.
This was a necessary part of payment deployment for our FIAT users, to ensure they have seamless and secure payment options to buy NFTs like any other ETH user on the system.
We’re happy to announce that from Dec 29th, 2020, the Terra Virtua FIAT payout system with Stripe is functional with SCA, and with 0 complaints or payment failures.
4: System Optimizations
This is all part of backend plumbing and is ongoing, but we’re sharing a few bits here for our more technical readers. 🙂
- Security: Security layers are added to our current blockchain payment systems highlighting factors like timestamps, transaction IDs, user signature methods, cart time reduction, auction/offer APIs validations and secure transfers.
- Load optimization: In Dec 2020, around the token launch event, we saw a huge load of live users landing on the system. We’re already prepared for it, and our systems are very stable and are equipped with auto-scaling serverless methods, yet there were two load glitches on the system, one halted the Trade API for 15 minutes and the other resulted in overloading of marketplace UI for 27 minutes.
None of these caused any breakage in regular user activities and all transactions were processed eventually, but processes did get slow. We take the matters of user experience very seriously so a bunch of system optimization deployments have been done (and are still rolling out), including but not limited to API segregations, inventory listings, filter save states and many more.
5: Staking and Prestige Program
We are working on a brand new approach to staking, where multiple pools will exist that will generate different types of rewards for different types of users. Someone may want to earn revenues, someone may want more TVK, someone may want to earn crazy new limited NFTs. We are developing something brand new which will allow prestige users to stake their TVK in multiple ways to get multiple types of benefits. Watch this space. This will be its own entire article soon.
Partnerships
In the last three months, we’ve joined hands with some of the best blockchain, DeFi, and financial companies to help improve our services and functional products for our users. Without going into much detail about what’s coming when (as dependent upon strategic timelines of business), here are some major technical partnerships.
- Arkane Network: Seamless sign-ins and easy-to-use wallets
- Phantasma: Multi-layer, timed, on-demand and nested NFTs
- Elrond: Adaptive State Sharding with PoS
- MEME: Stake farming for limited edition NFTs
- IGGalaxy: Social competitive gaming
- Utrust: Multiplayer payment solution
- Utopia Genesis: Tokenized music rights
We hope all these updates get you excited about the future, which we’re all building together!
Jawad and Azeemi
