Element4ls launch — The good, the bad and the ugly.
Hi everyone,
I am Tricrypta, one of the co-founders and developers of the Element4ls art collectible brand — https://twitter.com/element4ls.
First of all I’d like to start with apologizing to everyone who has participated in the launch. Not only didn’t we receive the amount of bids we expected, we also had an issue with the mint where our holders couldn’t mint after the lottery phase was done. I take full responsibility for this and hope to inform anyone about my mistakes so these don’t happen in future launches.
The team decided to refund 85% of the SOL paid to all of our lottery holders, and decided to airdrop one NFT to all individuals holding a lottery ticket. We have distributed all of the NFTs to lottery holders at the time of writing.
The launch of the Element4ls was a very messy launch with many problems which I personally didn’t account for.
Lets start with metadata problem #1 — The reason you couldn’t mint.
The contract in the Candy Machine only allowed for Integer numbers on the creator address share metadata. This wasn’t documented in the Token Metadata standard https://docs.metaplex.com/nft-standard, nor was it mentioned in the article from Adam Jefferies https://medium.com/metaplex/metaplex-metadata-standard-45af3d04b541. The upload command in the Candy Machine should’ve protected us from this exact problem but due to it not being properly implemented, we never received an error it wasn’t correct when uploading our files to Arweave via the Metaplex CLI.
We also failed to test the metadata on devnet, which is in my opinion the biggest mistake we’ve made but as we were so close to launch when I received all creator wallets and didn’t expect that we couldn’t use Floating Point Numbers in the Creator shares. — I thought it was all good.
As you can see below, the plan was for the three co-founders to get 16.5% of the aftermarket sales, and 50.5 % to go to our treasury for further development of the project.
This is what our Creators array looked like:
And this is the error we received:
As you can see the shares add up to 100 (16.5 + 16.5 +16.5 + 50.5 = 100) and we still received the error due to it being Floating Point Numbers.
Ansel (our other dev) and me quickly realized the Candy Machine contract only accepted Integers and have pushed a pull request to the Metaplex directory which has since been accepted https://github.com/metaplex-foundation/metaplex/pull/776.
This was a costly mistake as we couldn’t use our Candy Machine anymore and we had to re upload all of our fixed metadata to Arweave again.
Problem metadata #2— Trait types and value.
I didn’t create the generator from scratch as we used https://github.com/HashLips/generative-art-opensource as a base.
The generator was heavily modified to use Lookup tables for the Video effect on our NFTs. There was also a lot of work done on rendering the different traits in the right way as we were using a glow effect which required screen blending instead of normal blending.
The generative art opensource metadata generated is specifically used for Ethereum projects on Solsea and the trait metadata look like this:
On Solana you’d add “trait_type” to every trait and we thought we were done.
Unfortunately we had to also change the “name” parameter to “value” as otherwise the Solana explorer wouldn’t recognize the trait.
We fixed this in the second upload of our metadata as the rest of our metadata was fine.
Problem number three — The anti rug policy of the Fair Launch protocol.
We wanted to be as transparent as possible and this was one of our main reasons we picked the Fair Launch Protocol for our launch. Not only does it protect the end users from rugging, which creates trust. It also provides price discovery for the end users. We wanted everyone to have a fair chance on receiving an NFT, which FCFS doesn’t promote as people with the most stable internet connection that come first have the biggest chance of receiving an NFT if it sells out quickly.
After reading this article: https://hackmd.io/FxCiD20ETZeMbfA8on9WMg?view#Fair-Launch-Protocol like many have done, we decided to set the anti rug policy to 4000 and the refund policy to 85%. What we thought it meant was the following: “We’d have to convince 2500 people to buy our product ”. This is true to an extend but the definition of the anti rug is more complex after we were able to retrieve all of the funds without reaching 2500 buyers.
I contacted Jordan Prince (e.g. one of the makers of the Fair Launch Protocol) and he told us the Anti Rug Policy only applies when you sell out. Thus rendering the Anti Rug Policy useless for the projects that don’t sell out and rendering it useless for the end user if you don’t sell out.
The Fair Launch Protocol is already more complex than FCFS, and as I understood before our launch the Anti Rug Policy should apply in any case, not just selling out.
In our case, because of the mint not working, we could’ve ran with the funds without ever delivering on the project. Which is in my opinion a harmful development if you do intent to cause harm.
I think the Fair Launch protocol is still the best way to provide safety to your end users and I believe this will become more important in the future. The Fair Launch Protocol shows that there are great ways to protect the end user and I hope everyone in the space will try and find more ways to protect their end users.
I carry an incredible amount of respect for Jordan Prince. He has a kind heart and is an extremely talented developer with ideas to push the space forward.
I really cannot stress enough how valuable he is to the space and continues to innovate at an incredible rate. Thank you Jordan.
So what am I proud of?
The topics below are just a gist of what I’m preparing to do a medium article on. More to come.
- Our test-set for developers who want to test their generator but haven’t received their art yet:
- Server configuration on AWS, nodes and pricing
- Full overview of the modified generator
- Collaborative collection verifier
- PSD-parser and PSDs for setting up structure between artist and developer
- How to innovate your roadmap
- What to expect when creating an NFT
Thank you all for reading.
