A few weeks ago, following our work on TheGepek blockchain project, Split-Dalmatia County Tourist Board approached us with the idea of using Metaverse and Blockchain technologies to promote our county as a premium travel destination.

Aside from Slovenia and their ambitious Dubai Expo endeavour, not too many regional entities have dipped into the world of NFT and Blockchain, so we welcomed the challenge with open arms.

Buy the land, build the world

The first phase of the project was to buy the land where we would start building the metaverse. We decided to use the SANDBOX platform, one of the most popular ones with vast possibilities for making interactive games, stories, NFTs, etc.

Recreating a historical monument in Sandbox – Youtube

With our partners from Klikeri, we did a complete 3D modelling of the Diocletian palace as it looked back in the 3rd century. You can see it below in the video. In parallel, we minted Dalmatia.hr logo plus a few Dalmatians and put them inside the Diocletian Palace. Although modelling this building was far from a basic task, this was the first step in the long-term planning of using the Diocletian palace as the spot where we will create future activities including quests, NFTs exhibitions, and more.

Releasing the NFTs

The second part of the project was creating and releasing the first collection of DalmatiaNFTs. We created solidity contracts for the collection, limiting the number of NFTs to 101 (pun intended) and one NFT per address. We decided to use the Polygon network during the very low fees required for minting NFTs. In total, less than 1,5USD was spent for minting all 101 DalmatiaNFTs, including failed transactions – since some users tried to mint more than one NFT with the same address.

The flow was effortless; visit the DalmatiaNFT website, connect your Metamask and pick one of the four Dalmatians you want to mint – free of charge, with a gas fee of around 0.01USD (less than 0.01 MATIC). We also wanted to give some utility to these NFTs, so there was also the possibility to get a unique T-shirt with printed DalmatiaNFT you minted. Also, there was one more catch – we had a unique NFT, the fifth one in a collection, named Ekipa – this one was unlocked as the last one when 100NFTs were minted – and you could mint a unique token.

Bepo, Frane, Stipe and Duje quickly got their new digital owners

Can I still secure my own DalmatiaNFT?

As mentioned, we have given away 101 NFT in total, completely free of charge, without additional options to mint. If you want your own DalmatiaNFT, the only way is to find someone who is selling them at OpenSea marketplace, with the floor opening price set to 1.911ETH. Don’t ask us though, we are hodling strong!

Will that reduce the number of tourists in Dalmatia?

Not really, no. We don’t see this campaign as something that will change or reduce the number of travels, on the contrary, we see the metaverse as augmented reality that gives us endless possibilities to do things that are not possible in the real world. Imagine that you can enter a virtual world, play the game that involves competing in the antic Roman games, and win NFT rewards which can give you certain discounts once you reach your destination. Interesting, right? That’s just one use, scenarios are endless.

What are the next steps?

Well, first we need to ship all the DalmatiaNFT shirts to conclude the campaign!

All jokes aside, since DalmatiaNFTs received some notable visibility in the media and the community, we are actively working on utilizing them in promoting Dalmatia as a quality destination. There are a lot of good stories to be told, and with the tourist board, we will continue to work on other creative NFTs campaigns in the Metaverse which will serve as the main method of advertising Dalmatia in the digital world.

The results were fantastic. In less than 20 hours, all DalmatiaNFTs were minted, including the special one. We got a lot of good feedback from the community, and the most important thing was that a decent number of people tried and got the NFT for the first time in their life – which was also one of the main goals, to attract new people to try and use this growing technology.

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Using NFTs and Metaverse to promote travel destinations