In this special guest post from ELVEN community member RickyBobby, he shares his journey into the ELVEN family and what it means to him.

My ELVEN journey is different than most. I didn't enter the web3 space until after ELVEN had dropped and I spent quite a while fumbling around the space like a new-born calf. I didn't know anyone in the space, so I had to teach myself things like setting up a MetaMask wallet, installing networks , minting and using marketplaces like OpenSea. I watched a lot of YouTube videos in those days. We take those things for granted now, they come so easy, but when you first start out it's like learning a new language.

It was close to Christmas of 2021 when I came across a twitter post from ELVEN about this young female artist named Yasmeen Suleiman. I was blown away with the amazing artwork from someone so young. I eagerly dove into the story of Yasmeen and was even more amazed the more I read. I discovered that she had made her first collection, NFTeacups, at just 12 years of age. When I looked through the collection I was astonished by the immense creativity she had - each one so unique , so detailed. The imaginative way she created all these different teacups was mind boggling to someone like me with no artistic talent or that type of creative brain. To this day it's one of my favorite NFT collections in the space.

It was a huge success with some massive secondary sales of 1 ETH or more.  It even captured the attention and praise of Gary V himself, who became a holder and promoter of the amazing talents of young Yasmeen. But Yasmeen wasn't done there, she truly loved to create and would put forth a massive undertaking of 6000 NFTs to be known as ELVEN.

ELVEN dropped in Sept 2021, with a very modest price of 0.025 ETH and would become another sold out collection for Yasmeen. The artwork was astounding, with so many different traits, vibrant coloring and amazing detail. So many amazing hairstyles, different horns and these spectacular wing types. And the clothes....beautiful gowns worthy of the red carpet and dragon riding outfits fit for Game of Thrones. ELVEN was a huge success and everyone was realizing what a unique talent Yasmeen was.

The part that truly inspired me though was that young Yasmeen donated $25000 to the children’s charity Make-a-Wish International as well as $6000 to One Tree Planted to plant 6000 trees (one for each ELVEN minted.) Think about that for a second....someone that young wanting to give back so much. What a pure soul.  Yasmeen's artistic talents are only outweighed by her huge heart. I knew then I wanted to be a part of something so special.

Next I joined the ELVEN Discord community where I met a man named Desertminter, the project manager of ELVEN. If I wasn't sold on ELVEN already, this person would remove all doubts. I had never met someone so helpful and genuine in my web3 journey. Desertminter would go above and beyond to answer any questions I had, and I had a lot. So willing to share his wealth of knowledge, he even made video tutorials on how to do things, like make banners on Canva. This was huge for me as a visual learner, I had no Idea what Canva was at the time, an amazing free tool for designing most anything, and he took the time to teach me how to use it.  Desertminter taught me so many things over my time in web3 and I will forever be grateful for that. People like him are rare in this world, he's really the heart and soul of the amazing ELVEN community.

Over the next year I really got to enjoy the greatness of web3 and the ELVEN community. We shared ideas, experiences, opportunities…It was such a great place to bounce ideas around and get insights from other like minded people. A place where everyone looks out for each other and you didn’t have to worry about scammers or rug pullers. We  played fun games together like amazing web3 scavenger hunts created by Desertminter, community gif battles, trivia hackathons, all sorts of art competitions and now Crew3 Quests.  It really was an endless amount of fun. We even had a huge community mega raffle, where everyone donated different NFTs from their own collections and then we raffled them off to everyone involved.

Yasmeen also dropped a new Cinematic themed collection during that time with all proceeds going to Make-a-Wish International again. It was a huge success with heated bidding wars to take home one of theses coveted 1/1s. I was fortunate to take home a rendition of Harley Quinn that is my most prized NFT. Not because I think it’ll be worth a million dollars but because It reminds me of the good in the world and the fact that maybe I helped a little bit in making a kids dream come true.

We also got to witness the evolution of ELVEN, the evolution of Yasmeen herself really. Yasmeen’s talents were growing fast so she decided to transform the ELVEN collection along with her. She remastered the collection brilliantly utilizing her growing talents to transform the originals into an almost grown up version of themselves! Truly a marvel to behold. My role at ELVEN also evolved during that time when I was asked to become a member of Team ELVEN. I was so honored by this and excited to continue my ELVEN journey in my new role. ELVEN became my home in web3, a place with so many amazing people that really cared about the community and had a mutual appreciation for rare souls like Yasmeen and Steve. I am so proud to be a part of  ELVEN and even though the world may not yet be ready for web3 and the metaverse, when it is we will be at the forefront.

We want to say a huge thank you to RickyBobby for writing this guest post. Watch out for more guest posts coming soon in the “My ELVEN Journey“ series.

To take a peek at RickyBobby’s vaulted ELVEN collection, click here.

Follow RickyBobby on Twitter via @ayrbobby