Introducing BitDaemons: A new semi-generative character NFT series — only on Fantom Opera

LuckyLuciano
5 min readOct 20, 2021

--

GM Fantom community! I go by LuckyLuciano - you may have seen me active around Fantom NFT Twitter/Discords over the past few months. I’ve written this piece to introduce my upcoming NFT series: BitDaemons. Thanks for clicking!

I’m gunna go fairly in depth here, if you like what you see but don’t fancy a read right now then come join our Discord by clicking here instead! All important updates will be broadcast in there/on our project Twitter.

What are BitDaemons?

BitDaemons are a collection of 6666 (TBC) demonic pixel characters that will mint exclusively on Fantom Opera. The design of the collection is wholly original and (we think) pretty unique — if someone discovers an existing NFT collection (on any chain) that could reasonably be mistaken for ours then hit me up w/ evidence & I’ll eat my laptop on livestream. Each Daemon in the collection is completely 1/1 and belongs to one of five rarity tiers (more on this later).

Status of the project & roadmap (as of 20 Oct 21)

  • Finalise character art: complete
  • Finalise background art: in progress
  • Partner with a trusted dev team for airtight minting contract & UI: complete
  • Create the final NFTs and sanity check the whole collection: next up
  • Compile the final NFTs and attribute metadata to provide to the devs: next next up
  • Announce mint date and begin full marketing push: imminent
  • Launch of public mint: soon (promise!)
  • Follow-up plans: to be revealed post-mint

Why should I mint a BitDaemon?

The one and only airtight reason to mint a BitDaemon is simply if you think the art is gnarly and want one! Like all NFT projects, we cannot guarantee that there’ll be financial incentives to minting. That being said, we’re doing all we can at this stage to bring value to those who choose to mint.

We pledge that BitDaemons will be priced very fairly compared to Fantom NFT projects of a similar calibre (we won’t announce a price until closer to launch as $FTM has been flying recently!)— we’re not aiming to make millions and dash here, we want to build some organic hype and foster goodwill in the Fantom community, sell out the initial mint (allowing early buyers to have fun on secondary market) and invest mint fees into follow-up DaemonVerse projects that will bring additional value to OG BitDaemon holders/minters. This is our genesis project, but we plan on doing this right and sticking around for as long as you’ll have us! For this reason, we’ve consulting with much more experienced players in the crypto/NFT scene throughout this process.

We’re also looking into ways of further rewarding OG buyers (sharing royalties with the team on secondary market sales of the BitDaemons you initially minted etc.) but cannot confirm this until speaking further with the devs.

Daemon rarity tiers

We refer to the collection as ‘semi-generative’ as the highest rarity tier features Daemons that are completely handcrafted. Generative Daemons belonging to the other four rarity tiers are allotted a rarity ranking by aggregating the rarity of each of their attributes — this determines their tier.

Rarity tiers (from common to rare):

  • Grunt: ~40% of the generative Daemons
  • Fallen: ~30% of the generative Daemons
  • Prophet: ~20% of the generative Daemons
  • Overseer: ~ 10% of the generative Daemons
  • Precursor: Only ~50 pieces - handcrafted Daemons

A note on Precursors: while roughly half of the Precursor Daemons are original characters, the other half are based on the work of Fantom community NFT artists (both big and small), avatars of prominent community members or popular projects that we personally like. This development came about quite by accident but we’ve since realised that it’s an excellent way to celebrate the burgeoning Fantom community.

All artists who’s work we’ve riffed on for Daemon designs have been/will be approached for permission, offered a free mint at launch as thanks and asked to name their favourite charity — half the mint fee of each Community Precursor will be donated! We think this is fairest to other minters, simply gifting each their own highest-rarity Daemon would result in 50% of the Precursor supply being allotted pre-launch!

Precursor Daemons based on (left-to-right): TinfoilRealist’s Sellek avatar; StrangeBrew’s Brewmaster and Poxxy’s Mr. Skull. Please note that these characters do not necessarily represent the final product, we have been steadily embellishing each Precursor after coming up with their initial draft.

Now on to the real spicy stuff: the generative Daemons!

Generative Daemons: A quick overview

Lucky, why are the generative Daemons more exciting to you than the handcrafted Precursors?

Glad you asked! There’s a number of answers to this question:

  • Generative Daemons represent > 99% of the total supply! The vast majority of minters will only receive generative Daemons. They are by no means consolation prizes for failing to mint a Precursor, and we would not release the collection if we thought they didn’t stand on their own feet.
  • The code is better at making BitDaemons than me! The Daemons are pseudo-randomly generated by a pretty sexy program that makes combinations of the 300+ handmade assets across thirteen categories, drops shadows on to the lower layers based on the positioning of the upper layers, creates a custom colour pallette and calculates rarity on-the-fly. There are quintillions of possible resulting combinations, and early test runs have shown us that they’re all looking incredible.

We really believe that, despite being a pixel art project, we’re blurring the line between handcrafted and generative. Take a look and decide for yourself:

A run through 150 generative BitDaemons created for test purposes on 20th October 2021, with a placeholder background. Attribute rarities may be tweaked, additional assets added and the generative program modified pre-launch.

Okay that’s all from me today! Thanks from the bottom of my heart to the dedicated few who read this whole bloody thing. If you find yourself wanting to know more about the project or simply want to follow along as we build towards launch then check out the BitDaemons Discord/Twitter (links up top).

LuckyLuciano

--

--