Nakamingos delivers the Largest Ethscriptions Art Airdrop Ever
Nakamingos is a 20k-piece digital art collection and entirely on-chain. Nakamingos are Ethereum inscriptions, aka “ethscriptions”, and the entire collection pays homage to Nakamigos as well as the seminal Ethereum blockchain art collection, CryptoPunks.
A flamingo-fied parody reimagining of the Nakamigos IP and canon, Nakamingos has so far minted out an incredible 14,300 inscription NFTs.
In honor of the art that inspired the Nakamingos universe, Nakamigos holders can mint out Clones, identical Nakamingo cloned version of their own Nakamigos. Even more fantastic is that only holders of said Nakamigos can mint their Nakamingo Clones. Clones are exclusively for Nakamigo holders.
It is this attention to detail and commitment to aesthetic excellence, proprietary IP, and legitimate fun with art that has made Nakamingos one of the biggest successes ever for Ethereum inscriptions.
Yet even with this remarkable accomplishment, a win for the Ethscriptions community and a victory for Ethereum inscriptions, something dark and weird was discovered.
There was an artistic glitch in the Mingo matrix.
What’s a Nakamingo?
The craft of creating generated art NFTs and, by extension, inscriptions is meticulous. To generate an entire collection of 20,000 Nakamingos, the team worked relentlessly for nearly four months after putting the original idea together (as well as building a team some months before that).
Beyond this, in order to have the Nakamingos Clones available to Nakamigos holders on demand during the mint — the only time to claim a Clone is during the minting of the 20,000 piece collection — an entire second collection of 20,000 pieces, a match-for-match remake of the original Nakamigos collection, had to be generated.
This was essentially two entire collections created in the time that it normally takes to build one, with extra attention paid to metadata to insure the integrity of the output embodied the inspiration of the input.
Inevitably, with all that extra work and need for attention to detail, something weird will happen. And something did.
Rematrixing the Matrix
In a weird interplay of layers and coded instructions, unintentional designs of incompatible and peculiarly paired traits began appearing. Some even with transparent backgrounds creating “white” and clipped versions of Nakamingos pieces.
What caused all this was simple: It was a lack of sleep.
In art sometimes these unintentional mistakes are desirable. In this case, it resulted in the one glitch that would cause the team to do a double take: Twins had showed up. And even triplets.
For the team creating the Nakamingos collection, and what specifically informed the pieces as individual works of art to Snepsid, the project’s main found, creator, and artist, is that each Nakamingo is unique. Every single one.
With roughly 25% of the collection remaining to mint until the collection was fully minted out, and even though the launch had been successful, Snepsid and the founding team — Queen, Ben, Penguin, and Mike Mongo — reunited to sort through the glitch and somehow make Nakamingos generate again.
Together, Snepsid and Ben, with Penguin, Queen, and Mike acting as soundboards and math checkers, the team again practiced intense rounds of sleep deprivation, caffeine abuse, and new math (and in the case of Snepsid more than a few bong rips) dramatically realized how to outrageously engineer the improbable.
They would repair the glitch in the Matrix — by making the Matrix glitch harder.
Inscriptions: What Are They?
Ethereum inscriptions, aka “Ethscriptions”, are the Ethereum blockchain’s iteration of Bitcoin’s Ordinals. And inscriptions are art, words, and code inscribed directly onto the blockchain — by being converted into numerical code and that code then being “inscribed” onto the blockchain by its being pasted in a transaction’s note field.
Because inscriptions are unique digital artifacts that are not controlled by a smart contract, they are actually on-chain. For holders, it means inscriptions on all chains are actually owned by their holders — as they exist without the support of or need for Web2 services such as AWS, Pinata, Arweave, and IPFS.
Inscriptions as art are sent to the marketplaces wallet, which then holds and represents each item for trade. (This is how escrow of inscriptions is necessary. There are no smart contracts. Holders are the holders, and therefore to sell inscriptions, marketplaces get to be temporary holders of the for-sale inscriptions.)
The thing is, the thing that makes inscriptions also awesome, is that once inscribed there is no going back to “change the metadata”. What is on the blockchain, stays on the blockchain.
Getting Froggy With It
Iconically, one of the most valuable inscription collections ever, Bitcoin Frogs, had a similar situation. After minting generated art, it was realized that a large part of the collection was glitched art.
In order to to resolve that, Bitcoin Frogs removed the glitched pieces from the collection, something that is very simple to do with inscriptions, and dropped replacement BTC Frogs to holders. Impressively, this cost the Frogs’ founder an entire Bitcoin.
(For the record, this move was so successful that those original glitched out Frogs have since gone on to be part of their own collection, the highly-prized and uniquely delightful Naked Bitcoin Frogs Misprints.)
Bitcoin Frogs, of course, went on to take their place in Ordinals history, arguably the most successful inscription collection ever.
Glitch Mingos
Nakamingos’ Snepsid and his co-founders decided to replace the glitch ‘Mingos with newly-generated Nakamingos. In order to do this, new traits would get to be created.
Drawing upon the ideas, suggestions, and feedback that were percolating naturally from holders inside the Nakamingos Discord, Snepsid went to work creating an entire new dimension to the Nakamingos Mingoverse.
The Shadow Mingos.
Shadow Mingos
Populated by Shadow Mingos, Shadow Storks, aliens, Zomingos, and Dark Skellies, and the red-eyed Dark Skellies known simply as Darkness (was well as the one Golden Skellie), the Dark Mingo expansion of the Nakamingos universe is the imagination of artist and creator Snepsid opened up and gone full Naka Flocka.
Where once glitch Mingos held spaces in collector’s wallets, newly dropped Shadow Mingos began appearing at the end of February and have gradually come to be featured denizens of the Mingoverse. Shadow Mingos are special accents to any Nakamingos “flamboyance” (one flock of 13 Nakamingos) or else they are complete flamboyance hordes, supernatural expressions of pixel art flamingo majesty.
Enter the world of the Shadow Mingos.
New canon in the main Nakamingos collection, Shadow Mingos are not only here in the collections of current holders, gradually appearing as the remaining glitch ‘Mingos are replaced. Seeing as Shadow Mingos are minting now, embedded as surprises to be minted in the final remaining body of the Nakamingos collection, the Shadow Mingos are coming.
