For Good: Tactical Turtles
From the beautiful beaches of Solana, these Turtles are coming for litter!
Tactical Turtles take on The Garbage Patch
This week, I delve into Tactical Turtles (website, discord, twitter), a Solana-based NFT project that is looking to help clean up our planet’s oceans! I came across the Turtles in December 2021, long before the minting date of 27 February 2022, while I was looking for other #NFTsforGood opportunities and I was immediately interested as the team are aiming to help tackle our planet’s over-polluted oceans, something I am very personally involved in. To help accomplish this, Tactical Turtles will be donating to #teamseas as the project grows, but more on that in a bit.
Where did these Turtles come from?
Reading through the lore of the Tactical Turtles, much like the real world, these digital reptiles have always been around, enjoying the views from Byte Beach, hitting the warm ocean currents of the Digicific Ocean, living in harmony with other inhabitants of the Metaverse. However over time, humans have polluted the oceans of the Metaverse and have made the digital seas generally unlivable for our ocean friends. Through grit and determination, a cadre of 1000 tough, trained, and tactical sea turtles banded together to form an alliance, to take on these dirty Polluters!
To get a better idea of how Tactical Turtles and the team plan on helping clean up our planet’s oceans, I sat down with Tactical Curley, one of the team’s founding members, for a quick interview to understand how this intrepid Irish team came up with the project.
tehbizz: Where did the idea for Tactical Turtles come from?
tactical.curley: The first week of December, our team got together at our local beach to train for our yearly "Christmas Day Swim". We started talking about our latest pick ups, how big NFTs were becoming and how influential they were going to become in the near-future. We started brainstorming ideas about how we could use an NFT collection to aid our community. With a great interest in both swimming and beach life, we decided to do base our NFTs on a topic that would aid in cleaning our beaches and fighting pollution. This moment was when the seed of the Tactical Turtles movement was planted. We chose Turtles to represent our brand as they're an endangered creature and they are heavily effected by the pollution in our waters. We also decided that a cute turtle would be a nice face to represent us! Following that, we wanted these Turtles to represent our cause, the fight against pollution in oceans. With that in mind, we decided that an army of these cute Turtles fighting the people polluting the oceans would be a cool concept. Hence, Tactical Turtles V Polluters storyline was born!
tehbizz: Given that much of the team is from Ireland, why did the team choose to focus on turtles and beach conservation? The last time I saw the Irish coastline, it was overcast and I dared not get that close to cold water LOL.
tactical.curley: As I mentioned earlier, swimming and socialising at our local beach is massive thing for our Team. The majority of our team are from Crosshaven in Cork, Ireland so we have grown up on the beach's here. Over the years, we've noticed an increase in the rubbish being dumped onto our beach and the lack of care for environment in general so we decided to make a change. And yes, the water can be very cold here in the winter months so wetsuits are our best friends LOL
tehbizz: When the team was creating the project, was there always a plan to work with a charity?
tactical.curley: Yes, when we started coming up with ideas for our project, we wanted to make sure that they were all based around the whole pollution / charity theme. We believe it's important to have a good intention behind any project and hope that the Tactical Turtles NFTs can create a movement that will live long into the future.
tehbizz: I see that you’re planning on working with Team Seas, what made you choose this organization?
tactical.curley: We decided to go with Team Seas due to their message and the history of their campaign! Team Seas is the second wave of the largest creator-led fundraising campaign to ever hit the internet: TeamTrees. TeamTrees was launched in 2019 with a goal of raising $20M to plant 20M trees and they smashed it—raising over $23M and generating more than 1B video views. Even two years later, TeamTrees.org is still receiving donations and planting 2,600 trees every day. The organisers are now trying to rally the internet’s passion and imagination in support of the ocean. After learning about this massive feat, our team decided that it was the perfect charity for us to work with.
tehbizz: When the Polluters collection comes out, are there any plans for working with another charity or another type of charity?
tactical.curley: When the polluters drop, we are planning to work with more ocean cleaning initiative. We are yet to confirm any large details regarding this but we know that the polluters will be more focused on donating to smaller, local charities than larger ones. More info on the Polluters drop will all be released after the Turtles drop!
tehbizz: Finally, do you believe that charitable utility or donations will become a more commonplace utility in NFt projects as NFTs become more mainstream?
tactical.curley: I 100% believe that charitable utility should, and will, become more of an interest to NFT projects as they become more mainstream. I feel like the NFT community is full of kind hearted people that all have a mindset to do good, so as projects get bigger and more accessible, I think more people will use this wonderful technology to good, just like we are!
Measuring impact, where does the money go?
As noted earlier, Tactical Turtles currently plan on donating to 2 charities, according to their site, one of which is #teamseas and the team will be choosing an additional charity, as voted on by Discord members, for donations. Overall, 15% of all revenue will be split between these two charities, 10% goes to #teamseas as they have a bulletproof track record, and another 5% will go to another charity chosen by the community. In the past I suggested Sea Turtle Oversight Protect (STOP) and Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, both of which I’ve personally worked with in the past, as a volunteer and donator.
Gear up, get ready, Turtles roll out soon!
While the website does say the minting date for Tactical Turtles is January 2022, the team has pushed the date back to 27 February 2022. So far, the sneak peeks that the team has provided in Discord have been excellent looking, I’m anticipating the day when I can finally mint my own Tactical Turtle!