A look back on 2023
Dear LVCIDIA Community, as we enter 2024, Fvckrender and the LVCIDIA team wish to extend our gratitude for your unwavering support and share some reflections on the past year as well as our vision for the exciting journey ahead.
Reflections on 2023
Our journey with LVCIDIA this past year has been a testament to our undying love for art and the courage needed to create a meaningful change in the landscape of web3.
We started 2023 by reevaluating our vision for LVCIDIA under the Golden Circle principle: what are we striving to create, how can we accomplish our goals, and why do we do it? This line of thinking ensured we could approach the year with improved clarity and decisiveness, all members of the team working toward a shared vision. In the process, we landed upon our new mission statement: support purposeful artists, developing tools to extend the limits of their expression.
Under this guiding principle, we launched LVCIDIA Experiences in June 2023 with help from Artifex. Our debut release — featuring the first-ever 3D artwork by renowned artist Mad Dog Jones — sold out within hours, overcoming the bear market. The release proved LVCIDIA had the potential to become a major creative destination. As the year progressed, every Experience was given the same level of care. We made a concentrated effort to release informative interviews, articles, and live Q&As alongside each artist’s work. Both our artists and our collectors appreciated the uniquely engaging and thoughtful approach to exhibitions.
In May, we launched our new website with an elegant design by our devs Deven and PL. The site unifies all branches of LVCIDIA under one roof, allowing our community to navigate easily between Drops, Staking, Finery, and our brand-new Journal. Over the course of the year, our writers filled the LVCIDIA journal with thoughtful articles, spotlighting artists from around the globe. On Twitter, our social team also regularly used our platform to boost artists that we felt deserved recognition. We even made the leap onto TikTok, where our expertly produced video content helped us reach a whole new audience. LVCIDIA’s reputation as a pillar of support in the artist community continues to grow day by day.
For the team, a major emphasis in 2023 was delivering on past promises. Notable among them: a custom marketplace exclusively for LVCIDIA NFTs, IRL events for collectors, and a meaningful new era of LVCIDIA Staking. We’re proud to say we delivered on all fronts. LVCIDIA collectors had access to a rooftop party at NFT NYC this past April, hosted in collaboration with Nolcha Events. In July, we launched the LVCIDIA marketplace on our site, with enforced artist royalties and custom tools. Finally, we delivered the Second Era of Staking, a community-wide effort to craft a Planet. Each month, we made sure to keep the community up to date with everything we had to offer on our newsletter, Discord announcements, and even text updates through Laylo.
The year culminated with the final release of our Finery N2 collection. Few other projects have released even a single piece of clothing, but by the end of 2023, we had added 25 distinct, high-end clothing items to our shop. We never compromised on quality and fought hard to ensure every design captured the essence of LVCIDIA while also meaningfully building upon the streetwear we love. When sales weren’t what we hoped, we made the choice to give our collectors heavy discounts on all items, turning the negative into something positive.
Last but not least, we are pleased to report that there have been many, many updates made to the LVCIDIA immersive platform in 2023. While the platform has been offline for users for the past year, we never stopped working on it. Our lead developer, Sacha, has been spending countless hours ensuring the relaunch is worth the wait. The platform has been upgraded to Unreal Engine 5, which comes with a major graphical overhaul. New planets have been added — The Hub, the Center of Galaxy, the Community Planet — while old planets have been redesigned. Movement, animations, sound, VFX, lighting, textures, and even music have been upgraded to new state-of-the-art systems. Additionally, we were able to add LVCIDIA stars to the platform, updating in real-time to reflect the properties, names, and owners of each NFT. The immersive platform is shaping up to be everything we’ve dreamed of and more.
Takeaways
However, we’ve also encountered challenges that have shaped our perspective and objective for 2024. Let’s have a look at our takeaways are.
First, it became evident this past year that our collectors’ expectations of LVCIDIA and the team’s core vision were not fully in alignment. While our focus has always been to create a unique and innovative experience, it seems that some people were only interested in extracting value out of staking. We devoted substantial time and resources to crafting the Second Era of Staking and while we’re proud of what we accomplished, we also recognize that it turned into frustration for some collectors, leaving them disappointed with the outcome. In order to preserve our valuable community and more sustainably utilize our resources, we acknowledge the need for strategic shifts regarding staking.
Secondly, our efforts to communicate through various channels, such as our newsletter, blog, socials, Laylo, Shuttlebay and Twitter Spaces, never quite seemed to reach our audience. We continually faced the same questions from our community despite repeated efforts to clearly convey updates across all our channels and we haven’t noticed a satisfying growth in followers. We recognize that we must reduce the number of initiatives we are releasing to craft them more carefully and launch them with more impact. We must also simplify what we are asking from our community and reduce the entry barriers to reach new audiences. Our collectors are the heartbeat of LVCIDIA, so we need to keep providing a level of clear, consistent communication, while also finding new ways to grow our community through our social media.
Finally, LVCIDIA has been a passion project from the very beginning, a fun artistic endeavour. But it became clear this year that LVCIDIA needed to be treated as a real company if we wanted to ensure its longevity. Passion alone can only sustain a project for so long. With that in mind, one of our priorities at LVCIDIA for 2024 will be to diversify our revenue streams and reach new audiences to become financially sustainable. While our close association with Crypto and NFTs has historically served us well, it is also one of the reasons why the launch of our Experiences was not as successful as we hoped. Web3 is often facing a variety of challenges and LVCIDIA has been adversely affected each time. NFTs and blockchain technologies will always be our core business model, but we cannot solely rely on our pre-existing base or wait for a bull run to carry us forward; we need to grow and evolve.
Strategic Changes for 2024
In response to the reflections from 2023, we are excited to announce key strategic changes for the upcoming year:
Admin
- Conduct a review of our performance metrics.
- Reduce the number of ongoing projects and reallocate resources.
- Engage with investors to invigorate growth.
- Work with advisors from Supernova, a digital transformation studio.
- Work with La Piscine, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to catalyze businesses in the cultural and creative sectors.
Unreal Engine
- Relaunch of our immersive platform, offering cutting-edge experiences to our community.
Experiences
- Integrate the LVCIDIA Experiences within the immersive platform to elevate what we are offering to the collectors and the artists
Physical Space
- Create an immersive physical space that complements our digital offerings.
- Make digital art more accessible to the general public
- Make the LVCIDIA Experience an event that lives both in the digital and physical worlds
Finery
- Put the launch of N3 on pause (since the sales numbers for N2 did not live up to internal expectations).
- Allow collectors to use their leftover LVCIDIA Resources earned during staking to buy existing Finery collections
Staking
- Build utility that adds value for stars and planet holders without introducing new NFTs in our ecosystem.
Marketing Efforts
- Keep building the LVCIDIA brand (the next evolution in the museum experience).
- Build the hype around the launch of our immersive platform by showcasing what is being built behind the scenes.
- Push to get more people in our community (art and tech enthusiasts) by creating interesting short video content that showcases digital artists’ work.
As we embark on this new chapter, your continued support and feedback are invaluable to us. LVCIDIA is evolving, and we’re excited to share this journey with you. Thank you for being an essential part of our community.
With gratitude,
Manny, Chief Operating Officer at LVCIDIA
LVCIDIA’s COO.
Awarded artist with over 7 years of experience in marketing.
Fully into web3 since 2021.
