Chikn Wrapped | A Year in Review
Happy 1st Birthday!
For centuries, mankind has pondered a profound philosophical question. One whose answer has been elusive, but which could usurp the status quo and alter the course of humanity forever. And on the 12th of November, 2021, that answer was finally revealed.
The Chikn came before the $EGG — And that's when everything changed.
It was just one short year ago that the pantheon of familiar chooks were mere twinkles in a smart contract’s proverbial eye, dreamed up by a small Australian team who dared to push the limits of web3 Since then, this wild journey has seen the rise of upgradeable and interactive NFTs, deeply integrated with market psychology and tokenomics, leading to the robust ecosystem we know as chikn today.
But, as well all know, Chikns don’t soar by themselves. You, our community, are perhaps the greatest thing that has come about from Chikn; the wind underneath our wings. Whether you’re a steadfast holder, swing trading degen, or K-level strategist, we wouldn’t be here without you all.
Today we celebrate Chikn — our community, our NFTs, our tokens, our game, and our vision.
Happy birthday, Mother Cluckers ❤️
Clucked Up: An Autobokography
In the middle of November 2021, 10,000 chikn were born. First, we gave away 900 NFTs for FREE to the GoodBridging (GB) community to kickstart the mint process, which was so well received that many of those initial minters are still with us today. Then the real mint started on November 12, at a slow pace, a humble beginning marking the “zero to one” moment of the project. We watched with bated breath as the minting rate slowed down at 50%… Perhaps chikn was never meant to be?
The mint painfully crawled toward 55% over the following days. We kept quietly building our project and community regardless, but we weren’t quitting our day jobs just yet. Then, as if orchestrated by Satoshi himself, we couldn't believe our eyes when the minting rate suddenly exploded, and the remainder sold out just 48 hours later. On November 19, one year ago today, the 10,000th chikn was brought into this world — and there was no looking back.
It’s not easy being born, so our fresh chikn had a month in wallets to get used to existing while we prepared the Roost, and the beginning of an upgradable NFT revolution. Chicken-wire fencing was purchased, wooden structures were built, and digital straw was laid in anticipation of our poultry guests. The Discord was getting wild and anticipation for the grand Roostening was palpable.
Then, on the 12th of December, chikn were invited to “Roost”.
As the barn doors opened, we quickly realized there was a problem. Gas fees skyrocketed by as much as 20 times, and recognizing that something more profound than crazy hype was responsible, our Hengineers paused everything.
The team was perturbed but not disheartened by any means, we knew this problem was solvable. Our genius smart contract engineers Hen Solo and KFC doubled down on patching the contracts while Sherbok and Cluck Norris tweaked the tokenomics to suit.
After resolving the issue, Roosting was reopened on December 19 — this time, with resounding success. In just three days, more than 80% of all chikn were roosted, and laying $EGG. This was one small bok for Chikn, but one giant coq-a-doodle-do for NFTs.
The “Roost” launch was a defining moment for Chikn. With the initial hiccups, there was every chance that our ecosystem would go down as another failed project, relegated to the annals of NFT history. But that’s not what happened. Our community banded together and continued to support us through this time. After all, “Chikn is our lives — if we rugged, we would have nothing to live for” — BBQ 2021
And as a result, by December 30, Chikn had risen to the top, as the largest NFT series on Avalanche by way of market cap.
From all of us here, we deeply and sincerely thank you for your confidence and trust in the beginning. We certainly wouldn’t have made it where we are today without your belief in us, and in Chikn. ❤️
Honeymoon period
From chikn — to Roosting, from $EGG — to $FEED, the ecosystem grew rather quickly. On December 30th we launched our first LP farm on TraderJoe, allowing LPs to accumulate $FEED quicker than single-sided staking. Marketplace upgrades, CNS, RNS, and leaderboards all dropped in January, and our Discord community grew by nearly 150% in the first few weeks of 2022.
Avian Ink
Diamonds are forever, just like Chikn and tattoos. Community stalwart OneThirdNerd inked up his bicep. Rumour has it he’s lifting weights to keep the size of his arm-chook in line with the KG of his Chikn. Community member Enzo, That Pro-Coq Guy, also holds Chikn close to his heart — literally.
On January 20, we launched Pangolin’s first-ever Super Farm, allowing FEED/AVAX LPs to earn dual rewards. Chikn was still young, but we had bokked up enough rukkus to start getting noticed by established players in the Avalanche scene. These early months were truly the honeymoon period of the project, the wind was in our wings, our growth was unstoppable, and the upgradable NFT revolution had well and truly begun.
In early February, RNS got a major upgrade to introduce lore to your chikn bio. All of a sudden our poultry had backstories and profiles worthy of the greatest D&D game. We’re still sending love to Jeff.
By February 05, 98% of all chikn were comfy in their Roost laying $EGG and accumulating $FEED. In that same update, we noted that 68% of all minted $FEED had been used to stack the KGs on chikn. This achievement showed us that we were on the right track — the game was designed to encourage token burning, and tokens were certainly being burned. The same was true for $EGG — roughly 10% of the released supply had been burned by that update.
We had proven tritokenomics as a successful NFT innovation and pioneered the AVAX NFT ecosystem toward a new frontier. We saw many spinoffs and clones of chikn over this period, but nothing stood the test of time like chikn.
This was also an iconic time for the community, with the emergence of #bok4coq giveaways from ChiknWhaleGod (@Chiknwhalegod) which bought many new players into the game. We also saw the beginnings of community tools like RateMyCoq from Mesiya (@0xMesiya) and CoqMoney by TOB. These set precedent for the chikn community building out incredible third party tools to help improve gameplay strategies.
Barn Rave
Serotonin levels were at all time lows in the days following the launch of Chikn Radio on February 1, 2022. DJ Chikn Rhythm was responsible for the mix — shout out to his family.
There’s more than one way to crack an egg, but to begin with, we had only revealed a handful. That would change over the coming months. Sherbok leaned back in his armchair and lit his pipe, knowing that those precious eggies would be burned en masse in good time.
Enter: FarmLand
On February 20, Chikn serfdom became a thing of the past as ownable land became available. FarmLand was the second NFT release in the Chikn ecosystem and a major update to the way to farm $FEED. From a total of 5,000 FarmLand NFTs, 2,174 were airdropped to chikn owners while 2,826 were available to mint.
Rather than paying with $EGG or $AVAX, this mint required prospective landowners to burn EGG/AVAX LP tokens. As a result, 45,216 JLP tokens were burned, which today accounts for around $230,000 worth of liquidity locked permanently in the pool. This continued to sustain the ecosystem over the bear market.
With FarmLand out, $EGG burn rates skyrocketed as everyone raced to expand their land and unlock their tiles. The team had hit on something special here, the psychology of burning egg with the chance to reveal rare tiles was both innovative and effective.
Building on the success of FarmLand, the next big release was also just around the corner. If FarmLand made us all landholders, then this one would cement our place as the greatest group of coq holders on the blockchain.
Chikn at the Avalanche Summit
It’s somewhat surreal that a tiny avian NFT project would one day share the stage with the biggest names in the Avalanche ecosystem, but in March, 2022, that’s just what we did at the Avalanche Summit in Barcelona. At that point we weren’t a tiny avian NFT project — we had firmly cemented our place as one of the leading projects and communities on the red chain.
Cluck Norris gave an amazing keynote address — on days you feel like the world is against you, a quick watch works wonders to get your comb perky once again.
Huge thanks once again to Shauna (@ShaunaBurbary) and Ken Burbary (@kenburbary) for helping make it happen, and thanks to all the legends from our community that came out to meet us in person.
We had an awesome time advocating for the project, meeting all of the Avalanche OG’s and big-wigs, and most of all: partying with our community who made the trip. The boat party was a dismal failure thanks to monsoonal weather, but it resulted in the best night out imaginable for the chikn fam ❤️
Roostr: The Awakening
Roostr, the third NFT from the ecosystem, minted over two days on April 14 and 15. This mint was special — it introduced a gamified mint that saw poultry enthusiasts burn $EGG in a race to the top of a leaderboard. The higher you were on the leaderboard, the rarer the Roostr you’d mint.
Not only did Roostr place the most demand on Avalanche that the blockchain has ever seen, but it also gave an entire industry of therapists work dealing with the traumas experienced during the mint. Although many have moved on since, others still wear the thousand-yard stare that’s the hallmark of one who witnessed Roostrgeddon first-hand.
On both days, demand for Roostr almost managed to bring the Avalanche blockchain to its knees, with the chain arguably seeing its most activity ever. As a result, leaderboards weren’t getting updated and gas prices rose significantly, with some minters recording fees in excess of 4 AVAX for a transaction — much more than the Roostr NFTs themselves! On day two, a simple case of syntax translation meant that some browsers within certain locales weren’t even able to mint.
These were two more dark days for Chikn, but as D.A. Harvey Dent once famously said, the night is always darkest before the dawn. And when dawn came, 12,000 Roostr woke the world with their cacophony.
The gamified mint saw 1.215 million $EGG burned. After both mints were completed, trading volume on the Roostr collection was 15 times greater than the entire rest of the Avalanche NFT market combined. Coq-a-doodle-doo indeed.
Again, thank you all for your confidence and trust through the mint. We were trying something unprecedented with a gamified mint, and even though it didn’t go off without a hitch this time, it eggnited a flame that burns to this day. Just like the initial roosting launch, we learned from our mistakes and grew stronger as a team, project and community.
As we all learned at school, chikn lay $EGG and Roostr squirt $FERT. Roostr gave the Chikn ecosystem what it needed to improve FarmLand yields with the added benefit of burning more $EGG. The ecosystem had reached a new level of sophistication beyond the core tritokenomics, and as a result the liquidity was extremely high across NFTs and tokens, all the while floor prices kept rising.
Crypto Winter
But shortly after the Roostr mint, things started looking grim across the blockchain markets, and the broader macro markets. This wasn’t the chikn teams first experience with market cycles, and we prepared for the shifting tides. We managed our treasury wisely to ensure we had enough funding for continual development, which was also supported by our sustainable tokenomics and business model.
While the financial markets began to melt down, things were quite comfortable in the chikn coop, and we quickly became a beacon of hope. Our community fended off goblin attacks and a series of updates made the ecosystem stronger than it has ever been. While most NFT communities abandoned their ships, you stood by Chikn. Our floor price consistently rose during this period and new all-time highs were smashed, a testament to our strength as a community.
During this time a fantastic community initiative emerged, the Chikn basketball team, led by balling prodigy HoopDreams (@hoopdreamsbball). Representing the chikn fam at AVAXPDX and beyond, as well as kindly sending jerseys to the core team and community, the Chikn basketball team has since been a mainstay of the community.
Another incredible community initiative emerged over the crypto winter — the Bokcast. Hosted by the charming Clint (@ChiknBokcast) and his co-hosts Duke (@animalchartsorg) and Search4Yield (@avaxchikn), the Bokcast was a daily Twitter spaces where the community discussed the project's latest developments. The consistency and energy behind the Bokcast was impressive to say the least, with 100 days straight of Twitter spaces lasting at least 1 hour. The impact of the Bokcast will forever be felt by the community and project at large, still fondly referred to as the #bokcast effect.
We also had a plethora of community-driven content emerge including (but not limited to) the BokTerminal by Bitmaker (@0xbitmaker), ChiknWorld by Boksalot (@Boksalot), knockout explainer videos from PlayGateWay (@Playgateway) and Ryan McBay (Ryan Mcbay) and hilarious memes from Jafar (@JafarTheDegen) and Shaukath (@Shaukat1530).
Moderation also became more formal and we thank our mods deeply for their amazing commitment to keeping the peace and encouraging good times in the discord: Nik, Monegg (0xMonegg), OneThirdNerd (@onethird_nerd), VagabondCaravan (@Vagabond202020), Lgeeh (@lachlangilmour), Nifty (@CaptiaNifty), and LaverDude (@laverdude).
Over the depths of the bear market over the following months, we toiled away in the background developing the next iterations of the Chikn ecosystem. A bear market is a builder's market, and the eerie calm allowed us to line up the dominoes for the next phase of the project. Thanks to the community’s rampant engagement and enthusiasm, Chikn continued to thrive during the bear winter.
A new hope
The next major upgrade to Chikn would come on September 30, with the alpha release of the Foraging rollout. This introduces Foraging, a new mechanic in the Chikn game. Roostr and chikn were released from the Roosts and set free on expanding FarmLand. As they roam, they peck up treasured resources and return them to you. There are currently 10 resources to find that, with upcoming updates, can be crafted into items.
This novel new mechanic set the groundwork for gamification beyond the core idle gameplay of feeding chikn and Roostr. We set the direction for a more active form of gameplay with features akin to popular mobile and browser games. Like everything we do here at Chikn, Foraging is a springboard for our future releases including crafting, CoqFight, and Breeding.
King of the Roost
His Majesty the Chikn Sultan tops the leaderboard with a Roost totaling a whopping 10,584 KG across 185 Chikn — the largest single-wallet collection. That’s an average weight of 57.211 KG per Chikn, proving that biggr is always better.
Meanwhile, in the background, the finite FEED supply was beginning to approach its limits and the community began aping into LP, EGG swaps and Single-sided staking, to accumulate as much as possible. Speggulation began around what Life After Feed Farming (LAFF) would be like, and what the new rewards token would be. This is when the native EGG swap was nuked (thanks Sherbok), causing a massive supply shock to FEED emissions and triggering a new wave of hype and price action.
On October 31, the communities questions were finally answered as we were introduced to $WORM, the latest token to join the family. $WORM added a new layer (or ten) of depth to FarmLand, and the gamification of the ecosystem, by working symbiotically with foraging and crafting. Although yet to be fully realized, Worms are paramount to the entire foraging and crafting system, as well as providing a new incentive for liquidity provision.
Worms live in your WormFarm, housed in the soil under your FarmLand. As Worms are deployed into the WormFarm, Foraging time is decreased, treasures are revealed and soon, blueprint NFTs are found. To craft, mint and decompose the items corresponding to these blueprints, you’ll need to sacrifice some WORM from your WormFarm. This introduces a constant need to provide EGG liquidity, and to deploy Worms to the WormFarm, creating a new cycle of token demand and burning.
And, in truth, this merely scratches the surface for WORM and its utility.
So much more in store
As we write this retrospective, our Hengineers are working hard on Foraging updates to bring items and crafting to the ecosystem. We also recently announced our first Eggnite partners, bringing the first non-chikn NFTs into the Chikn ecosystem 👀.
As a massive “cluck you” to the bear market, Eggnite Partners EdgyEggs are Minting NOW 🥚
Best to keep your wits about you as we launch Chikn well beyond the stratosphere with Eggnite. Wondering when more official orbital pathways will drop? We may not keep you waiting too long…
Chikn pioneered idle NFT gaming on Avalanche, and Eggnite will naturally feed into our continual development of this aspect of the ecosystem. However, future releases will also bring about the much anticipated era of Active Gameplay, in the form of our PvP title offering — CoqFight, and the ever-expansive ChiknQuest for the long-game social anarchists among us. These, and a multitude of further use-cases for your beloved NFTs in the Chiknverse. We are in the thick of Gameplay development, and as well as delivering all of the above features to the ecosystem — 3D models of your chooks are even being carved out of digital stone as we speak.
An Ode to the Barn
We say it often, but we still don’t say it enough — thank you all for helping build Chikn into what it is today. Together, we’ve created an ecosystem that is the envy of all others in Web3.0, and with love, kindness, good humor, and includivity at the forefront — it’s a place we can all proudly call home.
When six friends from Australia got together to talk about launching an NFT project, we had no idea that it would develop into what it is today. In just one year we are now arguably the most prominent community on Avalanche, one of the most active communities in all of Web3.0, and, with Eggnite just around the corner — not even the sky is our limit.
Together — right here, right now — we are truly creating a movement.
Again, thank you all for making this possible. Whether you’re a silent holder or an active member of our incredible Discord community, your contributions and belief in both Chikn and the upgradable NFT architecture we’re pioneering is what has kept us blazing the trail.
The Upgradable NFT revolution is only just beginning.
Bok bok, dear frens — and Happy Birthday.
We love you all ❤️
The Chikn Team. 🐓🐔
