Pandimensionals: what I learned launching 10,000 NFTs into a gas war

I tried to ship a 10,000-piece generative NFT collection in the spring of 2022. We minted 460. It was the best thing I ever did.

The book

My brother-in-law had been writing a sci-fi YA novel for years. It was, and still is, unpublished. The world he'd built was rich: a fictional English seaside town called Broadcliffs sitting on top of a dimensional rift, and a race of cherryade-addicted pandimensional void ship engineers called the Phanackapans, who had crash-landed on Earth.

He'd never drawn them. The only description was "small, weird, a bit freaky."

We were locked down. I was a few months into the pandemic working at a health tech startup, isolated, building the same dashboards over and over while the world fell apart on the news. NFTs were happening. I'd been reading about CryptoPunks and Bored Apes, and I'd been thinking, like a lot of designers were thinking, that the format was finally interesting. I asked my brother-in-law if I could borrow the Phanackapans and the Broadcliffs lore for a 10,000-piece collection. He said yes.

Drawing the freaks

I sat in my house and drew Phanackapans in Adobe Illustrator for months. Heads, eyes, mouths, antennae, hats, drinks, accessories, backgrounds, dimensional rifts visible behind them. By the time I'd built 300 distinct traits across all the layers, I worked out that the generator could spit out roughly 11 billion unique combinations. The bottleneck was no longer my ability to draw enough variety. The bottleneck was choosing which 10,000 the world would see.

The Python script that did the generation handled rarity weights, attribute conflicts, metadata in the OpenSea schema, and a dead-simple deduplication pass. Watching it produce the first thousand was the most fun part of the whole project. Half the Phanackapans surprised me. Some of them looked unsettlingly intentional, like the script had developed a sense of humour.

Writing a smart contract badly

I am a designer. I had never written Solidity. I downloaded a starter contract from somewhere I should not have, deployed it to a testnet, and only realised it had security holes when I started reading the OpenZeppelin forums and discovering all the things that could go wrong if I shipped it as-is.

I posted on the forum asking for help. A developer I'd never met replied, looked at my contract, told me politely that it was a security incident waiting to happen, and offered to rewrite it. He used merkle trees for the whitelist, which I had to read about three times to understand. The gas efficiency of his rewrite was a different category of thing from what I'd attempted. I paid him fairly. He was the unsung hero of the whole project.

If you take one thing from this post, take this: pay a real engineer to write your smart contract. The cost of doing it badly is somebody else's life savings.

The marketing era

Months on X. Hundreds of Twitter Spaces, often at 3am because that was when the right people were awake. A PR partner I hired secured a piece on the front page of Wired, which I thought was going to change everything. It changed nothing. Traditional press, I learned, does not move a niche crypto audience. The audience moves itself, in private Discords and pseudonymous group chats, and you find your way in by showing up every day for months and being useful.

I did show up. I met some of the most interesting people I have ever met. Many of them were nineteen and in time zones where it was somehow always 4am. The community was kind, and the community was also a casino, and the two coexisted strangely.

Paris

We had already delayed the mint date twice. I was at Paris NFT Week, and announced a new launch date from there. It felt like the right place to do it, surrounded by people who actually cared. Then I found out that Yuga Labs were dropping their Otherside collection on the same day.

Fuck it, we ball.

This was, on reflection, the wrong call.

The Otherside mint became one of the largest gas wars in Ethereum's history. People were paying thousands of dollars in gas just to mint a single Otherside deed. The chain was, for several hours, effectively unusable for anything else. Anyone trying to mint a Phanackapan was being asked to pay more in gas than the NFT itself was worth.

I closed the mint at 460.

What it was secretly about

The thing nobody told me at the start, and that took me months to understand, is that NFT trading is not about the art. The art is the cover story. The thing being traded is liquidity, attention, and proximity to the next thing. People who understood this made money. People like me, who came in believing the art was the point, made a community.

The other thing nobody told me at the start is that I needed this project for reasons that had nothing to do with NFTs. We were in lockdown. People were dying. I was sitting in a small room building dashboards, and I was losing my mind quietly. The Phanackapans were the thing I did at night and on weekends that gave me a reason to stay up late and learn something new. They saved a year of my life that I would otherwise have lost to the news.

The phoenix bit

A few months after the mint failed, a crypto startup based in Barcelona reached out. They were a community growth protocol, funded by one of Vitalik Buterin's old employers. They had seen the Phanackapans. They knew the project hadn't worked, and they did not care. What they cared about was that I had spent a year shipping something hard from end to end: art, contract, mint site, marketing, community, lore. They offered me a job. I took it.

That job took me to NFT conferences all over the world. I met CZ from Binance backstage at one of them, before he was jailed. I sat through panels in cities I had never been to and would not have visited otherwise. I went from a year locked in a small room to a year on planes, all because of a project that had failed publicly and absolutely.

It was, almost exactly, like being a phoenix.

The follow-up

My brother-in-law and I did a smaller second collection, called Secret Cherryade Drinkers Club. This time the art was his.

He's still working on the book. The Phanackapans are still on the chain. They are not going anywhere. And four years on, I built a working mint page for the Cherryade Drinkers Club, capped at exactly 460 — the same number Pandimensionals stopped at, on purpose.

What I'd tell a friend who was about to do this

Do it. It's fun. Don't expect to get rich.

Then I would gently suggest they pay a real engineer to write the smart contract, not launch on the same day as a Yuga Labs drop, and remember that the project is not really about the project.

It's about the year of your life you get back from the news.