Meet @0xInuarashi, one of the leading solidity developers in the NFT space. Inu has worked on and helped to build countless projects like CyberKongz, Anonymice, GitTrees, Message to Martians, ZenApes, The Littles, Ether Orcs, CryptoHoots, EvoSnails and many more.
What’s the Inuarashi origin story?
INU: I started as a game developer developing MMORPGs before I had to put down programming and do some normal corporate stuff for a while. When COVID happened, I started finishing workdays super early and would get back into programming in my free time.
TEJI: That’s awesome I also grew up on MMORPGs — my favourite was Adventure Quest.
Where does the name Inuarashi come from?
INU: Well, I worked in a space were most developers remained anonymous and so Inuarashi is a character from One Piece, and I like One Piece so yeah.
What was the first game you got into?
INU: I used to be a huge MMO guy — way back I used to play Tibia and of course everyone went through their RuneScape and World of Warcraft phase. The experience playing these games really helped with programming MMORPGs.
TEJI: I wasn’t aware of your history in the MMORPG world which is funny because I’m starting to realise most people who played those games growing up have now all ended up in the same crypto circles.
When did you first discover Bitcoin?
INU: Not long after I started developing games I thought it’d be a good idea to maybe try own some Bitcoin, (it was around $200 at the time) so I decided I was going to either buy one Bitcoin or take $200 and put it into a cloud mining service. I don’t know what I was thinking at the time but I ended up choosing the cloud mining over an entire bitcoin — I ended up getting 0.01 BTC instead of the 1 BTC.. so that was about it for awhile, lol.
TEJI: Haha my first introduction to bitcoin was back when I was 14 when I’d browse The Silk Road in Math class, lol.
What was your first NFT?
INU: I bought a CryptoPunk as my first NFT at the local top for around 24.5 Ξ — right before Ethereum crashed from $4000 to $1000 in a matter of days, so I lost like 70% of my investment and couldn’t sell due to the lack of liquidity in the market. So, I just ended up locking it up in my hardware wallet and got out of NFTs for about a month and in that month, I started learning solidity because I was like fuck, I got to make my money back somehow I guess.
TEJI: Haha blessing in disguise — plus you got to keep your Punk! Big W in my books
What are some of the projects you’ve worked on in the NFT space?
INU: I worked a little bit on front-end stuff for CyberKongz, I’m the lead community dev at Anonymice, I made my first NFT project GitTrees and then I made Message to Martians. I also helped out with ZenApes, The Littles, Ether Orcs, CryptoHoots, EvoSnails and many more. But recently I’ve been working on much more complex contracts that help with gas optimisation.
TEJI: It seems like your becoming one of the goto devs in the space — can’t escape the Inu mouse, lol.
INU: Haha, one of the reasons why I became so well known in the space was I used to analyse smart contracts of upcoming projects and share my findings with the Kongz alpha discord (Wall Street Kongz) and then one day I stumbled upon the Anonymice contract — at the time around only 25% of the supply had been minted and when I saw the code I thought there must have been some very smart people behind the project so I shared it with the Kongz community and it literally minted out within minutes.
I saw the project, liked it very much, decided to make a staking interface for it in like 1–2 hours because I wanted to use it myself and thought other people would like it too and then I became one of the mouse devs.
What is the NFT Meta heading into 2022?
INU: There’s two — play to earn and digital licensing and obviously it’s going to become way more corporate, every single influencer and corporation is going to try make NFTs. The landscape will become harder for indie artists as mainstream artists like Snoop Dog, Drake, Lil Nas and Nicki Minaj enter the space.
There will also be a massive wealth transfer between low-income countries like India and some South-East Asian countries where people will no longer be oppressed by low-income jobs because of these magical play to earn games popping up that are paying more than jobs at 7/11 or McDonalds and it will be like a revolution — crypto is going to save low-income countries and increase these entire countries socioeconomic status. That’s 2022–2024 in my opinion and don’t think the derivatives are going to die anytime soon, lol.
What Play to Earn games do you have your eye on?
Ember Sword, It’s my biggest bull case. They’re trying to build an MMORPG like WoW or RuneScape on the blockchain unlike Axie which is quite casual for the time being. Also watch out for CyberKongz and what they’re releasing in their next phase. Oh and you can’t forget EtherOrcs and the insanity of what they’re doing!
TEJI: I personally really like what the Critterz team are building with their P2E Minecraft server.
INU: Ah yeah, Critterz is very interesting — it’s a very agile model. You see everyone’s trying to build this whole eco-system from the ground up while Critterz just comes along and says f**k your roadmap, f**k your four-year timeline we’re going to just use Minecraft and make play to earn tomorrow.
TEJI: Bullish.
What do you think Indie artists can do to stand out from the corporations entering the space?
Right now, Indie artists have so much potential to make it in the space compared to anywhere else in the world, but I think the trends not going to last as more corporations enter the space with superior management and marketing, but that’s how the world runs eh?
What advice for do you have for builders in the space?
- Don’t get ahead of yourself there’s so many geniuses in blockchain that you don’t know about that will exploit you to hell, be very careful.
- Don’t fork code — understand what each function does, if you have time start reading all the Open Zeppelin libraries
- You got to love it — If you don’t, you’re not going to go the extra mile
TEJI: Awesome! Good luck with your upcoming projects, keep building sir.
INU: Will do, thanks for having me on!