Crowdsourced and crowdfunded NFT minting. Connecting communities, artists and developers with a fun and engaging experience.
Let's build together a collection of 8,500 avatars and mint them. Instead of flooding the market with a huge collection, involve community members in the curation and minting process.
We provide you with a live generative art engine in the browser and a Tinder-like experience around it - swipe right to save your favorite butterflies to your profile and present them on the public feeds for feedback.
Once you decide which butterflies are worth minting, press the "Buy" button, connect your Phantom wallet, pay some SOL and the NFT is on its way to your wallet.
We think the NFT collection curation process should be done by art collectors, not the artist. There are several reasons for that. To name a few:
- Selecting the best looking 8500 avatars out of 1.8 quadrillion options should be a job done by collectors
- The artist shouldn't pay minting fees
- Survival of the cutest - collectors pay for what they like
- Support community growth with a sustainable engagement model
- Educate community members about generative artwork and NFT minting
- Build attachment to community identity - members fall in love with their avatar thanks to the Tinder-like experience
Unique generative artwork engine
The butterfly artwork is a unique generative creation that implements a novel approach to color theory in NFT avatar design - We are rotating the entire color palette using a relative phase around the RAL color wheel. This creates 213 color palettes for each body part and allows us to have 1.8 quadrillion possible combinations from just 500KB of body part artwork taxonomy. It is the most efficient generative NFT avatar solution to date.
Inspiration
The project is inspired by Crypto Kitties, Tinder, Avastars and MetaPlex Candy Machine
How we built it
It is a React app with a Firebase db. We started working on it during August and had a basic swiping mechanism by September.
For the Solana hackathon, we added
- a public feed,
- top and bottom bars
- artwork permalinks,
- butterfly names
- user profiles,
- voting,
- sharing buttons and
- the cherry on top is minting on Solana and payment with SOL using Phantom integration
We also developed lots of Cloud Functions to handle artwork generation in a way that would help us prevent users from abusing the generative art engine.
Much like Avastars, our generative engine is capable of ensuring all artwork is unique by encoding the gene DNA into the avatar ID. There can be no duplicates
Our artwork body part taxonomy is made of
- 4 Forewings x
- 4 FW Patterns x 213 x
- 4 Hindwings x
- 4 HW Patterns x 213 x
- 4 Bodies x 213 x
- 4 Antennas x 213 x
- 213 Background Colors
= 1,795,799,991,472,128 Possible Combinations
We are only going to allow minting of up to 8,500 butterfly avatars from this edition
Challenges we ran into
- Implementing permalinks and user profiles was not simple from a UX perspective. We are still trying to make it better.
- We had to abuse the Candy machine solution to match our use case, but it was worth it. We learned a lot from that about the Solana ecosystem and MetaPlex.
- The naming scheme forced us to put some more thought into our taxonomy. We ended up having a remix of our own taxonomy
- We had some performance issues with Firebase Cloud Functions. We found DigitalOcean to be a good and cost effective solution with better performance for that purpose
- Shakhal joined our team (welcome), while he has added a lot to our capabilities and cadence, we had to improve our internal communications and coding practices - We are now managing a product backlog, UI inventory and a Kanban process in Trello. On top of that, we are implementing gitflow and automated deployments on our private Github repository
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The app was just one view when we started the hackathon and didn't have the look and feel of an actual app. We designed a mobile first app UX and implemented some new views with different types of saved artwork feeds. We added a naming scheme to our taxonomy, so it's easier now to communicate your collection or the public feed with other users.
Have you noticed the sharing button? Give it a shot! send it to a friend over Telegram or WhatsApp and ask them whether that specific design is worth minting.
Our open-source RALative npm package for RAL colorwheel color calculations has been organically installed 250 times from npm since August without any promotions - we wonder what people are building with it...
What we learned
You have to talk with users from the very beginning. We got amazing feedback from the Women in Blockchain Talks community. Gas fees have a huge impact on NFT projects and it is crucial to lower them to a level that has low impact on the artwork price. People are a lot more willing to spend on primary market NFTs when the price is low. It simply increases the sale potential.
What's next for Butter Candies
Our current Solana integration is modest. We intend to improve and make it more robust while testing with users and implementing your feedback.
We hope you like it. Let us know what you think in the comments below or use the feedback button in the app.
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