Content List
How we created the perfect NFT world
Pavlo Karapinka
23.08.2023
10 Min Read
A story about a marketing agency that built an NFT game just before a big market crash.
Intro
It is evening, around 8 pm. 10 people sit in darkness (the electricity has gone down), talking about a guy called “Serrathen”. They agree that he’s a bit dumb. He’s just ended up on a strange planet outside his habitat. How could we save him?
They talk about a game and are committed to finding a name for it. The word “Void” is a core.
There’s also quite a big cat in the room, with sad eyes and a penchant for everyday weirdness. A candle burning out on the wooden table.
— How about the Void’s Howl?
— Damn good, but … doesn’t feel right.
— Serrathen’s path?
— No way, sounds like he’s a Jehovah’s Witness.
— The Void in the Cyber?
— Hmm… maybe CyberVoid?
The First NFT Anti-Case Ever: How We Built a Play-to-Earn Game with a Tarantino-Style Finale
Spoiler: This is the case about our passionate endeavour to launch a play-to-earn game in a Cyberpunk setting with a mystical mix-up. The case that happened to become an anti-case which is kinda a badass thing about it.
You’re going to go through lots of humour (both dark and ironic), NFT specifics, market fluctuations, pleasure, brainstorms, and joy, of course. Tarantino-kind-of-mood will be on full display. Get ready!
Let’s figure out how it happened. To help you better understand the nature of the hype that was around the time we gathered material for this case, we are going to walk you through the main events. Sit comfortably, sip your coffee, and enjoy!
Chapter 1
NFT Odyssey 2022 or what was in Marcellus Wallace's briefcase
NFT madness
High-pitched whisper, “Get your own NFT project… now… Want to know what Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield saw in the briefcase? It was an NFT collection of Marcellus Wallace’s…”
Boom! The NFT market got wild, uncontrolled, and viral. It was the very beginning of the autumn of 2021. Axie Infinity just planted a thought right into the action part of the brain of every single NFT enthusiast. The ideas collided with each other and deflated the market into bigger pieces.
This is how on the stage appeared various NFTs:
- avatars, trading cards, memes, video clips, arts, and even words. Marketplaces were packed with those. People would buy anything with an NFT label on it for the sake of buying. The NFT market was at an erupting volcanic temperature.
On the other side of the trend map another volcano started to boil up. The play-to-earn concept became super famous: like a high-frequency beat that slowly deafens simple binary games with pixel pictures.
The game industry was at the threshold of change.
Having watched both trends powering up, we suddenly caught ourselves thinking (out loud), “Shouldn’t we launch an NFT play-to-earn project?”
Conclusion
The hype was rising, establishing itself badly, and we just went along, submitting to the pull of our creative demands without apology. When the game industry faced such changes as it seemed at the moment it would be a mistake not to step in.
Chapter 2
A cyber cookie
How it all started
Two guys sitting in a car. One of them is eating a cookie, thinking. Another one is driving. He is wearing dark glasses and casting a gimlet eye on the car next in line.
— Hey, do you know about different NFT junk, and how people sell all kinds of crap?
— Yeah, so?
— Well, I’ve been thinking, if we could, you know, start an NFT game, one of the heroes…
— Would we eat a cookie that we’ll wrap later as NFT? Ha-ha-ha
— Duuh!
— Huh. FForget about that cookie – we need a hero who would do a splashy journey over the post-apocalyptic world just to do his job.
— Trapped, and hungry, he would want this cookie!
This mise-en-scène is how the whole thing started: Pasha, with a vast background in the marketing of Blockchain projects as a founder of Solus.Agency, and Dima, the owner of a game studio with experience in Game development, decided to use the hype to launch the project they’ve been planning for a long time: a game. The intention was to burrow deeper into this since both played games their whole lives.
However, none of them wanted any stripped-back route: not another NFT collection or meaningless chugging games.
Despite their experience, and the fact that more and more really strong players were approaching the market, they chose a hard path.
CyberVoid was supposed to put itself on a map as a cyberpunk game (in the Gibsonian sense of this word) with tangible shades of a mystical setting. The community-oriented NFT game was something that we wanted to move to the spotlight. We rolled out mesmerizing Lore in amounts that would easily turn into a book if the project held on a little longer.
To tell you the truth we wanted a real, true gaming thing.
If you are one of those geeks that has to know every single corner of the game, you can dive deep into the game’s concepts by reading the cards with descriptions. If you don’t need these details – let’s move further 🙂
Details
- Game Concept — CyberVoid is an NFT-based game that runs on the Binance Smart Contract (BSC) network
- Game Features — The game is created on an on-chain basis to guarantee users a transparent economy and security.
- Gameplay — Starting the game with only one inexperienced hero, the player gradually becomes stronger by improving his heroes and combining them into a team. The player can use heroes in PvE battles, and PvP skirmish, or send them to farm crypto in gamified yield farming.
- Game Setting — The world of CyberVoid is on the brink of destruction. Waves of emptiness are breaching the defences stronger and stronger every day. Players have a choice to make: save civilization, or join the warriors of the Void and finally destroy what's left of our world.
- P2E Game — A CyberVoid NFT game does not require players to spend money to start playing. Players can buy characters, and upgrade them, and to do that they can either spend in-game currency $GOLD which they earn while playing the game or spend $CBRV token.
- Game Economy — $CBRV is an exchangeable ecosystem token that is required to unlock the whole game's potential. Users can earn $CBRV when entering in-game events, farming, trading or competing with others. The token is correlated with an off-chain in-game currency $GOLD, regulated by a smart contract, that helps users interact with in-game assets, upgrade heroes and enter the economy.
- Community-driven activities — The community can control and help the main character find his way from the impasse he has reached.
- Giddy dramatic storytelling — CyberVoid has a background story where the setting has been described and the main characters had first interactions with the antagonists.
Sounds like a blessing from William Gibson or Tolkien.
This has to take time, ain’t it? They hoped that the community would be ready to immerse themselves into really classy games before the game was finished.
What did they plan?
- Do an extensive research
- Create a complex of gamification
- Attract the audience around gamification
- Launch INO in December
- Launch MVP in January
This ended up in a big, detailed manifestation that would clarify what the game was going to be.
So, they hit the road!
Conclusion
There was an obvious plan, a vision, and timetables. From simply having an idea we took it to a shaped step-by-step journey that was ahead of us to undertake. The next step was to research and make it happen.
Chapter 3
Wandering through the vast lands of NFT projects
Making an NFT game: a step-by-step journey
We started with extensive and deep research. It consisted of several segments:
- Design
- Content
- Marketing
- PR
- Business development
Once it was decided, specialised teams went to do the research. It took us quite a long time – 20 days (and nights).
During that time we did:
- Competitors’ game mechanics analysis
- Visual design research
- Сompilation of statistics on the dependence of project success on the design style
- Custdev sessions with NFT gamers
What did we get?
1
Design department conclusion
After analyzing a large number of NFT projects, we learned that NFTs as everyone knows them don’t make sense creating because soon they will lose positions (as for me they get boring too quickly and there are too many of them), so we need to come up with something out-of-the-box and something that will be different from all the others (like Dark Horizon).
Conclusion
- The two most relevant styles are Dark Fantasy and Cyberpunk.
- We can also use the movie Dune style as a reference (ie some futuristic style, where people have lost most of the technology and where there are a lot of deserts, etc.).
- We singled out these styles because they have few really decent projects (and in fact only one).
- The only problem will be to create illustrations that will reach the top project level.
2
Content department conclusion
A lore should be central to the game’s narrative – it will help to unfold the whole story and allow the users to proceed interactively. Besides, both lore and gamification were rarely used by other projects. But if it were implemented properly – it looked just top-notch.
Gamifications supposed to be a part of social media strategy. Such features were presented a little in other games, but what we saw was successful.
Conclusion
- It's crucial to form a unique tone of voice: one capable of borrowing the game atmosphere and engaging the audience with it.
- It would be great to make the content itself the main source of the background for the game.
- Lore should be equal to the game's narrative.
- The main heroes should be present on Twitter.
3
Promoting research group conclusion
Community first. And at that time the community required a pretty solid amount of deliverables and credibility points that your project needs to gain. That’s why authoritative partners in combination with well-thought-out game logic could almost guarantee the project’s success. Especially if the partnerships are not just established, but established and supported with AMA sessions, Ambassador programs and other community activities as well as retention campaigns.
Conclusion
- Names in the advisory board/investment partners mean a lot. It would be worth spending quite a lot of time on pitching well-known figures in the crypto world. The community would be happy to play and earn 🙂
- There is no need to conduct standard airdrops. Real gamers and NFT fans are ready to do much more than follow a page and like the post, so why not use it and develop strong brand advocates? Trivia, meme competitions, art competitions, etc could make the community fall in love with the project.
- Reservation system by the reference of Northern guilds. Community members need to perform certain activities in the telegram in order to receive places in the whitelist.
- The community loves to be privileged. But not everyone could. So the idea to establish an ambassador board both with well-known KOLs and just loyal brand fans and decide on special features for them must be quite efficient. Bloktopia and their Adblock or ambassador program from Game Starter could be nice references.
4
Traffic research conclusions
The first and the main rule – omnichannel. Using high-price KOLs from YouTube that deliver you the best deep-dive content of your project together with low-CPM PPC channels like Facebook (ghm…Meta) or Twitter\Google Ads guarantee you a perfect CPU price and retention, ERR levels. And do not forget about retargeting!
Conclusion
- Use KOLs as an influential mouthpiece that gives you trust and good understanding from your audience. And supply it with a huge amount of traffic from PPC channels to gain more audience and reduce the CPM\CPA. That’s it.
- We should definitely try to attract KOLs to something other than stable stablecoins. Influencers could be really interested to take a part in game lore if they will get special NFTs\in-game assets later for free. According to that they will be much more motivated to make content about the project.
- The first traffic move is to launch it to the site (additionally indicate groups in Telegram/Discord/Twitter on it). The second phase of traffic campaigns: we launch affiliate placements and free giveaways to recruit an audience on Twitter. In the third phase, we begin to lead traffic to the site and Discord for large updates and announcements.
5
We also understood who our audience will be
It is vital to know that our audience wasn’t supposed to be NFT gamers. No. We actually aimed at the breed of true gamers, old fags, if you will. Those, who like us, spend their childhood playing games and exploring virtual universes. You know why? Because such gamers will refuse to sleep, eat or will learn quantum mechanics in order to solve the Lore riddles. That’s the people we wanted playing CyberVoid.
NFT also had an impact on them once. The appearance of P2E algorithms completely changed their lives, because their hobby transformed into a means of earning a living. But with a length of time, their excitement decreases, as it’s difficult to compare their favourite games and blockchain-based games. Thus their motivation to earn while playing is strong enough to continue searching and testing new games with the hope to find blockchain-based “ Minecraft”.
Conclusion
Once each department conducted deep research we received a possibility to see a whole map of NFT projects and figure out the tendencies that are present here.
The research showed us what often disguises: the naked truth – our idea were one-thousand-percent right, and it would be a bad thing to keep it minimal.
NFT collections at the point (October, 2021) started to be wearing out — people were slowly turning to the games. Marketing didn’t stay still, it is, too, shifted towards business development. It was a feast where guildies and funds were the reason to build a community around them.
The role of IGO became vital. Also, it was an ideal moment to complete our business model. It almost lulled us into hypnosis.
Chapter 4
Art and content creation
1
“We don’t need any investors. We are the ones”
20 days didn’t last forever, and the research part was done. In the next step, we took our table in the middle of the room, and rolled over an extensive roadmap that had a clear statement:
We will create a game right away without waiting for any outside income. We simply invest our money in the development of GDD.
The game itself should have been like Darkest Dungeon with a variety of customizations for a user, but without complicating the very process of development. Since everyone in the team was a fan of games, and we have actual professionals from the sphere, so… the conviction that we made a top-notch off-kilter product is easy to understand.
We didn’t want to build a skyscraper that would never be finished: we took it step by step. We also realized that the whole game concept will be storytelling. Meaning: we wanted to distinguish a simple user as much as NFT users. Storytelling was a way to “grab” them into CyberVoid.
The game included:
- Lots of gamified investment products that don't distract a user from the game, like farmings and stakings
- An open user-generated economy that derives from tokenomic, but its main driving power is community
- Users can earn due to the presence of in-game assets and tokens of the project through PvE and PvP modes
- Extended possibilities to shape your business models in characters' development and breeding
2
Art & Content
So, what is the game?
CyberVoid depicts a future of the world that has been once attacked by The Void – a furious power that makes humanity vanish and takes their technological achievements out.
The Void is a mystical, strange race that left only a part of humanity untouched. It was enough for people to use it as a threshold for reinventing humanity on new terms. This time with a much greater impact of technologies they became cyborgs and created a dystopian order.
How this new world will reveal itself is completely up to the players, because they are free to choose the “dark side”, fight for the good guys, or let the Void absorb them and become an integral part of this mysterious thing.
The Lore and content were meant to be always echoing in the game. The better the users know it, the more chances they have to keep the enemies at bay.
The content was divided into two parts: Game and Studio.
- The content of the game part - the history of the game world, the characters (description of Lore elements, characters, attributes, longreads, + a lot of visuals, stories of heroes).
- Content of the Studio part - we open to the reader the processes of game creation, announce the upcoming updates/partnerships, detailed descriptions/sequences of launches. (Launch announcements, launches, guides, company news, reviews, reposts, information about publications and mentions of the game in the media).
“Man… my blood is like fucking frozen jam right now. This guy… I am jiggered if I can’t use this chance. It can solve all my problems. I have to bring him the crystal of Cyberspace.
The question that bothers me is where should I go…where is the place he was talking about?”
Why did we need this?
This distinction is needed to avoid blending business parts with storytelling content. The goal was to give users the ploy for authenticity – a real dive into the world of the game.
We created the world itself, capturing the essence of the time period with uncanny accuracy. We developed the characters and their backgrounds, and we tangibly conveyed their perspectives.
We created several funnels. In one of them there was an intro article — a kind of invitation to the setting. Then Serrathen posted his voice message, making all the (future) users guess how he may deliver a message for help without getting caught by police. Answer: by people reposting it a hundred times. And they did it, of course.
Conclusion
One of the most striking aspects of this extraordinary endeavour was to establish the proper timelines for the users:
- Event one: Serrathen gives the message
- Event two: the audience has to help him find the crystals;
- Event three: they are checking different locations, and get immersed into a side story, maybe somebody has some luck;
- Event four: In Twitter threads, we see some new characters (they will be in Lore later);
- Event five: People brought Serrathen to the right location, now a new chapter will come out in that location.
Сontent played a vital role in the concept of the game. It was complex, and multilayered, and provided an interactive experience of immersing in the game before it was actually released.
After the first, opening article about the world of Void, in the next one, we let people meet Serrathen. He was wandering on another planet after a chase. Having stumbled upon a robot, he received a message. Of course, it was hard to decipher, so he managed to reach out to Fokannon. Our community would have to repost his message 1000 times to help him. So… yes, he got the message deciphered, but nothing else happened.
How would people receive the first NFTs? Sit comfortably, we continue:)
Once Serrathen met a Void’s guard, he was given a task of finding 3 stones. This was going to be his deal with the guard, both would have their benefits. 3 stones, as you may have guessed, are 3 NFTs.
When Serrathen arrived on a task we launched a quest with a map. This is where the roaming would start. Community members would have to vote where exactly Serrathen should be heading: his home, Fokannon’s place, port, and a bar.
Each location was linked to the next other. Somewhere beside it, they would have to find an old madman. A prophet. He was ready to help Serrathen in exchange for one thing: to shout a hundred times “The Void is coming”. You get it — that would be another portion of reposts.
How did we do it? The answer is shorter than you may have thought: Twitter. We created threads that let users take Serrathen to different locations. One of them is definitive and led to the finish.
The user finds all three stones, and he gets to the guard hoping to exchange them, but the guard laughs: he tricked and lied to the user. But still guard gives a choice: either a user lets the Void come into the world, which means he will mint a character on the dark side. Otherwise, he can decline an offer and stay a good character and join the New Order.
Chapter 5
Bend your mind to enter CyberVoid!
1
Marketing strategy
— Guys, you did a fantastic job, but… this is not really matching with our brandbook, you know?
— Dudes, this is so cool, but we had to replan the event, also the triggers will be different…
Disclaimer: as a crypto agency we had a mass of experience promoting crypto projects. So we always had these boundaries that limited us. CyberVoid has become an outlet for us.
Meanwhile, the team of Solus.agency is in a state of total havoc.
— God damnit, they must be kidding!
— I knew they could say that crap about brandbook.
— Aahhhhhhhh!
— Hey, stop banging your head against that door!
— Tell you what: one day we’ll make our own product, we’ll be an agency for ourselves. That is when we’ll rock: ).
…
– This day has come. Here, take it. It is CyberVoid’s marketing manifestation, 40 pages long. We nailed our potential! Finally, no one can stop us! Hurrah!
Unexpected spoiler: about 15% of that manifestation we made happened. Ooh, that’s a lot, right? The cat scorned us. Even though we embark upon the task of creating a game, our inner nature always remains full-marketish. Even our cat understands that. But only because it is a marketer, too. (I am actually here. Anybody cares? Marketing, again? Seriously? You have a cat in the building, morons. Sometimes they forget this office belongs to me. Poor bastards)
Mostly due to the fact that it was always surrounded by the spirit of marketing and was our main brainstorm muse.
So, you must not be surprised that we took CyberVoid’s marketing part with hellish enthusiasm. Many ideas that were not embodied in our clients’ projects, we finally put out them out in the Ulysses-long manifestation. It included all kinds of bad words and marketing slang. In the end it did not look like the marketing strategy for the early stage startup. Nooo. Rather like a marketing strategy for a system networking business. Alas:)
What does our marketing strategy stand on, anyway?
- Quizzes. Our go-to marketing strategy was based on quizzes. But not just a piece-of-cake quizzes that any newby would solve. If Elon Musk told us that he managed to solve them for less than three days, it would be quite surprising. We wanted to attract a crypto-gaming community that goes crazy on games for real, not because it can bring some income. (But we call it a “quiz” just because it is natural to name that. In fact, it was more like a multi-level cricket style riddle that has been created by 20 people and the cat!) Example: when a user solves the quiz, they become a part of a Lore. So, every time something interesting happened with Serrathen, we were planning some activities. In the first stage, we offered users to decipher meta tags and find runes with the encrypted message. You could solve it by using steganography. It was just a riddle number 0, a warming-up thing. Can you imagine what was going to be after that?
- FOMO and exclusivity. Only x number of users that could go through all our quizzes would take part in the pre-sale, and get the special sweets. The access to the whitelist would have been opened for the people who went through the jungle entirely. While other projects would give it for basically nothing, to become a part of our list you would have to beat some circumstances 🙂
- Reactivity. We wanted our community members and potential owners of the CyberVoid NFTs to live out some story while joining CyberVoid. Therefore, our marketing strategy supposed that every action from the community would cause an action on our part. So, once users finished deciphering meta tags and went through other 100500 activities, those who managed to solve the riddle were redirected to a newly opened domain with a secret message. During the riddle-solving process, everyone could get hints from the characters of Lore.
- Profound meaning in the game and a warm community. We had seen literally thousands of projects while doing research. We've seen that many people just wanted to earn a dollar in ten minutes. So, our mission was to make more sense in the NFT space and to bring warmer relationships inside the community of specific projects. We put that as our unique selling point.
2
How did we plan to implement it?
Since we’ve been in this market for years, our contacts with top KOLs of crypto and NFT were as solid as the CyberVoid’s buildings.. But only because we put our hopes on influencers. So, the main idea was to make influencers the integral core of the whole quiz thing. This means that sometimes they would share insights with their community, become the characters in our Lore, or even stream how they try to solve the quiz asking people to help.
It looked like everything should have worked. For one thing, influencers were crazy about the game and wanted to participate in it even though they hadn’t tried it yet. They were happy to receive their own NFT, and monument their faces on those cards.
But we didn’t want to hurry. Okay, to tell you the truth, we wanted to. Looking at the experience of the projects we worked with, we see they lost most of their budgets just because they couldn’t wisely time their marketing activities. So, we decided to perform all the activities as quickly as possible.
Ideally, we wanted to accumulate the best we have from our different departments and synchronized the marketing activities two weeks before IGO.
So, our Bible-long marketing manifestation became one big waiting for THAT DAY. We would postpone it, since clearly Cyber Void wasn’t really ready for aggressive marketing activities. We ate some New Yearly food, drank some rum, launched a few tests and left the rest for THAT DAY.
Every day we would hold a high level of engagement due to our quiz activities. And… THAT DAY was still going to happen.
Conclusion
We planned to build our marketing based on the philosophy that claims “sweet fruit is the most difficult to reach out”. In other words, we wanted to gather a community of true gamers in order not to be like “all those standard projects”. In the end, we resembled “all those projects” that remained not released. You know what? The good stuff still lies ahead of CyberVoid.
3
Business development
If you think we hurried to raise more money, it is just the right time to leave this thought to the Void. No, we didn’t want that, because our aim was to get bigger investments after the first sale. So, we didn’t push funds to close checks right away – our own money was enough for the IGO.
What does our marketing strategy stand on, anyway?
- Ideas and game concept verification, game architecture development
- 28 team members hired: developers, designers, marketers
- Early adopters’ community gathering
- Blockchain architecture development
- Advisors' and backers' attraction
- The CyberVoid game design and building launch
- Connection with advisors and preparation for official plans
- NFTs Sale round
- Huge community gathering and involvement
- CyberVoid Quest Campaign
No one expected what's going to happen next.
Conclusion
We wanted to create a splendid before-the-experience where people could befriend the characters and help them go on the long journey. Since we also wanted to bring more warmth into the NFT community, to ruin the tendency of stumbling upon scams, we launched many activities to attract true gamers.
Chapter 6
What did go wrong?
1
How the NFT market has damp us for no fault of its own (And what happened to it (him))
Everything was prrrfct, to (almost) quote our cat. People loved us, the community was growing, and Serrathen got his ass from a strange planet in safety (to everyone’s pleasure). We’re approaching IGO, funds are joyfully communicating with us. But… we wanted everything to be truly like the cat (almost) said. To finish everything nicely, we have to postpone some dates.
IGO launches, like some space rockets, are always changing: November, the end of November, December, Christmas. The last one is too close to the new year. Damn it! Reluctantly, we decided to set up the date after New year.
Right at this point the market has collapsed. Well, we thought that this was all about holidays. But when the spirit of holidays faded away, the market was dead. The whole play-to-earn hype simply became outdated.
2
The sudden death after New Year: the story continues
We didn’t lose hope of launching the game at the end of January, then – in February. However, the decline was strong – the community weakened, and our efforts were fruitless.
It was about four days that we lost to launch pre-sale. We decided to freeze the project. Just like that.
Now we are still working on a project, taking aside the idea of a play-to-earn approach. Tell you this: if the market will not take the path of Lazarus, we would find another way to launch a game.
We planned to implement many other interactive activities, but the sudden fall of the market changed everything. However, even having been cut at its prime, CyberVoid still possesses lots of ideas to be released in the next embodiment.
Conclusion
We made it to the end and did a good job, but you probably remember what we got. No? Here’s a hint: god damn nothing.
What mistakes did we make?
- The pace we took was too slow. For such a speedy market it wasn't fast enough. This is the market that is really fond of the motto "live fast, die young". Adamant about it.
- A problem with scalability. We weren't a big studio to handle everything quickly, nor a small team that could launch another collection in a few days. We were right in between these two. If we had launched in November, everything would be just right.
- We followed the hype, instead of relying on more stable business models. The IGO hype is much weaker than the standard business model. It means we could close the round, get the investments from funds, and slowly move further.
As a marketing agency that promotes huge brands, we had big ambitions around Cyber Void, too.
Meaning: when we were working with influencers, we acted like a big brand – and did lots of research, while influencers lost their interest and motivation.
All of that brought us to the next thing we want to share with you.
Insight
This experience is still throbbing inside us, and here is what we want to say: repeat our mistakes. No kidding. Seriously. In the end, it was a wondrous place to be that offers Zen-like serenity, excitement, and, curiously, provides a threshold to move further.
None of us thought it was in any way useless, not one effort seemed to be vain.
Yes, we froze the project, but we made it exactly as we wanted it to be. There is nothing chivalrous about it, but if you think about it, yeah, it is.
Also, the joy and pleasure of the process was immense. It was entirely worth everything we spent and invested in the CyberVoid.
Don’t chase after the hype, but never stop taking risks.
Just keep in mind that the crypto market on the hypes is moving with a speed of light (or at least the same as our cat has). What was big news today, tomorrow could be entirely forgotten.
We’re moving further as a marketing agency and a game development studio. Partly, because this experience pushes us even stronger to move. What about the CyberVoid? You’ll hear about 2.0. soon.
CyberVoid
NFT game
case study
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