CyberBrokers: Building A Universe & Beyond

By Josie Bellini, CEO & Founder

Hey brokers, it's Josie. 😻🖖🖤🔥

It's been 7 months since we started this journey. On-chain madness, art, lore, Quests, merch, events, and more. We’ve built out the foundation of our entire universe, with you guys as our copilots. So THANK YOU for joining the ride so far!

I am excited to tell you that this is just the tip of the iceberg. We are building an entire universe and are about to kick it up to level 💯. But before I dive into this vision, I want to share a bit about what we have done and discovered in the past 7 months. 

What We’ve Discovered

We have expanded our vision of who we are and what we do. At its core, CyberBrokers is a metaverse-native media and entertainment company. We have three pillars that guide us in every decision we make.

Content

The story is everything. It’s the foundation of our universe. We are creating an entire world through a plethora of multimedia content; text, audio, and video, and we will be using innovative technologies like AI and XR as a force multiplier. The infrastructure and parameters for our world are being built so that people who want to build within it, can. User-generated content (UGC) is extremely powerful because it empowers fans to become part of the story, interweaving their own narratives and even personal identities. The massive universe we are building will have our creative team’s hand on the rudder, but pockets of the world will be of your own design if you so choose.

Collectibles

The narrative gives the art meaning, and art gives the narrative texture. This is why creating digital, and even physical, collectibles is such an important part of our mission. Crypto inspired me to become an artist and taught me the meaning of creating for a greater purpose - on a level that an entire community can connect with. Every collectible we release will be done with purpose and intent, thoughtfully interweaving with our storyline and providing relevancy, and texture, to our universe. As we ramp up the release of collectibles in the coming year, you can look out for these thoughtful tie-ins and easter eggs, even if you may not see them clearly yet.

Experiences

Experiences add layers of interactivity to both the art and story, providing opportunities for our fans to contribute to, play with, or simply just be immersed within the universe. This will include both digital and physical experiences and all things in between (think mixed reality). Physical experiences will include conferences, meetups, popups, installations, events, and beyond, while virtual experiences will include digital layers of the former along with Quests, gamified elements, XR, and more. I’ve seen firsthand the power of community and shared experiences, and know that in order for us to take CyberBrokers to the next level we need to support each other and create a dynamic playground.

What We’ve Built

• The original CyberBrokers Collection of 10,001 unique, on-chain, kickass collectible art pieces

• 13 Chapters of The Paradigm Lost lore
  

• 12 audio versions of the lore narrated by the incredible Supermassive. British accents are just the best

• 5 online ARG-style Quests to thrill our fans

• ~70k collectible TPL Mecha Parts (which will be used to craft full useable 3D mechs 💪)
  

• Produced an insanely cool IRL party in New York City during NFT NYC 
  

• Created a Community Fund to support community-led projects like the Lost Paradigms banner project, Pixie Bolt AI, and more

• Encouraged the community to take advantage of their CyberBrokers commercial license, enabling projects like Player Zero’s Web3 popstar Amari of Medina

• Developing a beautiful and dynamic website to house our entire CyberBrokers universe. (Coming soon!)

• Developing a mech Reveal and Assembly website, along with fully-rigged 3D mech assets
  

Team

Continuing with the theme of building, let’s chat about our team. Obviously, it is not just me behind the scenes. You can't build the future of the metaverse with a one-man army: it takes a whole village of fanatics to change the world. Our growing team is now up to 13 talented people, with backgrounds ranging from Disney, Magic the Gathering, Marvel, and more. Our passionate team is on an unstoppable mission to make CyberBrokers touch every corner of the world.

What’s Coming

Alright, now to the good stuff. We have some things coming down the pipeline we can share. (But we can't share everything just yet!)

CyberBrokers Core

We are developing a social, dynamic, interactive website called the CyberBrokers “Core,” where the entire CyberBrokers universe will be housed. We are in the metaverse after all, it’s only appropriate to have the most insanely breathtaking website possible.

Traditionally, most websites are pretty static and boring, with no real reason to keep coming back. But we decided to flip that premise on its head and go full CyberBrokers. We could tell you more about it, but we would rather show you. We will release a full blog in the near future with an in-depth behind-the-scenes look at the entire process.

World-Building

Over the coming months, we are diving deep into our Lore to expand it like never before, led by our new Creative Producer who has expertise in narrative design. Our next season will be hyper-focused on world and character-building and setting the stage for future narratives and spinoffs. What we’ve written so far is our prologue: we introduced you to the environment, characters, and landscapes. Now the real fun begins.

Creative Innovation (AI, AR, VR, 3D, and Beyond)

We want to continue to push boundaries and use any and every technology that adds layers to our world. This has started taking shape with Pixie Bolt AI, an AI-powered text-to-image service in the CyberBrokers Discord that empowers users to become artists in their own right. Our community has already generated ~30,000 unique images over the course of just three months, which is proof to us how powerful enabling our community’s creativity is.

Our use of new tech will take many shapes but could include things like filters, animations, marketing and gaming activations, fashion, and more. The possibilities are endless. There is also something special about the marriage between these tools and UGC. Stay tuned as we will be pushing these boundaries very soon. 😎

Questing

It’s been great to watch our community solve our first set of Quests, but in the next season, we are excited to open this up to be accessible and engaging to questers of all skill levels. (Don't worry, we’ll still have something for you big brains, it will just look a bit different.) Quests will be more frequent and have ways to participate at your own pace, along with both solo and community tasks. We are actively working with an expert game designer to balance and polish exactly how this will take shape, but we plan to release an MVP version Q1 2023 with continual iteration. In general, faster production times with continuous iteration is something our team is focusing on a lot in this next chapter.

In our new questing experience, players will be able to:

• Collect resources 

• Use resources to craft cool items, like accessories and weapons

• Level up Mechs

• Specialize Mechs to do unique things 

• And much more, which we won't reveal just yet!

Mech Utility

For now, a mech is needed to play future Quests and participate in the new crafting ecosystem. This means that we will eventually need more mechs, or other TPL travel equipment (vehicles, power suits, etc.) as the metaverse and our community grow. To be clear, this set of mechs you have earned through questing is the GENESIS set of mechs, and in the future, we may release more mechs that will look very different from this Genesis set.

Remember, mechs need operators and can not be used by themselves, which means that you will either need a CyberBroker or a Drifter to operate them. Or perhaps even some not-so-obvious characters in the future….

CyberBrokers will always be the premier access point into the CyberBrokers universe, and Quests are no exception. CyberBroker holders who pilot mechs will have access to exclusive Quests, rewards, or resources.

Mech Assembly

We are developing an incredible website experience for our community to assemble their TPL mechas, launching in two parts. First, there will be a “burn to reveal” of the official mecha components, where users can visualize their reward inventory of 2D NFT assets and unveil the beautiful 3D versions they represent (hint, they will look completely different than the 2D versions, and there will be a lot of variety! A full Lupis set may get you a mixed draw of any of the Lupis themes). We’ll give everyone a few weeks to trade and make sure they have all of their favorite forever parts. Finally, we will launch the “Assembly” portion of the website, where you can assemble, customize, and then mint a fully-rigged 3D mech.

Drifters

For those who haven't caught up with the lore, Drifters are humans within the CyberBrokers universe that periodically escape the frigid desolate IRL world to live in the metaverse alongside CyberBrokers.

Drifter NFTs of all shapes and sizes will eventually be available for purchase on our Core, and although it will always be more advantageous to have a CyberBroker in your inventory, Drifters will be an additional entry point into our community and Quest ecosystem. We plan to do a ton of cool things with Drifters, including releasing beautiful accessories that will make them an extremely fun canvas for you to represent yourself digitally. Drifters will take some time to perfect, so stay tuned! (“Stay tuned” as in - don’t ask us about them every single day or else we just might stop giving you early Alpha 😉.)

Q&A

Here are some other common questions we’ve been asked that I haven’t been able to elaborate on above.

• Is mech battling a thing?

  • As mentioned above, we will constantly iterate on Quests to make them even better, and although this next Cycle will be focused on resourcing and crafting gameplay, players will be accumulating accessories and weapons to bolster their mech’s stats in preparation for an eventual mech battling game far down the road (games take a very long time to build!). 

• Do you have any more information on MirrorWare?

  • I had originally created CyberBrokers as a way to kickstart MirrorWare to build in parallel with the CyberBrokers universe, but after launch, I quickly realized that MirrorWare needed to be put on pause so I could position CyberBrokers exactly where it needs to be. We’ll share updates on MirrorWare as soon as we have them. 

• Are comics coming? 

  • Eventually, yes. We did a bit of reprioritization and are now more focused on building out the visual content around our main storyline through things like animations and world-building illustrations. 

• Can we still expect bespoke art prints?

  • There are a few logistical hurdles we are working through, but this is still very much something we want to bring to holders around the world. We will provide an update on this as soon as we have one - hopefully soon!

• What type of creative license do I have as a CyberBroker holder?

  • We have granted collectors a full commercial license to create and monetize with the likeness of their own specific CyberBrokers. This type of license further strengthens the CyberBrokers I.P. overall, and it uplifts the entire community and universe we are building together. More details on our terms of use and licensing will be available on our website. 

• Do you have any marketing planned?

  • 100%! We have built out an expert marketing team to amplify everything we do in multiple channels. Bringing more people into our awesome community in innovative ways will be a huge focus for us in this next chapter. 

Thank You

There you have it - our past, present, and a small taste of our future. We are so confident about what’s coming next, and can’t wait for it to unfold with you as our copilots. I also want to say we are so grateful to have been able to take the time to build in the sandbox, experiment, learn, and soak up all of your feedback. Our hyperfocus on our vision has given us a clear path forward that we are positive will make waves throughout the metaverse (and even Web2!). Now it’s time to rig up and plug into TPL. 🔌