Update April 8

This is the first weekly update. Here’s to many more!

Catchup

It’s hard to keep up the momentum in Discord. At least it is for me… I know others who are great at it.

While it’s been silent in there, I’ve been working hard every night after my kids are in bed. For the past five months, since I postponed the original launch date, the project has evolved so much! I’ve utilized the extra time to adapt to a changing market and evolve a basic idea into a novel one.

For a backstory on what the project is about now, see the TL;DR post.

Contract status

For the last six weeks, literally, I’ve been fighting a specific issue in the contract around free mints for phase 1 holders. I was trying to use a merkle tree of a snapshot of phase 1 Ded owners, where the phase 1 contract is Opensea’s 1155.

I’m still learning Solidity, so I recently realized how to replace six weeks of trial and error and the entire Merkle tree / snapshot system with a single line of code.

So now, the contract is ready. Phase 1 holders get a free mint in phase 2 for each phase 1 ghost they hold, and we don’t need to do a snapshot. If you sell a phase 1 ghost before claiming a phase 2, the new owner can claim a phase 2 in the future (until 2,750 are minted). This is a much better system, and it was an amateur move on my part to approach it the way I tried to originally.

What’s left before mint

There are a few details to finalize in the artwork, and a little more to build out on the website now that the test contract is live.

But we’re close. Like a week / week and a half from minting 👀.

Marketing/Hype plans

A lot of collections are anti-hype right now. I am, too, clearly 😂.

Really, I think it doesn’t make sense to have hype for this project, where you customize your NFT before minting. Hype is the enemy of a good experience, in this case. You want to take your time. But I also recognize the importance of optics on mint day.

My plan right now is to get the contract live on mainnet in the next week or weekend, and then start to market it after that. Rather than market a drop date, I want to just market the live project. I can leverage my web3 connections to get the word out, and I like the idea of saying “go mint now” instead of just “follow on discord.”

ENS Subdomains

In other news, I’m really intrigued by the ENS subdomain system that Purrnelope’s Country Club is using. I want to figure out how to do this for the Deds, but I just started looking int it, so more to come.