The Bull Club Is Here To Stay | Stampede Update
This is a public update from the team at Matador Labs regarding the current status of The Bull Club, as well as some other things that are happening behind the scenes.
Hello Bulls, Fizzy here.
Before I begin I just want to say I hope everyone is doing well — The last year and a half has been a truly indescribable rollercoaster in the crypto industry. Everyone has had to overcome many unpredictable events that have caused all sorts of life-long damage, or as I like to look at it, lessons.
I am writing this blog not to come up with excuses as to where we are at now, but to just let the community know exactly why we are where we are right now, and to let you know that we are still here building — with the same optimistic vision and ideas that we originally had. It’s very easy to look back in hindsight and critique everything we have done (us included), but I’d like to mention that we truly believed that we were making the right decisions in the moment.
Further down in this article, there will be updates on where The Bull Club is at, plus a few touches on the BabyBulls and Matador Labs new project in the works, The FireBirds.
Here is a bit of perspective on what we have gone through in the last year and a half.
At the start of last year The Bull Club, formerly LunaBulls, was still striving on the original Terra chain, We had a full-time team of 6 with many contractors building for us. At that time it seemed the only way was up and out. We had so many big ideas (That we still have) that were unique to the NFT space that we were so determined to build and launch for the community and it seemed like it was going to be so easily achievable with the resources that we had and with how everything was going.
Then May 9th Happened.
Team
Starting off with the Team. It goes without saying that the May 9th collapse was a devastating day financially for everyone in the Terra community — This was no different for our team. Everyone on our team was near 100% in the Terra ecosystem meaning that our Team was hit super hard, two of the guys even having their life savings in Anchor.
Going forward was a huge mental challenge so there were a few weeks here and there were a couple of months where we had to take mental breaks and trips away to reset. Personally, I don’t think the team would still be here if we didn’t have those needed breaks. But we’re still here and still building.
The First Decision — Solana Bridge
This is where we as a team had to make the first BIG unexpected decision for the project — What chain do we migrate the Project to? We obviously decided on Solana, which at the time the community was 50:50 Polygon to Solana, and our team was too. It truly was an incredibly difficult call but we had to make one.
Funding Situation
The project lost ~85% of its funds. I think there is no way to sugarcoat this — And I believe most projects and people dealt with this same problem as nobody knew UST was going to go into a death spiral.
In saying this — Against all odds — the team saved enough funds to carry on, just.
Following this we made some financial decisions that have limited us even more with project decisions and development. We used the same developers that built the Tesseracts and interdimensional capabilities to build the bridge to Solana. This whole process cost us much more than it should have and looking back we should have shopped around for some more affordable developers. We have moved on from these developers now.
Solana — FTX Crash and what it changed for Solana
I like to think of the last year as the year of Murphy’s Law.
We opened our bridge to Solana on October 25th last year and just 2 weeks later, on November 11th the FTX collapse happened. This caused an uproar in our community as obviously everyone was divided with the bridge decision, as you can imagine we got all of the “Shoulda, woulda, coulda” comments from a large amount of people. Which is fine — as project builders you need to learn to expect criticism 24/7–365, even if some isn’t constructive.
This crash made us think further ahead so we started reaching out to some people building cool stuff to help us fast forward to the goal of going interchain. Also, in saying this we still believe Solana is a fantastic chain and believe that it is going to be a large part of our future.
Omni-X — Where we are now
If you have been following us for a while, you would know this has always been our goal since before the Terra crash and the subsequent decision to migrate to Solana. Initially, we had plans to build our own infrastructure to support the multichain capabilities. This would have required a tremendous amount of resources and, more importantly, time.
For that reason, we decided that we will be leveraging LayerZero’s infrastructure and Omni-X tech to execute the transition.
However, there has been one problem with this move. Unfortunately, the launch of LayerZero on Solana mainnet has been delayed a couple of times and resulted in an unwanted bottleneck in our development. The mint will open regardless and Solana will be temporarily “isolated” from the other chains until LayerZero and OmniX are fully deployed on mainnet. We have had the front end and everything built for months.
TLDR; Development was bottlenecked due to relying on a third-party mainnet launch delay.
Communication — The main problem
This is where I personally fucked up. Ever since the events of last year, going from being in a striving community and seeing the projects and people get royally screwed by the industry made me lose my motivation to stay on top of the social scene. Although my motivation to build cool shit on the blockchain never changed, my communication channels were down to a minimum.
To The Bull Club (LunaBulls) holders and community, I truly apologize for this as I know the effect it has had on the community. I should have identified this issue while it was happening and appointed someone to take over. I understand what we need to do going forward and will make sure that communications are not lacking.
The community should be the number 1 priority always — that is how projects strive. Whether it’s a PFP project or one with tones of Utility, it’s nothing without a striving community.
We will build this community back up and it’s going to be great.
The Bull Club 2.0
I like to look at The Bull Club's next stage as a new start. We are entering a completely new space in the industry being omni-chain. It will come with its challenges however we believe it will also open up so many more opportunities for the project going forward.
Where do we start?
The remint of course. We have ~5300 bulls that weren’t bridged and are itching for a new home. This includes many of the rare bulls and sought-after traits! (1/1s, Iced Out, and more!).
We truly believe the first step in rebuilding the community is with the mint. So we are about to launch our own built-in whitelist page called the “Bull List” on the bull.club site.
This system is something we have been brainstorming for a while. It involves a point system where you connect your wallet, X (formerly Twitter), and Discord accounts and you can earn points for various engagements such as chatting in Discord or commenting on specific tweets.
We believe this is the right approach to kickstarting the community again.
Once the Bull Club is whole again we can then proceed with all of our other plans whilst focusing on building the community around everything we launch.
The Bull Club Features
With the Bull Club 2.0, we plan to release the features we were building and intended to launch on Terra. These will eventually be modified and improved with a new points system to interact with.
These features are:
- Interchange (Already launched)
- Swap-A-Bull
- Toxify (Reimagined)
- Airdrops/Raffles/Giveaways
- ..and more 👀
Governance and DAO functionalities have been shelved for the time being until/if it makes sense to launch such features.
Reimagined Tesseracts
As you all are aware, the Tesseracts are not fully ready at the moment — Whilst bridging to Solana, the developers we were using bridged the Tesseract NFTs into a niche token standard which made them unlistable on marketplaces. So nobody could buy/sell/trade their Tesseracts through “official” channels. This was incredibly frustrating as once the NFTs were minted on Solana there was no way of switching it to the correct standard.
We also approached Magic Eden and other marketplaces to allow us to list the token type that the Tesseracts are but none would play ball with us. So we had to go to the drawing board.
The Tesseracts will be revamped so that we can go back to what you all are familiar with and return to their core proposition for the Bull Club ecosystem. More on this in the near future.
3D Bull Club
This is one of the more exciting things in the works. This was our plan from all along — build a 3D Bull Club where you can hang out with fellow bulls, interact with all of our smart contracts, and trade assets with each other.
Rather than explaining here is a demo video.
Cool right? Future plans would be to expand the Bull Club building and world as well as allow some other exclusive projects of ours and partners to enter the Bull Club world.
The new redesigned Club interface will be the hub of everything Bull Club.
Trading would be as simple as right-click > open trade with another bull in the Club and then a trade window would pop up. Then you and the other trader would offer whatever assets you like to the trade window. We would start with just Bull Club-related items like Bulls and Tesseracts, then we would slowly integrate more assets.
Community
This will be a much larger focus going forward. The community is the backbone of any project in this space.
We know there are lots of you out there who want to help and get involved. That is one thing that is great about this space. Going forward we want people to join the Bull Club team in many community roles to help.
The Stampede will be back and better than ever. With both the original and new members we will have community events within our online platforms and eventually within the planned 3D Bull Club.
We want to give back to the community — especially the ones that have stuck around since the beginning and all of the members who have stayed engaged. We will have a loyalty/reward system in place for all the loyal community members.
Baby Bulls
As you may or may not know, the Baby Bulls have found their new home on Polygon and the project has been sailing smoothly under the creative and operational direction of Coleman.
For a complete update about BabyBulls and what the team is building over there, you can head to the Medium https://medium.com/@babybulls
This is the best time to catch up with the Baby Bulls community because some very exciting stuff is being released very soon.
Secret Project 🔥
Whilst The Bull Club has been at a bottleneck, we have been working on a very cool project that we started brainstorming and building in September last year. While we want to reveal all the information about this project, we don’t want to ruin the surprise.
We can tell you the name, The Firebirds, and that it is a very innovative and unique idea that birthed from the demise of the Terra Classic chain. This project is getting very close to launch and All Bull Club members will not only be the first to know — they will be guaranteed to receive one of the NFTs and have a head start with the mechanics of it. This is no normal NFT project, it’s full of exciting, interactive, and fun mechanics.
Here is a sneak peek.
We cannot wait to show you.
Lastly, Thank you.
I cannot emphasize my gratitude enough. For being patient. For supporting this project. It’s been an incredibly overwhelming 2 years for many reasons, good and bad. But my favorite part about this whole project is that we have been building and connecting with all of you. I cannot wait to get this thing back in the right space.
The Communication will be back,
The Project will be back,
The Stampede will be back,
The Bull Club will be back.
