I’m not going to lie, we’ve had to swallow that we did not manage to make the project work as we wanted, and it was not easy. When you pour some time, efforts, and a lot of yourself in a project and it does not work, you take quite a blow.

We did work on the evolution that we were talking about before, but the heart wasn’t there and if we have made progress, we haven’t been able to get it finished (yet).

So, what’s new?

Well, we worked a lot on this collection, and we still want to see our demons in the wild, we want them to find new homes, we want to build a community, we want to go on building.

One of you had actually suggested we did go the free mint road, and if we were not convinced at the time, the idea grew on us and so, we’ve decided to follow the suggestion and make the collection free to mint.

We also heard what people from Asia, where most our team is, were telling us: ETH can be expensive for them, and even at a low price our NFT was too expensive for them. We always wanted our collection to be an entry point for artist and for people in markets that would have less buying power, so it made sense for us to go the free mint way.

It will allow us to build the community we wanted to build, and probably onboard more people who would not have made the step without it.

From there, we will still work on using a part of the revenue we might get from secondary sales to buy art from emerging artists. The mission does not change for us, the money to buy the art will just come from secondary instead of mint.

We already have 2 pieces to raffle between our holders, but we would like to have a bit more people in before we raffle them.

From now on Raksasas are free to mint, maximum 5 per transaction, you only pay for the gas. Gas is generally low these days and ETH is affordable so it’s time to get some more and invite your friends!

We wanted to talk a bit about the vision, why we do what we do. We had a few people asking us today about why we were starting the Mint so early, why we were not building a big Discord, a bit Allow list and then launch.

Well, that’s not what we want.

We have seen a lot of projects recently doing massive Allow Lists, building discords with 10s of thousands of people for 10k tokens.

It works well to sell all the tokens in a few hours, get a massive round of pump and dump in the next few hours, makes a lot of money for the team and decent money for the people on the Allow List.

But it also creates quite a few unhappy people and a vey bad start for a community, if you can even call that a community.

And we want to build a community. We want to build a community around the art. The first goal of this project is to take a part of the revenues, put them in our RaksaVault and us these funds to buy Art from merging artists in the space, give them that early sale they never or rarely had.

And from the art we buy, gift at least half of it to our community, to give you that feeling of owning a 1–1. That is very different than owning a PFP, trust me! And then make you the ambassador of that emerging artist, because you own one of their pieces, and from there, help that artist even more.

We’ll gift one Raksasa to each artist as well so we’re sure they’re part of our community, we’ll put the collection on our web site and we’ll promote it with the community on all our channels!

That is the goal! Develop Art, promote artist, get our community in contact with all the fantastic artists doing 1–1 win the space!

And along the way we want to create more collections, evolutions of our Raksasas, who are shape shifters by nature. That gives us so many possibilities! And we already have a whole story in our heads on how to do that!

And then the market place, we’re working on it, we’re already developing it. Salky has been on it for quite some time already. That would allow us to bridge the gap as well: we promote the artists, and then we offer them as well a place to sell, with reduced fees, and incentives … and yes the plan is to be able to give back to this community with the market place! Will we do that in a month? Absolutely not! Are we bullish on what we want to accomplish! Absolutely!

Our model is the Deadfellaz, their minting price was same as ours (and funnily enough ETH was around the same price). They minted quite quickly because the project art is awesome, and then they developed. They developed the community, the project, the team, the vision, a safe place for everyone. They’re a model on how to it right.

We’re not them, we’re the Raksasas. We have plenty of ideas in our heads, a lot of passion and a love of the arts. Our team is of artists, musicians, DJ producer, and nerds. We’re in this space because we believe it can change the world, one piece of digital art at a time. We’ve been thinking about how we could do that in the space for a long time, and this is our project.

We’re starting a great adventure and we hope you’ll join us.

We like the arts.

It was a busy Sunday for the team in Portugal and Afternoon in Bali! After a bit more than 4 months of work, we have deployed our smart contract!

We’re so excited as this marks the last step before we can soon open the minting, welcome people in the community and start to look for artists we want to help!

We haven’t set a date yet to start minting but we wanted to give you a bit more info about the process.

Mint

As we’ve already announced the price at mint will be 0.025 Ethereum. We want our collection to be accessible, we are conscious that a higher minting price would have prevented some to get in. So we’ve decided to place ourselves in the low range of minting price while not devaluating the incredible art of our artists!

We know gas price can be an important factor when minting, so like a few projects before us, we have optimised the contract and are using the Pagzi protocol that has proven to be very efficient in reducing gas.

Allow List

We will have an Allow List that will allow to mint a Raksasa for a very small 0.01 Ethereum. There will be different ways to get on the list:

• We will offer some spots to communities we like and some we have been active in for a while
• We will distribute some to our early believers, the one who were along us when there was nothing to see
• We will give away some spots here in our discord
• We will give away some spots via our social media channels

So stay tuned for more on this always popular topic!

Supply

There are 8888 Raksasa in total: 8000 are available for you to mint and 888 are reserved for:

• The Allow list
• Give aways, which include the ones we will be offering to the artists that the community will pick as a part of our RaksasArt initiative
• The 5 Raksasa’s founders NFT
• Each of the founder has 4 other Raksasas to give aways as they please

Join us and build the community with us in our discord !

On the Art side

Our artists created about 360 traits to generate our collection and over the last few days, we’ve been reviewing the 8888 Raksasas to make sure nothing was off. Yep, we looked at them 1 by 1.

In the meantime, Gusde and Andi have also been drawing exclusive pieces we plan to use in our collaborations (on and off-line) and preparing an example of one of our Raksasa in hyper-realistic drawing.
Gusde hyper-realistic drawings are incredible and here is the deal: for every 100 Raksasa minted, one holder will be able to pick his favorite of his Raksasas and get a hyper realistic version of it!

These will be placed in a side collection and will be considered as a full Raksasa, granting same right to the holder as the original version!

On the Dev side

Salky and Jeremie have been working hard on the web site and the smart contract, making sure all was working properly on both sides.

With gas running high, we want to make sure we’ll be using as little gas a possible, so we have been implementing the Pagzi protocol that a few projects have been using recently and that reduces the gas fee quite substantially, along with other optimisations that we’ve been working on and testing for the last 2 months.

We’ve also been testing our allow-list and giveaways functionality intensively, we are keeping quite a few of our friendly demons to be given away so it’s important we get this right. We’ll tell more about the allow-list in the coming days, we already had questions about it and there will be different ways to get in, but again, more on that soon!

On the Partnerships and collaborations

Lusi has been busy on our social channels, starting the conversation with everyone on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, and she’s also been active behind the scene, working on partnerships. It’s early days and we can’t tell you much about these yet but it’s very much on our mind and we hope we can tell you more very soon!

With the allow-list nearly ready, we’ll be starting to discuss with other projects as well to find fun way to collaborate and gift some spots on it! There are so many projects we would like to collaborate with, and we are going to do all we can to get them excited about our project!

A busy first “public” week for the whole team, and a lot of very positive reactions to the art and the project in general. We’re super excited to move to the next phase of the project and can’t wait to show more very soon!

Come and chat with us in our discord!

As we’re launching our website and social media presence today, we wanted to tell a bit more about our story, how we got here and what we want, hope to do.

It all started from a souvenir from Bali, an original idea centred around the “Barong” which is typically Balinese. On the advice of Gus De, our Balinese artist, we evolved towards the “Raksasa”, a demonic figure from the Hindu culture, ever present in Bali and represented all over the Island. Despite their fearful appearance and ferocity, “Raksasas” can be evil or lawful. You see them everywhere in Bali, but most famously you use them in the parade on Pengerupukan, the night before Nyepi. The art of our collection itself, designed and assembled by Gus De and Andi, is a modern take of how the Raksasas are represented in the balinese art.

Rooted in Asia

We wanted a project that has a strong link with Bali, Indonesia, and Asia in general. Not only because all the creators lived, or are living in Bali, but also because we believed in the importance of promoting a NFT project that has his roots in Asia. Ultimately our goal is, through our community, to promote and showcase original art from Asia (and elsewhere), helping new artists to make their first steps in the space.

With the project’s roots in South-East Asia, our team is also very conscious about the economic reality of the region compared to other parts of the world where NFTs have been thriving. We felt it was important to remain accessible and not follow an all too present trend in the space over the last few months that saw a steep increase in minting price. Our minting price will be 0.025 ETH to remain accessible for a large number.

Community oriented

Our project is community oriented, we have a mission: to discover and promote emerging artists, to help them launch or promote their early art and collections in the NFT space! We want to put our money where our mouth is, and invest in emerging artists, creators and collections. We want to put the power of a large PFP collection at the service of the 1–1 creators. Despite their fearful appearances, Raksasas can be protectors, and just like them, we want our community to be the protectors of emerging artists, or simply help 1–1 artists struggling in the NFT space.

We want our community to act as a platform to propel new talents, and to do so we will regularly buy pieces from new artists. We will ask our community to submit new artists, make them vote for the project we should help, and buy two pieces from that project. One piece will be stored in our vault and the other one will be donated to a member of the community via a raffle system. The artist behind the selected collection will also be gifted a Raksasa to truly be a part of our community.

By making our holders the holders of some of these 1–1, and storing some in our vault, we want them to be directly involved in the success of these collections.

Active promotion

We will be actively promoting the collection on our own website: each will have a dedicated page on our site in the “RaksasArt” section, and the piece we have bought will be displayed on our RaksaVault Page.

Each collection will be promoted through all our social media channels, and we will incentivise our holder to promote these collections, to make sure the collections we are investing in as a community become a success, actively helping the artists!

The team

Our team is part Indonesian and part European, and we all met in Bali. Andi and Gus De are from Bali and live in the Island; Lusi is from Java but lived in Bali; Salky is from Barcelona and lives in Bali; and Jeremie is Belgian but used to live and work in Bali.

We’ve chosen to dox ourselves from the start as we realised it was important for the community to know who was behind the project. Many times in recent weeks, as we were working on the project, we’ve seen people saying they were not trusting anonymous teams who would arrive in the space, and we understood their fears.

All of us have at some point been impacted by the Covid crisis, as we were all working in the hospitality industry, and if not all of us lost our job, the majority did. It was a rough year professionally and personally for most of us and this space gave us something new, something fresh we could dive in and have fun! So some of us invested, some of us coded and other produced art!

We all came together on this project about 4 months ago, we wanted to create, we wanted to promote the artists, we wanted to be part of this incredible movement! We spend a lot of time thinking, discussing, changing, evolving the project, dreaming bigger all the time!

The future

NFT projects need roadmaps, the art itself is often not sufficient enough nowadays to launch a project in the eyes of some collectors and we understand that. We have decided to divide our roadmap in 2 different parts: the minting roadmap and the future roadmap.

In the minting roadmap we’re focussing on minting incentives, gifts and rewards that will be distributed to lucky holders during the mint period.

The future roadmap is where the ambition and the dream are! We want our marketplace to be in line with the mission of the Raksasa project: focusing on the 1–1 and the emerging artists, providing them with a space where the new collection is put forward and not the trendiest one. It’s all still a work in progress and we will share the updates with the community as we go, but it is for us the next step and we will be investing time and hard-earned ETH in making it a reality.

And as we want the community to be involved in the collections, the artists we select, we will want to involve the community in the making and the running of the marketplace. That will require legal work and a lot of preparation but we want to, at some point in the future, evolve as a DAO with the marketplace, in the spirit of what ENS did.

Again, this is a work in progress, there will be many obstacles along the way with it but that is the goal for us, and for this community. In the meantime, we will go on working with you and for you: looking for partnership in the space and outside the space, looking to produce the best merch we can, and of course keeping a few surprises in our sleeve that will be revealed during mint and after mint!

This collection is just the beginning, and we hope you’ll join us for what will be an incredible journey!