First thing first the links

So who are we? Rebels!

WHERE ART AND TECHNOLOGY MERGE TO TRANSFORM THE WAY WE SHARE OUR DIGITAL IDENTITY.

Rebels is a 3D PFP NFT project and the vision is to build a bridge between different NFTs, evolving into digital Identities. The project was inspired by many different things such as high-end fashion, streetwear, protestors and even styles from games like Apex Legends.

The team started working on the project in December 2021. At the time, a common problem with NFTs was the limited ability to display more about yourself. Users could not display multiple NFTs through their avatars. Instead, many were using banners to display their NFTs. The problem had to be solved.

The ability of customization allows users to have their Rebels as a base to unleash their creativity with a unique patch system. This allows NFTs from other projects to be displayed as badges on the clothing of Rebels. By doing this, holders can showcase multiple communities that they are a part of and signal more about their digital identity. Rebel holders will also be granted commercial rights to their NFTs, these rights include subsequent copyright and commercial use. For example, hipster clothing, Sub DAO, merchandise, derivatives, etc.

Mint information :

Mint price and quantity are based on a16z existing data analysis. From the AMA's answer, Nass has referred to at least a hundred projects in the market. In addition, many of Nass's decisions follow some of the recommendations mentioned in a16z's previous article: "The NFT Mint' Sweet Spot': Data on Early Decisions". For example, a lower mint price to help users improve their returns.

• Mint date: June 12 1 PM EST/ 6 PM UTC
• Public sale: 0.80 eth to 0.10 eth in the form of a Dutch auction, lasting three hours
• Whitelist - 1 mint at 0.08 ETH
• Leet - 1 free mint and 1 whitelist mint
• Sudo - 2 free mints and 1 whitelist mint

The Team

Co-Founders

@Nass - Currently the Chief Information Security Officer at A16Z. Before joining A16Z, he worked on cybersecurity for Facebook (Libra team) and also worked on cybersecurity for some of the best crypto banks and Apple. Through working at a16z, Nass has often worked with some very good projects to help them grow, such as Opensea, Yuga Labs, Uniswap, etc.

@Sas - Over 10 years of development experience. Current technical lead at Hudson River Trading, where he is responsible for high-performance trading systems. As an early blockchain engineer, Sas was also involved in Facebook's cryptocurrency initiative Libra, and now he is responsible for developing the core technology of Rebels, including smart contracts, enhancing the mint experience and subsequent customization of the system.

@Alex - Alex (@alexlzd) is the Creative Director at Rebels. He is leading a team of ten dedicated artists to deliver the best art for the project. Alex’s background is in Visual Arts, and he resides in France. Alex was inspired by both fashion and graffiti art, a common interest with Nass.

Team members

@Cilooth - Discord manager and security expert, also a well experienced Node.JS developer. Cilooth has also worked behind the scenes in the past to provide technical and Discord support and advice for other NFT projects.

@3on - Jean-Romain Prévost (@3on) is a web developer, software engineer, and UX developer. Throughout his ten years of experience, 3on has worked as a freelance web developer, built a javascript library called dotCloud JS for dotCloud.

@sobiebee - Sophie Pham (@sobiebee) is a blockchain developer and community manager. Throughout her years of experience, she was a software engineer at Adobe, where she worked on data, consumer identities, and decentralized identities. Sobie is currently a community manager for Rebels.

@alou - Alouane Said Ruspoli (@alou) is a creative lead who resides in France. Throughout her years of experience, she became the product designer in set design for Henrik Vibskov, was a freelance designer for Latency and researched and developed 3D objects and spaces for VR and web projects for Baillat Studio.

Advisor

@elena - Elena Silenok (@elena) has a background in both the tech and fashion worlds, and her experience in design, retail, and blockchain makes her a perfect advisor for the project. She contributes to the bigger picture of Rebels in the NFT space and is working on future plans alongside founders.

3LAU - 3LAU aka. Justin Blau (@3LAU) is a successful entrepreneur and worldwide known DJ. He’s co-founder of Royal, a company revolutionizing the music industry through NFTs and has been one of the earliest adopters of the NFT technology. 3LAU will provide instrumental guidance in the team’s journey to build Night Labs' vision and brand.

@OhhShiny - OhhShiny aka. Benjamin Milstein (@OhhShiny) is a leader in the NFT space and a successful entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of DIGITAL, a metaverse investment firm, with Steve Cohen and Mark Daniel. OhhShiny will be an incredible partner to the team in strategy and execution for the future of the project.

Roadmap

No Roadmap! As Nass has mentioned many times, we talk about what we have done.

First AMA - Doxxed, why Rebels?, ecosystem vision, customization mentioned for the first time.

Second AMA - LEET announcement, mint number and estimate mint time. Further discussing the customization and community strategy.

Third AMA - Answering concerns, the core of customization and logic behind the system, the possibility of the ecosystem.

Fourth AMA (flash AMA in ZH channel) - The usage of the Patch system and Smart contract

Fifth AMA (ZH space) - New tech reval, the cold wallet implementation. Operation strategy for the Chinese community, smart contract safety and sub-DAO support.

Sixth AMA - THE MINT DATE REVAL and Sudo roles.

NFTs Customization

Rebels is incredibly unique. It will serve as a base for users to showcase their digital identity through a patch system. For example, if users have a BAYC, they can display that BAYC on their Rebel NFT. This way, users can connect to multiple communities through a single pfp.

Customization process

• v0.1, the focus will be on the patch system
• After evaluating the feasibility of the technology, we will add more customization features to the system.
• More options will be open in the future
• The process
  • Login to the website with a wallet
  • Interact with the website to approve the rights
  • Select the patch
  • Mint the patch

Patch

The patch is the core of the customization, in order to wear the patch. The user needs to interact with the website. From what has been revealed, we can analyse the patch into three types.

• NFTs from your wallet
  • The initial allow list will focus on the blue chips, for project marketing
  • Subsequent spots will give to the project which is verified by the Opensea.
• Single-use patch from Night Labs
  • The purpose of the patch is to reward contributors
  • This type of patch will be burnt when the NFT is sold. This process can not be reverted.
• Permanent patches
  • All designers and artist can design their own patches
  • Possible derivatives open up in the future.

Listing

• When reselling Rebel NFT, the patch changes in two ways
• If an officially provided patch is tied, the patch is sold along with the NFT
• If bound to another NFT in the wallet, this patch disappears after a successful transaction

Security measures

• The discord management is handled by the industry's professional and famous engineers. The ownership is split in a decentralised favor where no single owner holds full permission for the server.
• In terms of contract writing, we have software engineers with over a decade of experience in the industry, and we also have the best contract auditors in the crypto field. Both internal and external audits and stress tests are taken into account.
• Before Mint, the contract will be fully public on GitHub, and a bug bounty will be opened at that time.

Cold wallet innovation.

When Rebels' NFTs are stored in cold wallets, users can still make custom changes on the official website to patch NFTs. through this innovative mechanism, users can maximize the security of NFTs.

Contracts

From the information received so far, 721A is not the optimal choice. 721A's innovation lies in packing mint but still faces high gas fees when facing transfer. Besides the primary mint contract, a custom interaction contract is also one of the team's focuses. The team is currently discussing a number of approaches and trying to extract the benefits of each to create a unique contract standard.

The contract is now live on GitHub. From the contract, we can see that the contract is very simple. The current contract includes two functions mint and reveal. The minting function contains three parts, Dutch auction, whitelist and free mint. The whole mint process did use the ERC721A standard to save the gas, which can be found in the next section. And we have the reveal function which is based on ERC-165.

Gas Optimization

Here is the gas optimization we see for each function.

The normal GAS fee formula is Gas Fee = Gas Spent * (Base Fees + Priority Fees)

As if we take the example of 50 Gwei, the sum of base + priority. We will end up with the formula 50 * 122065 = 0.00610325 We can see the gas fee is heavily reduced. (This estimation is only based on the current Gwei average, Gwei is quite complex due to unstable)

Community operation

Discord and Twitter are the main ones. Due to the strategy, every A16z member is a KOL on Twitter. This is also good for the project itself. For example, in the second space AMA, we found 7 members of the a16z crypto group. Although a16z can't officially declare support, according to Nass, the project has been helped and supported by a16z members. In addition, Nass often sends Twitter to explain his ideas, strengthening the community consensus.

Discord currently has 73.7K people, with about 5K-6K active users.

The current number of Twitter followers is 86K people, with average likes of 1.4k~2k, and the picture release on April 22 reached a peak of 7.2K.

WL mainly focuses on the activity of members. Although there are no fixed rules, the audit mechanism is stringent. It has two levels of the audit. Unlike other projects, Rebels Mod has no power to issue, only the power to nominate. As a result, each Mod has a wealth of project experience. Also, members have the right to nominate each other, and when a member is trendy, members will spontaneously nominate them. In addition, the community's recognition of early members' contributions can be seen in the distribution of the premium whites. The current number of whitelist members is 3.59k, the number of OG is 698, and the number of SUDO members is 15.

Community derivative

Pixel Rebel

3D Rebels Toy

Collaboration

For collaborations, Nass prefers to build long-term partnerships with the community, building bridges between communities with our artists and technicians. We will collaborate with our own (Rebels) community—for example, x0r and 3lau. At the same time, Nass feels that collaborating with other projects for the WL exchange will not provide many benefits. Sharing community members between projects will lead to less involvement or contribution of members in the community.

Personal Analysis

Rebels is my very first NFTs Project. Through this project, I have met many beautiful people, some of whom I met have helped me throughout my journey in Web3. I have taken the chance to dive into the depths of Web3 to try and understand what we are looking for. So why am I writing this research report? Why am I so in love with this project? Why was I honoured with the Sudo role? The following is my conclusion from my personal experiences.

To emphasise, I want to say that I only represent my views, only my views!

Rebellion

At the beginning of the report, I have mentioned that we are the rebellion, or more specifically, we are the Web3 rebellion. As many of us know, we are suffering from bearish now, and the primary goal is survival. Therefore, learning during bearish to prepare for the bullish is extremely important. For me, I often ask myself, why do we have such FOMO during the bull markets and is this FOMO a good thing? Clearly, over the past few months, I have seen a lot and experienced a lot. It appears that FOMO and emotions seem to take over the market.

Web3 is a complex industry, many people want to join in, but the people within are already paralyzed.

Various projects are promising how much they can benefit the project holders while ignoring the core values of NFTs. Many projects anonymously rug pull with their funds. This is not a good development for NFTs. If the NFT space does not seek a breakthrough in the development and instead focuses on the “utility” and FOMO, we will experience a hammer from regulations.

Nass has been commenting on these issues on Twitter about why projects focusing and promising to “bring value” to their holders is not the way to go.

Background

From 6 AMAs, we can see that Nass is a very knowledgeable founder, and utilizing the resources from a16z is also a plus to the project. The other highlight is that Nass and the team are willing to analyze and evaluate previous smart contracts.

Many NFT projects are currently experiencing severe contractual problems, and many of these problems have a viable solution, but many projects still keep on committing to them. Comparing Nass with other project founders, we can see that a strong background brings technology and respect for history.

Consensus

Within Crypto, we all know the importance of consensus. One critical factor of measure is how strongly the community consented to the project. Most projects at the moment build consensus from the promise and the floor price. The value should not only be limited to financial value but also indirect factors like knowledge sharing and networking. Within Rebels, we tried to set up a positive atmosphere for the members, where @IC_mints leads a community space every week to spread the knowledge base to help newbies.

Incentives

In NFTs, many people buy an NFT image as a PFP. Not just to look good but to show the value of your NFT to others. NFTs are a mixture of aesthetics, patronage, status, collecting and socializing. In the case of whales, such holders will usually be other blue-chip holders. But the current PFP functionality is limited by the display of individual NFTs. There are ways to display multiple NFTs, such as a fusion of semi-divisions. Still, such NFTs cannot be vetted and certified by Twitter, so Rebels can be the bridge to link different NFT communities and allow users to display their holdings or favourite communities.

Mechanism

Badges also have many possibilities: NFT on NFT directly offers the possibility of second creation and derivation; an artist may not necessarily need to publish an NFT on Opensea in the future and instead create a series of badges, similar to a series of social media emojis. Or perhaps through a badge, members could go on to form a subDAO.

In recent thoughts and exchanges, community members have developed the concept of achievement. Today many projects give out POAPs, and the core concept of POAPs is very much like the achievements in traditional games. So can we extend the achievement system? One achievement is the traditional POAP. Another achievement is based on the initial holder. For example, if the holding time exceeds 500 days, the project will conveniently issue a diamond hand achievement. So badges will not be limited to a part of the content. The possibilities are endless.

Rebel labs

Rebels Labs is a sub-DAO of Rebels NFT. It is founded by Rebels Chinese community.

Advertising:

Rebels Labs will utilize the breakthrough patch system, transforming patches into billboards. Rebels Labs runs business such as producing advertisements, metaverse activities. It aims to realize the upgrading of advertising and marketing from Web 2 to Web 3.

Service:

For projects that are before minting:

To promote these projects, Rebels Labs members will employ their NFT native accounts to generate viral tweets. Meanwhile, Rebels Labs will provide professional service on advertisements targeting, marketing strategy etc.

For projects that are after minting:

All the Rebels Labs members who were involved into the marketing plan will wear these projects' patch on their Rebels NFT, and tweet in same format to initiate a marketing campaign in group.

Income:

Rebels Labs will gain profit from the collabrated projects ethreuem pay, NFT airdrop and free mint spots.

tl;dr

• Rebels are minting on 12 June at 1 PM EST
• Rebels NFTs are a bridge by allowing the user to use customization
• The Rebels is more than just an NFT, but the infrastructure of NFTs