Resurrecting Rugged Rhinos In The Wild
How A Community Came Together To Save Rhinos From Poachers And Scam Artists
The community shaped around blockchain, crypto and NFTs have seen a fair share of scams and rugs over the four or five thousand year period since Bitcoin was invented way back in the ancient times of 2009. Some of the scams are easy to spot, some are elaborate and sophisticated, certain scam artists somehow manage to do it over and over again without changing their MO nor their Twitter names. Some rugs are almost comical while some scams are deeply sad and nasty. Some “scams” are not even scams, just bitter investors who saw the short end of the stick and attack people wildly online for no or almost no reason. They come in all shapes and forms.
There’s however one type of rug that many feel are just so over the line that it can not be tolerated. I’m talking about when projects portray themselves as charity projects that are created to do good and to spread love. When charity projects turn out to be a scam you know it’s performed by the lowest of the low and you ask yourself how in the world some people are thinking.
But, like the old saying goes - where responsibility is abandoned, opportunity lies. Opportunity for someone to step up and be a hero. We’ve seen it with the Untamed Elephants where Adam Gharhramani became the knight in shining armor who together with the community took a soft rugged charity project and turned it around.
With that as a backdrop we’d like to introduce the Rouge Rhinos: A revived charity project with the purpose of saving the Rhinoceros, a severely endangered species with only around 29,000 individuals left on the planet, down from over 500,000 in the year of 1900.
The project launched during the summer of 2021 under its previous name Raging Rhinos. It sold out and the community was vibing hard in the discord. Joy was everywhere and one member of the community was extra happy. Being a Rhino fan, Ryan Farroki had found the perfect NFT project. A great community surrounding a project with the purpose to save his favorite animal. What could go wrong?
Apparently a lot. Ryan was one of the most active community members and became a moderator in the Discord as well as a community manager on Twitter for the project, working for free - loving every minute. Loving it until he started to sense that something was off. Promises from the Dev team were broken, the response rate from the founders plunged, and more and more people started to suspect that maybe this was not all it was supposed to be.
Ryan got more deeply involved and even managed to get the Devs to give him admin rights to Discord and Twitter to try to help the situation. But as time went by it became more and more clear to him and the rest of the active members of the community that the Raging Rhinos in fact probably had become the Rugged Rhinos.
With the dev-team MIA Ryan and some other people in the community started talking about taking it over and reviving it. Unlike in the case of the Untamed Elephants they didn’t have any access to the contract as the devs weren’t responding. As a mod in the project he did however have control over the Twitter account. Not nothing.
As the FUD reached its peak while the price of the NFTs crashed, discussions about revival quickly escalated. A new team was taking shape. Being a graphic designer Ryan had a lot of experience in what somewhat surprisingly many NFT teams lacks - creative development. He knew what was needed and took the responsibility to lead the new project in the making.
The newly formed team was all put together though Discord and Twitter. None of them knew each other when the idea started to shape in Ryans head. Now they’re a stellar and dedicated team spread across the globe:
Ryan Farroki - Founder
CoinFuPanda - Solidity Dev
Cloroxo - Web Dev
Bandy - Artist
Zain - Wildlife Liaison
NFTweety - Wildlife Liaison
MaxTech - Asia Marketing
They immediately decided that the new project was to be shaped around the holders of the now Rugged Rhinos, by letting them mint the coming project for free. As they needed a new Discord server, new contract on Ethereum they also decided to create completely new art with more impact and a unique expression.
Everything started with a bang when Ryan realized that one of the members of the new team was actually going to Africa to visit Najin and Fatu - the last two Northern White Rhinos (both female) living under constant protection from poachers in Kenya's Ol Pejeta Conservancy. Sudan (the last remaining male) died on March 19th 2018, effectively rendering the entire subspecies extinct.
The planning was done, the first physical object had been designed, the first visit to Kenya to link up with one of the partner charity organizations was done. Now it was time to get to work.
Mint Goes Live Soon
The Rouge Rhinos public sale is taking place towards the middle end of March with the pre-sale for whitelisted wallets starting the day before.. Anyone with a Studio TBD Membership token is automatically whitelisted (snapshot was made on Wednesday the 16th of March).
10% of the proceeds from the sale goes directly to the Rhino charity the team is working with with - International Rhino Foundation.
The 5% royalty from secondary sales are split evenly between the team, the foundations and a community wallet.
Free mints up to 5 Rouge Rhinos is offered to anyone holding the previously Rugged (Raging) Rhinos 1 for 1.
So on Friday or Saturday it’s time to mint and save some Rhinos frens.
Studio TBD DAO will add Rogue Rhinos to our DAO Collection and we’re adding this project to our product development as well.
Stay tuned for Part 2 dropping tomorrow Friday the 19th of March.