Galverse #6 - Gals in Paris, Harajuku, Art Matsuri and more!
Art Matsuri is Almost Over!
In the newsletter last month, we'd only just announced the upcoming Galverse Art Matsuri - our first ever art competition - and now entries are almost due!
In the meantime, we've had some awesome announcements and seen soooo much amazing art from the Galverse community and beyond.
First up... Our amazing guest judges!
Three of our Web3 heroes agreed to join us as guest judges in the Art Matsuri!
Betty, the horde mother of Deadfellaz! Betty is an absolute trailblazer in Web3 and heads up one of the space's strongest communities!
Clon, the artist of Cool Cats! Clon is the chillest cat in the world, and we love his cool creations.
Naoki Saito, illustrator of Megami! Naoki has over a million art students across his online channels, and encourages everyone's creative spirit.
We already met with Betty and Clon at NFT NYC - and Ayaka managed to catch up with Naoki-san at a Megami exhibition in Tokyo too!
We're committed to a fair judging process, so the Galverse Team won't be taking part - it will be a blind scoring survey where our Guest Judges will only see the artwork in front of them, to ensure it's fair!
We are adding even more prizes to the mix - we already had over 8 ETH worth of prizes up for grabs! But, we've been so inspired by how many entries we've received so far, so there'll be even more Gal NFTs for our amazing artists to win.
We've also got some amazing community choice prizes up for grabs. Of course, there'll be Gal NFTs available - but the headline item is an amazing pair of custom Gal Nike AF1s!
Hand painted by sneaker OG and certified Gal SekureD, these are wearable works of art that will get shipped anywhere in the world.
The pair below were an initial custom with Emi's Gal - but the #1 Community Favorite artist will receive a pair with their own Gal emblazoned on the side.
We're also throwing in a custom Gal art commission from community artist DRΞS13! DRΞS put together one of the first Gal commissions ever back in May, just after launch day - and we've been waiting to get another piece done ever since.
We'll show off some entries further down the newsletter!
The Art Matsuri was dreamed up with the hope that we'd inspire the Galverse community's creativity, bring new artists and community members in, and see the world, lore and characters interpreted through fresh eyes.
The whole team has been absolutely blown away by the results! There are so many talented people all over the world - it's humbling.
Gals in Paris!
Emi and Devin were also humbled to be invited to Paris to speak at the NFTin Europe conference! This is one of the coolest NFT conferences in the world - having recently had a stellar session in the US back in March.
Attended by great artists, designers and industry legends, and curated by the best of the best, it was a real honor for the team to get two chances to share the Galverse story.
Even better, it took place in the beautiful, historical Théâtre du Gymnase in the heart of Paris.
Emi got up on stage and shared her personal story in NFTs - from minting music, helping her son with Zombie Zoo, and the formation of Shinsei Galverse. It's an awesome story, and the crowd loved it!
Devin did a deep dive behind-the-scenes of creating Galverse. All of the nitty-gritty bits and bytes of generating artwork, metadata, and launching them into the world. So many hours of work went into launching Galverse - it must be cathartic to share it with the world!
There was also a Galverse exhibition onsite - of course, we asked our superstar Gal Holders in Paris and beyond to let us share their Gals with the conference attendees.
Both talks will be published online soon, in wonderful high resolution video. Please stay tuned to Twitter and Discord!
Gals in Harajuku!
Emi and Ayaka spent a September weekend at Laforet Harajuku for the "Hello my name is NFT" event!
Another chance to meet superstar Gal Holders and introduce the project to new fans and community members too!
They set up a stand with artworks and giveaways of the Galverse project - including some of Ayaka's concept art for upcoming projects!
Check out community member Asami's VTuber diary of the event on the tweet below! Ayaka did some live painting of her Gal.
Even More Exhibitions!
64 gals were exhibited at the Tokyo Digital Art Gallery in September as well!
We have more events coming up in October. We're working on a better way of keeping track who'd like their Gals shown in Exhibitions, and where they are located in case they can visit IRL - so we don't have to ask every time something comes up!
Inked!
This level of commitment to the Galverse deserves its own section.
One of our amazing community members, Benoit, got inked!
His Gal, Litzy Matter, now holds a permanent position on his arm (and in our hearts). Pictured below at the Tokyo Digital Art Gallery!
Gals on the Page!
We were featured in Vogue Japan in August, and in September we featured again at their Vogue Alive party in Tokyo.
Amazing artist Ayaka as well as Gal community members Ren and Benoit went along to check it out! You can see Vogue Gal on the wall back there.
The media in Japan continue to keep an eye on Galverse too. Forbes featured Emi in an awesome interview that covered her journey as a badass Gal and entrepreneur - a real dream come true!
Gals also made the pages of Elle Japan, next to Bored Apes and below our good Friend of Galverse, amazing artist Sputniko!
Sneaker Freaker, one of the best sneaker mags out there, picked up SekureD's work on the custom Emi AF1s as well! We're in good company!
Head here for Sneaker Freaker’s Monthly Mods series to see the best custom sneakers of September.
Gal Collabos
It was a great month for Galpha. Gal Holders got access to two awesome free mints for two very unique projects!
Kumaleon is a generative art project by some of our friends in Tokyo, part of the team behind Generative Masks - an OG Japanese NFT project!
The Kumaleon character a 3D mascot that has a generative art texture applied over it. You can even apply another NFT you own as a texture for the Kumaleon! It got a heap of hype in Japanese and Western NFT circles.
We've been chatting to the team at Heroic Story for a long time! You might remember Heroic Story as the team that created this awesome Pplpleasr Gal derivative artwork, and also animated Ayaka's Gremplin Gal!
They've been working on a lot of cool projects, and most recently they gave the Galverse community the opportunity to mint their 'Fortunata World Pass' NFT.
The World Pass lets community members join a massively-multiplayer Dungeons and Dragons game, held over discord! They can jump into scheduled sessions with professional DMs and world's story is always moving.
It's an awesome concept, and their mint sold out - congratulations and thanks for giving our community the opportunity!
We have more awesome Galpha opportunities coming up next month, and some special art and community collabos cooking in the kitchen too.
Please stay tuned for more exciting news from the Galverse collaboration department!
Devin's Desk!
Check out #☕│Devin's Desk, the latest channel in the Galverse discord! Devin has started streaming work on the upcoming storefront, gal profiles and manga typesetting!
Building on our WAGMAA principles of transparent creation, Devin is now streaming his design work live to Gal Holders on a regular basis. Tune in to see sneak peeks of upcoming projects and developments.
We've been inspired by Sally Danger's awesome streaming work while developing our Gal VTubers, so the whole team is thinking about what else we can create with the doors open!
VTuber Beta Updates!
We announced the launch of the Gal VTubers beta a month ago, and there's been so much action since then!
Our first 30 VTuber beta Gals have been distributed to community members, and they've been busy creating amazing content and experimenting with how to use them.
We've seen Gals singing, dancing, streaming games, making travel video and photo diaries and more! Check out Sally's adorable song with Asami below.
Kurumi Gal is cleaning up Japan! Are we witnessing the creation of a TikTok superstar?
Game streaming is popular too! Here's a screenshot of Yuki with her game face on! Some other Gals are getting ready to start streaming Nintendo Switch games too.
Other Gals have been testing out the two player functionality of Voltaku's Vodcasto app. And Sally has been keeping us up to date with all of her rigging and creation work!
Check out that hair bounce on Chels Gal below!
Manga Sneak Peek!
Ayaka has been working super hard on the next pages on Galverse Manga! They'll be up on the website for Gal Holders very soon!
We'll get to meet some of the characters that were named by our community during the WAGMAMANGA contests not long ago.
Friends of Galverse!
The Friends of Galverse contract is live, and we've been minting FoGs for our FoGs since then!
It's an ongoing creative process that involves a lot of custom metadata and feedback from our friends to make sure their Gals reflect their true Gal selves! It's quite fun to poke through the custom stories and metadata.
We'll be introducing even more Friends to the Galverse community soon enough.
"Making the galaxy cooler one planet at a time!"
WAGMAA on the Way!
We're deep in negotiations on the anime production, right now! These are happening under NDA, and out of respect to our potential partners, we can't give away any big details just yet.
The team is all feeling very optimistic about where we're at and what we can share in the months to come. We're confident that it won't be long before we move into 'Phase 2' of Galverse - when the gates on WAGMAA open and the community get involved too!
As mentioned, we're taking inspiration from our work to date on sharing VTubers, Manga, and more - all of which will inform how we work together to create this radical new piece of media!
Listen into September's Town Hall for a deeper dive into WAGMAA status.
Amazing Art Matsuri Entries!
We wanted to share some awesome entries into the Art Matsuri here!
There are way too many amazing artworks to post them all in this newsletter. The posts below also won't impact our guest judges' decisions at all - we just wanted to highlight some of the creative, diverse entries we've received so far!
Tweets of the Month!
We loved seeing Ava's working process for her Art Matsuri entry!
Is it the 90's again? Ayaka's sticker book was inspired by the old days, collecting and trading stickers with other cool Gals! We think the sticker book is going to make a come back...
EdoLena and some of other amazing Gal Pals met up at the 'Hello my name is NFT' event. We love meeting Gals IRL!
Coming Soon...
What in Mother's name is this..?!
The path forward!
Team Galverse has really been working hard over the last month. On top of all the public projects and collabos you've seen, a lot of September's efforts went into preparing for the busy months ahead.
October's newsletter will be even more jam packed, we think!
And that's it!
