To the Moon (Ducks)
The first official derivative of the Dastardly Ducks is here — and current duck holders get one for free!
A few days ago, more Dastardly Ducks arrived, though these are particularly pixelated. The new “Moonducks” collection features 2,500 generated portraits of ducks in a carefully crafted pixel art style. Because we want to say thanks to supporters of our original collection, we have given every wallet holding an original Dastardly Duck before May 15th, 2022 a reserved, free mint — just pay gas fees. Roughly half of the supply is available immediately for anyone to pay to mint for just 0.005 each.
While these are unlikely to ever be worth the sort of money their namesake, the similarly pixelated Moonbirds, fetch, we are excited to expand the scope of our digital duck farm as much as our real life one. We conceived of the project as a way to reward existing duck holders, though the way the mint is structured still helps bring in a little extra revenue — as well as cover costs like the deployment of the new custom contract used for this collection.
Typically, we have also stuck to relatively straightforward releases, where there are no allowlists or special sales periods — though my smart contract work has consistently used profoundly little gas. However, by integrating Merkle proofs, we are now prepared to handle these sorts of free claim lists elegantly in future projects. When claiming the free mint on the site, it generates a cryptographic “proof” that the wallet is allowed to do so. This is then verified on-chain in the smart contract before minting happens.
We are also seemingly the first NFT minting site to make use of RainbowKit, a tool to help facilitate connection to crypto wallets — Rainbow or otherwise. This made it easy to offer a much more polished experience to people minting Dastardly Moonducks. We want to ensure that we continue to push forward the quality of our minting experiences as a web3 studio, and Moonducks takes it to a whole new level!
If you didn’t hold a duck before May 15th, only the paid mint will be open to you — but this will not be the last freebie for having one of the original Dastardly Ducks, especially since we are going to continue to release free airdrops on Polygon. We also have an interactive NFT in the works — our first NFT-based minigame. Given we are just two people working with limited resources, we are reluctant to release a huge roadmap, but we have so much in the works.
As of the time of writing, about 70 people have claimed their duck of the over a thousand eligible. We will hold these reservations for at least a month, though the smart contract includes a provision for enabling the remaining reserved supply to be minted. We want to ensure eventually the entire 2,500 are minted — though we hope as many people as possible claim their free duck.
We have deeply enjoyed seeing the positive reactions people have already had to their Moonducks and are glad we could add more to the world of the Dastardly Ducks. As the markets are down, we want to continue to spread cuteness and joy through this cute cartoon world. While some skeptics and hater rush to declare crypto dead (again), we know this is a time for builders to keep building. And it means a lot that people enjoy what we build.
Moonduck Links
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