What are CyberBrokers? | Crypto Interview

For anyone not familiar what is CyberBrokers?

CyberBrokers is a digital art collectibles ecosystem centered around 10,001 unique and on-chain NFTs. Each CyberBroker has an identity and backstory that interweaves with ongoing, interactive Lore, community Quests, and related collectible drops.

As a project, we are focused on building out our three core pillars of content, collectibles, and gaming. Overall we aim to create high-quality and technologically advanced digital and physical collectibles, thrilling community experiences, and captivating storytelling and content.

Can you tell us a bit about your personal history as an artist in and out and the crypto space Josie?

In 2017, I left the traditional finance world to join the cultural revolution of crypto. Since then, I’ve been creating art that celebrates and tells the story of the crypto ecosystem. This journey has led me down a path I could have never imagined: I am grateful to have exhibited and sold my artwork at conferences, galleries (including Christie’s and Sotheby’s), and of course, the metaverse. This has all led me to CyberBrokers, a Web3-native company where I can continue to push the boundaries of NFTs and dive deeper into the metaverse.

Who else is working with you on the CyberBrokers project?

We are lucky to have so many talented people on our growing team, and have recently hired a few more! Other than myself, our founding core team members include Ben Heidorn, Christopher Chapman, and Azamat Khairov.

Ben is our Technical Lead and overall a super talented blockchain engineer, game developer, and programmer. He is also the CTO of Blockade Games and a co-creator of Neon District, Plasma Bears, Pineapple Arcade, and Ledger of Szabo. Chris is our brilliant Creative Director, responsible for crafting our lore and all things narrative, and has worked at many diverse organizations you’ve likely heard of, such as The Sandbox, Universal Pictures, and Disney, to name a few. And finally, Azamat is a talented digital artist whom I collaborated with on the entire collection of CyberBrokers and has joined our team to continue to expand our universe visually.

We are also hiring! If you, or someone you know, are an amazing marketer or character technical artist that is passionate about our project, ping us at info@cyberbrokers,io.

What was the inspiration behind CyberBrokers?

CyberBrokers was originally inspired by cryptoart, futuristic fashion, cyberpunk art, innovative tech, and of course, the metaverse. But everything got turbocharged in May 2020, when I first showed Ben the early stages of CyberBrokers art. When we started chatting about the direction of CyberBrokers, one important thing continued to come up: we wanted it to be stored on-chain forever. We became obsessed with the idea of adding the most complex and detailed art possible on-chain. That decision informed the art style in the beginning, and how we could get the most detail possible in an SVG format.

As far as our lore, we were inspired by Ready Player One, Snow Crash, and Neuromancer. Our Creative Director Chris is a huge William Gibson fan. Plus, we took a heavy dose of blockchain and tried to imagine what our lives might look like in a couple of hundred years.

What makes CyberBrokers unique?

It’s hard to choose, but I’ll list the first few that come to mind.

1. CyberBrokers are stored entirely on-chain, in a lossless compressed format that maintains full data integrity. We developed the compression and storage algorithms from scratch, allowing us to store art with exceptionally high fidelity at 1/4th of the storage space and costs. All CyberBrokers can be reconstructed from data on-chain using both on-chain and off-chain decompressors, and will exist permanently within the Ethereum ecosystem, forever. This feat was not easy nor cheap, but despite the challenges, the on-chainness of CyberBrokers has been a mission-critical value since the beginning. We wanted to build something permanent, allowing owners to truly own it.
2. Our universe is centered around lore that is released regularly as chapters and interweaves with our NFTs. We take real-time feedback from our community on things such as plot direction, making it a collaborative, creative process. The Quests also coordinate with the plot! Here is a short snippet of our backstory to help you fall down the rabbit hole: “The earth is frozen. Locked in a modern ice age. The world governments had come together with a plan to save humanity by moving everyone into the metaverse. It had been called “The Paradigm Shift”. The first ten thousand volunteers, ready to light the way, were called CyberBrokers. Everything went wrong. Two centuries later, a complacent human race copes with a great awakening. This is the story of The Paradigm Lost.”
3. The CyberBrokers artwork is comprised of art layers in SVGs that allow them to be composable. For example, you can right-click “save as” and literally undress or redress your Broker, turning off or on each individual layer that it is comprised of. Owners have even played around and created their own layers for fun! Our community has loved this feature and has created some really cool tools to make layer-changing easy.
4. Last but not least, we are very permissive in our licensing. In summary, we granted everybody a full commercial license to do whatever they want with the likeness of their specific CyberBrokers. We can’t wait to see what types of creative endeavors spin out of it!

What are some of the different classes of CyberBrokers?

CyberBrokers have many different traits, but two of the primary ones are the 6 Classes (which include Founders, Creators, Services, Warriors, Explorers, and Leftovers) and the 51 Talents. Don’t worry, I won’t list out all 51 here, but some of my favorites include Cammers, Degens, and Chefs. We feature a new talent on Twitter every day, so stop by and see what makes each so special. If you’re in the mood to read up on each one’s bio, check out the collection on OpenSea and filter by Talent.

What added value have CyberBroker holders had already?

We fully believe in the motto our community has coined, “Less floor, more lore.” We are just about one month out from launch, and although it is amazing where the overall price value is at right now, its not something we focus on.

Beyond that, there are several community-focused initiatives we have launched, or will launch, that we are excited about. 

I mentioned this, but we have kicked off Monthly Quests where the CyberBrokers community, and even non-holders, participate in complex virtual puzzles to unlock new content. After our most recent Quest, participants were airdropped one of two Mech Arms, which will lead to mech crafting at the close of Quest Season 1.

We also are excited to launch our Community Fund in the near future. It’s important to us that we support the community and creators to build around and on top of CyberBrokers. In order to do that, we are allocating some of the funds we have raised specifically for community members to pitch us CyberBroker ideas. If our team and other community members love it, we are going to pay them to actually build it.

The last one I will mention is a Lark exclusive. We are creating a digital comic book series based on the CyberBrokers characters and lore. The first Issue will be released in a matter of weeks, so stay tuned!

We have so much more in our pipeline, but as we always say, we like to under-promise and over-deliver.

What comes next for CyberBrokers?

I’ll leave this one on a bit of a cliffhanger since I mentioned a few things in our pipeline on the earlier question. One thing is for certain: we will continue building out our three core pillars of content, collectibles & gaming in a way that is innovative and stays true to the philosophy of Web3. As a metaverse-native brand, we want to be interoperable and collaborate with other projects and creators as much as possible, extending beyond our universe to make something really exciting. Fostering our community will always be at the forefront of our ethos. Speaking of, we would love for anyone and everyone, holder or non-holder, to join our community on Discord and Twitter. We can’t wait to explore TPL (The Paradigm Lost) with you!