Blog: February 2023

Feb 28, 2023: Getting ready to do another mint with some new animals. I am also working with The Giving Block to see if it might make sense to set up a direct ADA payment channel for charity as well as looking at some local charities. Reminding people that we do not accept donations directly and that it is best to make donations directly to the source. There are many reasons for this: tax implications, the more hops/the more transaction costs/less money gets to destination with every hop, removing possibility of mismanaged funds (send to wrong address/wallet/comingling/conversion).

Feb 25, 2023: I am in real estate class this weekend so probably not too much going on at the moment. We are positioning ourselves to make another donation and increase the charity giving % which has been way more than the minimum anyway.

Feb 24, 2023: Made a new logo and uploading where I can and where it makes sense. Updated some text on website in a few places as well. Discord is slowly growing at a pace of 1-2 people a day now. We are at a little over 300 followers on Twitter now as well.

Feb 22, 2023: Today we released one special Custom Shop NFT and released 8 more other NFTs to the Rookie Squad A collection! We are now over the 1/2 way mark to 99. Fixed some bugs on our Discord server and officially released to the public today! Things are rolling along. We need a special logo for Fire Animalz and I have an idea in my mind, if we can just execute it. 

Feb 20, 2023: Quick update here. We minted some more kittens today and Jared's first NFT creation, complete with his name in metadata. We are still doing QA in Discord server but things are looking clean and good. Inviting a few people in to get a preview before we do the full release. I did make an announcement on Twitter about it and people are taking notice.

Feb 18, 2023: Great progress on Discord server. It is just about ready for QA. 

Feb 17, 2023: Doing more stuff behind the scenes. Definitely need to get a few more minted but all in due time. We are starting to put more focus on building out Discord. Will have a couple admins and a couple mods for great coverage. Will be a lot of fun.

Feb 15, 2023: We have a functional site, Twitter is doing OK and production software is working well. We now need to circle the wagons and focus on Jira project management, work on time management and focus on next steps.

Feb 14, 2023: Happy Valentine's Day! Many great things have happened already and it isn't even 7am here! Firstly, we minted five new beautiful, "love" swans to the Rookie Squad A collection. Then we made a couple charitable donations, one being the second charitable contribution from Fire Animalz! Some more updates were done to the donation spreadsheet as well as main site. We are closing in on minting about 1/2 the total supply. Some enhancements were also made to help make production more efficient. Another big update is that we have increased donation rate from 10% to 12% and broadcasting this on our banner.

Feb 12, 2023: It was a nice family day today and yet, we were still able to mint some NFTs! We did some more centered around media events of today. That is proving to be a lot of fun and quite interesting. It may in a strange way, help to bring people in that are outside of Cardano and blockchain all together. I added a Vision/Mission/Values page as well. It is a work in progress but it seems to be off to a good start. Will be thinking on it more. Also added a picture of our son Jared at the computer. He also came up with some good NFT ideas today. 

Feb 11, 2023: Had a great time on the Cardano Over Coffee show yesterday. Met some new friends and got to talk about Fire project and Fire Animalz. We had almost sold out of all of our NFTs as well! What a surprise. Today, I also minted the first Custom Shop NFT under the same policy ID. This is a much more specific rendering with custom meta data and in this case, was a special tribute for a good friend. Just taking it easy over the weekend. We minted a small amount this morning (mostly kitties).

Feb 10, 2023: Fire Token and myself have a debut on Cardano Over Coffee this morning. We are both looking forward to it. We get to talk about our projects but more of an emphasis on Fire Token and the history. Really excited about this opportunity to spread some awareness. 50% of the current mint supply has been sold at this point for Fire Animalz. Things are moving in a good direction. I have also been looking at Arlington Fire Dept for volunteering. Looks like there are about 17 stations in Arlington alone! Today, I also added to the About Us page to further dox myself and what I have been up to.

Feb 8, 2023: Twitter has been having issues lately. Did not do anything on website today. Overall, it is in pretty good shape. I did put up a links page for donation sites. Trying to warn people to not donate money directly to a wallet, especially from people that literally have not background or motive with disaster assistance. If people want to help, they should assist in pointing people in the right direction. 

Feb 7, 2023: Yesterday we reached out to a few projects that assist with donations using ADA and we found one that will do it in an ad-hoc fashion. Looking into them currently. It might mean that we won't need to convert ADA to fiat on our end. Surprised that there are not more channels already. Just really trying to help out with the Turkey/Syria earthquake. We made some updates to site to help support and made a contribution. Also looked at doing a custom mint giveaway but so far, nobody has claimed it.

Feb 5, 2023: It is family day and will be going on an outing. Probably not too much happening today.

Feb 4, 2023: Today was an epic day! We made our first Fire Animalz charity donation to the Judge Fite Charitable Foundation. It allowed me the opportunity to sit down and put the process through the paces, making sure that everything is captured properly on this website, for upmost transparency. Pretty satisfied with the way it came out. Renamed the Transactions page to Donations and did some organizing. Getting some good interactions off of Twitter as well. Very happy with the way things are going! Next step might be to think about doing some more minting. Meow.

Feb 3, 2023: I am changing date formatting to something less confusing. Starting to play around with Discord server just to get more comfortable with it. Also setting up branded email. Looking at YouTube for Fire Animalz. Today I probably won't be able to do a whole lot on website.

Feb 2, 2023: It is amazing what can get done when you are iced in! Populated the Special Thanks page. Changed banner in a couple places just for fun. Did some overall formatting on site. Played around with blog pages again. Choosing different banner images for different pages and changed anchoring in some places. Restructured and reformatted About Us. Reworked the transactions spreadsheet and added an inventory tab. Also minted a special one-off groundhog to celebrate Groundhog day, with some interesting meta data. It has been a packed day. Today we also saw borrowing/lending go live for Liqwid. Yesterday was stablecoin day. So much happening in the crypto space! Also created a Jira board to start using SCRUM on project.

Feb 1, 2023: Organizing blog section today but that is about it. Cleaned up home page and added more graphics.