Geographer Dev. Talk

As you may (or may not) have noticed - our mint went pretty pretty… pretty… good and it’s all due to the fantastic pre-planning that the the team did both in the mint lead up and the subsequent deployment. Behind every great Chief Geographer is a team of equally great Sr Geographer Developers.

In the spirit of sharing ‘lessons learned’ our lead Geographer Developer - Doug Pfeffer - will provide insight into what we discovered during our harrowing journey so that others may dodge the unruly bears and reach that glorious peak of mild success.

Introduction

When we launched Turf we had a bunch of key things going against us. The biggest of which was that we are nobodies and no one knows anything about us. So there was a rather large invisible elephant in the room that needed to be placed on an equally large pedestal. Though what you will read from Doug will be more technical in nature just keep in mind that everything we did was in service of building a foundation of trust within our fledgling community - essentially even if a decision stemmed from a technical vantage it still had to connect back to trust.

  • Trust is king
  • Every outward action is a signal to be translated by the audience into Trust
  • Doing the “Trustworthy thing” is not about doing the “easy thing”
  • Really tho… Trust is god king emperor, only lesser than Grand Geographer

On Chain == A Cool Thing =/= Good Drop Security

One thing that we heard overwhelmingly from those in the know was that the transparency of data on the blockchain does not make for great drop security. It was suggested by our friends over on Def Crypto to use a cut over strategy. Doug implemented methods for obscuring our data on conventional hosting (AWS) while cutting over to hosting in line with the sentiment of the community (ARweave) at a later time. This is a tight rope act of instilling trust in our drop security while also building a bridge toward trust in the future (sick of the word ‘trust’ yet?).

Why are we doing it like this? Why did we not just upload all of our content to Arweave before the mint and call it a day? For Reasons! There are trade-offs and risks. Even assuming you work out the technical details, there’s a lot to consider from an operational point of view - Doug’s post on metadata

Practical Implementation on ARweave

For the technically savvy in our audience it might be best to focus on actual ARWeave implementations. Doug also did a fantastic write up on this…

There’s been no shortage of discussion about the levels of on-chain-ness an NFT can possess. This is a wonderful deep dive into the various flavors and techniques that are employed in the pursuit of maximum on-chain existence. But since everything in NFT world is moving fast and a lot of documentation is sadly locked away in private Discords, hidden from search engines, sometimes it can be hard to find actionable guidance when it comes to certain details. - Doug’s technical write up on ARweave implementation

Next Up Mint Strategies

In the next post we’ll provide insight to explain how we executed our mint from anti-bot methods to dealing with the shear volume of transactions (4,500 plots minted in under 30 minutes). The word ‘trust’ really does come up often in our daily internal discussions. The challenge of NFT/Crypto is in creating an environment in which you don’t have to trust us because there are fewer ways for us to break your trust.

(Even this article on technical transparency is meant to signal yet another reason to trust us)

Definitely be sure to keep an eye on Doug’s Mirror.xyz as he is a fantastic resource for all things NFT development.

Subscribe to Turf
Receive the latest updates directly to your inbox.
Verification
This entry has been permanently stored onchain and signed by its creator.