My chest was tight when we pushed the raffle page live. The posse has taken down our website before and this was probably the biggest thing we’d launched since the Test Subject DB. We’d learnt a lot since then; we now have a whole load testing process where we can model the volume we have come to expect and build our tech accordingly.

On the flip side I also didn’t know how quick uptake would be! As we all know, the market is weird right now. As I hit the deploy button I refreshed our database every 5 minutes, seeing the entries come in and texting Joe a running count. I did not expect we’d hit almost 70k unique entries in 48 hours. Although, we couldn’t celebrate just yet, it was time to clean the list for bots and malicious intent.

It’s pretty expected that a project of our “hype” would have lots of people trying to bot it, multi-wallet or abuse it in general. We actually received some screenshots of developers writing and testing their code! As a dev myself, it was interesting to see that the amount of bot entries grew exponentially as time went on; developers had clearly been working on programmatically interacting with the page or structuring their API requests through trial and error, finally cracking it towards the end of the raffle window. We knew this was going to happen, and we were ready.

In the end we ended with around 3x the wallets that we were aiming for, all ready to mint. I wanted to share some of the insights that we had doing this, and some of the techniques, so that we can spread our knowledge to other collections launching in the future:

Feels like we’ve been waiting for this day forever right? I’ll get straight into the details and then explain a bit more about our rationale below:

• Public Raffle Entry: June 14th - 16th (48 hours)
• Mint Date: June 30th (AL and winners of public raffle)
• AL Mint Price: 0.25
• Public Mint Price: 0.35

By the time Mint Date rolls around it’ll be a little over 5 months since we announced ourselves on Twitter. From a hype perspective, we definitely could have pushed to launch earlier. From a market perspective it probably would have been a smarter decision. But from a project and brand perspective, it wasn’t right. @whatthefurr and I always said that we wanted to take our time to build out the brand, community, art and tech so that we could really deliver something of a high quality with longevity and a vision; something where the art draws you in but the purpose and community keep you here.

Probably worth saying a couple things about the market and price, especially since everyone is like “FREE MINTS ARE THE NEW META!!!”. Firstly, I don’t think they are (remember Simp DAOs anyone?) and I have more thoughts on this that’ll just distract from this announcement if I go into it too much. Secondly, we’ve seen projects successfully mint out recently that aren’t free mints, and if anything what I hope is that this new “meta” means that we start to expect more from projects that aren’t free; high quality art, tight-knit communities, experienced founders and visions to change the world beyond our web3 bubble. Hopefully you feel our mint price is fair value for that. Thirdly, 1 ETH is 1 ETH.

For those that follow NFT projects, it’s starting to become more and more important that a team is doxxed. It’s not necessary, and I respect anyone that wants to remain anonymous on the internet, but doxxing certainly increases trust with a project and it’s founders. You trust me with your ETH, I trust you with my identity.

For me, it’s not like this is a big reveal. My twitter account is only pseudonymous and only became so in the last 6 months. It’s pretty easy to figure out who I am or what I look like. Regardless, there is a difference between making you Sherlock Holmes for information and being upfront.

(quick note on pseudonymity)

I just find it much more comforting and freeing. I think this is true for a lot of people. It’s certainly not to troll or be outrageous on the internet. I think a lot of people think is the reason when someone “hides” their identity online. For me, it goes back to when I started playing World of Warcraft at 15/16. While talking with my guildies over voice chat (is Ventrilo still going?), I had a different confidence and freedom that I didn’t have at school and it helped me grow into adulthood.

Yesterday @whatthefurr (Joe) and I (@tmw_buidls / Tom) launched the first teaser of The Possessed; an NFT collection of generative animated characters. I’m biased but I think they’re f*cking based

Joe is the artist, I am the dev. In a world of rugs, hacks and scams we want to be transparent from the outset about who we are, what we’re building, why and how. This is how we believe NFT projects should be built. We’ll post more about ourselves in the future; but first I want to focus on the art.

Each of the Possessed is made up of hand drawn traits, edited in Illustrator and animated in After Effects. Each trait has a human state and a possessed state.