Introduction:

In recent years, the rise of cryptocurrency and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) has captured the attention of investors and collectors worldwide. However, along with the promise of lucrative returns and unique digital assets comes the risk of deception and fraud. As the popularity of these digital assets grows, it becomes increasingly important for individuals to educate themselves and take proactive measures to protect their investments. In this comprehensive guide, we will explore strategies to safeguard yourself from deception in the realm of cryptocurrency and NFTs.

Understanding the Risks:

Before delving into protective measures, it’s crucial to grasp the various risks associated with cryptocurrency and NFT investments. These risks include:

1. Scams and Frauds: The cryptocurrency space is rife with scams, including fake ICOs, Ponzi schemes, and phishing attempts. Similarly, NFT marketplaces can be vulnerable to counterfeit artwork and fraudulent sellers.
2. Market Volatility: Cryptocurrency markets are notoriously volatile, with prices subject to rapid fluctuations. This volatility can lead to significant financial losses if not managed effectively.
3. Security Breaches: Given their digital nature, cryptocurrencies and NFTs are susceptible to hacking and security breaches. Investors risk losing their assets if they fail to secure their digital wallets and accounts adequately.

Protective Measures:

To mitigate the risks associated with cryptocurrency and NFT investments, consider implementing the following protective measures:

1. Research Extensively: Before investing in any cryptocurrency or NFT, conduct thorough research to understand the project, its team, and its underlying technology. Look for red flags such as anonymous developers, plagiarized whitepapers, and unrealistic promises of returns.
2. Verify Authenticity: When purchasing NFTs, verify the authenticity of the artwork and the legitimacy of the seller. Look for artists with a credible reputation, and use reputable NFT marketplaces with built-in verification mechanisms.
3. Practice Secure Trading: Use reputable cryptocurrency exchanges and NFT marketplaces that prioritize security and user protection. Enable two-factor authentication (2FA) on all your accounts, and never share your private keys or passwords with anyone.
4. Diversify Your Portfolio: Spread your investments across multiple cryptocurrencies and NFTs to reduce the impact of market volatility. Diversification can help mitigate losses in case of a downturn in any particular asset.
5. Stay Informed: Keep yourself updated on the latest news and developments in the cryptocurrency and NFT space. Follow reputable sources, join online communities, and participate in forums to stay informed and learn from others’ experiences.
6. Be Skeptical: Exercise caution when encountering investment opportunities that seem too good to be true. Beware of high-pressure sales tactics, guaranteed returns, and promises of overnight wealth. Always trust your instincts and seek advice from financial professionals if uncertain.
7. Secure Your Assets: Protect your cryptocurrency holdings and NFTs by using hardware wallets or secure digital wallets with robust security features. Backup your wallet keys securely and regularly update your security protocols to stay ahead of potential threats.
8. Report Suspicious Activity: If you encounter suspicious activity or believe you have fallen victim to fraud, report it to the relevant authorities and seek legal assistance. By reporting scams and fraudulent schemes, you can help protect others from similar threats.

Conclusion:

As the popularity of cryptocurrency and NFTs continues to soar, the importance of protecting oneself from deception and fraud cannot be overstated. By understanding the risks, conducting thorough research, practicing secure trading, and staying informed, investors and collectors can safeguard their assets and minimize the likelihood of falling victim to scams. Remember, diligence and vigilance are key to navigating the ever-evolving landscape of cryptocurrency and NFT investments.

· The current Any collection is concluded, since all the sold eggs have had their hatch airdrops sent off (check your hidden folder). Unsold items have been burnt. Although its primary utility is now finished, if you buy an egg item on secondary currently, you will still be considered a VIP as a holder, with all the perks that entails.

· There will be a migration to a new smart contract away from the OpenSea ecosystem, which should lead to a second collection with a free mint in the future.

· Collectors of the current collection are VIPs. Currently, this means they get exclusive giveaways and discounts, and will be able to advertise or reserve a slot to build whatever they like in the Cryptovoxels community plot. Metaverse integration is planned after the migration, as is other utility, but not far along enough to announce yet.

· The first exhibit for the dynamic Cryptovoxels community park is now open! If your animal is included in an exhibit, check your unlockable content folder for the .vox files. They are in pieces so the different body parts can be animated separately, as you can see on the plot. You can put them together in your own plot if you have one, or import into Blender for your own 3D pieces. I can provide a combined model on request.

Hi all. I apologise for my past history of sporadic communication, particularly last year. I am usually quite reserved about my personal life, but I do need to give you all some explanation. I already didn’t have an amazing amount of free time — I have an existing job and could only work on projects outside of work hours. Without going into too much detail, a lot of health issues that had been unaddressed for some time couldn’t be ignored any more — both physical and mental health-related. For some time, I was in too much pain to work on the project when I did have the motivation, and the inability to work on your airdrops for long periods worsened the mental health concerns. Take care of yourself!

There are a number of reasons I failed to mention this at the time — pretty much all personal worries. I was ashamed that I didn’t have a consistent output, and hoped that it would be more temporary a setback than it was. I didn’t want it to be thought that I was making excuses. I know now that so many others were going through the same at the time and that these concerns were unfounded, but it simply wasn’t talked about then. I tend to be very hard on myself: I have issues with perfectionism and sitting on things like this article for ages, constantly editing and adding things. I’m working on being more confident and letting my work go out into the world as is, without feeling the need to iterate on it forever to get everything ‘just right’. And if I have something going on in my life, I can just say so and people are happy to get an update, which is better than not saying anything. This sounds simple, but I didn’t realise it at the time.

Because of these issues, along with the very long backlog of airdrops to be produced, people at the tail end of the queue were left waiting for a very long time with little explanation from me. While I was on my Twitter break, I received some treatment and am in general doing better, which is how I was able to finish up the rest of the airdrops in the first half of this year. However, some of the trouble is ongoing and I’m still working on it. Going forwards, I need to be more present and communicative, and I’ve been doing this in Discord, starting from while I was on my Twitter break earlier this year; but outside of Discord, not so much yet, and that’s something I need to improve. With social media being so busy, it’s easy to miss things happening — especially with all the bots clogging up notifications! But I have certainly not been as open and active as I could have been.

I completely understand and accept any loss of trust, annoyance, or any other issues caused by my lack of communication.

Enough about me though, let’s talk about the project.

Mistakes Were Made

If only I had a more simple idea. Things were a bit different back at the start of last year, with almost everyone only having access to the OpenSea shared contract. I thought I could try to do something more interesting than what other collectible pixel collections were doing, within the scope of the contract, by using this airdrop system — buy one item, get a second later. However, it didn’t scale well, and was complicated and confusing to explain. My original intention was to edit the item once I was ready to do the reveal, with the token slowly changing appearance over time, but the limitations of the contract were not really well-known at the time, and it wasn’t until I went to do the first one that I found out that it wasn’t possible to edit a token on the OpenSea contract that you created, but didn’t own any more. So the airdrop system was an emergency workaround, and the only way I thought I could get it to work.

Furthermore, because all of the animals were completely unique and from scratch, with a unique two-stage animation, it was very time-consuming to produce in my already limited time with work and health issues — in comparison to other hand-made collections which tend to run off of a base template and only have a basic idle animation. I assume that in the fast pace of social media, many may not even have noticed the extra animation!

As a result, I announced in Discord a little while ago that I was removing the unsold eggs and capping the collection once the last airdrop was delivered, which has already been done. The final number of items in the collection is 158, which is 79 egg-animal pairs. This includes 63 numbered animals, which I always called the ‘base set’, as well as the ‘Earlybird’ trilogy, and 13 ‘festive’ extras which were done as special events via giveaway or auction.

As for the remainder of the original 100 planned animals, I would like to collaborate with a smart contract writer to get a ‘second generation’ mint-your-own collection happening, with a free mint for existing collectors. The second gen collection will only have an idle animation, to allow for them to be created faster, rather than the existing collection’s idle into ‘flourish’ animation. This means that the original collection will still be the most prestigious and unique in both detail and supply!

These items will consist of the remaining ~40 of the planned animals that I would have done if I had a better contract and if sales/my health were better, as well as more that have been discovered/popularised in the time since I started the collection. It should have an instant reveal too, so no waiting.

Hopefully, this should remove what I think are the two main issues with the original collection: having two separate items with an initial buy-in, and the uncertain amount of wait before receiving the second item.

The egg items themselves will have no further utility by themselves.

But before this second generation collection appears, the existing animal items will be migrated to a new collection.

The egg items will remain on the current contract and are currently aesthetic only. However, if you happen to purchase an egg on secondary, you’ll still be honoured as a holder, with all the perks that comes with detailed below. That may change once the new collection comes around, since they will not be migrating over.

Why migrate?

· Decoupling from OpenSea ecosystem, providing more decentralisation and:

· Better visibility for non-OpenSea platforms, including LooksRare and x2y2. OpenSea contract items are currently not viewable on these platforms.

· Some of the items (around 3) have some metadata errors which I’d like to fix in the migration. I also want to rework the metadata tags.

· Required to be able to mint ‘gen 2’ collection for free

· Any metaverse integrations would be done in the migrated collection.

Some artists are doing this themselves manually, but I would like it to be done via contract so that the migration process can be done through a custom website — this way, collectors can burn their existing token and receive a migrated version in a single transaction, without having to organise anything with me and wait around for a response when I may be at work or asleep. A number of artists I know who have old collections on the OpenSea smart contract are currently stuck at the same crossroads, feeling unable to proceed without moving to a new smart contract, and with most of their old collectors vanished or inactive. I think this is the best way to get people to migrate over in their own time, without having to try to chase anyone up.

I always wanted this to be a very small collection, supply-wise. The second collection is the only planned major expansion. There maaaaay be some minor no-utility spinoffs for community events down the line, but there won’t be any ‘Any Babies’ or anything like that (unless a lot of people really want a baby variant of their animal?). I had an idea for fusions some time ago, which you might have heard me mention once in Discord, but I’ve decided to nix that.

Metaverse?

My end goal would be to be able to get everyone’s animals integrated into all of the pixel metaverses, such as Kiki City, Worldwide Webb, Turf, or pixels_online. This would be substantially more work than the original collection, but any sprites made would be usable across all of them, with only minor changes such as resizing to suit the scale of each metaverse. As mentioned, the collection will need to be migrated first, but I’ll start working on the sprites soon in between Cryptovoxels stuff (see below) and other art. I took a look at Worldwide Webb a couple months ago to see if it could work with the existing collection, but it doesn’t currently have support for OpenSea collections. :(

I would love to get integration with Sandbox too, since anyone can mint assets now, making actual game presence super easy, but I will be focussing on Cryptovoxels and pixels first. I’ll likely need to hire a proper voxel artist and animator for Sandbox integration.

If people are interested in the more realistic 3D metaverses too, I am open to it, provided that the art style doesn’t clash too much with the animal design.

Tokenomics?

There are no plans for tokenomics, staking, or anything of the sort for this collection.

Community Park

Any Community Park, a combination park/zoo/community space, is in Cryptovoxels and you can go there right now! This is a dynamic space that will change often to show off different animals in the collection in an open voxel space, similar to the Bronx Zoo plot, and with seasonal events. I’m learning MagicaVoxel to do this myself — I’m doing all of the modelling and design. This is what I’ve been up to all this month and last month. If I can really get the hang of it, there might be some cool wearables tied to seasonal events in the future! I plan to do some in October at the earliest, for a Halloween event.

VIPs (see below) can book the park for free, to host whatever event they like with build permissions (within Voxels terms of service, of course), promote their collection as a crossover or advertisement, and so on. This perk may be open to others at a later date for a small fee, if demand is high.

I currently have plans for a few exhibits, with each running for about a month. And if your animal is featured in an exhibit, I’ll add the .vox models into the unlockable content for you to use! (Those in the current exhibit have already been added to your unlockable folders!)

As for cross-promotion, VIPs are currently welcome to contact me about putting up an advertisement on the bulletin board with a link to their collection or profile. If you want to book the space for your own event sometime, let me know.

VIP Status

Holders, and any close friends & supporters who have supported the collection over the past year non-monetarily, will be given VIP status in Discord (those currently in the server have already received this role). This is a two-tiered system, with ‘Golden Egg’ being granted to holders (connect your wallet with CollabLand for this), and ‘Silver Supporter’ to non-holders.

Because the Discord is currently quite small and quiet, I won’t be differentiating too much between the two ranks at this time, but if many more new people join, it may become more important in the future. Some specific utility such as free mints for the gen 2 collection, and some future things I’m yet to announce, will be limited to holders only.

VIPs will have access to exclusive giveaways, discounts on my previous mints on ETH as well as a discounted presale on new mints, and will be able to host an event in Community Park. The first of these have already gone off in Discord as a trial run.

Not sure if you’re a VIP? To start with, since things have been quiet lately, I’m basically grandfathering in all you old friends. So if you’ve known me since early 2021, or we talk regularly, you’re a VIP as far as I’m concerned.

Discorderinos

I’m not making any additional Discord servers for any future projects; there will only ever be the one. I’m in way too many old project servers that have been abandoned, but the artist is still off making new things and haven’t mentioned anything in there (or, maybe they did on Twitter and I completely missed it). I may rebrand the server in future as a general spacefish stuff Discord (it’s basically that already).

Any upcoming collections?

As far as ETH is concerned, I have plenty of ideas for further, ambitious collections which require custom code, but these are on hold for now. I may launch some of these ideas if things work well with the smart contract and website development. VIPs will receive free or discounted mints when this occurs. I’m still doing miscellaneous things on Tezos occasionally and might launch some things on fxhash. And I need to get back into Punksterpieces, which has been on hold basically the entire time I was working on your Any hatches. That’ll be migrating to a new contract on Manifold.

In the meantime, I’ll be focussing on my existing collections, Cryptovoxels fun, and later, metaverse integration for Any (whew!).

Thanks everyone for your support! 👋🏼💕