I Support the Current Thing 👌 🖨️
NPC-ers NFT Launch
Do you struggle to keep your profile picture up to date in support of the newest cause?
Do you think you’re supporting the current thing, only to find out people got tired of it last week?
Wouldn’t it be easier to just conform instead of the pressures of thinking for yourself?
Finally, an NFT project that makes every NPC’s cold grey heart beat just a bit faster.
The rise of the social media has ushered in a golden age of conformity. For the majority of the population that lacks the capability to perform independent thought, it’s never been easier to shut off your brain and plug effortlessly into the internet hivemind.
Is giving up independent thought the right thing for you?
After a great deal of research, scientists have distilled the essence of NPCs: conformity, groupthink, and obedience. We believe it’s now possible to represent these values directly on the blockchain.
An NPC NFT was theoretically impossible before the Merge. Every NPC knows that minting an NFT used to require burning down an entire rainforest. This is just basic science. NPCs like science as long as it’s the “conforming to orthodoxy” type of science, and not the flavor that values skepticism.
The transition to proof of stake ushers in the era of ethical NFTs. Now that Ethereum has received the blessing of the World Economic Forum, NPCs can finally have a home on the blockchain.
Handling the smart contract development for this project, it was very fun to map the NPCs on-chain. The entire project has been custom architected to best represent the unique properties of NPC:
Keeping the Current Thing Current
We know the Current Thing changes fast. Within a few years, it may not be possible to virtue signal allegiance to the Current Thing before it changes. If it begins changing at a rate faster than every 12 seconds, Ethereum will be too slow to keep pace. Fortunately the Current Thing at present generally survives for a full 24 hour news cycle, so we have built a resilient NFT.
We therefore built the NFT with the functionality to be easily updated with new “Current Things.” The methodology of generating and storing the artwork makes it simple to update the project artwork with a single transaction to update the base URI.
This means you could make your NPC NFT your Twitter avatar and see it automatically update with, say, an overlay of whatever color you need to shade your profile picture this week to avoid getting cancelled.
Naturally, this feature could only exist if the community continues to stay active. Therefore we found a great way to push this responsibility to the community of NPCs.
Proof of Conformity
How can the NPC community stay up to date on the Current Thing?
Every mint of an NPC NFT also awards 1000 valueless $THING tokens. $THING tokens can be used to vote on triggering a new “Current Thing” using a proof of conformity mechanism. The planned voting mechanics is designed to reward users with more $THING tokens for provably voting with the majority, thus rewarding conformity over time while silencing independent thought.
As the community votes on new “Current Things,” it creates a new epoch that displays the results of the community vote. Thus, you can always find out, on-chain, whether we’ve always been at war with Eastasia, or if we happen to support them this week.
Note, the specific voting mechanics are still pending. We need to see the distribution after the mint before finalizing the tokenomics for voting.
Technical Notes
Our speech at ETH Latam declaring that Solidity had a natural advantage over Vyper for NFTs is not aging well. Devs were quick to point out that the addition of the native uint2str function makes Vyper great for NFTs now.
The NPCers Github repository for the project offers a nice template for anybody who wants a featureful NFT project built in Vyper (which also contains a gov token to boot). The repo contains thorough documentation and extensive testing providing near 100% coverage for guaranteeing both ERC-721 and ERC-20 compatibility. The minting contract allows for things like whitelists and coupons which could be useful for other projects to extend. The project has been thoroughly tested on OpenSea and is fully compatible.
NPC-ers becomes the first known NFT project built using Vyper 0.3.7 — which launched last week with some new features, including better compatibility with Etherscan.
The gas savings from using Vyper have enabled the capability of minting both an ERC-721 and an ERC-20 in the same mint and still keeping it cheap. However, this is due in part to the low price of Ethereum and quiet gas fees. Should prices become unaffordable, we built in the capability of reducing the mint price by disabling the ERC20 drop. For now gas is great though, and deployment costs are a dream.
The token is non-burnable, since NPCs cannot be destroyed even with fire. Adding the capability of burning the token would have required a slightly more complex architecture to comply with the ERC721-Enumerable standard. Keeping it non-burnable simplified the construction.
Where there was a choice between adding some small cost to the mint to index some of the Enumerable parameters, and lowering the mint costs while increasing the costs for reading this data, we opted for the former. At current prices, the increase in mint costs amount to pennies. While read costs mostly only matter if this is being read from other smart contracts, in some cases the costs could be as high as hundreds of dollars. The tradeoff was worth a few extra cents of mint cost just in case the community wants to be build on top of this in the future for, say, NPC cagematches.
Although the ERC-20 token has been designed with the capability of voting on new epochs, the Voter contract has not been finalized yet. It will incorporate the use of a Vyper merkle tree to distribute the $THING bonus to users, and is worth staying tuned if you are interested in address whitelists on your project.
Conform
We know NPCs have a big future in several fields, including gaming…
And literature…
And even international affairs…
Join the compliance renaissance. The NPC NFT mint is now live.
The mint is live at a flat rate of .008 ETH. If you have questions, check some of the other resources:
Contract Addresses:
NPC ERC-721 NFT: 0xa5ea010a46EaE77bD20EEE754f6D15320358dfD8
$THING ERC-20 Token: 0x2c9084E65D046146d6CFc26Bf45F5b80042b90EB
The artwork for all 6000 pieces was done by the great ScoobyDoomer of CT All-Stars fame. Frontend credits to Chungus and SK Holmes. Legal and marketing to Charlie Chaplino. Puffer as Multisig Understudy. Grey Matter filled in as template for the grey individuals.
Disclaimers! Author has the right, but not the obligation, to 25% of proceeds from the NFT sale.
Forgive the Friday post coming in a day early frens, but the mint is not on pace to last so long.