Hey, z3us here, and I’m ready to share my story and how the Diamonds came to be.

Okay… but who is z3us?

I always get stuck when presented with: “Tell me about yourself.” It’s so broad and open-ended. I could give you my professional elevator pitch, but frankly, that doesn’t even begin to cover who I am. Not to mention, I’m going through a transformative phase with what I’m doing, so defining “who I am” at this time seems unnecessary, as it will likely change by next month.

So we will skip the professional elevator pitch, and I’ll leave you with this:

I love data and creating things that are out of this world. I have a deep passion for learning and sharing what I love with everyone around me.

Those sentiments alone capture the essence of what drives me to keep pursuing bigger challenges. They are the reasons why I completed a PhD in neurobiology, even though the signs all around me told me to quit. Why I jumped head-first into the blockchain space, even though everyone told me it was a scam. Why I risked my academic/professional reputation as a community manager at an NFT marketplace when everyone was expecting me to pursue a post-doc position or jump into the biotech industry.

While those options aren’t out of the question just yet, I’ve realized something: Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith for your dreams, especially when the opportunities present themselves. Great opportunities are hard to come by, and sometimes you need to be at the right place at the right time, or you’ll miss the boat completely.

So when the Blast L2 Testnet launched with the announcement of the Blast Big Bang hackathon, I jumped at the opportunity to do something I’ve never done before: launch my own PFP collection. Sure, I could have launched on one of the easy minting platforms like NFTs2Me or Blastr, but I wanted to challenge myself. My goal then became to launch a full-stack dApp + my own ERC721 smart contract with art made by me to capture what I think is beautiful.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

If you’ve been keeping up with me on X, Friend.Tech, Seam, or Discord, you’ll know that Diamonds isn’t my first NFT collection. I launched the Lunation 2024 collection on the January new moon as a challenge to myself to go through the motions of learning how to use digital art tools and get familiar with EVM NFT minting. I chose to launch that project on Polygon through OpenSea’s drop pages because I wanted an easy-to-use platform where people don’t have to concern themselves with high gas fees, plus Polygon just has great tools and infrastructure. I really enjoyed the process and have been an avid collector of fun JPEGs since Marble Cards (eth/matic) in late 2020/early 2021. Since my early days collecting NFTs, I’ve known I wanted to launch my own PFP collection, but I always thought it would be “too hard.”

Well, nothing puts the fire under your ass to learn something challenging than getting laid off and continuously rejected for other jobs in the blockchain ecosystem for “not having the type of experience they are looking for at this time.” I took that to heart. I knew that I needed to get more experience beyond what I learned as a CM + degen, and now I had the time to really learn new skills.

So in November 2023, when Chainlink announced their Constellation Hackathon, I used that opportunity to take a stab at making a full-stack NFT project. While I did learn a lot and made some progress on the non-Solidity side of the project, I was not able to achieve my goal for that hackathon. However, it did get me started on learning how to build dApps, how to use Python for image editing and file organization, and the basic process for building a full-stack application.

THE BIG BANG

With the Blast Big Bang Hackathon, I wasn’t going to apply originally because I still felt defeated from the Chainlink one, but it sounded like a great opportunity. So I created the art and submitted my proposal for the project, though my submission was a contract made on NFT2Me through the Blast testnet. Originally, the project was called Blast Babes, and I was just going to give up on pursuing them, but when Blur launched NFT trading on Blast in April 2024, I knew I had to commit and bring my girlies on-chain.

There was a lot of FUD surrounding Blast back in March, and rightly so with all the bad actors that were popping up. That’s not new, though, and frankly, just a part of any new ecosystem, so you have to be smart and play it safe. The Blast hackathon brought a lot of interesting projects on-chain built by indie devs and small teams (+ bad actors, ngl), so it was really a wild time in the beginning.

I was fortunate enough to have been following the development of a really unique, super degen dApp called Super Blur Battlerz, which basically let you stake ETH on which Blur farmer you think will get the most Blur points after an 8-hour period, and if your farmer wins, you get to split the prize pool with everyone else that staked on the winner.

I LOVED this game. I spent March and April obsessed with this game, and I’m glad I did because it was a great way to earn Blast gold, points, and make new frens. Come the end of April, I decided to give back to this group of early Blast dApp users (I did win some of their ETH the last couple of months after all… though I lost most of it when Hanwe went demon mode on the full moon). I took a snapshot of all the wallets that staked on Race 107, which was the first race taking place during the April full moon. I decided it was now time to really pursue my project especially since Blur also announced NFT trading on Blast would go live.

THE DIAMOND ERA

The first thing I needed to do was build a full-stack application: an NFT mint site. A lot of tooling needed to get this project done in the most painless manner was available through JavaScript for React apps. Did I know how to work with JS or React? NOPE. I did have access to GPT-4 and other LLMs, which is how I was able to build the non-Solidity side of my Constellation Hackathon project, so I knew with some elbow grease and commitment, I could build a React dApp too.

Simply put: building a React app is a lot of work if you have no idea what you’re doing. The good news is that it’s very modular, and the tools had great documentation in case you get stuck in loops with your GPT or the GPT doesn’t have access to the latest releases. Also, shout out to Rainbow Kit because they provide the basic infrastructure to set up a full-stack React app with Rainbow wallet connect. From there, it was a matter of getting the individual modules set up to enable checking if a wallet is on the whitelist, a free mint function for whitelisted wallets, a public mint function for the main sale, a gallery with all my girlies, and an about page.

So I was able to get the basic site set up (YAY!), but then came the real challenge: create the smart contract and enable minting from my site. I went through at least 15 iterations of an ERC721 smart contract until I finally got to my final version deployed and verified on the Blast Mainnet. I had to learn how to generate a Merkle Tree, how to generate the proofs for the whitelisted wallets, how to pass the proofs to the presale mint function, and then how to set up a paid mint. Not to mention the other functions needed for the contract to be secure, incorporate the cool Blast features like claiming gas fees, and ensuring that funds aren’t locked in the contract.

The other big challenge I faced was generating the metadata for the tokens. The idea of NFT metadata was so abstract to me at first, and I had to learn about IPFS pinning and how you need to include the image data within the .json metadata file for the token URIs. Three months ago, all of this may as well have been an alien language.

But I stuck through it. I had studied a couple of different collections and really liked how CryptoPunks used Base64 encoding of their image data to ensure that the images remain visible because if the IPFS gateway you are using for image hosting goes down, so will the image on the NFTs. So I also learned how to use Python for Base64 encoding of each Diamond and inserted it as the image data for the token URIs. In the end, I feel more comfortable about token URIs, IPFS, and am excited to keep experimenting with these things in the future.

So, I had my metadata, Merkle proof verifications, all the necessary functions for security, and the minting functions. I want to take a second to shoutout some contracts that helped me find my footing along the way:

• Radbro BTC Passes: Devs are so based for this one. I modeled my Merkle tree verification after this and this contract was basically my standard.

• Allstarz: They had a lot of different sales, so it was really useful in modeling how I’d set up a presale vs main sale.

• Feline Fiends: Though I hadn’t heard of this collection before, I came across a really thorough breakdown of their contract and how they utilized Merkle proofs for whitelisted mints.

Finally, on May 6th, 2024, I launched my first verified ERC-721 contract on the Blast Mainnet and enabled the presale free mint claim for supporters of my Lunation 2024 collection and the April full moon degens. This is the culmination of my past 9 months since getting laid off at my last position and grinding for something more. I have no idea what to expect, and there are no promises for anything beyond super cute waifus on Blast, but whatever I do next is going to be exclusively for the Diamond holders. I’m only getting started on my “dev arc,” and now I’m equipped with the tools to keep going.

Keep an eye out for the Diamond Lore and Art Process article!

THE DIAMONDS HAVE ARRIVED

OpenSea: https://opensea.io/collection/blastdiamonds