Reflections on Bankless Collectibles Drop #1

Dear Bankless Nation,

On November 18th, we released Bankless Collectibles to begin our exploration of web3 media. 

Bankless Collectibles are meant to act as limited edition collector items for the 100 true fans of every episode. 

This idea has been circulating for a year, and the execution and build out took roughly ~3 months. While we’ve seen a handful of independent creators explore podcast NFTs, this was largely the first one at scale. 

During our discovery phase, we found a lot of parallels between music NFTs and what we scoped out for podcast NFTs.

They’re effectively the same thing — just one is a lot longer. 

As a result, we elected to use two popular tools within the music NFT sector to make this product launch possible: 

1. Sound Protocol: Protocol responsible for deploying and minting the podcast NFTs. 

2. Bonfire: A tool to easily build out a custom web3 frontends for NFTs (primarily on Sound Protocol). 

Both tool support the creator economy. The teams and products provided all of our initial needs while our small, internal developer & design team stays focused on our new website launch. (soon™) 

That said – everyone involved was still new to podcast NFTs. 

While similar to music, there are a handful of different nuances that resulted in issues with minting the first drop in the Genesis Collection. 

This post serves as a retrospective on drop #1 and highlights some changes that we’re making to the rest of the collection.

The biggest issue was surrounding the public mint.

No one was able to mint from the website at the scheduled time. This issue was actually due to an unaccounted feature on Sound Protocol.

If you’re familiar with Sound.xyz, you may be aware that every drop has a “listening party”. 

When the public sale starts, the code automatically plays the NFT’s recording for the community to listen. The mint doesn’t open until the recording is finished. 

Given songs are a few minutes, but podcasts are hours long, this created an unforeseen issue with the minting flow. We were unaware that this occurred on the contract level and neither of our teams accounted for this during the uploading process. 

We identified the issue after about 20-30 minutes and deployed the fix and restarted the mint. Unfortunately, the final issue came with our initial fix where we did not include an “end-time” on the pre-sale, which blocked the minting on the front-end. 

However, after the initial fix, minting was available on the contract level.

The community figured this out and the sale sold out amid deploying the final fix. 

This issue has been identified and resolved for future drops.

Many Bankless DAO members had an issue where it said they were not eligible for the sale. 

This was a front-end bug on Bonfire’s mint block.

Any wallet who held >35,000 BANK on Ethereum mainnet as of the snapshot on Thursday, November 17th at 12pm EST was eligible. 

You can view the official address list here. 

The issue came about as the pre-sale ended quickly — roughly one minute — and as a result, the UI closed the minting.

Instead of saying that the pre-sale had sold out, it was displaying that they weren’t eligible to mint during this phase. 

We’ve worked with the Bonfire team to identify the issue. It’s now resolved. (alpha: improved mint block coming for the next drop!)

There were also edge cases involved here for Bankless DAO members.

Users who held their BANK on Polygon or other chains, were providing liquidity, etc. weren’t included in the snapshot. 

In order to maintain simplicity, Bankless DAO members who want to be eligible for the Collectibles pre-sale will be required to hold >35,000 BANK on Ethereum mainnet. 

Snapshots will happen every Thursday before the Friday episode at 12pm EST.

We received a lot of feedback from the community after the first drop.

As such, we’ve taken a few points into consideration and will be making a couple of changes to future mints of the Genesis Collection.

The first change is setting a maximum of one mint per wallet during the pre-sale and public sale.

This was originally set to three during the public mint, providing avid collectors with the opportunity to scoop up more if they wanted to.

However, we want to ensure that each fan can attain one edition during the mint.

One of the biggest disappointments from the community was that we didn’t include a mechanism for Bankless Premium Members to participate in the pre-sale.

We originally didn’t include this because it’s tough to identify premium members on-chain (substack premium is off-chain!). Moreover, our distribution mechanism for Bankless Badges, an on-chain representation of Bankless Premium members, is fairly unreliable.

However, given the overwhelming response from the community, all 2022 Bankless Badge Holders will be eligible for pre-sale access.

Badge members will have until December 1st, 11am EST to claim their badge. We will do our best to accommodate all support request (please email support@banklesshq.com for badge issues).

With that in mind, snapshot for both Bankless Badges and Bankless DAO Members will occur every week on Thursday, 12pm EST before the drop.

If you’re not a Bankless Premium Subscriber and looking to access the pre-sale, we recommend acquiring 35,000 BANK to join Bankless DAO.

Uniswap is more reliable than email!

The final Bankless Badge distribution for this year will happen on the morning of December 1st prior to the snapshot.

There will be a very limited window to claim your badge and make it into the snapshot! Keep your eyes peeled.

The Bankless Nation — Bankless DAO and Bankless Premium Members — should have first priority on collectibles.

That said, all 100 editions will be available in the pre-sale for those members.

The benefit of this are two fold: (1) prioritize the Bankless Nation as first class citizens and (2) minimize the number of bots and flippers that can access collectibles during mint.

The pre-sale will start at 12pm EST on Friday and will last one hour.

After an hour, any remaining editions will be available in the public sale starting at 1pm EST on Friday.

If all editions are sold in the pre-sale, there will be no editions available in the public sale.

The final change is that due to the high demand and limited supply, we’ll be increasing the mint price slightly.

This will be a marginal change for pre-sale participants and more substantial on the public mint.

Our first mint on the Genesis Collection was definitely not ideal. We’re new to this.

The silver lining is that we shipped a product that people want. Nearly 3,000 individuals were on the website during the mint — all trying to collect an edition.

Better yet — the secondary market was thriving following the mint.

As a result, we currently have 97 unique owners of the 100 editions. This is close to a perfect distribution!

With that in mind, it’s probably worth emphasizing that collectibles are ULTRA RARE collector items for the 100 true fans of Bankless.

We can’t promise you that everyone will get one on each mint.

However, we can promise you that there will be more opportunities in the future.

If you’re an avid Bankless fan, there will be an episode for you.

We’re excited that you’re excited. And there’s a lot to improve on from us to meet the standard you expect from us. 

We will do better. That’s a promise. 

See you on 12/2 for [REDACTED].