the mfers ahead story

In November 2021, I bought my first NFT at probably an ATH for that Nouns derivative collection. I had no idea what derivatives were, what “cc0” meant, and what staking your NFT did. I bought the art — the jpeg was that of a chicken and chickens are funny.

I discovered Mfers in early January 2022. The floor price was about 0.20ETH and I couldn’t afford it (read: illiquid staked chicken). Still oblivious to the idea of derivative collections, I saw 3Dmfers and thought they looked much more sophisticated. I minted one at 0.1ETH and that was my entry into the mferverse.

After that, I quickly got excited about other projects (acquired pickles and pineapples, yes) and it was a while later later that I got my first mfer. I remember scrolling through the collection looking for one that looked like me. This time, I bought the vibe.

I loved my mfer and my new mfer family on Twitter. Every day I said gm, liked posts indiscriminately, and tried to make mfer memes. I drew my mfer doing things, and a week later, I drew my mfer from a different perspective. Mfers were amused and someone said it felt like looking into the forbidden face of God.

From scribbling on walls at home to doodling on the margins of worksheets at school, I have been drawing all my life. I wouldn’t even consider it a hobby, it is just innately what I do. Needless to say, I have never thought to put my drawings on the market. I read a lot about digital art after getting into NFTs, got fascinated with generative art, and harboured a small hope of creating my own collection.

In January 2022, I created a collection of 10,000 jpegs with traits inspired by Universal Studios’ classic monsters. I minted 50 of these manually on OpenSea, listed them all and sold none (of course). I eventually deleted all of them except this one werewolf that I now keep as a memento. The engagement on my forward-looking mfer drawing spurred me into thinking that I might get another chance at creating my own NFT collection.

1/10,000 werewolf that is now a 1/1
1/10,000 werewolf that is now a 1/1

I guess you can say this mfer seized the memes of production and feverishly went to work drawing layers of mfer properties. I took a deep dive into @sartoshi’s artwork and realised there is so much depth in the mfers art. I tried to stay true to the lines, proportions, shading, kink of the elbow, how far apart the eyes are… but there were some elements that needed changing in the forward-facing version e.g. the black smoke would not have shown up well.

a rare matching pair
a rare matching pair

Despite my newly-minted skill in digitally generating art, I liked these little earnest-looking mfers so much that I decided not to make a generative collection. I wanted to check each and every one of their vibes before sending them out to the world. I had (and still have) no tech skills, and asked some web2 developer friends if they could write a blockchain contract. They said they could learn it in a few weeks, I told them I didn’t have a few weeks, I will find some other way. The only other way I knew how was to mint these mfers through OpenSea and manually input each property, so I went with that (and you can still see all my typos in the collection properties).

Mfers Ahead was launched on 27 January 2022, only two days after the idea was conceived. On the first day, I dropped 10 mfers and got a repost from sartoshi. They sold out in 2 hours, but I wasn’t sure interest would keep up in the days to come if sartoshi didn’t continue to retweet my drop posts to his large audience. I had no collection cap in mind, I thought I would just stop dropping them when people stopped picking them up.

The rest of the story you might be familiar with — I dropped ten Mfers Ahead every day and fortunately every drop was picked up. It was a wondrous feeling to be able to sell my art. Yes, the eth was good to have, but to see people posting proudly about owning a piece of my work was so, so special. At the same time, I had imposter syndrome and got anxious when people picked up more than one Mfers Ahead. I wanted to scream at them that it is all worthless and you are wasting eth. Safe to say the first week was a bit overwhelming.

In those weeks of minting Mfers Ahead, I made many frens in my DMs and started building a community. I was often asked about customs to match sartoshi’s mfers, but chose not to do them so I did not restrict the collection to OG mfers and could onboard new people into the mfers community. When Mfers went to 4.2ETH and then 6ETH, I was told “yesterday’s price is not today’s price” and I should raise the price of Mfers Ahead. I kept it at 0.03ETH to continue to onboard new mfers who were priced out of the original collection. When the drops got hard to snipe, I encouraged successful snipers to share tips with those who failed to snipe. I made little concessions for mfers who wanted to mint one for their wife on Valentine’s Day, who lost gas to many failed transactions, and put out properties that were asked for in next drops. I tried to stay as fair as possible in these stealth drops, but there were always some wins and some losses as they started selling out as soon as they were listed.

When multiple pieces in one drop got sniped by the same wallet, frustrated mfers started calling out that the drops were botted. I had no idea how anyone could bot a drop and how to prevent it. On the same day, an mfer who failed to snipe created a collection called FwdMfers (later MfersOnward) and started marketing with copy-paste art. I felt that was wrong, but if the project was CC0, could I say anything about it? I stopped all Mfers Ahead drops for two days and tried to wrap my head around everything.

As a one-man show on Mfers Ahead, I had no team to strategise with. The way mfers came through for metabananas and Mfers Ahead that one difficult day made me realise how important a strong community is behind a project. The mfer who sniped a majority of the drop (not a bot) talked me through the tools they used and advised me to run a raffle to prevent this from happening again. The Chinese mfer community on WeChat helped me look for ways to run a raffle. About my discomfort with FwdMfers, I lamented to sartoshi, who told me “to embrace the starting point of how the blockchain holds the original and whatever happens after that happens”. On a Twitter space that happened when I was asleep, @Breezy, @Sequence, and @lexito stood up for the collection and advised the mfer working on the new collection to reach out to help me instead (this matter was settled out of court). At the same time, there were so many Mfers Ahead in my DM that were ready to help with anything I needed to continue the collection, not least @bbglitch and @justanotherape.

Eventually, a raffle was run and the rest of the Mfers Ahead picked up. I didn’t start out with any thought of giving back to the Official Unofficial Mfers Treasury but by the end of the collection my thoughts about supporting the community had evolved. As a small collection, a typical percentage of proceeds will not run up to any significant sum. I decided to auction the last three Mfers Ahead for the benefit of the Treasury and I know mfers bid generously for that cause. It turned out to be a good 10% of our entire trading volume in the end (thank you @0xjayson).

Mfers Ahead #420
Mfers Ahead #420

Today, Mfers Ahead has a great community both on our Mfers Ahead Discord (a Twitter DM group set up by @martogm) and a 大饼脸 (big biscuit face) appreciation group in the Chinese mfers community. We continue to onboard new mfers and OG mfers and the community continues to grow.

Just this week, we saw the first Mfers Ahead meet up in Mexico:

@Hoodiemfer set up a virtual gallery dedicated to the collection:

And Mfers Ahead have turned out to be more metaverse-ready than moving 3D avatars:

As for me, Mfers Ahead has helped me grow in ways I never could have imagined when doodling in bed over an iPad just three months ago. I have never felt more empowered in my life to do anything that I set my mind to. To borrow a line from sartoshi:

in conclusion we all mfers love u mfers & gm mfers we just getting started


Check out Mfers Ahead on Twitter and OpenSea.

Check out the original sartoshi’s mfers and the mfers story.

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