ELVEN launched on September 27th 2021 - the 13th birthday of artist Yasmeen Suleiman (@theartofyasmeen). The world of web3 moves quickly though, with projects launching on an almost hourly basis, so many newer NFT collectors may not even have heard of ELVEN.

Let’s remedy that. 💜

💜 The Art of Yasmeen and her path to NFTs

Yasmeen has been a gifted artist since she was old enough to hold a pencil. She’s a multi-disciplinary artist who will paint on canvas in the morning, sketch with ketchup during lunch and then create digital artwork in the afternoon. In 2019 she was introduced to the world of virtual reality art by family friend Steve Bambury (AKA Desertminter - ELVEN project manager) and went on to make quite a name in the VR Art space. This included captivating crowds with live performances at Dubai World Trade Centre in early 2020 (just before COVID hit) and launching her own YouTube channel to showcase her VR art. In 2021 a film student from USC (and former student of Steve Bambury) created this short film about then 12yr old Yasmeen’s work with VR art -

In February 2021, Yasmeen was introduced to the idea of NFTs and the potential that they offered for her to share her art with an even wider audience. This lead to the inception of her first project - NFTeacups.

NFTeacups dropped in 10 waves of ten 1/1 pieces during April - July 2021. Each wave sold out but things really took off when Gary Vee bought in during the fifth wave, leading to instant sell outs on subsequent waves. Gary even talked about them on his YouTube show Tea with Gary Vee!

Encouraged by both her own success and that of her peer Nyla Hayes (teenage creator of Long Neckie Ladies and someone she was interviewed alongside in the Summer of 2021) Yasmeen decided she wanted to try her hand at a larger-scale generative art collection. With BAYC just firing up for its first big run and Coll Cats freshly minted, Desertminter suggested a peacock themed project which Yasmeen actually started mocking up designs for…. But her heart wasn’t in it. She had something else in (her young) mind - something that had been gestating for several years.

Yasmeen had been sketching elf girls since she was about 10 years old and decided that if she was going to bring a larger collection to life, this would be the theme, She set to work designing the assets and Desertminter began to search for a dev team to handle the contract side of things. The launch date was set for 2 months later - on Yasmeen’s 13th birthday in September 2021.

💜 The Launch of ELVEN (Sep. 2021)

ELVEN launched at a mint price of 0.025 ETH and a collection size of 6000 - which was relatively low at the time when 10k was the clear standard. It had over 150 traits across ten categories, several of which Yasmeen drew live on Zoom sessions with the community in the lead up to the mint. The rarest ELVEN were those with traits like the Sea Blue skin or the Royal Gown dress as well as optional traits like wings and horns.

ELVEN sold slowly and steadily for 6 days before minting out overnight when several influencers bought heavily into the project to support Yasmeen. Ironically she wasn’t even aware it was happening as she was in school but the community managed to reach her mum Assel who went to the school to break the news and bring her home (there’s actually a very sweet video of this moment somewhere in the ELVEN Discord.)

Fun fact - ELVEN launched and sold out WITHOUT a Twitter channel - all posts were shared by Yasmeen and Desertminter through their personal channels. Compare that to today when we have Twitter channels for projects less than a week old, bloated with fake followers and bot engagement.
(PS the ELVEN Twitter channel was eventually set up about a month after the launch. You can access it via @ELVEN_NFT).

For a great sense of the project at the moment of conception, take a look at this interview Yasmeen did with CryptoPapi right before the mint -

In parallel to the launch of the main ELVEN collection, 12 notable NFT artists were brought on to create 1/1 ELVEN for a special side collection. This list of amazing artists included Swolfchan (Mitzuki), Technoveins (Hypnos), Specifics (Acolytes) Belu Drawz (Fursonas) and Fors (Skvllpvnks). These pieces were auctioned over the 2 week period directly following the ELVEN launch with 100% of proceeds raised being donated to our partners at Make-A-Wish-International. In total 6.78 ETH was raised and donated (and bear in mind ETH was > $3500 at the time of donation.)

In addition to this, a partnership with One Tree Planted (at the behest of Yasmeen after she learned of the environmental impact of ETH) meant that 6000 trees were donated - one for each ELVEN sold.

Sadly not everything surrounding the ELVEN launch ended so positively. The dev team brought on board to work on ELVEN had become increasingly difficult to reach and right before the mint we were told by a trusted advisor that we shouldn’t have picked them. This seemed to be confirmed when we later found out that the % they took was significantly higher than pretty much any other dev team were asking for (they literally received 50% of the primary sales.) Upon the reveal some trait clashes were identified and a lengthy chase began to get the dev team to fix this issue. Unfortunately it soon became clear that this was not going to happen as they had long since moved on to new projects.

We learned a valuable lesson and whilst for most projects, losing your devs would mean game over, we just kept going.

💜 ELVEN: Year One

Unfortunately ETH also felt differently and within a week of the ELVEN mint, as the crypto market surged to it’s ATH before crashing into the bear market we’re still “enjoying“ today, gas prices hit astronomical levels. If you’re newer to the world of Web3 you may have missed this… for context, gas sat at 100+ for weeks. There were multiple giveaway winners in the ELVEN community who were sent messages like “we are just waiting for 2 digit gas to deliver your prize.“ Seriously crazy and for projects withy lower floor prices it was a kiss of death because gas to buy from secondary was 2-3x the cost of the NFT itself, making it hard to justify the purchase. We were stuck in a macro situation we had no control over (and TBH we were lucky to have minted just before it kicked off!)

We kept moving forwards though and Yasmeen dropped a limited edition Halloween collection directly on OpenSea - The ELVEN Witches.

She also continued to create custom 1/1 ELVEN as prizes for community members which were minted to the Customs and Collabs side collection (alongside the Make-A-Wish pieces.) These were designed as per the requests of the winners and remain one of the most coveted prizes in the ELVEN ecosystem.

Yasmeen enjoyed multiple opportunities to share ELVEN outside of the Web3 community throughout the year. She presented her work at The British Embassy in Dubai, spoke at the GESS Conference held in the Dubai World Trade Centre and guested on several podcasts. She also appeared live on the Lovin Dubai morning show and was interviewed by national newspaper The Khaleej Times who not only featured her interview but put her on the cover of their WKND magazine!

Meanwhile in the community we ignored the gas prices, the floor price and just kept on finding new ways to engage and reward holders. We’ve hosted gamified trivia unlike anything offered elsewhere in web3, unique creative challenges ranging from creating pixel art ELVEN to Doodle-style ELVEN to matching ELVEN to celebrity lookalikes! We hosted weekly “Project Spotlights“ sharing other projects, both 1/1 and generative, that we appreciated and gave 3x tokens from these projects away to our holders. Oh and of course there were the infamous stealth raffles pioneered by the devilish Desertminter.

Talking of which…. If you’re here on March 17-19th, the raffle link you need is below and the code you need on Crew3 is 2981.

Microsoft Forms link for Raffle Link 👇🥷

We brought in some wonderful community managers/team members to help coordinate all this including the eternal font of positivity that is N1ugn1p (aka N1), crypto maestro Agents 301 (who has since moved on to new projects but is always family) and the truly wonderful Ricky Bobby (who’s now making some great alpha calls himself.) It would be remiss not to shout out Minneap0lis too as he is such an integral part of the mod team, a prolific ELVEN hunter and one of the most generous people in our entire web3 community.

We have also been blessed with some incredible collabs. Some notable ones include the Zoo DAO integration, art collabs with the likes of The Alien Boy and Cryptoverse and of course our two “Beauty and the Beast“ challenges which were hosted with Purr Evil and later with Monster Shelter. These involved matching ELVEN with an appropriate partner from the other project and were incredibly fun events.

Another amazing collab was with ETH Walkers dung their first season. Not only did Team ELVEN (made up of dozens of our community members) beat the odds to have a wealth of survivors make it through this awesome zombie RPG but we did it wearing Yasmeen’s art on our avatars - themselves created by the Emmy-winning artist from the TV show Archer.

As we headed into Summer 2022, we began thinking towards the first anniversary. Yasmeen had always been upset that the trait clashes in the original art were never fixed by the dev team that abandoned us so we turned to our great friend SpiriDono (Purr Evil/Edgehogs artist + self taught smart contract wizard.) Spiri told us he could help update the metadata and initially Yasmeen was going to simply fix these lingering errors… but she had something bigger in mind for the anniversary…

💜 The First Anniversary: ELVEN Evolved

Rather than just fix the limited number of trait clashes, Yasmeen decided to redraw the entire collection. Not only had her skills improved exponentially in the previous 12 months but she had access to a more professional digital art tool as well so she wanted to take the opportunity to make ELVEN look the way she had always wanted.

This also meant that the 6000 ELVEN would be growing up - evolving into teenagers from their more child-like initial form. This was ELVEN Evolved and thanks to the incredible support of Spiri, the anniversary heralded a new age for ELVEN.

The evolution was incredibly well received with the new ELVEN art becoming some of the strongest female PFPs in the entire NFT space. It’s also worth noting that one category was overhauled completely - the “Special” category. This had previously included several piercings which were incredibly hard to notice and a band-aid trait which was never popular as it somewhat “spoiled“ the characters that had it. These were replaced with a set of facial tattoos/face paint that elevated the characters lucky enough to have these traits.

We also launched a special ELVEN gallery in Spatial which curated both the new ELVEN artwork as well as many of the side collections and collab pieces. You can access that here. (runs directly in the browser on PC/Mac and can be opened in the free Spatial app on iOS/Android.)

One new collection featured in the gallery: the ECU. The ELVEN Cinematic Universe, a collection of 1/1s inspired by famous female characters from Film & TV. These were auctioned in the days following the anniversary, again for Make-A-Wish International.

Another anniversary debut was our weekly Collectors Challenges. These are token-gated raffles open to holders of specific types of ELVEN which certain traits. Over four months later and these are still going strong and rewarding collectors many times over. (Special shout out to Unstoppable Domains who have provided over $750 worth of free domains to our holders as a part of the prizes for our collectors challenges.)

💜 ELVEN: The Lost Tribe

So what’s next for ELVEN? That would be The Lost Tribe!

This limited edition collection of just 888 brand new ELVEN made entirely from new traits (many of which were suggested by the community themselves) drops in March 2023.

A separate post with full details on this will drop here on Mirror very soon so make sure to subscribe to get the details you need.

You can also collect this entry… Might be something? 🤔

Explore al of Yasmeen’s collections including ELVEN and NFTeacups, as well as media clips and more via this Linktree -