Deds Update — April 21
👋
We’re almost live.
I haven’t shared my full thoughts on how I view NFT launches and mental health in the NFT space, but I wanted to touch on that to set up these updates.
I believe that the hyped drop stuff will be gone soon. Flipping projects with no substance is almost already gone (but that’s a little besides the point). I think projects in the future will “launch” by opening a mint and then starting to build in public, which will attract minters over time (as opposed to creating buzz and hype and then “launching” in a single mint day, all before building anything).
That’s exactly what I plan to do, although I haven’t told anyone formally yet. Consider this the formal announcement.
In my opinion, this is the true promise of NFTs as fundraising. It doesn’t make sense to get all the money upfront so everyone can trust you to not rug. But it does make sense to democratize funding (and fundraising) and get rewarded financially as you build and prove yourself.
Right now, to get angel or VC funding, you have to prove yourself first using “friends and family” capital or bootstrapping, which can be prohibitive to a lot of potential founders. NFTs can solve this, but we accidentally swung way too far in the other direction.
Right now, to get NFT funding, you spin up a website, a smart contract, and a discord, and then you market and hype like crazy, by necessity, before you start actually building! It might make sense for PFP communities and pure art, but it doesn’t make sense for projects based around more than the NFT itself.
And then quickly, mental health-wise… it’s tough to keep up excitement publicly while building and adapting to this insanely fast-paced space. I believe that unlike pre-web3 spaces, where you might be able to push through a lot of mental health stuff, it’s literally not possible to “just push through” in web3/NFT land. You’ve got to actively manage your mental health. It’s a combination of the speed things move, the financials at stake, and the broad/transparent access to retail investors and the general public. All of these are good aspects of NFTs, but they’re a lot more stressful to build around! There are other founders writing about mental health in the NFT space as well, most notably WAGMInterfaces (https://medium.com/@wgminterfaces/a-passion-project-that-no-longer-feels-like-a-passion-project-c388011db108).
I’ve been quietly, but extremely, stressed about different aspects of this project, and several times, I’ve just taken a step back. Each time it’s resulted in positive things (for me and the project), but to the outside world, it just looks like delays. This is challenging, but with a non-hype approach, it feels ok and makes a lot of sense. Soon, I hope it will feel normal!
Anyway, I’ll write something more thoughtful on that somewhere else. Just wanted to preface the Deds update with a bit of my thought process there, so the rest makes sense.
The Update
With the thinking above in mind, I’ve been doing a lot more to prep for what it will take to actually grow this project (not just mint out this project). I’m going to build a lot more of it in public.
For example, I started a document that outlines the “NFTs as characters in the story” details. I want the Deds to license your NFT and pay you royalties for its use. (Did you even know that? 😂) There’s a lot of legal and technical stuff to figure out there, so I’ve been quiet about how it will work, but why? Now it’s a document that has a “last updated” timestamp at the top, and it will continue to evolve as the project moves forward.
I also just wrote something up about the 1/1 special Deds that I plan to run giveaways for at mint milestones. For holders only. I don’t even know if I mentioned these before 😂.
Contract and Mainnet
The next step in general is to get the contract on mainnet. I have just about everything working and tested on testnet, through the website.
That includes:
- Rolling your artwork before you mint
- Choosing your Background layer
- Choosing a Street in the story’s fictional neighborhoods
- Minting (of course)
- Pulling traits from any Phase 1 ghosts you own into a Phase 2 ghost
- A free mint for every Phase 1 ghost you hold
I’m back and forth on one final contract addition, which is a function to change the price. I’m a little scared to be inflexible there because 1) I’ve seen a few recent mints that struggled and ultimately dropped the price, and 2) if the mint goes longer than a day or two (something I’m basically promoting), who knows where the price of eth will go? I don’t want to get stuck.
So I’ll either make that change or not (and I’ll run it through everything on testnet again if I do), and then I plan to deploy the contract on Mainnet with the sale toggled off until we’re ready. Most likely, I’ll be pretty quiet until then, except for these updates. After that point, I’ll drop a lot of announcements and share updates in a lot of places, with a message of “like this idea? go mint now!”
This approach is very freeing. I don’t have to say “join the discord” or “get on the waitlist” and then maintain a hyped community. I can actually market the live project.
Artifacts
Lastly, I quietly dropped the second “artifact” for the Mystery of the Deds experience.
If you’re not familiar with what the artifacts are, they’re a huge component to the project 😂, and you can learn more in this TL;DR post: https://medium.com/dedaverse/tl-dr-the-mystery-of-the-deds-3e2c4ba29cc1.
The second artifact is a police report about a wolf that entered someone’s home in Forkton in 1995. The wolf was shot with a shotgun by the home’s owner. The interesting part, though, is some of the details that were shared with the officer…
And that’s pretty much it for updates for now. Super low key. Super fluid. When mint time comes, I’ll of course let everyone know in Discord, etc. (I’ll make sure it’s not missed), but before then, I’m not holding myself to any dates, timelines, or deliverables 🙃.
Quick hits
- Due to a contract change, no more snapshot is needed for Phase 1 holders. If the Phase 1 ghost is in your wallet, you can claim its free mint.
- I really want to try what Purrnelope’s Country Club did where every owner gets a subdomain at their ENS address. I think it’s done in a separate contract, so I’ll look into it after I get the minting contract up.
- There are a few Phase 1 ghosts for sale on OpenSea that are less than the mint price (.08). If you buy one of those on OpenSea, you get a free Phase 2… so a cheaper Phase 2 plus a bonus Phase 1.
Til next time 👋.
Project website, Discord, etc: https://urlz.com/deds
