TWW Deep Dive 001

“Oh for F sake. This guy is going to tell us how the future is with those silly little JPEGs that you could just right-click-save and keep for yourself, they’re not even bloody art.”

Buckle up readers, it’s going to be a journey.

Let me set the scene. It’s an average day in the Barton-Stewart household in sunny Melbourne. I finish a day of looking at 3 screens for my day job to lay back on the sofa and tune into another screen, flicking through the six subscription services I have. We drink our sleepy tea, head to bed and it’s time for my 30 allocate minutes of fun - TikTok. Whilst tuning in, I get served a video about NFTs…Ah FFS, this Ponzi scheme again, carry on swiping. Dog Video, epic fail, millennial crisis, the Gladys dance, and AGAIN. Another video on NFTs.

And just like Homer, despite my protestations, I give in and start absorbing what some random bloke is telling me about NFTs. In this video, he starts talking about getting ahead of the curve - so rather than buying on a marketplace for thousands of dollars, get in when they’re being minted for hundreds of dollars. The site he mentions, Rarity Tools has all of the latest drops from artists where you can see the time they’re launching, their Discord channel, their website, and their Twitter account.

And the top tip included with this is to visit their site, do your research, read the whitepaper and look at their roadmap. Then go to their Twitter account look at the interaction, the followers, and join their Discord. Now, Discord is completely new to me (yes i’m a n00b) but it’s like a slack-ish app where you can once again see the engagement and the community that the NFT project has created.

More engagement, more followers, more hype = a promising project.

To summarise, do your research. Don’t just jump on a project that you think is pretty - I mean, you can if you have dollars to burn!

Anyway, I landed on a project called The Visitors. A neat little project from an artist called Mike Mitchell - check out his art here.

This is a generative art project called a PFP (picture for proof or profile pic). PFP projects differ from most NFTs in a few key aspects... Typically people think of NFTs as one-off digital artworks, whereas, PFP involve the drop of thousands of NFTs at once, all algorithmically put together using a fixed set of data & layers of art and act more like a collectible - think Pokemon or baseball cards, with the rarer the set of attributes - the more valuable the NFT. (Hopefully, I didn’t butcher that explanation)

So for The Visitors, there will be 10,000 minted and the difference with this project is that it lives on Polygon rather than Ethereum. Okay, WTF does that all mean!?

I’m going to use an analogy here that ignores a lot of the technological difficulties & minutiae that is the blockchain, but humor me…The blockchain in this poor analogy is where NFTs live - think of them as the gallery (The Louvre is where Mona Lisa is shown - that’s the authenticity certification). Well, the Ethereum ‘gallery’ charges an entry fee of fluctuating amounts called ‘gas’ (the energy cost to mine the blocks). But, Polygon charges a far less entry fee - like paying a dollar rather than $100, and the queue to get in is shorter. Gas fees are payments made by users to compensate for the computing energy required to process and validate transactions on the blockchain.

Okay, got it? Good. So you may be asking, what do you do or how do you get one once you’ve done your research and know that this art is for me?

First thing, do you have money? Good.

Next up, go to your crypto exchange (I used coinspot.com.au ). I exchanged AUD for Polygon(MATIC) and then sent this to my MetaMask wallet

From here, I connected my Metamask wallet, pressed mint, and minted my first NFT.

And drumroll… I got this guy!

Visitor #3270 appeared in my wallet (after I claimed him). Now, there is a 1 of 1 proof of authenticity certificate for “#3270” that exists on the blockchain, securely housed in my digital wallet. Don’t believe me? Well, you can verify this yourself via PolygonScan.

Happy days, I’ve just purchased an NFT he’s in my wallet, and now what? Well, this is the cool part. Earlier I mentioned the different characteristics that make these all individual & 1 of 1, well to find the true value or the rarity of this little fella then you can go back to Rarity Tools. This awesome site tells you the rank and the rarity score - the lower the better obviously.

So putting my digital marketing hat back on (and ready for the old guard to poo-poo this) if you’re a brand that has distinctive artwork, collectibles, an engaged fanbase or just looking for ways to experiment and increase alternative revenue streams - then NFTs should be entertained. An organic Facebook post that gets a 1% CTR is a positive these days and shows signs of an ‘engaged community.’ Just imagine if you had 10,000 fans swarming over art, having a positive shared experience with a community brought together by a brand. Just look at Taco Bell…

What started as an experiment (and being a n00b with some spare change in crypto), turned into finding a community that was thriving despite all of the “it’s bullshit” claims from the outsiders, and I genuinely love the art that I received, so much so that I minted another.

The future of NFTs looks incredibly bright IMO - despite the Gartner Hype cycle putting them at the ‘peak of inflated expectations.’ PFP projects create these fandoms; communities where everyone is genuinely cheering for each other and supporting artists, with the collective goal that the project goes to the moon.

In Australia, where we’ve been in lockdown for over 200 days, the community for The Visitors is bringing light to my days and I’ve loved this experiment. 👽