Introducing the BarnBridge ERC-721: The NFT $BOND Collection

We’re formally announcing the BarnBridge Non-Fungible Token, also taking the ticker for $BOND.

Website | Twitter| Github | Whitepaper | LaunchDAO | Discord

For an overview on BarnBridge please read our introductory post.

Defi & NFTs.

The NFT ecosystem is BOOMING & Defi is looking for ways to get involved.

We’ve been looking across the Defi ecosystem to see what other projects are doing in the NFT space. What started as a general curiosity turned into an in depth analysis of some of the ways you can use NFTs for incentives in Defi.

While, on one end of the spectrum, a ton of people were #halfrekt on $EMN causing $YFI to “lose the Andre premium” on it’s token price, you also have Aave working on $GHST & Aavegotchi. It will be fun to watch where both of these projects go from here.

Meanwhile, MakerDAO announced Badges for their community, essentially gamifying activeness in governance. And, from what we’ve heard through whispers in the community, a well known anonymous defi project wrapped a collateralized NFT to bootstrap seed stage fundraising.

In the most lucrative use case of NFT experimentation from high profile Defi projects, tucked away in the $UNI token announcement, there was a retroactive reward for holders of $SOCKS, skyrocketing the value of the $SOCKS NFT.

Downstream, we’ve seen defi projects propose using NFTs as proof of liquidity in income streams & wrapped NFTs as loan representations.

With almost every high profile Defi project experimenting in one way or another, the point is clear: Defi is looking into NFTs.

Outside of Defi, we’ve seen Rarible, SuperRare, & OpenSea explode in activity. We also want to give a shout out to the rising value of Crypto Punks, Crypto Kitties, and Rare Pepe’s as some of the original NFT projects.

As NFTs continue to gain traction, we should expect to see something from Compound & Synthetix soon enough.

NFTs for Community.

While we’ve been looking at what NFTs mean for Defi, at the moment, we’re just paying attention.

However, in our analysis, we realized that NFTs are an amazing way to bootstrap community and essentially “tag” early stage community supporters.

Founders of companies in hypergrowth often outgrow the direct need for some of the people in the early stages who helped them get there but they shouldn’t forget the early stage contributions of those people.

We don’t want to get “too big for our britches” as BarnBridge grows but people naturally get busy. So we’ve been looking for various ways to reward early stage community participants & NFTs seem like a solid way to do this. While the distribution of governance tends to bootstrap community activeness (as we’ve seen in the $YFI, $SNX, & $LINK communities), often the loudest individuals are the ones with the biggest bags. Some of the early stage participants naturally get lost in the hype flurry.

Rewarding early stage community members with NFTs could mean a few things:

1. Exclusive groups in Discord/Telegram that you have to hold an NFT to access. This is something we’re looking into.
2. Scarcity & exclusivity in value.
3. Retroactive rewards.
4. Reputation systems.
5. Badges.
6. Ideas nobody has even thought of yet.
7. The main reason: because they are cool and fun.

Announcing the BarnBridge Non-fungible Token.

Something we’ve been working on while we gear up for Yield Farming, we decided to launch our own NFT.

So we’re formally announcing the BarnBridge Non-Fungible Token, also taking the ticker for $BOND.

The BarnBridge Non-Fungible Token is a collaborative created by around 20 artists. $BOND is a contract for 200 (two hundred) fully compliant ERC-721 tokens minted by InfiNFT and viewable on OpenSea here:

OpenSea Storefront (we are still uploading NFTs it takes a while).

Metadata and storage: Arweave & IPFS.

Due to size limitations with Ethereum, NFT file data is stored on both the Arweave blockchain and IPFS. Both file hashes from these storage platforms are written to the NFT during minting.

We believe this redundant storage, especially when paired with on-chain metadata, provides an extremely robust token solution with the goal of being everlasting.

Every $BOND NFT is one of a kind. There may be similar ones in the collection but no 2 are exactly the same.

Some Disclaimers

These NFTs may be and will likely be completely pointless outside of being cool and fun.

We’re not promising we’ll ever give retroactive token rewards to NFT holders or that the NFTs will ever be voted on by the community to have any use on the BarnBridge DAO, we still think it’s a good to use NFTs as a rewards mechanism for early stage community members so we don’t lose track of who helped us early on.

With that said, we don’t want $BOND to be viewed as a 2 token economy so we’re going to distribute the first 100 $BOND NFTs to the team, seed funders, and advisors so if the community ever votes to include NFTs into governance of the BarnBridge DAO in some way, the earliest stage supporters of the project are not ever diluted.

Retroactive Rewards.

We’re expecting after $BOND holders have skin in the game for the list to grow so I want to give a special shout out to the first $BOND NFT recipients because they literally had no incentive to help us, outside of a general interest in our project,when they did.

Some community members have already stood out to us, so we’re announcing some retroactive rewards for early stage community members who have provided value with no expectation of return from the BarnBridge team:

1. ResumeBit on Discord — ResumeBit came in, seemingly, on day one throwing heat with articles and interesting content for us to consider spanning from governance, to security, to how BarnBridge would work at scale. ResumeBit is the kind of community member you want as an early stage project.
2. Hu on Discord — offered to run our Chinese community and we’ll probably get them to help with translation. Hu was one of our first active members in Discord and has been asking extremely high quality questions and looking for ways to provide value to BarnBridge.
3. Danijel on Discord & Twitter — built a spam protection bot that is going to make our lives less of a living hell during yield farming.
4. Anthony Sassano— talked about BarnBridge on his podcast and wrote about us on his weekly write up a few times super early on in our project. Sassano’s tweets alone & early support were a big push to get us over 1000 Twitter followers (along with Kain from Synthetix).
5. DeFi Dad— this is a little retroactive in that Defi_Dad talked about BarnBridge with Keegan from Fourth Revolution Capital in his podcast with ZapperFi but it’s moreso proactive in that Defi_Dad has offered to make videos about how our protocol works when we’re further along.
6. @CryptoToit on Twitter — by far one of our earliest and most active Twitter followers. Introduced us to Daniel on Discord for the anti-spam bot and has been active in retweeting and starting conversations about BarnBridge very early on.
7. @ClubShitCoin — our favorite frog on Twitter who was one of the first people to start retweeting and pushing $BOND on our behalf.
8. j1mmy.eth — taught us everything we needed to actually make this NFT project come to life. J1mmy runs InfiNFT which we used to mint the NFTs and he pushed us to use a platform that stores the metadata for the NFTs on chain. If it wasn’t for J1mmy, this would have taken way longer than it did.
9. Nate Alex — just like J1mmy. Nate is an NFT legend and he really helped us figure out how to launch this entire NFT project.

Get Ready. Meme Competition.

This is where everything started. We simply wanted to run a meme competition and reward the winners each week with an NFT from Rarible that gives away the PKs to a wallet with some type of monetary rewards. However, when we started diving deep into Rarible vs. the minting platform we decided to use, InfiNFT because of how they handle metadata & storage.

With that said, we’re still doing the meme competition. We want memes, memes, and more memes to post, especially during yield farming.

So this is how the competition works:

1. Post $BOND related memes into our Discord channel for memes.
2. Once a month, starting in October, we’ll award one of the participants with a BarnBridge Non-Fungible Token of their choice (out of the available tokens left that have not already been rewarded).
3. We can use any meme posted in the channel in our social channels and announcements. Us using a meme does not mean you automatically win the contest each month.
4. We can stop the contest at any time.

Here are some examples of some submissions (so far):

We hope they only get better from here.

That’s it. That’s the whole post.

Get active and let’s have some fun.

Memes welcome.