Saving The Elephants - In Order To Save The Elephants: Part 2
From rugs to riches under new leadership.
This is part 2 of the story about the Untamed Elephants. You can find part 1 here.
While chaos, pandemonium and desperate cries for “devs to do something” was running wild in the Untamed Elephants discord, the rest of the NFT world was busy with a crazy bull run. Projects minted left and right and everything that wasn’t a blatant rug (and some that were) started their run towards the ever so elusive moon. There was a raving jpeg party going on in almost every discord. Parody projects shot up to several ETH per NFT while the Elephants were stuck in a dire tire fire situation.
The word about the threat facing the Untamed Elephants were discussed in several other discords with head shakes and many eyre rolling emojis. Hindsight is always 20-20 and people were competing in telling each other how fkn obvious it was that the project was a dud from the get go. Theories disguised as certainties about exactly what had happened spread like wildfire, and there was actually a time where if you sported an Untamed Elephant PFP in certain discords you were ridiculed and bullied. It’s not all fun, games and WAGMI in the Metaverse - that’s for sure.
In one of these discords where news about the unfortunate events happening in the digital Serengeti were discussed, word finally reached someone who had been through something similar. Instead of joining the packs of laughing hyenas to pick the bones, Adam Ghahramani felt intrigued by the situation. He could immediately emphasize with the community, having been a pretty substantial investor in an earlier project that turned out to be a scam with a subsequent rug pull. He knew two things with certainty - that this is a very unfortunate and horrific situation for the community and more importantly, that it might not be the end of the world. He saw potential.
Still an Anon at this point, he started communicating with the project holder and offered to take the project off his hands. Adam was no noob in online community stewardship. Since the dotcom boom he had lived his life in and around digital culture. He had been running several websites and communities since the 90s. One of them being theotaku.com, another was icv2.com. ICV2 has the brilliant line “For the people on the front lines of the geek culture business, staying ahead of the trends isn’t something that can be left to chance—it’s a basic necessity for being successful.” in the about section.
Untamed Adam was the right man in the right place at the right time. A master of the digital human infrastructure of the past, present and most likely the future.
His approach, experience and expertise seemed to actually resonate with the fed-up founder. Still refusing to put anything in escrow the founder did in the end accept to split the payment for the takeover in three parts, giving up a bit of control for each payment. With zero guarantees, Anon Adam decided to take a leap of faith. A third of the agreed on amount of ETH was transferred, then another third, and finally the total sum had gone one way, and to his credit, the founder held his word. The control of all aspects of the project were sent in the other direction.
The takeover was finally a done deal. And with it a new era was swiftly ushered in. Top priority: The great unbanning. Everyone out of the hundreds of Untamed owners that had been cast out of the community were unbanned and welcomed back into the discord. TheVikingDad was allowed to make a triumPhant return to become the new community manager. The community was happy, but a lot of damage had been done. Just like a sports franchise, it was time for a rebuild.
Rebuilds are long term commitments. What takes moments of irresponsibleness or fraudulent behavior to tear down, can take a long time to build back up. Adam Ghahramani knows this and he is in this for the long term. Having run online communities for decades already, he is just getting started here. And it’s quite an impressive start.
Immediately after his takeover he started to receive offers from other Anons. Offers that would have put Adam in a position to make several 100% on his investment in just a couple of days. Still an Anon, he could have just sold it again and disappeared. But that was never an option. Instead he doxxed himself and got to work.
After the great unbanning the roadmap was tweaked. Slot machines and other strange things were removed. Like a true brand steward he turned his attention to the basics of the project. A new, and more positive, logo was crowdsourced from the community. The website was redesigned and a new roadmap was unveiled.
Untamed Elephants became an official sponsor of NFT NYC where they did get a lot of positive attention. He also turned his attention back to the elephant part of the project. Untamed Matriarchs were planned and are designed, with a free mint coming soon for all Phant holders. Elephant herds are always led by a matriarch, something that the original founder of the project had not realized.
A first IRL meet-up is also planned for holders. Not on some luxury boat with EDM music and over priced Moet, but in Sri Lanka together with an elephant saving fund called Saving Ganesh. The meetup is going to be a volunteer elephant rescue mission and will happen in February. A good number of participants have already bought into the trip.
New art is coming too. Where all the collectibles will be updated through a metadata play that won’t cost the holders anything. You’ll just be able to “update metadata” on your Phant on OpenSea. The new art will fix a few oversights from the original version and also change the proportions so that your Phant will take up more space in the image.
This art update won’t change any of the rarity properties but there is a suggestion that if your Phant is smoking - you could switch that property to “eating pizza” instead. One member of the community did ask if it was possible to ask for your Phant to start smoking instead - the jury is still out on that one.
The new leader of the herd is in it for the long run, and for the all right reasons. He has invested more funds since the initial transfer sum during the last weeks to give the herd a flying start. Over the last month more new owners have piled into the Untamed Elephants than ever before in the project’s lifetime. The Phants have all the potential in the world to become a “rugs to riches” story.
The community is positive again and there are loads of activities that happen constantly. Happy hour drinks on Fridays, the organized Twitter Stampede on Sundays. All the tweaks to the art are being voted on by verified holders, the community is invited to come with ideas. All in all, the buzz is back, the bottom might very likely be in, and the herd is re-starting its long journey towards the moon.
This is not the first, nor will it be the last, project that turns out a rug pull. And it’s not the last time the community will step in and take it over. Just a few days ago there was another crypto project that turned out to be a rug where the devs disappeared with a big chunk of the cash and the market cap crashed from around 40 Million USD to almost zero.
This time it was the meme-coin $WGMI. Just like with the Phants, the community took over the project, rebooted it and have now started a new movement. Many NFT aficionados were invested in $WGMI and since the rug, many more have come into the project. The NFT community at large is strong and has a tendency to be able to come together to sort out chaotic situations. You just love to see it.
These community takeovers are a fascinating aspect that’s unique for the Metaverse. It’s reminiscent of getting an “Extra Life” in a video game. In our research for this article we have stumbled across a few more projects that are on the verge of takeovers and we wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes a trend in the space. As Studio TBD we have already received approaches to come in and support branding and strategy for projects, and we can definitely see a future where we can find great fits to step in and help. We are a creative collective after all, and we have a lot of love for the space.
We don’t know exactly where this monster movement of digital ownership, communities, DAOs, tokenization and WAGMI attitude will lead us. But it’s definitely a world where the investors and community members have more power and more responsibility than anything we’ve seen before in the realm of business and art.
The Untamed Elephants were saved from the brink of extinction, so that they can live to fight another day. A fight that is about something way bigger than the 7,500 Untamed Elephant collectibles living on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s a fight for the survival and revival of the real elephants that roam the earth.
The project Untamed Elephants has generated more than 55,000 USD in charity donations to rescuing elephants already, with more attention that number will climb significantly. This project is a founding member of the Studio TBD DAO Collection.