Inspiration

I was connected with Henlo via my first NFT project, Ohayo Labs. He is a supporter of both myself and my NFT project, as he minted Ohayo and was a huge fan of the anime inspired art.

On Twitter, I saw some of his art previews of what would later become Chimkens. I was really impressed with the art and thought it was both unique, yet simple. He mentioned he used AI to help generate the art, as well as create his own manual edits. I decided to reach out to see if he was launching an NFT project and to see if there were any potential collaborations.

As an architect and artist, Henlo was confident in creating the art but hesitant in the development of the smart contract and website. He had a certain vision for his project, but did not know exactly how to realize it. With some negotiation, we agreed that I would hop on board as the developer of Chimkens. As the dev, I would be responsible for the smart contract and website, while Henlo would be respoonsible for the art and marketing. It was a great opportunity for us both to work on a new project, utilizing each of our strengths to collaborate and create.

Vision

As Henlo was the founder of the project, I let him take the lead on the vision. Of course, he did ask for my advice and I was happy to offer it, as I had experience launching an NFT project before while it would be his first.

He was inspired by Ohayo Labs and took a lot of similar themes from my project into Chimkens. Chimkens would be an AI focused project, with a low supply of 999 and a low mint price. There would be no promised utility, just good art and good vibes. We would do our best to not over-allocate the whitelist and give true supporters a chance to mint. And of course, I would create a custom website and smart contract in order to add novel features and a personal touch.

We also had lengthy discussions about which blockchain to launch Chimkens on. Ethereum NFTs were declining due to gas fees. Bitcoin ordinals on the other hand were rising, but it was quite expensive to inscribe Ordinals on Bitcoin. Meanwhile, Blast had just launched their layer 2. And Base was generating hype due to its low gas fees and ease of use.

In the end, we decided to launch on Base. Being a low supply collection with a low price meant it would be extremely costly to launch Chimkens on ETH or BTC. And Base NFTs were starting to gain traction more so than Blast. In the end, it was an easy choice as we could ride the rising tide of Base NFTs while enjoying low gas for deployment and minters.

The website would be a “good vibes” website with clean art and abstract buttons. It would have minting functionality via connecting your web 3 wallet. You could also view and confirm your whitelist spot. And we also added a FAQ to help answer common questions.

The smart contract would be be a simple ERC721 contract with a few extra features. There would be a whitelist mint separated by Chimkenlist and Ohayo list. I was able to negotiate 300 mint spots for the Ohayo community, and Henlo would create his own Chimkenlist for his supporters for the rest. Whitelist mint price would be .0069 ETH. There would also be a public sale for any remaining unminted NFTs, which would have a price of .0088 ETH.

Post Launch

The Chimkens mint was a success as we sold out all 999 NFTs, raising 7.5 ETH ($27k)!

The whitelist mint went very smoothly, as most supporters had ample time to mint their allocation. After the whitelist sale, there were about 250 NFTs left for the public sale. The public sale sold out in seconds which was both a good and bad thing.

Good because there was a lot of demand for the sale. But bad because bots claimed most of the supply, and it was very difficult to mint if you were an average joe on the computer.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a great way to combat bots for a timed mint, as they will almost always be faster than the human hand when clicking buttons. And this is especially true for Base, where bots have negligible gas fees and can repeatedly spam the same function without material cost. But it did give me a few learning lessons to help reduce the amount of bots that can mint. Next time, I can over-allocate the whitelist to ensure most if not all of the supply is minted fairly, thereby eliminating the public sale entirely. I can also keep the timing, price, and amount able to mint a secret, so bots cannot pre-plan their minting strategy. On the same rationalization, I can announce an initial price and change it at the last second, so only those minting through the front-end will be successful. And lastly, I can wait to verify the contract publicly until after mint, so bots cannot screen the contract functions and use them nefariously.

In the end, I learned some great lessons and had some really important takeaways after the completion of Chimkens:

• Working on a team was really exciting and helped reduce my responsibilities. Henlo was a great partner for this project as we balanced out our strengths and weaknesses. He was able to take the lead with the art and marketing, and I was able to stay in the background focusing on the programming and development. It worked out really well because marketing and art isn’t my strongest suit, and I was able to focus on programming and let Henlo take care of talking to supporters, organizing collabs, and creating the art metadata.
• Having already launched Ohayo previously, launching Chimkens was a lot easier as I could take my experience and prior work and rebrand a lot of it for Chimkens. I didn’t have to create the smart contract from scratch again, I could use the Ohayo contract as a base and update it accordingly. And although the website would look completely different, the Web 3 functions are usually the most time consuming part of building a mint website. Luckily, Ohayo was also a mint website so i could reuse a lot of the code to implement the same logic for Chimkens. Overall, the process was 2x-3x faster programming Chimkens compared to Ohayo.
• Launching on Base was also a new but fun experience. I wanted to gain more experience on other blockchains, so I was really happy we decided to launch Chimkens on Base rather than Ethereum. Having negligible gas fees meant I could be more loose with the smart contract and add more functions and checks without the extra cost of gas. The contract would be safer in a way because I wouldn’t have to worry about cost when deploying and interacting with the contract.
• I learned some new ways to keep supporters happy by reducing bots and keeping a well-maintained whitelist. Things like waiting to verify the contract, changing the contract shortly before mint, and hiding functionality on the front-end can help reduce the amount of bots that snipe the public sale.

Slowly but surely, I am becoming a more complete Web 3 Full Stack Developer. I’m confident developing my own smart contracts and deploying and interacting with them. I know how to incorporate Web 3 functions within a website to make the experience seamless for the front-end user. And I’m more comfortable working on a team with different responsibilities, and developing that trust that each one of us is doing our jobs correctly with pride.

I’m not exactly sure what’s next, but I definitely plan on developing new projects or joining existing teams as the bull run continues this year. There is so much more opportunity out there, so I’m sure I won’t be bored for too long!