Untamed Elephants

We sat down with Untamed Elephants to learn more about their project.

What are Untamed Elephants?

Untamed Elephants is in the history books as the first charity-driven NFT community on both Ethereum and Ordinals. Our goal is to innovate around web3 impact while enriching our holders.

How did you come up with the idea to use NFTs for charity?

There are lots of great web2 businesses that innovate around a social mission or charity. We wanted to take their lead but for web3. Many web3 projects might donate once or twice but we work closely with the non-profits to push the envelope.

Tell us about the partnerships and synergies between merch products like wine that are to be used with NFT purchases.

We’ve done a lot of great synergies. We worked with Saving Ganesh in Asia to take our holders on a two week adventure in Sri Lanka to help elephants. We worked with Save the Elephants to name four of their wild elephants and create our Conservation Card fine art collection. We made our own wine brand, called Hello Fam, which was the first web3 wine brand. We recently collaborated with Reddit to bring our art to their avatars platform.

What has the reaction been from the broader NFT community to Untamed Elephants?

Our community is die-hard and we build in public with them and learn about elephants and conservation efforts alongside them. 

A tough balance we have is that a lot of NFT investors in the greater ecosystem are purely financially motivated so we have to balance how we help our holders with how we help an important cause.

How did you first hear about Arweave and ArDrive?

Like many projects, we used IPFS and Pinata for many years. But it’s not a good long-term solution. We want our project to survive forever and IPFS requires a centralized entity to constantly pin the data or else it disappears. We were drawn to Arweave to give our community permanent storage; it’s one less thing to worry about. 

ArDrive was an elegant solution to uploading and manifesting all our images to Arweave. 

What was the process like getting your NFTs onto ArDrive?

First we downloaded all metadata and images from IPFS. Then we setup a wallet on ArDrive and added AR token to it. Then we used ArDrive to mass-upload all the files. Finally, once the files were there, we created a manifest and pointed our smart contracts to the manifest.

What are hopes and plans for Untamed Elephants in the future?

We have three hopes:

(1) Set the standard for how a web3 project can innovate around impact

(2) Our ConservationCards.org fine art collection becomes globally recognized in galleries/museums

(3) Operate a model elephant rescue sanctuary in Asia using our connections. We would need much more resources to do this but a lot of web3 projects have greater resources so it’s possible!