TL;DR — The Mystery of the Deds

The fastest way to get up to speed on phase 2 of the Deds NFT project

Drew Thomas

Published in

Dedaverse

5 min readFeb 23, 2022

In this TL;DR guide, I’ll cover:

📙 The history of the Deds (phase 1)
🧠 The concept behind phase 2 (the mystery part)
✍️ The writing process and community involvement
👻 Phase 2 minting
👓 Phase 2 traits and 1/1s
🙌 Community ownership and future plans
🔗 Links

📙 The history of the Deds

The Ded.so project started with a phase 1 collection that was released on 10/1/21.

It started as a way to showcase Bildr through a personal challenge… could I make generative art like the Bored Apes, using Bildr and visual development? Turns out I could, and after a few demos to the Bildr community, it was clear that was an interest in making my demo collection a real thing. I took time to make the art for real, even though it was a demo, and admittedly, I was liking it a lot myself.

If I was going to make it a real collection, though, I wanted it to be more than just the art. I love NFTs that are “just the art,” don’t get me wrong, but that’s not what this project is for me. This project is an exploration of a new and exciting technology that’s creating new and exciting social and financial dynamics!

So I came up with the concept of a collaborative NFT project, where the buyer somehow contributes to the artwork or the lore/narrative. The phase 1 collection didn’t include any collaboration, but I started marketing the project as collaborative from day 1.

Phase 2 is where we realize the collaborative aspect… you roll your art before you mint, so you start with a base of something that appeals to you. Then you can change the background and choose a “street” trait.

After mint, the mystery of the deds goes into full swing, and we’ll drop weekly artifacts that slowly unravel the mystery of these animal kids in ghost sheets. Owners will also shape the direction of the story as its being written.

🧠 The concept behind phase 2

The Mystery of the Deds

The Deds NFT are animals (or a tree) with ghost sheets and other halloween costume items.

But why?

Something happened in the town of Forkton, on Halloween night in 1995. Kids from two side-by-side neighborhoods vanished, but that’s not even the weird part.

As a mechanism to drop weekly (or more frequent) clues to this mystery story, we came up with the idea that we found a floppy disk related to this night. It’s so old, though, that the files- each of which reveals a little more to the overall mystery/lore- are taking literally weeks to load. Every time we drop a new clue, which we’re calling “artifacts,” it shows up on the computer at ded.so/disk.

The first artifact is live at the time of this writing… the Forkton Police missing person report for 14 year old Sara Blume.

In addition to the concept of telling a story through mysterious artifacts, we’re also involving ghost owners in key choices throughout the writing. These choices will shape the narrative, but ultimately, our in-house team of experienced screenwriters will form the important story and character arcs and control the pace of the mystery.

NFTs as characters

The mystery of the deds is ultimately about the ghosts represented by the NFTs, and so the characters in the official Deds narrative should be actual NFT ghosts, owned by their owners. As characters get introduced into the story, the community and our team will select an NFT ghost for each character. Those NFTs get updated metadata and potential future perks.

✍️ The writing process and community involvement

We don’t know the full process just yet, but we have the skeleton of the story, some potential directions and outcomes, and a loose idea of running polls and similar things through Discord. More info on this process will come after the mint.

The writing process itself doesn’t kick off until 50% of the collection is sold, which is 1,375 ghosts.

👻 Phase 2 minting info

Cost: probably .08, but still deciding

Link: Coming soon

Phase 1 free mints: For every phase 1 ghost you own, you get a free phase 2 ghost. There will be a snapshot, and it will be announced ahead of time.

Phase 1 traits: If you own a phase 1 ghost, you can choose to carry those traits into a phase 2 ghost. The new traits are updated versions of your phase 1 traits and are exclusive only to phase 1 owners of that trait.

👓 Phase 2 traits and 1/1s

Traits are similar to phase 1, but the art is all updated. In addition to the phase 1 traits, phase 2 adds traits for:

Nose
Mischief
Street

In addition to new trait types, phase 2 also brings a few 1/1 versions of existing traits, some brand new 1/1 traits, and 3 completely custom 1/1 NFTs. These 1/1s will be randomly assigned when generating the artwork, which is before minting, so even if you roll a 1/1, you don’t have to mint it and someone else may get the chance. 1/1 traits will be clearly marked during the rolling/minting process, though 😉.

🙌 Community ownership

The last piece of the Deds project puzzle is the community ownership piece. At this point, officially, there is no actual plan to become a DAO or tokenize, but I mostly say that for legal reasons. I can’t commit to anything yet. But I’ve been doing a ton of research and would like to find a way to make the Deds a truly community-owned project.

At the very least, royalties from secondaries will be going into a project treasury in order to fund the next step of the project. Minting will cover the costs for the entire plan we have so far, which will probably run for about 6 weeks after mint. After that, we’d love to keep building the project, using treasury funds, and with community involvement. Even if we’re not officially a DAO, we’ll involve the community in decisions from day 1.