Meet Our Guest
My name is Kotaro. I’ve been building in the space since October 2021. We were initially on a blockchain called ICON, but we recently migrated when SUI came out. We fell in love with the tech, and since then, we’ve been building out our community. We take pride in having the best community on SUI. We were also the top project for 90 days, and we’ve been building many cool and interesting experiences.
Studio Mirai is a project I built. We’re a venture studio that builds experiences and products for people, specifically in DeFi and NFTs. Projects come to us, share their ideas, and we work on them extensively. We create the art, the marketing campaign, the brand narrative, everything, plus the tech. That’s essentially what we’ve been doing for the past few years.
We also have an extensive lore that one of our team members wrote. We have a manga coming out in September. Right now, we have about four books, totaling 20 chapters. It’s a detailed novel, but we’re going to transform it into a manga and maybe, in the future, into an anime.
As for me as a builder, like I said, I joined in 2021. I didn’t have much exposure to crypto before then. My brother, who is also my co-founder, was the one who showed me the ropes and guided me through it. Thank God, because I joined with Shiba Inu as my exposure, which definitely wouldn’t have been healthy if I had kept going down that route.
Before Web 3, I was a filmmaker. I worked in marketing, mainly in universities around my area. When I joined Web 3, I didn’t know where my place was. When I initially decided to be a founder, it was mainly because I didn’t want to work for anyone else. Initially, I did a lot of marketing, which slowly evolved into a creative director role. I ended up getting much more involved in the space. I advise many projects now across chains such as Solana, Ethereum, and Bitcoin. I help projects looking for creative branding, storytelling, and similar aspects.
I also still do videos but mainly for our projects, usually like commercials for upcoming campaigns. The three-year adventure has been a lot of self-learning and adapting to the space.
Why Robots?
I guess there are multiple explanations. First of all, the initial project that launched was called Tamashi. We launched this collection on ICON. Currently, the floor price is around $10,000, and we’re actually migrating to SUI at the end of the year. In our lore, Tamashi are essentially humans that put on these TV-like devices that allow them to plug into a world where they can forget about their current reality. This idea came to me in a dream. I think I had a bit too much to drink and had a weird dream that kickstarted everything.
After that dream, I went to my friend, and we talked about what we could do for the lore. We came up with the idea of robots because we wanted to convey our inspirations into art. Prime Machin, specifically, is the robot that is my current PFP. It’s inspired by black and white. When you get the NFT initially, it comes in black and white, and through engagement, you can color it in. My inspiration comes from growing up watching Gundam and G-Lin; I love mechs. It’s a great opportunity to showcase the details in art. If you zoom into my PFP or anyone’s PFP, you can literally see wire by wire in the art. We focus heavily on that aspect.
We also felt there were too many human and animal collections. It wasn’t really a good chance to set us apart. We wanted to own the robot section. It’s very hard to own the DeFi section; I mean, everybody and their mother’s collection are humans, and the same thing with animals. So, we wanted to go with robots because it gives us a lot of leg room no matter what type of art style we do. We have some pixel robots, 3D robots, and 2D robots. It always allows us to show as much detail as possible. It also fits into this mob mentality because a robot army makes sense. So, that’s why we chose robots.
What’s $KOTO?
$Koto is never meant to be a token that people trade. $Koto is always meant to be an engagement token. You can literally get it just from joining our events and interacting with other people on the Discord. So, the actual price action of the $Koto token is not something that we plan to manage at all.
In terms of $Koto utility, right now we have Coloring Level 1, and Coloring Level 2 is coming out. We also have Koto Tax for receiving items. Each NFT in our Prime Machin is its own NFT. You can drop assets and other NFTs into Prime Machin, so one Prime Machin can hold a Prime Machin that holds a Prime Machin that holds some SUI. Every time you claim something from a Prime Machin, you pay some $Koto.
In the future, we have an Enforcer Machin upgrade, where all the NFTs are split up based on traits. People can swap and create their custom Prime Machins using $Koto. We also have ideas for dropping merch. If you own a specific Prime Machin with a specific t-shirt, you can reserve that t-shirt and order it using $Koto. We have five merch items coming out probably by the end of the year. All of the $Koto that gets used is burned. I think we’ve already burned like 5%.
$Koto is mainly an engagement token. We host events almost every other day in the Discord, from Pokémon openings to AMAs to game nights. People can earn $Koto from that. We also make it a requirement that you have to own a Prime Machin. Instead of checking if an address owns a Prime Machin, we just send it to the Prime Machin. If there’s engagement for someone else’s Prime Machin, so be it, but either way, it’s going to a Prime Machin.
Using $Koto, you’ll probably get a discount. $Koto isn’t that liquid, so we’re aiming for Christmas, but if it gets pushed, it gets pushed. Recently, I tweeted about our first shipments going out. This is for the Doomi jacket, a super bougie green varsity jacket with the Nozomi University logo, which is part of our IP lore. I’m a huge non-believer of putting PFPs on merchandise; I think it’s super ugly. We’re always trying to create merchandise based on the t-shirts that the Prime Machins are wearing. Those will be created eventually.
Why Black And White?
The biggest inspiration for Prime was manga. In the original manga days, it always started off black and white, and then eventually, you’d get the color copy, and finally, an updated color copy, followed by the anime. We want people to decide which one they want. Since they’re all on-chain objects, when you color in a black and white one, it destroys the black and white and replaces it with the color. You actually get Sui back because, on Sui, if you destroy something, you get a rebate. So, the black and white disappears and is replaced with the color. It’s always interesting to see who chooses to color theirs and who doesn’t.
We have level two coming out, which lets you color in any color you want. The metadata will still show the original color, but externally, it will display the custom colors. We’re planning to release this in the next few months. If everything goes well this week, there will be an announcement about level two, but the details are still redacted at the moment.
Level Up Nfts / Trait Nfts/ CODA/ Mirai Labs
So, Pokémon has an item called Rare Candy, which you give to a Pokémon, and it levels up automatically and then disappears. A level-up NFT is essentially the same thing: you give it to an Enforcer, it levels up, and then it disappears. Traits, however, don’t disappear; they can be added, removed, and traded. So, traits and bases will have their collections, and you can trade those. Every two weeks or so, we’ll launch new traits, and people can reserve them with $Koto and other means. We’re still working through the details, as there’s been much more tech since we initially designed this concept. We’re definitely going to utilize as much tech as possible and push the boundaries because Prime did many different things for the first time, and we want to do the same with Enforcer.
Now, on another topic, when I was doing research on Studio Mirai, I saw that you have a vision of building Web 2 apps with Web 3 tech. Then I found something called CODA, but there isn’t much info yet. Can you give us info, or is it still under wraps?
It’s still under wraps, but TL;DR, we’re rebuilding the music industry from the ground up. Both my co-founder and I grew up as piano players. My brother has been in the music industry for over 10 years; he worked at Disney, on Broadway, and on many shows around the world. He’s very deep into the music industry. I don’t work in the music industry, but I’ve been performing for about 20 years at different shows. I played piano and was in a band, so we’re both deeply involved in the music industry. This is something we’re building for that. I can’t talk about anything else because we’re in stealth mode right now.
I also saw in Mirai Labs that there was something about holders of the derivatives of the Tamashi collection working hand in hand with the team to make some artistic changes or do something art-wise on Mirai Labs. Will Mirai Labs be handling artist interactions and music interactions?
Yes, Mirai Labs is essentially the B2B tech-building branch of Studio Mirai. Studio Mirai is about the story, the Nozomi IP, and the community. Mirai Labs is about the products we build. Mirai Labs technically builds Studio Mirai, CODA, and some other redacted projects. We have four (4) artists: one who does our marketing, one who works on secret stuff I can’t talk about, Jay, who works on the Prime stuff and the pugs, and Ethan, who does the manga. We’re a very creative team.
Plans On Bringing people Into Sui Ecosystem
Right now, the cult seems to be forming strongly around Sui, but not many people know about it in other ecosystems.
We want to capture most of the people in Sui first. Tomorrow’s partnership should help, as it will connect a bunch of creatives and put us on the map for them. We also plan to collaborate with projects outside of Sui, like on Ethereum and Avalanche, to host co-ed events. This will probably happen in August. We’re also constantly pushing our events around the world.
CODA is also an app that isn’t strictly Web 3, so our focus isn’t just on reaching out to people in different chains but on reaching out to people who don’t know they’re using Sui. Our big target is consumer apps. In the short to mid-term, we have a lot of events and community activities planned. We’re one of the few NFT projects on Sui really pushing the tech. For example, 4K on-chain isn’t possible on any other chain. We’re pushing that even further soon, but I can’t talk about it yet.
I want you to understand that we want to fortify our community first. Moving from ICON to Sui was a good decision because the tech of Sui NFTs aligns with our vision.
So, NFTs on Sui can receive other objects. Have we experienced any cases where a Prime Machin has been sold with another object in it? For example, if a Prime Machin is worth $300 and comes with an airdrop worth $100, you would be paying $300 for the Prime Machin but also getting an extra $100 bounty.
Yes, we’ve done this. We’ve been dropping random items into the floor Prime Machins for a while. People have bought NFTs that literally have a SuiLend account attached to them. SuiLend does a thing where they wrap their accounts into an NFT, and you can trade the NFT. If I put $10,000 in my SuiLend and transfer my SuiLend NFT, I lose the $10,000, and the new person gets it. We collaborated with SuiLend and airdropped accounts with $5 each into a bunch of Prime Machins. Some people bought a Prime Machin with a SuiLend account inside. They can go to their dashboard, click claim, and it takes them straight to SuiLend with their position opened.
We don’t ask people for addresses for airdrops because we can just take a snapshot or send it directly to the NFT. This way, people don’t miss out on airdrops because they forgot to book or send a wallet address. We want to ensure that people never feel left out.
We will always build on Sui. Sui is much Alive to us and we enjoy everyone to embrace it and lets grow together.
