Wench 2043 Reboot
Third time is the charm for the Reboot of Wench 2043!
After 2 attempts at minting Wench 2043, we have everything in place for a successful 3rd minting/cloning. I previously wrote two articles about how I came to creating the generative series of groundbreaking NFTs featuring collage and other mixed media elements, as well as the layer conflictions we found while making test Wench’s.
I hired a team out of Pakistan I found on fiverr.com in early November 2021 who seemed competent & had experience, priced in-between beginners, and some expensive people I found here. They did everything except create the art.
They wrote the contract, generated all the layers and attributes into final images, built the website, and used IPFS to store the images. Everything was going well until before Christmas for a January 15th 2021 mint date when I started to review the 2,043 Wench’s and noticed the image generation did not turn out properly.
They used 5 different categories based on rareness, Common, Rare, Super Rare, Ultra Super Rare, and Legendary. Then I was asked to assign the rareness of the attributes to each category, however, all the attributes for each category were not properly distributed to other categories, they stayed in each category. I assigned too many categories to the Common, and very few to the rarer ones.
For example, the Zombie was a Legendary category and it only had Legendary traits, not any of the other traits sprinkled in. So, every Zombie had every Zombie attribute, and no other attributes assigned to other categories. Same with the Ultra Super Rare, Albino and Gold Wenches only had Ultra Super Rare attributes, and none of the common attributes.
And my percentage of Common Wench’s was completely wrong. Over ½ were Original with only Original traits, and they pretty much all looked the same, simple background, no special attributes at all. This was before Christmas and the team felt it was too close to mint date to try to upload again, and they wanted several more thousand dollars to do that, so I let it go, and mint date came.
As you can see above, the rare Wenches were super rare, and most people ended up with a Wench like below. In fact, besides the 1st one being different, the next 75 looked like this and I was horrified on mint day!
Then we found the contract was not written to optimize the gas fees; the fans I had attracted found out on mint date the gas was in the $150+ range! For an NFT that had a mint price of 0.02 Eth, or about $66.18 at the time, resulting in a price for each one costing $216.18 of Eth. Only 21 were minted, and to try to salvage this, I minted up 9 that I owed as prizes, which were different, spending pretty much what I had made to that point. I soon after cancelled the mint and pulled the mint site.
To say I was devastated after several month preparation was an understatement. I had invested quite a bit of my crypto in the mint site/backend, and I made the mistake of paying for the swag store in advance, thinking I would sell out quickly, and the Eth to the shillers I hired to spread the word.
My next move was to list them individually on OpenSea. I was debating whether to use Eth or Eth-Polygon, as OpenSea proclaimed there is no gas fees when you mint that way. I wanted to make it up to my fans, and wanted to give 2–1 for everyone who minted on the 15th as a way to say thank you, and I had 19 that I had given away as prizes.
I found someone on fiverr.com who helped me generate the images and JSON files which have the meta data about attributes & such. We ended up adding an Alien so now there are 7 Wench types with a better distribution than before.
I also increased the Attribute count to 195.
However, I had no idea that the cost to convert the Eth to Eth-Polygon in the Metamask wallet was as much as, if not more expensive than the gas fees had I used Eth. Only a couple sold, they were the Aliens I had added to the mix as an even rarer trait.
Then I tried to get that Eth-Polygon out of the wallet and it’s still stuck there, it’s very difficult to convert in Metamask. I was told recently lovers of Polygon NFTs use Crypto.com to convert their Eth first, avoiding the high conversion fees in Metamask. I’ll try sending it there to convert.
Either way, it was the wrong choice, no one want to mint any of the rest of the 300 I manually added, so I stopped listing them. Then I met someone in a Twitter DM for a NFT I had purchased, and said he would help me out to create a new contract and get them minting again.
I hired him, and he wrote a beautiful contract that only charges $1–2 dollars, no matter how many you mint, created a basic mint site, and we tried it out in a Pre-Mint status to see how it went. I minted the first one, and it was less than a dollar gas fee to mint! Success!!!
I debated minting for free, as that is all the rage recently, however, its resulted in a lot of scammers, or people picking them up and dumping them. That is not what I wanted, and I did want to try to recoup what I initially paid, so the Wench is priced at a 0.0069 Eth, and you can mint up to 20x at a time.
However, there were two issues that needed to be fixed.
#1, Others told me they could not buy more as Metamask was showing the gas was $35 to $50, and when I went to check, it had only cost $1–2 dollars, though that warning prevented them from buying more if you did not have that amount in your wallet.
#2, Was it was only accepting Metamask wallet, and a friend only had Coinbase wallet, excluding every other wallet from minting. We added Wallet Connect and now other wallets that they support can mint.
Our Offical Launch date is August 6th,2022, and already in Pre-Mint 131 have been minted, or 6.4%, which I am ecstatic over! I will follow up to this article at a later date.
Everyone who mints a Wench will get a free swag store from Maddies.co for each Wench they own to sell t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, stickers & more.
The official mint site is Wench2043.com, and the OpenSeas page for resale is Wench 2043 Rebooted. We all have some Wench inside us, come join us!
