When we talk about NFT’s, everybody gets excited but the truth is that most of these innovative marketplaces have their origins on the Ethereum Network.
But since the launch of Kalamint in March of 2021 you can create, sell and collect NFT’s on the Tezos Blockchain with the goal of representing art, freshness, and color in a decentralized way using FA2 token standard technology and the cheap, fast, and more environmentally friendly gas/ storage costs associated with Tezos transactions.
So far, they were able to facilitate more than 211,000 ꜩ in sales with over 5631 sales. This means they are having an average of 40 sales per day. Their biggest sale was an NFT that was sold for 3500 ꜩ.
Why Kalamint?
With the launch of Kalamint v1 in March of 2021 this project has three main objectives:
Create/Mint: Create NFTs native to Tezos leveraging the FA2 token standard
Sell: List your NFTs on the marketplace by specifying a price in XTZ
Collect: Buy listed NFTs and either add them to your collection or sell them later
Besides this, this innovative marketplace presents several advantages compared to the current projects:
Cost-Benefit: Since the smart-contract interactions on the Tezos Network are a fraction of the cost compared to marketplaces deployed on Ethereum and even Binance Smart Chain.
Community in Charge: In order to improve Kalamint NFT Marketplace, the team behind it wants the actual users of the protocol to be in charge of the decision-making process. Therefore, not only most of our feature releases are driven by community feedback as the team has in their roadmap the creation of a DAO in order to even further decentralize the decision-making process.
KALAM Rewards: When you participate in the marketplace by minting, selling, or buying NFT’s, you will be eligible to earn $KALAM tokens that are distributed on a weekly basis. Currently, these tokens can be used for liquidity mining/farming and in the future will be used as payment on the platform and for the governance of the protocol.
Artist Curation: In order to combat copyminting on the platform, Kalamit is in charge of validating the identity of the creators via the information provided during the creator’s application. If this procedure, all the artists on the platform are less keen to copy minting or commit any abuse.
NFT Registry: In order to value the creators work and prevent plagiarism or copyright infringement on the platform, they create an innovative mechanism called NFT Registry where a separate smart contract tracks all the assets minted on Kalamint and therefore anybody can easily verify if a particular NFT has already been minted on Kalamint.
FA2 token standard: This new Tezos feature called FA2 is a unified token contract interface that supports both a wide range of token types (e.g. fungible, non-fungible, non-transferable, etc.) as well as multi-asset contracts (e.g. ERC-1155). Therefore, FA2 aspires to offer a variety of ways for creators to express themselves without boundaries while maintaining a common interface standard for wallet integrators and external developers.
Tokenomics
The token will be a core part of the Kalamint Ecosystem and is already being utilized on the platform. The team has recently also introduced a burn mechanism.
~1% of the total supply has already been burnt.
Governance participation: the token holders will be the ones in charge of the decision-making of the platform by voting on the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) of the protocol.
Payments on the Kalamint platform: Buy and Sell NFT’s using the native token of the platform
Staking: You will be able to stake $KALAM Crunchy.network
Therefore it is important to make note that currently there isn’t a precise use case for the token of the platform besides staking it on Crunchy. Strong tokenomics mechanisms usually have the objective of creating the right incentives to align the interests of every participant on the platform while aiming for price stability or even price appreciation. If currently we can’t use the token for any purpose and continue to have inflation through the staking pools, this might constitute an issue.
Staking
In order to stake this token, you need to use Crunchy, a platform that provides DeFi services and solutions on Tezos to projects who want to launch their staking incentives. The team has allocated 1.000.000 in token rewards that will be distributed until 31st of October of 2021 for the stakers. This represents 10% of the total market cap value.
Check out our Tutorial on how to stake $KALAM
Currently they have 53537 ꜩ worth of KALAM staked with an APY of 120.37%. However, be fast to stake, as the reward multiplier will decrease over time and therefore we will see a substantial decrease in reward. By allocating more tokens in the first weeks for this staking incentive, they are creating a very good mechanism of incentivizing early adopters and stakers not only to accumulate more tokens, as to test out their product.
However, this is a very recent project that didn’t suffer any known audits yet. Therefore, there is a normal risk associated with the smart contracts interaction, not only from Kalamint but from Crunchy. Besides this, as more tokens enter the market, it is expected to have price depreciation and therefore the reduction of the current APY, unless there is an increase in adoption of the platform and a rise in token demand by its users.
On the other hand, you don’t have any lock-up periods or minimum amount to stake.
Governance
Currently, the project is completely in the hands of the developing team.
However, the team has made some efforts to create a project in which the community comes first and the main stakeholders are the collectors and artists. With these said, they incentivize everybody to give feedback and also battle test the contracts and interface in order for the developing team to make the necessary changes as listening to the users is important to create a platform that is relevant to them.
Nevertheless, they have planned to further increase the decentralization of the decision making
by developing a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) where the token holders can take control of the project although this feature has no planned release date or estimation.
Team
Public information about the developers is unknown but in some medium articles, it is claimed that the idea was backed by Draper Goren Holm Ventures, Amesten Capital, and Moonwhale Venture which is a validator of the team’s capabilities and product concept.
How was KALAM launched?
The first part of the Token distribution was to Seed and Private Investors where the team was able to raise $200,000 at $0.45 on the Seed and around $650.000 at $0.56 to Private Investors securing a total of $850.000 at a market cap of $5.4 Million. These tokens will be vested for 12 months.
To the Team, it was distributed 17,5% and to the Advisors 5%. Nevertheless, investors should take note that 17,50% of the Tokens distributed to the team might constitute a high value compared to other similar projects and that this value makes it likely to be a negative price pressure after the vesting period in 6 months after the listing.
Besides this, the team created more incentives to early adopters in the form of token distribution to users who mint, sell or buy NFT’s on the Marketplace. There will be an average emission of 33,333.33 $KALAM per week as rewards totaling 133,333.33 $KALAM every month over the next 3 years.
The rewards each week are going to be distributed like this:
10% (3333.332 KALAM) to minters irrespective of sales.
40% (13333.332 KALAM) to sellers proportional to the value of the sale.
50% (16666.665 KALAM) to buyers proportional to the value of the buy.
Last but not least, 3% to provide liquidity to the liquidity pools in order for users to buy and sell the token on the decentralized exchanges and another 10% for the Foundation, that will be locked for 2 years.
Competition
If we only have into consideration the Tezos Ecosystem, Hicetnunc is the project who takes the lead and has the biggest NFT Marketplace.
In May of 2021, Hicetnunc had more Daily Sales and more Daily Users than all major Ethereum NFT marketplaces combined according to @KMehrabi (Tezos Community Member) on Twitter. Although the values for each sale seem to be much lower and draw much fewer media attention.
For instance, the highest sale of Hicetnunc was around $15.000 and on Kalamint $11.000. But on OpenSea we have several examples where NFT’s were sold for millions of dollars.
Nevertheless, Kalamint proposes a better user experience compared to Hicetnunc, with a simple user interface and minting process to the creators. This fact can be easily perceived when you visit the website of both projects. If we also have into consideration the fact that Kalamint has a native token in their project, we can also expect that there will be synergies and additional user participation in the protocol compared to the competitors.
Summary & Conclusion
Kalamint is definitely a pioneer on the NFT Marketplace and currently is the second-largest NFT Marketplace on the Tezos Ecosystem.
Nevertheless, they are still behind the well-established players like Opensea ( with $74 Million in daily volume) or Rarible (with $400k in daily volume) that operate on the Ethereum Blockchain. So far, it seems to be where the heavy users are and want to be and this fact might constitute an adoption challenge for the team.
On the other hand, most of the team vision has not been implemented yet and therefore there is always a path to improve with all the risks associated with those development decisions.
You should also have into consideration that currently there aren’t enough token usage, burning mechanisms or other methods that can result in substantial price appreciation. In addition, the large number of tokens attributed to the team, early investors, and advisors constitute an imminent risk of price depreciation after the vesting periods. This also constitutes a risk for stakers since the amount of tokens in question is much higher than what they get in staking rewards.
Nevertheless, Kalamint is a very unique project, still in the early stage. If the team’s vision and ambition are big enough to accomplish the road map that has been proposed, the risks associated can definitely be well rewarded.