Gender Unicorns CNFT card game

Gender Unicorns is the first CNFT game promoting gender diversity, equality, and acceptance via interactive gender alliances

Our core team is of 9 people, of different genders and expertise. You can find more about our team here: https://genderunicorns.com/#team. We have two designers, a backend developer, a director, a CFO, a CMO, a community manager, a performance manager, and a data entry assistant.

[IMPACT]

Main features:

• Proprietary NFT card battle game (aka Unicorn Battles) that utilizes smart contracts & NFT metadata

• Proprietary NFT lending platform (aka Unilend) where users can lend Unicorns and receive fees paid in $ADA

• Proprietary NFT battle matchmaking platform (aka Unibet) with interactive custom filters

• Proprietary in-game currency (aka Unicoins) used for community and alliance voting powers, reputation management, and rewards

• First NFT project to feature two collective purposes and rarity tables: Collection rarity and Battle rarity

• First gender-diverse NFT project, featuring 20 different genders with exclusive gender alliances and features

• Exclusive Gender Alliance’s Club chat rooms, contests, leaderboards and rewards

• Exclusive Unicorn smart-contract marketplace available on the official website

• Exclusive perks for NFT holders (physical Unicorns cards, meetups, events, charities etc)

• The largest number of custom hand-drawn designs than any other current CNFT project (more than 476)

• The largest combination of traits of any NFT project: only 10,001 NFTs minted from over 195 quintillion combinations (195,312,500,000,000,000,000)

Main audiences:

• Marginalized people of various gender identities who need support and understanding

• Casual gamers (mobile, browser games)

• Experienced strategy game gamers

• Advocates of human rights, social justice, and gender equality.

• NFT investors, NFT collectors, and crypto enthusiasts

Impact on each main audience

Marginalized people of various gender identities who need support and understanding: 

Under-represented minorities will find a home in Gender Unicorns' alliances and will be able to express themselves and meet others in fun, engaging, and rewarding ways. Token distribution will be available exclusively to active community members who help break gender biases and educate others for their gender or other genders. We want to create a safe space for love and appreciation in our community where everyone is celebrated.

Casual gamers (mobile, browser games):

Casual gamers will find an easy-to-learn (though hard to master) gaming experience which requires little time commitment but offers high challenges in an intuitive environment directly on the web browser. Each game will be quick but involve some smart strategies, yet the match-making system will match players with similar experiences and skills. Most importantly, the game will teach the value of cooperation and appreciation of all people to an audience that is rarely exposed to positive social causes in their gaming activities.

Experienced gamers of strategy games:

Provide a game with a high strategic value that requires high skills and experience to master. High-ranking players will be granted leadership roles in their alliances and exclusive rewards. Such high roles are not permanent and rely on users' votes, which incentivize expert gamers to keep a humble and helpful attitude. Experienced players will be able to keep challenging themselves using the adaptive match-maker algorithm, earn more reputation rewards, and inspire others in their alliance not only to perform well in their battle duties but most importantly to maintain a spirit of respect and collaboration.

Advocates of human rights, social justice, and gender equality:

Gender Unicorns aims to be the first mainstream NFT project to normalize the diversity of genders and identities and promote a vibrant yet respectful community that will unite all people. The project will break the stereotypes and make a bold statement that social causes can also be entertaining and engaging to everyone. The gameplay and alliance mechanics aim to unite all NFT holders to play together and collaborate to achieve common goals and rewards and learn to interact with others in meaningful, respectful ways. We aspire to have many social justice advocates join our discussion forums and share their thoughts, ideas, and experiences and help our audiences understand the importance of social justice in modern society.

NFT investors, NFT collectors, and crypto enthusiasts:

The project will provide a vast number of hand-drawn designs (more than 470), resulting in more than 195 quintillion possible combinations while utilizing a unique, easy way to view rarity statistics. Additionally, there will be many rewards given to long-term holders, including free entry to the Unicorn Battles games, participation in the Unicorn alliances, redeeming physical unicorns cards, meetups, events, and charity initiatives. Those efforts will result in a collection with long-term investment value to its loyal supporters. Aside from monetary benefits, the Gender Unicorns aim to bring technological advancements to the fields of blockchain gaming and make it easy, intuitive, and accessible to the masses.

The most important mechanism to achieve our ambitious goals and KPIs is our diverse, experienced, and dedicated team. Our team is working under strictly defined tasks and responsibilities for each member. Daily and weekly meetings are taking place since August 2021, when the project began, and continue more rigorously as we come closer to the launch date.

The head of all operations and the final decision maker is the CEO George Chrysochou. His main task is to assign, moderate, and coordinate the entire team to complete daily, weekly, and monthly tasks and ensure the project meets its goals and objectives.

Each team member must invest a minimum of 8 hours of work during weekdays (with 9+ hours being optimal) and 5 hours of work during weekends. A Google spreadsheet is available for each team member where each completed task and the workouts should be recorded daily.

The responsibilities for each team member are defined in the private tasks lists found in the project’s proprietary drive data. The COO is responsible for overseeing the minimum required daily tasks/hours and reporting to the CEO. The CEO is responsible for supervising the COO’s own daily tasks/hours.

All code development tasks are managed by the CTO, Giorgos Georgiou, and a team of part-time developers and contractors.

The main design team comprises Olko Vladi, the Lead Character Designer, and Katerina Kuparadze, the Lead Graphic Designer. Evros Neofytides, the Lead Web Designer, provides additional design assistance on demand.

The marketing team comprises all main team members, which are assigned daily marketing responsibilities and their regular duties. All marketing activities are monitored via productivity sheets and custom CRM implementations.

This level of organizational structure ensures that our team will stay on track with our weekly tasks, milestones, deadlines, and processes. Every week, the CEO monitors and adjusts the weekly tasks with the assistance of all other team members.

Marketing Strategy

The core of our marketing strategy is based on five pillars:

1. Influencer marketing
2. Email outreach
3. PPC advertising
4. Contests
5. Community building

1. Influencer marketing:

Influencer marketing includes paid and free mentions from NFT, CNFT, and cryptocurrency space authorities.

Our marketing team has carefully created a detailed list of more than 2,000 NFT & Crypto influencers primarily active on Twitter and Youtube, and to a lesser extent on Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin.

We have been gathering promotional cost info for each influencer by reaching out to them over several months.

We then analyze their engagement metrics -including formulas for engagement rates, bot or inactive accounts percentage, activity rate, effective audience, reputation scores - and allocate our influencer budget accordingly.

2. Email outreach:

Email outreach efforts are categorized into two main phases:

The first phase is creating extensive, manually researched email lists of the thousands of websites related to the following niches: NFT, crypto, news media, social causes, social justice, NGO, gender equality, gender rights, etc.

The second phase is manually outreaching to those websites utilizing every email account and team member. We simply present our project and its social impact potential and share our media packages in our outreach attempts. We are also open to participating in interviews, events, contests, and partnership deals if the parties' goals and code of conduct align.

3. PPC advertising

Our team consists of two directors of two Google Partners agencies, who collectively have more than 20 years of experience in Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.

The PPC campaign will focus primarily on branding campaigns via Google Display Advertising, Google Search Advertising, Facebook Advertising, and to a smaller scale by using Twitter, Linkedin, Reddit, and Instagram.

In such campaigns, the main aspects of the project will be communicated with static and animated banners, shown to a carefully targeted user demographic of NFT and crypto enthusiasts.

4. Contests

Gender Unicorns will run regular contests to expand our user base and reward our most active and valuable members. Such contests will require meaningful community contributions, such as being an active participant in the dedicated gender channels, having a high number of positive mentions among the community, inviting a high number of relevant people in the community, publishing and sharing valuable content, taking the initiative for helping any associated social cause and charities, or any other related activity that helps strengthen the community and aligns with our social impact objectives.

The rewards for those contests will be:

• Pinklisting spots (limited to a maximum of 2 NFTs per individual)
• monetary rewards in $ADA
• exclusive moderator roles on our community channels such as discord
• exclusive access to private community channels
• voting rights to important project decisions
• exclusive access to new iterations of the Gender Battles
• exclusive positions within the Gender Alliances, and 
• perks defined upon community polls.

5. Community building

Our most prized asset is our community; therefore, we must ensure that it is built on a solid, safe, and respectful foundation that will allow us to scale our reach and maximize our impact.

Several automated qualitative and quantitative systems and structures will be placed to give recognition, rights, and rewards to the most reputable, active, and respectful community members. A bottom-up management system will be applied in selecting community moderators as their powers will depend on their reputation. The community will vote for which moderators and community speakers should be promoted via periodic polls.

Furthermore, the status and reputation of members who wish to enter the safelist or moderator team will also be verified via engagement metrics, discord bots, activity reports, and manual reviews by the moderators. Every safelist or moderator approval will require the agreement of the majority of the relevant moderating teams. If there is no consensus, an application can be re-examined after 1 week upon request.

Most importantly, we wish our community members to feel free to express themselves in their way and meet and exchange ideas and thoughts with others in a respectful environment. Everyone can join our discussion events and create a live call through our servers. We plan to bring regular speakers that will discuss gender diversity issues, among other topics, and encourage each of our members to join in and create their events.

Once those systems take place, we expect our Community to have the largest impact on our growth via viral marketing and word of mouth. This will be the true catalyst that will bring our project worldwide recognition.

Main Challenges

The main challenges that may jeopardize the project’s success are:

• The unstable macroeconomic and regulatory environment may affect the technological advancement of both the crypto and NFT market. There is an absence of an international body of NFTs for setting regulations and legalization globally.
• The invasion of Ukraine and global political instability affect the availability and performance of the highly skilled workforce. Two members of our core team (Olko & Luba) come from Ukraine and are facing dire effects from this horrible Russian attack against world freedom.
• The NFT market and technology is very new and hence is often a target of scammers, phishers, cyberattacks, and criminal activities
• The potential of some key team members leaving the project before it fully completes its objectives
• High inflation may trigger an exponential rise in our expected development and marketing costs and drastically reduce the purchasing power of our available budget/funding.
• Lack of transparency in our main channels of advertisement. Part of our marketing strategy depends on promotional Twitter accounts and websites with less than 2 years of existence that belong to unregulated natural entities. Inevitably, a part of them will not deliver the required services.

Risk Mitigation

Some of our mitigation strategies include:

• Emergency/contingency fund from the investing team of €30,000, in addition to the initial fund invested in the project for its planned operations. The emergency fund will be used to counter the rise in expected costs and unexpected development requirements.
• Cardano is unquestionably the most technologically advanced, future-proof blockchain technology. Nevertheless, we consider the unsystematic risk, and therefore we will release the mainnet of our game after rigorous testing in a technologically and regulatory stable period.
• In the unlikely case that a core member has to abandon the project before it’s fully implemented, we maintain a list of highly skilled candidates ready to replace any position in our current team. Also, we keep very detailed documentation for all the work processes and tasks required for each team member, which will function as a guide for every newcomer.
• Before we launch our mainnet, we will request independent audits from third parties such as Haskell consultants (such as Well-Typed ) and cybersecurity experts to inspect our code and features and analyze any potential website vulnerabilities.
• We have been using advanced marketing analytic tools to analyze the metrics of influencers and websites (e.g., engagement rates, bot or inactive accounts percentage, activity rate, effective audience, reputation scores). This way, we minimize our exposure to the lack of transparency and fraudulent activities.

[FEASIBILITY]

The project main milestones are presented below:

• Reward & promotion programs
• Community build-up
• Pinklisting & moderator programs
• Outreach & partnerships
• Gender alliances’ clubs
• Smart contracts official marketplace
• Unicorn battles & Unibet testnet
• Unicorn battles & Unibet mainet
• Unicorn battles global contests
• Gender alliances battles
• Unicoins integration & rewards
• Alliances voting & leaderboards
• Unilend lending platform
• Gender Unicorns metaverse club
• Community voting for new development features

The expected work hours (WH) and associated costs for the remaining development tasks of the project's roadmap are presented below. We assumed a fixed $100 hourly rate for each task in those calculations. The total estimated development budget for the specified tasks is $51,400.

Unicorn battles Mechanics & Game

• Wallet NFT sync - 9 WH - $900
• Selector screens - 6 WH - $600
• Battle mechanics - 26 WH - $2600
• Battle grid - 14 WH - $1400
• Animations - 20 WH - $2000
• Smart-contract - 37 WH - $3700

Unibet Match Making Service

• Unibet main interface - 7 WH - $700
• User filter search - 9 WH - $900
• User profiles - 6 WH - $600
• Auto matchmaking smart algorithm - 9 WH - $900
• Smart-contract - 18 WH - $1800

Gender Alliances

• Alliances chat & strategy rooms - 20 WH - $2000
• Alliance mechanics - 14 WH - $1400
• Alliance bonuses - 12 WH - $1200
• Alliance contests - 10 WH - $1000
• Smart-contract - 14 WH - $1400

Unicoins In-game Currency

• Currency integration - 22 WH - $2200
• Battle rewards mechanics - 16 WH - $1600
• Validity checks - 10 WH - $1000
• Unicoins automated distribution - 13 WH - $1300
• Smart-contract - 27 WH - $2700

Alliances Voting

• Voting mechanics - 15 WH - $1500
• Voting events - 9 WH - $900
• Voting interface - 8 WH - $800
• Smart-contract - 23 WH - $2300

Alliances Leaderboards

• Leaderboards mechanics - 13 WH - $1300
• Leaderboards events - 10 WH - $1000
• Leaderboards interface - 11 WH - $1100
• Smart-contract - 18 WH - $1800

Unilend Lending Platform

• Lending mechanics - 29 WH - $2900
• Lending interface - 12 WH - $1200
• Lending contests - 10 WH - $1000
• Smart-contract - 37 WH - $3700

*Smart contracts development time also includes expected Q/A time.

We are proud of our diverse, multi-cultural, multi-gendered, multi-talented team (also available to view at: https://genderunicorns.com/#team )

The core team of the Gender Unicorns is the following:

George Chrysochou - Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

George has an M.Sc n in Entrepreneurship from EDHEC Business School and a B.Sc in Economics from the University of Cyprus. He’s the CMO at Financer.com, one of the world's largest personal finance sites, and the founder of SocioBright Ltd, a Google Partner digital advertising agency.

Giorgos Georgiou - Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

George has an MSc (Eng) in Advanced Software Engineering from The University of Sheffield and a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from Sheffield Hallam University. He has more than eight years of experience as a Software developer and DevOps.

Olko Vladi - Lead Character Designer (LCD)

Olko has a professional background in graphics and user interface design, but her real passion lies in character design, visual development, and illustration. She has 9 years of design experience and created hundreds of unique characters in her career. She likes traveling, playing volleyball, and hiking. She comes from Ukraine and hopes to see her country free once again. 🇺🇦

Katerina Kuparadze - Lead Graphic Designer (LGD)

Katerina studied graphic design at IT college in Tbilisi, Georgia. For the last 6 years, she has worked full-time as a graphic designer. She specializes in logo design, social media graphics, web illustrations, and branding. She enjoys going hiking and playing video games, tennis, and piano. 

Antonis Theofanous - Chief Operating Officer (COO)

Antonis is the director of the companies Amazon Investments, ACIS, and Pitsas Insurances. He has an MSc (Hons) in Finance from Durham University and a BSc (Hons) in Economics from the Athens University of Economics and Business. He provides investment consulting services to HNWI from all over the world.

Luba Shevchuk - Performance Marketing Manager (PMM)

Luba is a passionate marketer with 12 years of experience in online advertising, PPC, and e-commerce. She speaks 4 languages fluently: English, German, Ukrainian, and Russian. She places herself easily in our client’s shoes and helps identify strategic opportunities and goals. Luba is from Ukraine and prays to see her family and her people survive the invasion. 🇺🇦

George Lazarou - Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)

George has a degree in Sports, Events & Entertainment Management. Currently, he is working as a Senior Account Manager for a major online marketing company in Cyprus. George has experience in project management, affiliate management, digital marketing & media buying. 

Aizel Ash Villarino - Chief Community Manager (CCM)

Aizel has a degree in Hotel, Restaurant and Airline Management from the Philippines. She manages a team of Admin Assistants and helps businesses expand their operations through data management and lead generation. She loves working with people and organizing events.

Inna Ivanova – Chief Compliance Officer (CCO)

Inna holds a Bachelor of Laws and BSc Degree in Management. She worked many years as Chief of Internal Audit in prestigious Russian firms. Today she is a managing partner in the Legal Company Amazon Corporate and Immigration Services.

Evros Neofytides - Lead Web Designer (CWD)

Evros has a Bachelor's Degree in Graphics & Advertising Design. He’s the Director of Cyprus Graphics Shop, Co-Founder of SocioBright Ltd, and a Lead Designer for Contentworks Agency projects overseeing the creation and re-branding in the Finance Sector on behalf of their clients.

Marina Eromina – Chief Investment Officer (CIO)

Marina is a senior risk analyst at Alpha Bank in Minsk. She holds an Economics and Marketing Degree from the Belarusian State Economic University. Marina has experience in international transactions, digital banking, risk management, and applied mathematics.

Chief Diversity Officer (CDO)

To be announced

[AUDITABILITY]

All Gender Unicorn team members work in prestigious international companies and participate in renowned international projects. Our accumulative experience helped us choose the correct mechanisms to help us coordinate and track our progress.

For the effective coordination of the Gender Unicorns team members, we are using the following tools:

• Google Workspace
• Google Drive
• Github
• Discord
• Jira
• Nimbus

All the milestones from our road map and inserted in Github and Jira enable us to track our progress at any time. To measure our project's progress and development, we introduced an agile methodology. The idea is to prioritize the tasks and then continuously deliver small functionalities of our project in small iterations (3 weeks). At the end of each iteration, our stakeholders will have the opportunity to see the demonstration of the development progress and provide feedback and recommendations. On the other hand, the development team will have the opportunity to evaluate their progress of the last iteration through retrospective and improvement. Jira will be our mainboard to keep track of our agile iterations and our backlog and roadmap.

About data management, we are using a tailor-made, GDPR compliant CRM system that helps us to monitor and manage our branding activities. Through our CRM we are tracking the daily OPEX of our project, enabling us to cooperate more effectively with influencers and partners. This system also helps us distribute our budget more effectively by comparing competing marketing offers. Additionally, we have created custom solutions that help us organize and analyze our community analytics across all of our media platforms, via measuring engagements, community size, users quality, and more.

For file exchange, and collaboration we are utilizing Google Workspace and Google drive, with access, restricted only to team accounts via dedicated profiles. We are securing all of our accounts and devices with 2FA authentication and allow access only to safelisted IPs. We are all using encrypted passwords and password management solutions to each service that we are using on both personal and business accounts.

Since our project has a complex nature, with several objectives, our success metrics will be broken down into three main categories, Social Impact, Minting Economics and Gaming Adoption.

Social Impact

The most crucial success factor is forming a vibrant, respectful, and active community that will accept and love each other. We foresee to have 30,000+ discord members within 2 months of launching our gameplay video and its respective marketing campaigns. Moreover, we wish to have at least 1,000 participants in the dedicated genders channels expressing their feelings, ideas and encouraging each other. By the end of the first year marketing operations we foresee to have 100,000+ discord members and more than 10,000+ gender channel participants.

As the community grows larger, and our alliances and game features come into life, we expect to have an increase of 5% in the engagement rate of our community members by the end of 2021. This translates into more than 5,000 messages for topics related to gender acceptance, inclusion and appreciation shared each month across our servers and social media channels.

We plan to run anonymous, period sentiment polls across our channels and measure the level of acceptance and satisfaction within our members. Our target is to have at least 80% of all participants stating with confidence that their involvement in the Gender Unicorns helped their emotional state and wellbeing. We also aim that at least 50% of all members found a new friend that they can trust within our community.

Minting Economics

We target to completely sell all the 10,000 NFTs of the Generation 1 collection, within 1 month since the minting and distribution phase begins. Only pinklisted (pre–approved) individuals will be allowed to enter the distribution lists, to ensure a fair, and diverse community of owners. As we mentioned above, the exact price of each NFTs will be determined later through community voting.

We expect to have more than 4,000 unique owners for the entire collection, a goal which will be in accordance with the pinklisting process. No pinklisted entity will be permitted to receive more than 5 NFTs each, during the pinklist. The majority of the pinklisted entities will be granted only 2 or 1 NFT.

Three to five NFTs per entity will be permitted to people of extraordinary contribution to the community. By keeping those limits we expect a more diverse and involved community of NFT owners.

We also expect to maintain a floor price of our collection that will be at least 200% above the original minting price. Our team however will not actively participate in “sweep the floor” initiatives, i.e. rebuying our own NFTs below a certain price, as such transactions are dishonest and manipulative. Instead, we will focus on increasing the usability and inherent value of the project to long-term investors.

Gaming Adoption

The next phase of our project is the creation of the Unicorn Battles card game and the encouragement of the active engagement of users in the game through gender alliances.

We expect to have at least 2,000 unique users participating in the Unicorn Battles once the Unilend service goes live, which will allow users to borrow Unicorns from others to form a team of 5 and compete. The only minimum requirement to enter a battle is owning at least 1 Unicorn which should be the Bet (explained in detail below). This flexibility allows more participants to enter the Battles.

Lent Unicorns should be at least 50% of the total supply, within one year of launching the Unilend platform. We will encourage the lending of Unicorns with special events, Unicoins rewards and livestream promotions.

In total, we anticipate to have more than 50,000 Unicorn Battles within the first year, which translates to more than 25 battles per active user.

All gender alliances should maintain a roughly equal level of active members, and total monthly battles, which roughly translated to 5% of the total for each alliance. We will achieve this with adjusted rewards as explained in the Unicorns Alliances section.

Several Unicorn Battles will be broadcasted live on our YouTube channel. We aim to accumulate more than 1 million views for our gameplay videos within 1 year of publishing the service. We plan to partner with at least 10 gaming influencers to promote our game, and accumulate more than 10 million views of our game on their personal accounts.

This is a new proposal not related with any other proposal.

No member of the project has received funding from Project Catalyst for any other project in the past.

SDG Rating

We are very proud that our project is eligible for the 5th category of the Sustainable Development Goals set by Project Catalyst in accordance with the United Nations' goals.

Achieving global gender equality is one of the most critical challenges of the 21st century. Nevertheless, genders are not limited in a gender binary classification of males and females.

Our project aims to give particular attention to the issue of recognizing the right of gender identity of all human beings. The specter and diversity of gender identities is manifested through our project and we ask all international organizations and governments to listen to the voice of the people suppressed by prejudice and hatred.

The passage of gender equality civil rights legislation should remain on the highest priorities of all administrations globally. The voting of legislation is the most convincing demonstration of a necessity to condemn the onslaught of existing laws targeting members of the LGBTQ+ community globally.

Gender Unicorns is the best medium for all participants to read about gender identities and support our cause.

SDG Goals 

Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

SDG Subgoals

5.1 End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

5.1.1 Whether or not legal frameworks are in place to promote, enforce and monitor equality and non‑discrimination on the basis of sex