Features and unique points of the first minted PoS collection
Put it on record — we are the First! We are PoSers!
The Posers NFT collection is dedicated to this new era of crypto brought about by the successful merge to proof-of-stake Ethereum — We are the first onchain PFP collection minted onto PoS — we are history! This achievement was no accident — it took a lot of planning and coordination to make that claim.
The first mint of posers happened immediately after the Merge. The contract code was written so that the mint function opened automatically once the block difficulty became 0.
In fact, our collection became available for minting exactly at the merge to PoS, and the first transaction took place 4 blocks after the merge was complete. The collection Seed appeared in the contract code immediately once the first mint was issued, and all airdrops were revealed only after that mint, turning them into full-fledged NFTs with metadata.
All airdrops before PoS were just empty code with ID, and were not the NFTs you see today. The collection in its full-fledged form did not exist before PoS.
Why are airdrop and mint different functions?
An airdrop allows you to send a token directly from the contract to the wallets, to create an NFT without a minter involved. In this case the airdrop was a generic placeholder, without an image or any metadata to identify it as unique. In our case, this “NFT” was nothing until the first mint. Without the metadata, these airdropped NFTs were indistinct and interchangeable, their metadata did not exist, they were all identical.
The Posers NFTs only came into existence when the metadata arrived on chain, in PoS.
Why couldn’t we make an airdrop after the PoS?
The airdrop was necessary to establish the existence of the project and prove our position to the NFT marketplace in advance! This was an important precaution to ensure we were not confused with any fake, scam projects. We linked our Twitter account to our official collection links, ensuring that only the correct information was shared across our social accounts. Our primary goal was to keep our community safe.
The second reason for the airdrop was because we planned to renounce ownership after the airdrop, to permanently freeze any contract changes. The collection’s metadata and on-chain collection generator take up a hell of a lot of space on the blockchain, and there are complex dependencies (e.g., the entire data is a separate contract) in place. We did many transactions to load all SVG layers for generation, and had to make sure in advance that everything worked properly — that all the contracts were tied up and so on. If we identified any mistakes, we would have been able to change the contract with the SVG data in advance and replace the link to it in our main contract.
We decided to shift the time when we would renounce ownership to a later date, which turned out to be the right decision — we were able to change the cost of the mint and make airdrops to everyone who used the paid mint features, which would not have been feasible after renouncing ownership.
Renouncing ownership was done immediately after selling out and scanning all NFTs for visual problems. With that, the project is forever frozen on the blockchain. The metadata and images exist permanently on that record. The Posers are now a part of history, and your NFTs will always show that no matter what!
To summarize!
We can confidently state that we are the first on-chain PFP NFT collection on PoS!
Perhaps there will be discussion or debate about whether a collection can be considered as originating on PoS if the contract was first deployed to PoW, and whether an NFT collection exists as a collection in some sense if all of the tokens are identical placeholders without unique metadata. However, if there is disagreement on these philosophical questions we will leave that to others, the record shows our place on the blockchain and we believe that speaks for itself.
The story behind the artstyle of the collection
I came up with the idea for the collection back in January. I wanted to make a collection that wouldn’t look like the low-effort scam projects that pervade this space. I was inspired by some of the most notable bluechip projects, and left references to some of them throughout the art. The most obvious and recognizable inspiration comes from using the floating eye of Doodles — that feature fit so well into the 24 pixel grid that after the first trial, I could not give them up.
Drawing process: https://posers.app/artprocess
Also, I won’t hide the fact that I borrowed the idea of gradient backgrounds from Genuine Undead — in our project I want to make everything as transparent as possible, especially when it comes to creative inspiration. I was amazed by this visual solution, where the backgrounds are not pixelated, but rather appear as a smooth gradient at high resolution. I knew that such a thing could be implemented in an onchain in SVG format! Once I made this realization, I immediately started to adjust these gradients right before deployment. I could only check the gradients on testnet generations, and I had to do a lot of generations until I decided that the backgrounds looked good and it was ok to show them to people.
Everything else you see was inspired by the general vibe of the NFT world, in an effort to create something new. Most of the traits don’t reference other collections, and are meant to be sources of inspiration for others!
Yes, the total number of traits is a bit more than 150, but I moved and changed pixels 1000 times to make each trait perfect. It was important to make all of the traits as universal as possible, so that I wouldn’t have to exclude one trait from use with another because of some unwanted layer superposition.
I’m happy that I managed to construct the generation process so that each trait looks perfect together as an avatar! For me, it’s the only reason of nft existing — to flex with a cool avatar among my friends. Hopefully soon NFTs will be on passports!
Image and meta generation
Our team was formed in late 2020, when the NFT boom was just beginning. We have never quite had our time to shine in this space, but many nft collections have passed through our hands and tools. That’s how we developed our own NFT generator, which has undergone many tests and turned into a full-fledged program for generating collections. I already wrote an article about the features of our generator on the project Whimsy Sisters, you can read about its features here — https://medium.com/@whimsysisterscollection/intriguing-features-of-nft-collection-generation-477fb61487aa
On Posers, our devs did something incredible and were able to transfer the generator functionality onchain! That’s right! I just created the collection and all the settings were automatically sent to the programmers to load the dates (layers, exceptions and rarities) onchain.
We also developed a converter of pixel raster images into SVG format with as much compression as possible. The script recognizes areas and creates vector polygons from them with colors from a given palette!
Since the main purpose of the collection is to create a central place for web3 assistance, education, and community, I plan to find safe ways to distribute our generator to others! There are so many talented artists in the world who can produce incredible PFP collections, and a tool like this will be vital for them. We want to protect these artists from opportunists and scammers, so we will carefully think about the distribution system of the generator.
Our marketing ideas for success
We realized that we needed protection from bots at the contract level. Free mint is good, but you can’t give all of the supply to bots. So first we decided to make access to mint only for ENS-domain owners. After opening discord and setting up collabland only for ENS, our idea was transformed into something interesting. I decided to give roles to the bluechip projects that I respect and admire. An entire night was spent in collabland, setting up roles and adding new ones.
As a result, people came to get a whitelist. Any of the holders on our bluechip list could come and automatically get a WL role for free mints. In the beginning, Apes, Moonbirds and Neotokyo were displayed separately on the server. The Neotokyo community especially showed themselves as super cohesive guys and were the first ones to raid our server. We thank them from the bottom of our hearts! Later, theywere joined by other collections, and the chat became painted in many different colors.
As a result — during the mint on various mint-sniper sites popped up that Posers are bought by blue chip holders and this had its effect. At that initial stage of the launch we attracted a lot of new and interesting individuals to our community!
At the start we had 3 different mint functions:
- WL mint 1 free and 2 at 0.02. For the mint, you must have the WL and in addition to the ENS domain or bluechip on the wallet.
- Poser mint 3 for 0.03. ENS domain or bluechip on wallet is required.
- Degen mint 3 at 0.05. This is a standard feature with no additional conditions.
Through a community vote, we decided to make only bluechip holders have access to free mints, but without the requirement of ENS.
We made an airdrop for every paid mint from Poser Mint and Degen Mint functions and just after that we renounced ownership.
We removed ENS from the list of bluechips because I was worried that there was a network of bots with ENS addresses and most of the most special NFTs would get minted to them. We delivered the airdrop to every paid mint, after that we renounced ownership.
Subsequently, we sold out and the Posers are on the road to the moon!
Technical features that helped the success
- The collection is dedicated to the new era in the cryptoworld and was made according to a fundamental principle of web3: generated on chain where they can stay forever on the blockchain, without any interference from the outside world! All your images in vector format are stored directly in the Ethereum.
- As mentioned above — we renounced ownership after checking the collection for bugs. This is a very important point for many true holders! This is the basis of pure web3, decentralization and independence, so we and our holders are forever in history!
- Since the images are stored in vector format, we have made a converter from SVG to PNG on our site, holders can enter their poser ID to get 1200x1200px PNG.
- Onchain gradient backgrounds added zest to the visual component of the collection.
- We didn’t load wallets into the contract, but used a special backend server to link to the contract, which automatically issued signatures for the WL mint through the site. This was necessary to add new wallets, because a lot of bluechip holders with WL roles didn’t submit their addresses on time and had to add them right in the moment of launch. Also, there were many cases of replacing a hot wallet with a cold one, so we allowed the contract to give eligible individuals the opportunity to mint.
- On the site, everyone could get a signature for the mint through the contract on ethescan, and we did this because we knew in advance that many people were afraid to mint through the site.
- We know that many people don’t like to use bluechip-holding wallets for new mints, so we gave those holders a Whimsy Sister NFT on a hot wallet from the devs personal supply, that way they would be eligible for the free mint.
- The contract was made with the ability to add bluechip collections to the list for the free mint, which allowed us to add some other bluechip collections on the fly. For example, at the beginning of the mint I forgot to add MAYC to the list! Fortunately, this misunderstanding was corrected in time and all of our MAYC friends could join the mint without any issues.
Conclusion
Of course, we couldn’t take into account all the possibilities for the smoothest possible start, we know there are no perfect starts and if a collection does not pass that initial turbulence zone, it cannot become a true bluechip. However, we feel we delivered the best, safest, and most fair experience to our community!
The team continues to develop the project day and night in collaboration with our holders, and we are always open to discussion in our discord. Come join our community and say hi! We look forward to what the future holds!
