Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the WaveDaemons
GM legends — LuckyLuciano here coming at you live with the big saucy Daemon update you’ve all been waiting for! BitDaemons are chilling in the care of the DaemonDAO, DaemonPunks roam the Fantom streets in gangs, TinyDaemons journey intrepidly between chains — so what the fuck are the WaveDaemons?!
In August 2022, the threat of the Daemonic Autonomous Entity to our precious EVM chains was nullified and the TinyDaemons freed from its control, thanks to the kind blockchain defenders who turned up to mint. The DAE still lurks on Fantom, but the threat is contained for now. While our focus was solely on the blockchain however, we failed to notice one of our deep space observation platforms going dark — an unnatural level of background noise means we’ve been unable to re-establish contact.All Daemon Science Directorate resources were pooled into dispatching a probe to investigate. Upon arrival, the source of the comms blackout was identified as a mysterious Daemon sub-species with the ability to broadcast otherworldly signals — classified WaveDaemons.
WaveDaemons are a collection of 1K NFTs exclusive to Fantom Opera. So what makes these special then? Each WaveDaemon NFT contains a unique PFP, and 1 of 5 tracks written & produced by LuckyLuciano — the first audiovisual collection released by the Daemon team. In another first for our project — we actually have a mint date to accompany the reveal! WaveDaemons will release on Saturday 17/12/2022 at 10pm UTC and we’ll host a release event in the BitDaemon Discord server.
NFT Design
The WaveDaemon images were designed in a two-tone format on a 74x74 pixel grid (64x64 plus a 5px border). Rare “Dimensional” WaveDaemons feature a higher res (740x740 px) background with a black overlay. Most Dimensionals were made by ArcAyn, a couple by me, and some fantastic guest contributions from our Fantom artist frens Chronic, Crisps, Shoe, Edge, Xavi, Nano and Spearhead. The WaveDaemon borders denote the track name associated with that NFT:
- Dance of the Daemon
- Rilassare 94'
- Stormfather’s Call
- Artemis
- Seifertova
All wholly original productions: bit ambient, very dark, slightly janky, messily mixed, terribly mastered— utterly Daemonic. More than any Daemon release before, this really feels like baring my soul — music is a deeply personal medium, and these 5 tracks are as close as I could come to realising the soundtrack that’s been playing in my head while designing every Daemon collection and 1/1 to date.
As a final detail, you’ll notice some familiar names popping up on some WaveDaemon bodies — we seen plenty of tributes to other NFT creators and influencers in generative collections, we thought it’d be fun this time to do shout-outs to the collectors instead! Every DaemonDAO member we can identify by name has a custom ‘top’ in the generative collection.
This is our small way of saying thanks to the kindest & calmest bunch of weirdos in web3. Basically, if you see one of these usernames pop up in a discord you’re in, go say hi you’re talking to a genuine legend.
Now I know what you’re thinking: “a 1K collection on Fantom in this bear market Lucky wtf are you lot smoking no way this sells out”. Yeah you’re absolutely right slugger, no way we SELL 1K NFTs in these conditions. Let’s talk about the distribution:
WaveDaemon Distribution
The WaveDaemon distribution can be split into two categories — claims/airdrops and mint. Let’s talk claims/airdrops first:
Claims/Airdrops (est. 40% of supply)
- WaveDaemons will be airdropped to BitDaemon holders and holders of our auction collections (1:1). We have not expressed our thanks to holders of our auction pieces enough — you really supported us in the early days
- All contributing artists will be dropped a Wave (+ some fanties for their trouble, of course)
- And DaemonPunk holders? DW we gotcha still — details TBA shortly 👹 every Punk holder will be able to claim a Wave, but there will be some engagement involved
Note: there will be no separate team allocation — we’re all Daemon holders and so will get ours through the same mechanisms as everyone else.
Mint Mechanics
There will be two ways in which you can mint a WaveDaemon — the standard way for 60 FTM, or by 🔥burning 5 TinyDaemons on Fantom🔥
The reason for including the burn option is multifaceted:
- Reward ALL our holders with a unique, vibey music+PFP NFT collection
- Squeeze supply on TinyDaemons — a deflationary omnichain collection! If we mint out but no-one mints in FTM (RIP us hahaha), the TinyDaemon collection will be cut by ~30%. And there’s no reason why we couldn’t do this again in future 👀👀👀👀👀👀
- Allow people to decide which Tinys to sacrifice, community curating a tighter, cooler Tiny collection. At a 60FTM mint, burning TinyDaemons is a discount option up to a 12FTM floor. Do with that info what you will
- Encourage holders & collectors on other chains to bridge to Fantom for a sick free NFT — it’s worth a try right
Now if anyone feels inclined to mint with $FTM instead of/as well as burning TinyDaemons, know that funds raised support the team and the project directly, being split between myself, ArcAyn, MaxFlowO2 and the DaemonDAO treasury, same as all secondary market royalties in perpetuity. I plan on compensating all contributing artists from my own funds, we’re not relying on mint proceeds by any means. Also, if the mint stalls for whatever reason, y’all know how we handle that:
Let’s look at some statistics: without any market movement or traversal from other chains, the top 100 TinyDaemon holders on Fantom alone could mint ~45% of supply without paying anything bar gas. Combined with the airdrops detailed above, that’s 85% of supply accounted for. Basically if you want one of these fookers, better not sleep.
Summary, Final Thoughts & The Future
Okay so to wrap up the reams of text above: WaveDaemons will mint on Saturday 17/12/2022, holders of BitDaemons/auction collections will be dropped 1:1, active DaemonPunk holders will be able to secure a drop via [REDACTED], and there’s the option to burn 5 TinyDaemons instead of minting for Fanties. Phew. This collection is a huge thank you to every single one of our holders, both in design and distribution.
Now for some brief musings for those of you who made it this far — this bear market has been fucking brutal ey. I do believe that there’s a light on the horizon for the Fantom and its NFT scene though, darkest before dawn and all that. Recent weeks have seen a significant step-up in communication from the Foundation, we love to see it. Also big shout-out to the fantastic people we’ve met in our first year here, whether they hold our NFTs or not. I’m not gunna bang on about “community” but I’ve made some genuine friends this past year in the space, you know who you are.
For the BitDaemon team’s part, we’ve been around the block now — learning from our own successes and failures, and those of our friends in the space. While the value of $FTM has round-tripped back to where it was when we joined the space in summer 2021, we as creators and leaders are certainly not who we were back then. We think a lot about where the Daemons go from here, and what paths we can pursue to ensure long-term value for our holders.
As such, following the WaveDaemons we’re shifting focus a little to building novel infrastructure that leverages our existing collections, pursuing strategic partnerships and carefully laying the groundwork to enact our most ambitious moves yet. I will elaborate on these thoughts specifically in a future article. No announcements or reveals until we have tangible progress to show, but trust when I say it’ll be worth the wait. Some of the prospects we’re exploring leverage unique infrastructure on other chains as well! I think our pal Slothy said it best:
Any potential crosschain ventures will be carefully thought out, only enacted with majority approval of the DaemonDAO by vote, and we pledge that the benefits to holding our collections that we’ve promised from the start (drops to DAO members, other perks to all holders, revenue to the DaemonDAO treasury etc.) would not be impacted were we to release anything on another chain.
Above all, wherever we may venture Fantom remains our primary base of operations — DaemonDAO membership will always and forever be tokenised by the holding of a BitDaemon on Fantom, and any systems integrating our NFTs will be launched here before anywhere as well! I mean why not, low fees and fast txns (most of the time — wen FVM) on the spooky chain right 👻
The End
Yo that’s gotta be the longest one yet, if you made it all the way through then fair play. Huge thanks to those who’ve supported us and played a part in our journey (it’s almost the 1st anniversary of the Daemon Mass-Transit Event!) and if you’d like to get involved it’s never to late: jump in our Discord, follow the BitDaemons project page on Twitter, check out our ever-growing project website and come ride out the bear with the Daemon Family.
LuckyLuciano, on behalf of the BitDaemons team
