Aww, Rats! — An update on our minting plans.

We wanted to give an update on our plans for self minting, and how the plan impacts current holders. Don’t worry, this is all good news, we just want to make sure there are no surprises.

TL;DR: To build rat races and other fun and useful dApps we’re going to move our collection from the current OpenSea collection to our own smart contract.

If you own a rat from the initial collection we’re going to reproduce your rats on the new contract. They will be ERC-721 tokens instead of the original ERC-1155 tokens. Any existing Rat Holders that have a rat reproduced will be the only holders ever that receive the benefits of being a Big Cheese.

What we thought.

The rats that we have listed on OpenSea right now were minted directly through OpenSea (OS). We minted on OS because it allowed us to get something out quickly, test our generator, and start building out a community of people to make sure we built something awesome. Our initial intent was to have our self minted rats just added to the same collection.

What we learned.

As we learned more about how OpenSea and NFTs in general worked, we realized that wasn’t possible. We also realized there are a number of other issues with OpenSea’s shared contract.

• OS uses a shared contract for all the tokens that are minted on OS. That makes it impossible to get all the tokens in an OS collection without using the API.
• OS doesn’t allow you to get metadata about your token without going through their API.
• Here’s the biggest problem, the OS API doesn’t support tokens listed on Polygon, so there’s no way for us (or other Polygon NFT creators) to retrieve token metadata from things minted through OS. This makes it impossible for us to build useful and fun apps like our rat races for OS minted tokens.

We also decided that we want our rats to be ERC-721 tokens instead of ERC1155 (which is what the OS minted tokens are). There are a number of reasons for that decision, but the one that affects most people is that many popular wallets that say they support visualizing NFTs only show ERC-721.

What it means for our Big Cheeses.

If you’ve bought an Aww, Rats! NFT since before we have had to make this change (any ERC-1155 token, signified by the floating cheese in the top-right corner), congRATulations — you are a Big Cheese.

• We’re not going to leave any of our Big Cheese holders hanging. You’re the reason we’re doing this project, and make it worth doing. We’re going to reproduce your rats on the new contract. They will be ERC-721 tokens instead of the original ERC-1155 tokens. They will continue to show the Big Cheese icon.
• We’re going to delist the remaining OS minted rats from OS and hold off sales till we’re ready with the self minter, which should be sometime next week. Like I mentioned above, if you own a rat from the OS collection, we’re going to replicate that rat for you on the new contract. We’re not going to support resale of the ERC-1155 tokens or add any new tokens to that OS collection.

We appreciate all of your collaboration and friendship. Let us know what you’re thinking and if you think we missed something. As always, hopefully all of you who are getting ready to create your own projects can learn from us working and learning in public.