Hi Ramen Lovers! We have been working hard behind the scenes and we wanted to give you a big progress update on what we have been working on.

After our shaky mint, we wanted to come up with a strategy that rewards our diamond holders and the community that stuck with us throughout.

What Went Wrong With the Mint

While our project was unique and we offered utility that had never been seen before, we failed when it came to NFT strategy. We also did not handle the post mint well due to our lack of experience in the space and that along with the issue mentioned below, caused our mint to fail despite our best intentions and despite releasing our utility even before the mint.

Since the start, we were researching where other projects were failing and/or succeeding as to follow the best route for our minting process and tick all the boxes. This included allocating only half of the whitelist spots to give everyone a chance to mint 2 and having the smart contract audited by other developers outside of our own project.

Unfortunately we were too focused on the smart contract and overlooked an issue we had on our minting dapp which did not connect to the smart contract well. We had tested this issue on the rinkeby test network but as soon as we uploaded it on the ethereum network it went wrong. This miscommunication between the minting website and the smart contract allowed anyone to mint regardless if they were whitelisted or not. We had paused the contract and had the issue fixed within a few hours.

Our main focus since our launch has been to come up with the best strategies that bring the most value to our holders and rewarding our biggest supporters no matter the price we have to pay ourselves. Along with that, we have hired and partnered with people that are more educated in the space than us to help us provide more for our holders.

Growing The Team

The first step we took was to expand our team. We hired people that can not only help us keep the discord fun but that can also help us come up with new strategies, bring more utility and bring in even more ramen shops to our network.

The first person that joined our team was Kankan8.
He has been in the ramen shop restaurant business for 20 years and has grown a big network of restaurant managers. He is experience does not only include ramen shops but also a bakery, a curry store, and an izakaya. He is now running 4 ramen shops in Nagoya, Japan and they are all collaborating with us to provide value to our users. His company deals with commercial kitchen equipment and provides consulting services for opening restaurants as well as kitchen design, sales and repair. Now he is also in the business of consulting other restaurants and attracting customers online . He can provide his consulting services to ramen shop owners working with us or anyone looking to open a ramen shop.
Through our NFT, he wants to advertise ramen shops and other restaurants in the metaverse and to create a new era for the future.
Ramen Shops he currently manages:

Yokohama Iekei Ramen Ginya 8–7, Tsubaki-cho, Nakamura-ku, Nagoya-shi, Aichi, Japan
https://goo.gl/maps/Kss48mQqQADjQXjJ8

Yokohama Iekei Ramen Deraya 4–13–6 Meieki, Nakamura-ku, Nagoya-shi, Aichi, Japan
https://goo.gl/maps/gszpUUdouFdEYNRdA

Kajiken (Nagoya Station West Exit Branch) 5–5 Tsubaki-cho, Nakamura-ku, Nagoya-shi, Aichi
https://goo.gl/maps/JWQdrKcgutRKUrKz7

Fujiyama55 (Nagoya Station West Exit Branch)8–7, Tsubaki-cho, Nakamura-ku, Nagoya-shi, Aichi, Japan
https://goo.gl/maps/asKu1Fvj2XFeuARN6

We are truly honoured to have him as part of our team and he is doing his absolute best not only to educate other Ramen Shops about the NFT space but to also educate the NFT space about Ramen Shops and provide consulting services to anyone looking to join the space.

— — —

The second person we hired was our strategist/advisor Darknighthimself who, aside of being a musician, is an NFT strategist, a Project Advisor, a collaboration manager and is part of some of the most prestigious teams in the NFT space, such as the Neo Tokyo Outreach Team, Dutch Crypto Investors, wgmi.io and AMNFT.
He has been helping us come up with strategies to bring this project to new heights. His experience in the NFT space has helped us close more deals with web3 companies and get a better understanding of what users outside of our project like to be seeing.
He will make sure that our awesome real-life utility and creative art translates to a solid floor on Opensea and as well as an esteemed reputation in the NFT space, while designing a long term strategy that will ensure our next mints will be a success.

— — —

Thirdly, we expanded our discord community team by bringing in more community mods. NikkyNFT, Kozy and Kevin. The mods we brought in were all supporters of the project since before the mint and are excited to be part of our community and help grow our project together!

Genesis Collection

One of our main priorities is to reward our holders and especially our diamond hands who truly believe in what we are building and are giving us their utmost support.

It was unfair for our holders not having the chance to claim their free ramen since the legendaries had not been minted. To battle this, we decided to cap the collection at 600 supply and include the legendaries in the updated supply.
Furthermore, we minted the remaining supply to 600 ourselves and transfered the NFTs to our holders. We will also be giving away the 1/1 Ramen Nagi NFT that allows holders to claim free ramen to our biggest holders/supporters. We are keeping the other 4 legendaries delisted until extra utility is attached to them similar to the Ramen Nagi NFT and we will be giving them out as well as soon as this is in place. This will allow the other holders of the legendaries to reap the benefits of the extra utility and for us to provide even bigger ramen deals in other countries and regions.

In our case, burning the remaining supply will reward our current holders by making our OG community even more exclusive, which means that the value that will be brought will be way less diluted.

In order to do this, we had to transfer the collection to a new contract. We created a new collection on Opensea and we have already sent everyone the tokens they owned. The previous collection will be deleted as to not create any confusion and help us focus on bringing even more value to our current holders. As of right now, the only way to join the Ramen NFT community is to either buy on OpenSea or follow the community updates for upcoming contests and games to grant you a free NFT. As for our holders, you don’t need to do anything, you should already have your new NFT in your wallets and gas fees had been paid by us for all 600 NFTs and transfers to each wallet.

Rewarding Diamond Hands: Staking

We wanted to bring in more use cases for our NFTs and for our holders to be able to interact with them. Along with that, we wanted to introduce extra utility and find a fairer and clearer way to reward our biggest supporters. This staking option will come with additional top tier utilities in the web 3 space as well. With The Ramen Shop, diamond hands and long term holders are always greatly appreciated and generously rewarded.

Some of the benefits staking will have to our Ramen Lovers are:

• Receive whitelist spots from other NFT projects based on staking period (longer stake = earlier access to the WL giveaway)
• Percentage chance or guaranteed chance for free NFT airdrops based on staking period
• Receive discount and/or free NFT tools from Web3 Companies based on staking period
• 1 or more free NFTs from our second collection based on staking period and amount of NFTs staked
• Ramen shop discount benefits and freebies will only apply to staked NFTs regardless of staking period (excluding the legendaries)

We noticed that we focused too much on real life utility and wanted to bring even more value as Web3 utility. This is why we are increasing the amount of free NFTs and airdrops we are giving away to reward our active discord members participating in competitions and giveaways as well as our diamond hands. One of our priorities right now is to help our holders profit from our collection by pushing the floor price for our true supporters. Holding & staking more than 1 ramen shop genesis NFT might grant you access to some even more exclusive benefits.

Community Events

Due to the time we spent planning our next moves and the lack of team members, we have not been hosting any community events. Part of the reason why we expanded our team was to mitigate this and increase the amount of community events both on discord and on twitter drastically. You can expect regular voice chats, giveaways, community games and competitions, bonding events and ofcourse educational sessions as well as more frequent updates and behind the scene works by us. Even if the competitions end up being non-NFT related, you can expect to be rewarded in other ways depending on the competition. An example of this could be video game competitions with in game items given as rewards.

Marketing

When it comes to marketing, we are putting more effort not only in design but also in the collaborations we have with other projects and companies to increase our brand reach and relay the message of our vision and our utility in a better way to newcomers. We are doing this to increase activity in our discord server, volume on Opensea and network with other projects in the space. Along with this, there will be more giveaways hosted, AMAs and frequent community updates.

Socials

We created a Linktree to better organise our socials and include even more websites to help us structure our information better. This will include medium posts, whitepaper links, a completely new website that will keep being updated as the project moves forward. Along with this, some information such as ramen shops we are collaborating with was hard to find, so we wanted to structure this in a way so that newcomers can find such information more easily.

Ramen Shop Partners

We are proud to announce 2 more ramen shops joining us from Japan which are also part of international chains.

FUJIYAMA 55 is a franchise chain with 50 stores in Japan and 20 stores overseas (China, Thailand, Indonesia, France, and the Netherlands).

FUJIYAMA55 8–7, Tsubaki-cho, Nakamura-ku, Nagoya-shi, Aichi, Japan

https://www.instagram.com/55nagoya/

https://twitter.com/55nagoyaeki

Kajiken, is another ramen chain with 60 outlets, 5 in Singapore and almost 10 in China.

Kajiken 5–5 Tsubaki-cho, Nakamura-ku, Nagoya-shi, Aichi

twitter @kajiken_nagoya

https://www.kajiken.biz/shop/nagoya_w/

We are now targeting the US market as well as expanding the countries covered by the chains we are already working with. U.S, U.K, China, Thailand, Indonesia, France, Germany, Netherlands, Malaysia, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Korea and more. The ramen chains we are now partnering with have access to more than 200 ramen shops internationally and we are using our utmost effort to partner with each and every one of them.

Extra Utility

Along with the new ramen shops, we will be offering our stakers access to NFT tools through discounts and free tools. We will be collaborating with more than 1 Web3 company and cover a broad range of tools to help you invest, snipe NFTs and learn about both investing and also creating in the space. We are currently in talks with such companies and we are trying to offer our holders not only as much value as possible but also even more value to those who choose to stake their NFTs for a longer period of time.

Long term project collaborations

Throughout the past few weeks, we have been in talks with other NFT projects, sealing long term collaborations with them not only to reach a wider audience but also become a reputable project in the space offering and gaining extra utility through these collaborations. One such project we are excited to be announcing as our long term partner is Tasty bones. They have bought some of our NFTs for their users and we are happy to be part of their food offerings.

Along with this, we will be releasing a collaborative 1/1 NFT with them to celebrate our partnership. This is a step towards creating a food network through NFTs and introducing NFTs to real world businesses to not only reward our users but also to support restaurants that were affected from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Future Plans

This is only the beginning, even though we have already launched, you are all extremely early to this and our collaborations with Ramen Shops are only the beginning. You can expect more utility such as web3 tools to be added, more ramen shop coverage in different countries and regions as well as entirely new real world utility that will be introduced along with The Ramen Shop Friends.

We are also actively monitoring the NFT space in its entirety and the big companies coming into the space. We are doing this not only to bring the more value to our holders but to also plan our steps into the Metaverse. We are excited for what is coming next and we want to thank you all for supporting us this past month.