This serie of interviews was conducted at the Athens Builders Meetup, which took place at the end of June 2024. If you’re just discovering Alephium’s ecosystem, it’s a great way to learn about all the main projects!
Here, we are happy to welcome Kylian from Alphaga, an NFT marketplace which just launched on mainnet! Find the full (slightly edited) transcript below if you prefer reading.
Can you tell us a bit about your journey in tech and crypto?
I’ve been involved in the crypto world since around 2019, having interacted with other cryptocurrencies in the past. For the past two years, I’ve also been active in the NFT space, participating in numerous projects and purchasing NFTs. I joined Alephium in November, thanks to my partner OverGames, who is collaborating with me on Alphaga, and introduced me to this ecosystem. Since then, we’ve been working on the marketplace.
You have actually answered my next question, which is, “How did you find out about Alephium?” So, I guess it was through your co-founder. Do you know how he found it?
I think he told me he found it through Mobula. I’m not sure how specifically, but I think this is how he learned about it.
Which chains have you been doing NFT stuff in the past?
I’ve been a little bit on Elrond, Mulritversx. It’s a French crypto and I bought some NFT on it. I’ve been in the community. And then I left to come to Alephium to have my time on Alephium.
What did you find here that you didn’t find elsewhere?
One thing that I think is most important is that the community is really close together. They’ve been helping each other with development and building stuff. And even the core developers of Alephium have been helping us a lot. And this is something that we don’t find in most cryptocurrencies.
This is why I really loved Alephium: when I joined and had a question or needed help, the Alephium team was there, helping us since the beginning. They are available, and all the members of the community have been helping each other. So this is something I really liked, and this is why I stayed on Alephium.
You said you were doing NFT stuff on other chains. Were you a creator? Were you a collector?
I was more a collector yeah, working on some small projects over there. Like, answering questions to people for the community. But it was most like a collector.
Was it a specific sector, such as generative NFTs, PFPs or gaming items?
Yeah, it was most stuff like that. And I also was a good member of a project, was doing poker and they made NFT for it. So I was really helping them answering questions and being part of the community.
There’s already an NFT marketplace on Alephium. Why did you decide to create your own separate marketplace? It’s not a criticism at all — we love the idea. I’m just curious about your thought process. What made you think, “They’ve been here for a while, but we need to do something different”? What inspired your vision?
Well, we wanted to do something where we were already close to the community, first of all, and wanted to have more updates and more to do more stuff on a marketplace. So the other marketplace that is live is DeadRare and we know the owner of it, we are really close to him. He’s been helping us, we’ve been working together for some stuff and we really wanted to have something where we could do more stuff on our marketplace.
First of all, in our marketplace, we’ll be able to choose if you want to mint in a random NFT or if you want to be if you want to be sequential. So the owner will choose. We also want to do something like, for example, you can buy NFT with crypto, such as $AYIN. So you have different currencies. We implement our token, which is called $ALPHAGA, too. And with it we could do a lot of different stuff, just such as lower fees mint, I mean, and stuff like that. So for example, if you own some $Alphaga, the fees will be 50% lower. Our fees is only 1%. So this is something really want to bring up. And that’s pretty it like really. Do a lot of updates.
So people will be able to mint NFTs in another currency than $ALPH technically.
Yes. So if the owner wants to do like that, it’s possible.
So you could have a meme coin creating an NFT collection that is payable in their currency.
Yeah, it’s possible. Of course, we will choose whether to accept this cryptocurrency because we only want to do cryptocurrencies that are verified and have a good project beyond them. But 100%, it’s possible.
You mentioned a bit about the utility of the token and how it offers perks like lower fees. Could you tell us more about the tokenomics? What other benefits or features are attached to the token?
First of all, lower fees. If you have around 20,000 $ALPHAGA, it would be 50% lower. So there are fewer fees. We really want to have few fees on the marketplace. What we can do—it’s coming in the future—is have staking, a staking program. With the staking program, your people can stack their $ALPHAGA and have more perks. At the moment, I cannot say more about that because it’s not yet in our roadmap.
We also want to have a grant program for projects in the future. $ALPHAGA will be able to pay NFT projects if they have a good roadmap. We really want to help them in the future by paying them and helping them build something better in our marketplace. It’s not about the token, but we also want to work on a verified system in our marketplace where people can verify if they have a good roadmap and a good project beyond.
We also are working on DAO in the future. So this is something we really want to work on. But it’s nothing yet at the moment in the roadmap because we’re still working on the testnet and in the development of the marketplace. But this is something within a long-term project.
How many of you are building ALPHAGA?
So we are a team of four people at the moment. So, I am working mostly on the marketing and communication side. “OverGames”, which came to the meetup, is the web developer. So he’s working on the front and back end side. We have Kryptox with the designers and the designer of Alphaga. So he’s the one who made everything that looks nice for Alphaga. And we have Benjamin, the smart contract developer who works on many other projects on Alephium, such as Alphpacas.
Yeah, he’s BenLarkey.
That’s pretty much it at the moment. We are a team of four, and we hope to hire more people in the future. And so we really want to be open to the community what we said and not stay only between us. So, in the future, we’d love to hire new people and developers, for example.
One of the big challenges for an NFT marketplace is attracting great creators. Is this something you’re thinking about? Do you have ideas on how to attract various types of creators, such as anime artists, gallery artists, video makers, or game developers? How will you bring these talented individuals to Alphaga and Alephium?
Well, this is something we’ve been working on in the past weeks is that we really want to have new projects and not only like artificial intelligence products, we really want to have good designer NFTs, not just like random NFTs. And this is something that we don’t find at the moment in Alephium. So we’ve been working on that.
This is why we want to propose a grant program to help those people build good stuff and good projects to bring up new projects on Alephium. What we’re working on at the moment is a good marketplace and, really, like I said before, a verification system where people can be verified on our system. And this is something we think is a good value for projects that want to come on Alephium so they can be get verified, they can get maybe some money to put more stuff on it and, and what we can say more at the moment. It’s true that on Alephium, the NFT world is still early, that we still don’t have many much projects. So that’s pretty it. But we really, like I said, working on a good marketplace that is easy to use and that we explain everything on our documentation so that people can create NFT easier.
This is something we really want to be. And of course on our platform we can answer questions if people have any questions, like we’re really open to the people if you have any questions and we can help them do stuff if needed.
Are you considering offering capabilities for generative artists, similar to Fxhash on Tezos or Foundation on EVM? Is this something you’re planning for the future?
We really want to add more things to Alphaga. So, one thing I can say at the moment is that we’re working on video NFTs, so that people can buy and sell NFTs videos on our platform. So, this is something we don’t currently find on Alephium. So it’s not just an image. We can have a cover, we can have a video for the profile of the collection. So this is something we’ve been really working on. And in the future, it will be possible to have generative NFT, like you said. It’s not possible yet, but we’re working on being open and having the most things we can on Alphaga.
It’s still a big field to explore, but it’s a great idea. Okay, so first, when do you launch?
At the moment, we closed the testnet to work more on it. We think in about one week, we do a v2 testnet so people can try again. And we have more stuff on this and hope to launch in about; I don’t have the exact dates at the moment because it’s. But what I can say is we hope to launch in about a month. So more or less, we think it would be more. It would be a little bit less than a month, but it’s kind of the date I can say at the moment. Yeah, yeah.
So sometime at the end of July, most likely August.
Yeah, 100%.
That’s great. Can you tell us about the secret alpha, what’s on your roadmap, and what's next on the road?
Well, first of all, the launch, of course. Yeah. And after that, staking. We are also talking with some projects, I cannot say more at the moment, to have a staking program, and something that we really want in the future is a DAO, so that we can help other projects and have a grant program so we can give them money and they can make better NFT project and helps the Alephium community. So this is something that is coming really soon on Alphaga after the launch of the maintain.
You were at the meetups in Athens. What did you think? What was your feeling about it?
To be honest, since I’m not really a developer, I was scared that I was not going to understand most of the things on most of the topics, but I did understand everything. It was really awesome. All the explanations were really great. I also learned a lot of stuff, such about other projects, such about builders. And what I really loved about this meetup was that we could talk to each other in real life and have a face to other people. So, like, I’ve met other developers, I’ve met other builders, and it was really awesome to meet people of the community. I also loved being able to meet Alephium’s team, which was awesome; they were really nice to each other. They made something beautiful for us. And this is what I really loved about it. Like really. Absolutely. I want to meet other people and share a moment, a three-day moment. And it was really, really great.
Links:
Website: https://alphaga.app/
Twitter: https://x.com/AlphagaMarket
Telegram: https://t.me/+y2wHXrmssEg2YjUx
Discord: https://discord.gg/ctkjBKrbvp
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