Jan 22, 2022
Infinity Labs: Building to outlive us
Happy 2022, explorer!
We’re so excited that you’re here. My name is Eve and I’m one of the Co-Founders here at Infinity Labs.
My Founding Story
I started Infinity Labs during the height of the pandemic, after being diagnosed with an extremely rare cancer. I won’t sugar coat it — it was brutal. Having to go through treatments alone, without any visitors allowed, was extremely difficult.
But out of that suffering came motivation and light. I wanted to escape my reality. And so, I decided to start building my own, by creating immersive art and stories. I wanted to build something beautiful that could outlive me, alongside my friends.
From the team: Why we’re named “Infinity Labs”
Infinity Labs is a small collective of engineers and artists. We named ourselves “Infinity Labs” because we want to build things that outlive us, inspired by Eve, who started it all from a very dark place. The soul is infinite, and we believe that the best projects will be the ones that don’t necessarily rely on specific teams or individuals, but carry on through the compounding (potentially infinite) contributions of its community members over time. We are infinite, we are Infinity Labs.
Infinity Labs Today
Looking at Infinity Labs today inspired from Eve’s initial spark, our team of talented engineers & artists came together and made what seemed impossible happen. Some highlights:
- We launched a record-breaking sold out collection of 8888 Scene NFTs across 8 different timelines.
- We became a top 10 collection of all time by total volume.
- Grew the infinity community to 40,000 people from around the world across platforms.
- Received 2500+ pieces of lore submitted by explorers around the world, effectively creating the first crowdsourced metaverse on web3 alongside the development of an entire wikipedia (in progress) and Reddit of the ever-expanding Solverse.
- Gave away over 1111 out of 8888 Solverse Scene NFTs to our community for free, and continue to give away scenes over time.
- Endless partnerships, collabs and giveaways for our community, including with Justin Kan’s (Founder of Twitch) Fractal, where our our lead engineer Chief helped them launch a record-breaking airdrop as an Official Partner (builders ❤ builders)!
- Built and launched the first ever animated merging on the chain, which has never been done before, a month ahead of schedule. 700+ Scenes have been discovered by the community and counting.
- Hand animated over 1111 scenes for the first stage of animation, along with thousands more in progress for the next stages of merging.
- Much more!
The Difficulties
Despite these wins, however, the journey has not been without its difficulties. Being the first to do things can be difficult, and we set a goal to build something that no one has ever done before. For example:
- Fair Launch Protocol and marketplace launch pads weren’t widely available at our time of mint, and we dealt with quite a few bots.
- Many tried to scam Infinity Community members and team members out of SOL with fake DMs, links and impersonations.
- Our record-breaking launch broke Solanart, which was the #1 marketplace at the time.
- We saw a vast majority of liquidity exit the Solana NFT market as a whole:
- We set an extremely ambitious timeline to launch merging by the end of the year and originally planned to use Metaplex’s upcoming fusion library for this, but realized it wouldn’t fit our use case so we needed to build everything from scratch.
- We hand animated 1111 scenes one by one, effectively making each scene 1/1 artwork and not generative. There were days where some of our artists would do nothing but animate scenes for 16 hours straight.
- We built a brand new merging protocol from scratch to fit our complex use case, and to try and get merging out earlier for our community, we needed to spread it across phases.
But of course, here we are! We did what we set out to do and continue building despite setbacks. We were the first to introduce game theory mechanics and deflationary merging on the chain to unlock enhanced, animated artwork. 2-Timeline merging went live on December 2nd. It was a brand new innovation, and we saw hundreds of animated scenes discovered by the community. We’ve had our difficulties, but we’re ready to move forward and keep building.
Moving Forward
Despite achieving all of this in a short amount of time, we also reflected on additional lessons that we want to take with us as we move forward. For example, we realized that the team likely spent a bit too much time in the weeds — building, creating and animating non-stop— that we could have communicated better. So we’ve re-grouped, taken feedback from the community and are excited to share with you our plans for the future, while capitalizing on our biggest strengths for what’s next.
We want to:
- Introduce more explorers into the community and bring back a similar spirit from when we first launched.
- Streamline our flow of information, especially for new members and holders to easily learn what our collection is all about and the many ways to get involved, from our discord to our updated roadmap and website.
As a team, we also reflected on our Greatest Strengths:
- Art, we have created beautiful pieces that inspire.
- World-building, we have the most community-generated content across Solana.
- Engineering, we have some of the most talented full-time engineers in the ecosystem who built brand new protocols and handled the largest mint of all time.
- Great partners, builders ❤ builders.
- Passionate community members, especially those who love writing, world-building and art.
So What’s Next?
We are so early in the NFT ecosystem, and we know that many games, metaverses, projects and experiments may come and go / rise and fall over time.
We will be investigating and experimenting with building high quality 3D assets inspired by ongoing community lore and Solverse scenes that people and projects can use and build utility off of. This could provide holders of Infinity Scenes added utility across the ecosystem, in addition to beautiful art.
Why Build 3D Assets based on the Solverse?
We’ve already seen the potential for Infinity Scenes to be integrated into metaverses and games, from Portals to Catch Kings, Botborgs, Enviro, Bitbrawl and many more. We believe that we can take this to the next level.
- Our idea is to experiment with bringing select components of the Solverse to life as a 3D asset over time in addition to animated scenes.
- “Picks and shovels” — As we mentioned, we are so early in the NFT ecosystem, and know that many games, metaverses and various projects may come and go / rise and fall over time. Hypothetically, 3D assets could potentially be integrated into these platforms.
- One of the biggest needs for games is more players and diverse communities, which via integrating infinity assets we can potentially help provide, in addition to helping you discover new experiences/communities/games in web3.
- With more assets comes more potential holders, and an influx of potential new community members to infinity.
Having beautiful art, great high quality assets and lore ready to use and build on top of, can create a cycle of building. This is our idea.
Community Spotlight: r/Solverse
We also wanted to give a big shoutout to all the great Solverse explorers (Reddit usernames Select_Class4028, legatlegionis, ZeSKK, NameWasKicks, interoperabilitie, icemancap and epicurusthesolverian) who came together as a collective to create r/solverse. From their team:
“r/Solverse is a Lore discussion forum for the Solverse, based on the Infinity Labs “Scenes from the Solverse” NFT collection on Solana: gallery.infinitylabsnft.com. For each of the 1,111 scenes, members of the Solverse community have imagined Landmarks, Creatures, Celestial Beings, Magical Items, and Events, many of which are listed here. Respond to posts with your own lore, suggestions, comments or anything else! Let’s create the Solverse together. 💫”
Read their amazing medium post here introducing the entire initiative.
We look forward to supporting and uplifting community endeavors such as this and many more, including incredible community tools like the Scene Sniper (search for timelines and scenes across marketplaces) and Scene Finder (search for a scene by keyword)!
Mergers and 3D Infinity Assets
The team is still hard at work hand-animating scenes for the next phase of merging (merge up to 4 timelines). As an update, we are approximately 70% complete where every single one of the 1111 scenes will have at least 3 animated components.
- 2-Timeline merging: it’s out! Anyone who owns a 2-timeline merged scene can be eligible to claim to a next infinity asset.
- 4-timeline merging: We originally aimed for an ambitious early 2022 release date for end of January, but don’t want to rush it. We will let everyone know once the animated artwork is 100% complete, and will only announce a launch date when it’s ready.
- Anyone who owns a 4-timeline merged scene can also be eligible to claim a next infinity asset.
The Journey to Building Timeless Art
Thank you explorer for being with us. We’re excited for all we’ll create together. We want to build stories and worlds that can outlive us.
We are Infinite, we are Infinity Labs.
