Lil' Heroes: the NFT, art and TV project that moves millions of dollars and a Uruguayan participates

The initiative was born from an agreement between Curative, experts in the world of art, Exile Content Studio, a Hollywood audiovisual production company, and Edgar Plans, a Spanish artist who has drawn animated characters that excited this company American based in Los Angeles.

Throughout his career, Plans has created characters called "Animal Heroes." He has a "colorful, expressive and lively" style, as he describes himself. His works of art are sought after all over the world and end up breaking records at renowned auction houses such as Christie's.

The project, which takes part of the name of its characters, but is called Lil' Heroes, is about a new way of doing entertainment. The idea is to break with the traditional idea of ​​setting up a story and then delivering it to the public.

Thanks to the possibilities offered by new technologies, it means creating content with the collaboration of the audience. “We want to receive input from the community,” said Ignacio González, the Uruguayan living in the United States, who works for Exile and coordinates marketing actions and general aspects of the project.

How does it work?

First, remember what NFTs are. They are a unique digital certificate, registered in a chain of blocks (blockchain), which is used to record ownership of a digital asset.

The most summarized form of this technology is to compare it with a work of art of the physical world: although there are many who can copy it, there is only one that is the original. An NFT would be a unique, unrepeatable and unalterable object in the digital world whose value is assigned with one of the cryptocurrencies on the market. Those of Ethereum and Solana are some of the most popular in this business.

This has opened up a gigantic market, which continues to grow. And there are more and more projects with users interested in investing. One of the strongest that was released on December 28 is Lil' Heroes.

Like the vast majority of NFT projects, its promoters first form a community on Discord, the communication platform that became very popular in the video game industry, but has been very useful for users interested in the world of gaming. blockchain. In just one month of life, more than 150 thousand people make up this community.

With an expectation campaign that lasted about 20 days, González coordinated the appearance of some of the characters in Times Square, which gave greater visibility to this disruptive initiative.

The Lil' Heroes in Times Square.

The creators of these projects usually create a roadmap with different phases of the actions they will take. This builds community loyalty. The first of Lil' Heroes was to put up for sale the 7,777 characters drawn by Edgar Plans, but without revealing their identity. That is, the person bought a character, but still did not know which one. They were traded through OpenSea, the world's largest NFT market, which would come to officiate as the Free Market for these digital assets.

The sale was held on January 16. The 7,777 “heroes” were sold in 45 minutes. There were 1,200,000 people who wanted to buy, but there were only 7,777 who did. "Crazy," González said. The price at which they were sold was 0.4 ether (at that time it was US$ 1,500). In a few hours, it became the most important NFT project in the world. In less than an hour they managed to raise US$ 11.5 million.

These characters were acquired by some celebrities such as the Colombian rapper J Balvin, as well as some Uruguayans interested in this technology.

Those who invest in this type of digital asset seek to find it useful. Until now, the greatest utility is actually owning digital assets that are in short supply in the world. "In this case, those characters are going to be on a television show," added González.

Identity Reveal

Last Sunday each of these characters were revealed in an event called "Reveal day". The expectant buyers wanted to know if they got a "general" character or one with an interesting uniqueness that could enhance their NFT.

The rarer the character, the rarer it is and the more value it has on the NFT market. It is a phenomenon similar to what happens when a collector is missing "the difficult figurine" from the album. You're probably willing to buy it if you're really interested.

In this market, each character has certain rarity components. When the user buys it, it indicates in percentage how rare the eyes, clothing, and mouth are, among others.

In this fast-paced technological universe, there is a second-hand NFT market that moves millions of dollars. The prices of these characters have grown a lot in the last week for this issue. For example, a person who bought a character on the release date for 0.4 ether ($1,500), sold it before the date the character rarities were revealed for 2 ether ($4,200 Sunday value). .

That same Lil Heroe was later sold for 42 ether (US$100,600) because it was a rather unique character within the collection,

Towards Netflix?

When one of the following phases of the project is completed, it can be enjoyed on some of the major streaming platforms most consumed by viewers. The Exile production company has already worked with Netflix, Amazon, among others, to offer famous series and movies.

“Instead of thinking of a pyramidal structure in which a group builds towards the public, this is the other way around. This is the audience that helps establish guidelines and guidelines, and a team specialized in creating television shows builds a story,” González commented.

In short, these 7,777 characters are investors in an audiovisual product that has not yet seen the light of day. It's as if while Star Wars was being produced, the public could participate in the creative process by putting money into it.

The form of participation could be through voting. This will be revealed as the different phases of the project progress.

Entrance to the metaverse?

Owning these Lil Heroes guarantees access to certain events and products that could not be obtained without these products. For example, in the participation of some events of this technology.

On the other hand, according to González, there will also be announcements of entering the metaverse. There are many games linked to the blockchain that are already considered in this way and that seek to link the physical world with the real one through events.

Another of their plans is to create exclusive products for Lil' Heroes owners, which involves agreements with clothing brands.

“It is a project that connects Hollywood with art at the highest level. It is something very innovative. There are people who think about NFT projects and people who think about television projects. This unites the two worlds”, he commented.

Watch out for scams

Many users take advantage of the popularity of the projects and create bogus websites that pretend to be the real thing to steal money.

The modus operandi is, in addition to creating websites and Instagram and Facebook accounts, to request that ethers be transferred to a MetaMask digital wallet account.

This image is from the mintlil-heroes.in website and is a scam. If you deposit money in cryptocurrencies on this website, you will send it to a cybercriminal.

As the world of blockchain is decentralized and there is no Central Bank that regulates the way of transferring money, scams through these platforms have also grown over time.

In fact, as Cromo corroborated, when a user googles Lil' Heroes, the first website that appears (which is a paid ad to Google) is a scam.

Members of the project claim that there are fake accounts that have up to 50,000 followers. From Facebook, added the same source, they have deleted at least 10 false accounts about this project.