📜Our Story
Last updated
Last updated
I met @_CAOS_BOY_ about twenty years ago when I was still in high school and opened my first clothing shop. Caos was a clothing designer, and I had a hard time finding exciting stuff to sell. We became friends as my shop kept growing (and selling more of Caos's creations) until I sold the brand. Then we lost touch, as life happens. We only met a few times over 10 years.
In those years, I first heard about Bitcoin I believe it was in October 2009. As a joke, I asked my mom to buy me some BTC as a birthday present. A few years later, when credit cards were accepted by some exchanges, her card was declined. Fock my luck. LOL.
I've always considered myself an early adopter, and this technology was something I didn't plan to miss. In 2015, I heavily invested in crypto and firmly believed that blockchain was the new internet. After selling a couple of businesses, I found myself in the world of crypto and invited Caos to join me and work from my brand new offices.
We immediately knew neither of us believed in coincidences and we had to build something together. So we started a marketing division focused on clothing brands. Caos was already working with big firms as an art director and is renowned in his niche.
One day, I had a client meeting and needed to take care of some matters. So, I organized a meeting with @_siriusboy and @legionboy51, who were talented friends of mine that I had previously worked with on projects. The project turned out to be incredibly successful, and we had a lot of fun working together. We decided to join forces. Our team grew to a size of 60 people but eventually streamlined to around 20 people, which we found to be our sweet spot (still is). During this time, we closely followed the progress of something called OpenSea, which totally intrigued us.
One Saturday, after a few drinks at the office, we were kind of burned out from one of our biggest clients, a bank/financial company. We told ourselves we need to work on something fun again. So Caos shared some drawings with us. It was a big-headed alien. We started talking about why Mickey Mouse was so successful, and I flexed my neuroscience knowledge. I love that stuff from my poker days. We also discussed why some games were more successful than others and how communities impact the growth of games. Caos has adolescent kids, so we discussed the types of games they loved to play. We decided to research if people would also love Caos's drawings. We started with his kids and ended up asking almost 100 people, including family and friends. The results were great.
Before the NFT Summer 2021, we were hired to create art and a smart contract for an NFT project that had an intriguing lore and was selling a few pieces every day. As we became more experienced in smart contracts for NFT projects, we found ourselves working on more and more of them. Fortunately, I had a friend living in Barcelona, where we had one of our company offices, who introduced me to NFT farming. I was also lucky enough to get in on Cryptopunks early and spent 2-3 hours every day engaging with the community there. It was a place where brilliant minds gathered to discuss all sorts of topics related to the new web and everyday stuff. It cracked me up how some people would claim credit for major creations like Bitcoin. As someone who's been collecting stuff I love since I was a kid, diving into collecting digital items just made sense to me.
Then it was kind of straightforward – we were ready to launch our own NFT project as a side gig, just the four of us, separate from our company, purely for the sake of having fun. As massive Banksy fans, we've always embraced his quote "Copyright is for losers." So, we were like, why not just drop the collection as CCO and let everyone go wild with Caos's creations? Coming from the clothing industry, we thought people would love to wear their own customized stuff, just like we do with Caos. It's all about the crypto spirit—do whatever you want with what you own because it's yours. Copyright is for those who rely on a single success and for uncreative people. Period.
Caos completed the entire collection in a few days while Sirius, Legion, and I were experimenting with the smart contract. All the mints in those days sucked - tons of rejected transactions and high gas fees because they overcalculated them to avoid rejected transactions when gas spiked. So we came up with an idea we discussed with a friend involved with the Ethereum Foundation. We found a way to ask the network for the gas price before each mint, so we could set a more specific limit. And it worked.
We opened this Twitter account in April 2021 and decided to announce our launch date. April has always been special to me. We told Caos we had everything tested and ready to go. The main idea was to launch on Saturday, June 5, 2021.
With the entire collection ready to launch, Caos thought the art didn't fully represent something we'd love to wear. It was too simple, but remember, most collections were like that in those days. The first one that comes to mind is Chubbies, those abominations Gary Vee shilled about. Bored Apes launched, and their mint was kind of slow until @pranksy paid attention to them, kicking off a new period for NFTs. Good timing? I just think my luck is above average.
So Caos decided to rebrand everything. When we started leaking the art, people tried to FUD and say we took images from Google which ironically led to all of NFT Twitter talking about us, which after all, it was great publicity. I keep it as one of my life trophies that some digital friends were talking in the Cryptopunks chat saying there was no way The Alien Boy collection would sell 10k NFTs (in-your-face).
One week later, on Saturday the 12th of 2021, I met @sammons_h in the Arabian Camels Discord server, who joined us and invited some friends to participate in the minting process. Boom! It went viral. A combination of factors contributed to The Alien Boy becoming the fastest-selling collection in the NFT community at that time. In just 4 days, our collection completely sold out, setting a new record.
We did something pretty unique by delaying the reveal for a few days. During this time, we placed bag heads on the NFTs while Caos finished the art. Meanwhile, I found myself trying to gain the attention of Pransky. It's hard to admit, but his reply to one of my tweets played a part in our major success. I recall him asking someone about our "unique selling point," which I thought was too sophisticated for a fun collectible.
The smart contract worked flawlessly, allowing us to gain recognition and build the best community we could have ever imagined. Our Discord was just crazy. I remember those days as some of the best moments in my life, and honestly, I miss the adrenaline.
One of the things I'm most proud of is that we onboarded a ton of people who were new to the NFT space (sorry, LOL) and it allowed us to conduct a bunch of new experiments. As a result, a part of the NFT community began to notice that we were pioneering in various aspects.
P.D. Thanks to all those who have been a part of this amazing journey so far. And for those about to rock, we salute you.
