A Look into our Genesis NFT MINT Phase 2
Overview of Phase 2 Mint:
- Carried out on Polygon, ERC 721 token, enabling low gas fees
- Total Phase 2 Invitation Cards: 14,000 (with 10% referral fee)
- Number of masks minted: 7,771 at 160 MATIC
- Time taken: 13 minutes
Preamble
We are always looking for new ways to do things, via experimentation and learning from those around us. NFT minting of in-game assets are no exception.
After Phase 1 where we had successfully minted about 1,500 NFT Masks, including a small number in collaboration with the awesome team over at Phantom Galaxies, we had some thinking to do; what could we improve on for the next minting phase? How could marketing be more effective? Were there technical things that needed tweaking?
83% of masks minted during Phase 1 were used for our very first mission in-game. This had us think towards the direction of making our next minting phase geared towards incentivising existing players and holders of Genesis masks. After all, we strive to build a core community to work with and iron out bugs throughout the alpha period. In fact, our very own Brent Maxwell, has written an article that provides more insight to the technical side of things when it comes to product development and tackling bugs.
How did we go about rewarding players while expanding our footprint?
1. Increased In-Game Earning Potential
In efforts to get more users into the game instead of simply holding their NFT mask in wallets unused, we increased the earning potential for Mission 1 significantly — including a bonus 5,000 $DEFY tokens for players who land in the Top 25% leaderboards, and a group bonus for getting together as a team and solving a global puzzle. The added incentive led to a sharp increase in gameplay participation beyond anything we had anticipated — from an initial prediction of 30% to having over 80% of masks minted being utilized in-game! The average number of hours a user engaged with the app, observed and shared excitedly by our tech team, were wild!
2. Invitation Cards System
We set up an Invitation Cards system for minting and airdropped 1 invite to anyone holding a Genesis mask, and an additional 9 invites to users who downloaded and connected their masks in the DEFY app. This resulted in a greater supply in Invitation Cards compared to the total number of masks available to be minted, thus creating a sense of urgency to mint sooner than later.
Additionally, we decided to introduce a 10% ‘referral fee’ for our loyal players. Essentially, players that received an Invitation Card for free via airdrop who go on to share it with another user would receive 10% of the mint cost (16 MATIC) if the user went on to successfully mint a mask. This was part of the smart contract that our development team made, and it led to an initial boost on the floor price of masks leading up to the snapshot, which rose as high as 8x of mint price.
Post-snapshot players were pumped to hand out invites for free as they stand to gain the referral fee from it being used. There were also those whom opted to sell them on OpenSea instead, to ensure those that held invites would follow through and mint the masks rather than simply letting it sit in their wallet. In fact, we had over 36 ETH in volume on the Invitation Cards alone within a couple of days!
3. Increased Marketing Efforts
Having data from users playing throughout Mission 1, we observed the different regions that gained the highest engagement and noted Japan topping the list significantly. This led us to opening up a Japanese-language channel within our Discord servers to help grow the community prior to the next minting phase.
4. Newly Improved Minting Site
There was a good amount of hard work and planning behind the scenes, especially towards building the site to handle the traffic and provide everyone with a seamless experience minting. Our earliest users would be familiar with the slow and congested network experience that happened during Phase 1 of minting, which led us to extending the minting period to span several days for users to take their time to mint. Our tech team later realized the default gas was set at a very low level, which led most users to get stuck in their transactions unless they manually increased the gas fees.
To improve Phase 2’s minting experience, the default gas fee was raised to 200 GWEI and 250 Priority, which thankfully still costed a very minimal amount due to being in the Polygon network (approx. $0.40 per transaction). This contributed to our masks completely selling out in record time, within 13 minutes! We also included a live counter onto the site displaying how many masks were minted and how many were left, which very likely drove more demand to mint a mask before it sold out.
The website experience was an actual JOY (much props to our amazing Devs) and comprised of 4 simple steps.
Connect wallet => Select Invite => Confirm Funds => MINT!
Let me show you what I mean by taking you through the steps with pictures:
Step 1: Connect Wallet
It is common for users to accidentally be connected to a different network, such as ETH mainnet. Our devs have inserted a prompt that pops up if a user attempts to connect their wallet from any other network besides Polygon.
Step 2: Select invite
Upon successfully connecting the wallet users would see their invitation card(s) displayed as shown below. Without an invite a user will not be able to mint a mask.
Users with multiple invites can select which one they want to use for minting, and invitation cards that have already been used are greyed out, as observed above.
Step 3: Confirm Funds
Navigating through Crypto can be confusing to the average user. Loaded ETH into your wallet and not realised that this is not the payment method for our mint? That’s okay, as we offered two options (a bridge to transfer assets and a ramp to purchase directly) and a warning for those that are signed onto the ETH mainnet.
We also have an alert that pops up (in red) if a user does not have enough MATIC for the mint.
Step 4: MINT!
All you need to do at this stage is click the mint button and wham!
Outcome page:
In Conclusion
Through our experience with carrying out this second minting phase we have learned how to execute future minting phases better. From implementing an incentivised system to reward holders and targeting marketing efforts towards where our audience were, to creating a website that is intuitive, connects wallets seamlessly, and pushes higher gas through transactions by default, there were a lot of different factors that led to the overall minting being smooth and successful.
About DEFY Labs
DEFY Labs is passionate about building the next generation tools and platforms that allow users to view and interact with NFTs and other digital collectables in the real world. DEFY Labs’ vision of the metaverse is one that involves merging the virtual and physical worlds in a compelling and inspiring way.
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