The Penguin Incubator Project: Saving South African Penguin Chicks with NTFs with Zaffron & Mitchell

oh my gosh it looks like the timer has started it's time to talk about penguins penguins Eddie Denver we need everybody to come over here and listen to us talk about penguins now all right all right hi everybody my name is Daffy castagnaro I am 17 years old I'm a senior at Mountain Vista High School which is just south of Denver uh you may recognize my name because I am the daughter of man the Mr Legend Russell castagnarrow Steward of bubblecorn Ventures yeah so um you know I'd like to say I'm a blockchain nepo baby and I can get into all the VIP lounges and stuff I'm also the founder of something called conservation companions which is working on the penguin incubator project with penguins International and New Frontier works I'll let you guys introduce yourselves hi I'm Katie prop with penguins International so all the penguin lovers in the house go awesome so yeah we're really excited to be involved in this project we're based right here in Denver Colorado but we work with all 18 species of penguins throughout the southern hemisphere right so my I have come to eat Denver every year since this whole party started and on my journey I've bittled my way up to creating some really fun projects and a cool bufficorn Adventures Portico called New Frontier works nftw so anyways we build cool projects that help take all the fun technology that we develop here at Denver and we try to make it useful so how that all came together was this really weird story that Katie's or sorry Zappy's going to tell you about what brought us all together here to solve penguin problems all right go I ever since I was young I've been a lover of animals and um in my AP environmental science class we had this guy come speak to us from a conservation organization his name is Dave Johnson he works at the Katie Adamson conservation fund he's a great dude does awesome work but my teacher was talking on and on about how proud she was that last year they had raised two hundred dollars and I was like okay 200 high schoolers that's a lot that's good but I was like I took that as a challenge I was like I can one-up you all I can triple that maybe even more and I was thinking through you know all of the different ways I could do this and my mind went straight to my dad who knows all this stuff about blockchain and crypto and things that were way out of my league at that point so I I you know screwed on out of class and um called up my dad was like hey is there a way we can use this technology nft specifically to um fundraise for conservation efforts and he was like hell yeah and so as soon as the class was over and the presentation was done I went and talked to Dave who was totally on board and he introduced me to Katie at Penguins International because he knows I love penguins and we kind of hit it off immediately and then eventually we brought in Mitch what we met actually at a chalk art festival and the entire time I kept on going to my dad nudging him and I was like have you talked to him about it yet will he will he do it and he was all on board so that was great yeah right off the bat I was like that is a that's a great idea that's gonna work yeah so now all together all of us have been working with South African penguins which a little bit about them um right now there are only 14 000 breeding pairs of South African penguins alive on the world which is you may not know that's a really really small number they've had a drastic drastic decrease in the past three years it's been ex reverse exponential I don't know where it is for that um and you know because of the warming climate and their black backs they tend to get really really hot and abandon all of their eggs and go in the water and sometimes you know hundreds of eggs can be abandoned in a day and there are people who go and collect these eggs but they can only do so much with the limited resources they have so what we are doing is we are building incubators for South African penguin eggs in South Africa yeah so do you want to talk about the yeah exactly so so what does this have anything to do with you know web 3 and blockchain and why why would tokens you know be useful for this so uh yeah the whole idea is to to raise money in a way that we can account for so right up here we have so far sold 35 penguin chicks for 18 so you can do do the math on that and we have sold two incubators and eighteen hundred and eighty eight dollars so we've raised almost five four thousand four hundred dollars so far uh for for penguin uh conservation and so what's cool about this is that when you buy a an incubator you actually get an nft that nft represents the facts that you made a tax deductible donation to a you know venerable and important organization that's doing real work uh out there so we we create a way of of creating a proof that you have actually done good for for the world and we're storing that on the blockchain so oh we already lost our and what's also good about that is because of you know the tokenization you can get select access to information like updates maybe a new penguin chicks have had right so we get this cool uh ticketing system that we we generate these tokens at token penguin World The Domain there but Penguins International is actually they they built their website using WordPress and so uh we deployed a pretty cool uh WordPress plug-in where we're actually able to create these tokens in one domain take payment do all that mint them onto the polygon blockchain uh the user logs in we've used web 3 auth as our our uh our all our wallet uh integration platform and from there we now have a wallet with a token in it that they can head over to penguinsinternational.org and they can use that token for token gated content to learn a bunch more about penguins so this tax deductible donation not only goes to help penguins but it onboards new users to web3 gets them to set up an account and use it and then we're able to use that account across domains to do all kinds of interesting things so we're still you know working out what those what those uses are but we're off to a really good start we started this project what I like about a a month and a half two ago yeah it's a fairly new project but like I said it's saving real Penguins if you care about penguins at all and by having them on this planet Earth this project is tied directly to it so you can see right now to this day we have 35 penguin chick nfts that have been minted and hatched so I want you all to pull out your phones right now scan the QR code that we have right here and if you're interested in Saving a penguin you can do so right now and that number will change right before our very eyes and we have um Dave Johnson who I mentioned earlier just went to South Africa and visited um sand Cobb which is the place that is um you know housing these these penguins and there's they're they're they're they're penguin in like they are at the at the um conservation centers yeah and and they're they're getting stuff done and you know if you want to be a part of that amazing work this is a great way to do it and you know helping out you know little young young young blockchainer like me you know help me get my start um but yeah no there's a lot of great reasons to do this and you know this is I think a great example of how we can connect you know this amazing like blockchain technology this new stuff to you know things that wouldn't seem like they'd have any sort of connection such as you know animal conservation and no other charity stuff so as a non-profit I have to say I'm a fish out of water or rather a penguin out of water at this event right like this is completely new to me as a non-profit organization so being having zafi here that made web 3 and nfts a comfortable space for a non-profit to get involved and find a way to support a very real project is so cool yeah I'd have to say that's been one of my favorite parts of this whole project was that you know zappy has this really cool idea that comes to her and then all of a sudden we're banding together working together having you know weekly meetings figuring out a way to take this crazy technology and actually make it useful and yeah I mean Katie was totally green to all this it never had never said anything like this up and now we've got it up and running and it functions we've got wallet integration we're taking payment uh we can take your payment using uh stripe so you can pay with a credit card you can pay also using dpay D5 which is super cool and we were gonna do a demo but obviously the internet has been a little bit goofy here because you can actually buy a token penguin with spork so using dpay if you log into your account you can go uh it's really simple you just go through our simple checkout process and you can actually use some sports so right at the moment uh I bought one chick yesterday and it was about 750 sport would get you an 18 uh penguin chick so I didn't actually check to see uh how many sport I'd need to get a full incubator but I think at about two and a half cents a sport you can do the math I'm not sure if there's enough liquidity out there for that to happen yet but that's an interesting thing ah we're up to 40. so this number unfortunately we didn't get this Chromebook again to the internet uh but we are up to this should say 40. so it actually live updates if you look at your phone you should see so 41. all right we can get this up to 100 that would be our optimal dream goal for 8th Denver but if that was any of you guys thank you so so so much you guys are really changing penguin lives that's absolutely amazing thank you so much so some of you may be wondering why do African penguins get in this situation in the first place well penguins like we mentioned they are in Africa some people know that some people just picture Antarctica somewhere really cold and in Africa they have a lot of heat down there because it's a beach and so they're really warming up so they're actually abandoning their eggs at a very fast rate so they're basically abandoning them to go cool off in the ocean and then leaving that egg exposed to essentially the Sun so definitely a really important project and the avian flu that also hit through South Africa this past year we were just informed through our partners in South Africa that the ban has just been lifted so yay quarantine for Penguins is now done they had their own covid-19 of sorts for the birds yeah and um we've got 42.

thank you thank you yeah thank you very much um yeah and also if you got one of our awesome cards they do say yeah the rate of penguin um eggs being abandoned has increased by 256 so it is a lot this is no no small issue and you know penguins are a lot more than just you know cute little creatures that waddle around and swim you know they're a great way to um help scientists see the health of the ocean because they're not and so they're like they're right in the middle of the food chain too so they make a lot of um impact on other species you know their prey their predators everything all over is all affected by penguins so one thing I'd like to talk about that's a pretty cool part of our project up here if you can see I maybe I can scroll the screen up a little bit but we used uh stable diffusion I know there's a bunch of stable diffusion folks here today um but we actually use stable diffusion to create a bunch of the artwork here so um there's there's some pretty pretty interesting art and one of the bufficorn adventures companies that's here today I see them out in the audience uh he's got a company called artspark and you guys should definitely check check out what he's doing but we're looking to collaborate and find ways where we can actually make this art generation piece a little bit more interactive and dynamic so uh we think there's a there's a bunch of ways that now that we have onboarded users logged them in giving them a wallet we're able to take some money from them we're able to connect that money with a really important cause that we can do some fun things to expand and to to take this this whole platform to the next level so this is really a very Alpha Project we wanted to prove that there was the possibility of actually raising real dollars connecting those real dollars with real action in the world and we wanted to do that using web3 technology and we've we've achieved it so um I think that's a pretty awesome uh accomplishment for us to you know over the last few months just come from this awesome Zappy's awesome idea to making a real impact making a real a real difference uh in the in the Ecology of our world and to a a species that who who doesn't love penguins any any weird people out there don't like penguins yeah um and and luckily we have Katie is going to go to South Africa and check on progress of how things have been going in May right yeah so we're going to be able to see get some new content uh videos photos updates on chicks all kinds of stuff also artspark that's handy back there wave that's that's who started art spark it's a great program for anybody who wants to use it he's going to help us with hopefully some cool stuff in the future that Mitch was talking about yeah so this this whole project really represents uh I think the coming together uh of bufficorn ventures of East Denver projects um and it really embodies the spirit of what eat Denver is really all about and Bubba Gordon benchers has been instrumental in my life personally of helping me uh to transform and to grow and I really you know I'm really proud to be a part of this project I'm proud of what we've done I'm proud that we're making nfts that are are positive we're not just out there trying to create unnecessary you know imaginary value out of you know limited Supply no no we're we're connecting real dollars with real action we're using the technology and we're trying to make it as easy for possible people as possible and you know over my years of coming to eat Denver I think it's really awesome to see things going from just a Bare Bones idea to now having technologies that we can implement we can use them it works it's actually you know driving change and making an impact so yeah I think this is awesome I I'm so proud to be here on this stage at this point and to see how far this whole event has come how far the technology has come how far the community has come together um so yeah I'm just really my hat hats off to you guys and thank you for for being being who you are and what you do and most assuredly thank you guys for for all the effort you've put in all of the you know the courage you've had Katie to just yeah dive into this weird technology obviously you fit in around here but yeah cheers yeah and if you want to keep up with like how this is going um you can follow uh at Penguins International on Instagram they'll have lots of updates also at is it Katie Adams or kacf kacf on Instagram or you know me at zathi castagnaro definitely not just trying to drive up my Instagram followers it's fine um uh yeah and or and will can update you and this is the website tokenpenguins outworld where you can see how everything's going our numbers if anything is improved and we can tell you all about how you know we are hopefully saving Penguins one incubator at a time totally yeah if you've got any cool projects that you need help with new frontier Works uh new frontierx.com you can check us out there um we'd love to help you take take this technology and bring it out to the real world to build some useful stuff so do we have a final count how many how many have we got so far we're at 43 Penguins so far so thank you I think you know that means yeah we must take seven or eight Penguins just in the last few minutes so we we've made an impact from the impact stage here at at Heath Denver cool any final thoughts happy East Denver everybody have a great time yeah happy biddling all right thank you guys so much