For The Greater Good
We said we’re serious about Cereal, and we mean it.
The Cereal Club
Cereal Club was created as a vision for a collaborative project to bring people — creatives, builders, artists, & web3 enthusiasts — together in a place to learn, connect, & have fun. In a literal sense, we love cereal. Everyone can relate to grabbing a bowl (or three) of cereal & watching Saturday morning cartoons. Metaphorically, our bowl is intended to be a mix of people of all different backgrounds. A community of passionate individuals coming together to empower web3.
Dutch Auction
The idea behind launching our project via a Dutch Auction was never intended to be a cash grab. As our ideas started to evolve into a tangible project, we witnessed Azuki’s innovative, game changing contract & minting mechanisms. Why did we see value in a Dutch auction? We understood that the model allowed the community to determine the true mint price based on demand.
From a monetary perspective, a Dutch Auction also serves as a method of raising capital for a start-up & project that has a long term vision and a road map & plan that the team is determined to execute. It allows us the ability to build quickly, add talent to our team, & follow through on project initiatives. An important part of web3 is independently taking control of finances to empower the web3 industry as a whole. We witnessed projects that had to resort to raising capital through traditional web2 VC avenues when they wanted to scale. We wanted to keep the power within web3.
Whitelist, Discord, Community
Since the inception of our project & the creation of our Discord, we have always prioritized a quality community over quantity. Implementing a closed discord had multiple benefits. First, it allowed us to build a strong community through genuine conversation and engagement. It also allowed us to identify & remove bots while completely eliminating bad actors that could impersonate the project and scam members. Lastly, it allowed slow & steady quality growth of a solid community as opposed to a focus on inflated numbers as a cheap metric to show the value of a project.
An open Discord leads to a higher volume of users which comes with multiple setbacks, some of which are touched upon above. Although our Discord was closed, it still quickly grew to 30k+ members. One issue with an open Discord is that it creates an unhealthy environment & unreasonable expectations to attain a whitelist (WL) spot. Our messaging and corresponding actions since day 1 were that we would not allocate WL spots in a manner that would enable Discord grinding. It is one of the worst parts of our industry and is neglectful to mental health, physical health, & does not lead to genuine connection.
Our WL of 2,000 mints was originally composed as follows:
- 1250 Food Scientists: This was a CollabLand role for Cool Cats & Doodles holders, two projects that reflected the type of community we wanted to emulate
- 250 First Bowl (Raffle): Our Discord OG role
- 120 Artists: Awarded to community art creators that caught the teams attention
- 50 Notable Partners
- 25 Cereal Club Mods
- 10 Non Fungible Mods (Raffle): A moderator networking role
- 5 Voice Chat (Raffle)
The balance was allocated towards project collaborations & giveaways, which is reflective of our vision of a collaborative web3 community.
This announcement was instantaneously met with a strong push back from our community. The team spent countless hours talking with & listening to the members who helped build our project. Although our intent was to dissuade Discord grinding, we failed to provide an avenue for community pillars and authentically engaged members to attain WL mints. We heard our community & implemented changes to our whitelist.
We added an additional 500 WL mints, which were allocated as follows:
- 250 Cereal Killers & Cereally Cool People: Our most engaged members
- 250 Cereal Olympics: A competition where each cereal role came together as a team to work on irl & digital creations
NFT Ethics
The morning of our mint, the team woke up to a Twitter thread by NFT Ethics full of unsubstantiated allegations. First & foremost, our team has always been Doxxed on Twitter, on Discord, with our relationships throughout web3 & have have always been forthcoming in our involvement with Cereal Club. We take pride in being present & easily accessible in the web3 community. NFT Ethics never reached out to the Cereal Club Twitter page or to any of our team members individually, nor did they respond to our DM offering to answer any questions.
Labeling a project, and more importantly people, a scam / scammers without minimal due diligence sets a dangerous precedent in our industry. An account named “NFT Ethics” should live up to its moniker and be held to a higher standard of quality work & information. Instead, this account resorted to click bait journalism tactics that are always too conveniently timed hours before the launch of hyped projects. If its contents are even accurate, this planned & strategic method is based on engagement farming and attention rather than giving potential buyers ample time to do research and avoid making poor decisions. It also prevents any project from having the opportunity to answer questions or debunk any blatantly false allegations.
KB24
KB24 is a 100% non-profit passion project that was created in honor of our childhood idol. We always have & continue to work in accordance with the guidance of the foundation. KB24 has evolved into something special & much larger than just an NFT, which is what we have always envisioned. It has grown into a tight knit group of friendships that have crossed over from web3 to real world hang outs and relationships. The community has a more engaged Discord than most active projects and it is meaningful to us that we continue to provide once in a lifetime access & opportunities to our members to this day.
Public Dutch Auction Mint
Despite the exciting start to our day, the heavy workload heading into our DA, and finding time to hold a community AMA 3 hours before our mint began, the team couldn’t wait in anticipation of our public sale. At the top of our Dutch Auction, our mints were selling at a very high rate with unbelievably low gas fees.
All of a sudden, we noticed a very abrupt pause. The entire team was confused as to what was going on. After 3 hours of troubleshooting, we determined that MetaMask’s estimated gas calculations were not correctly calculating gas fees in a way that it reverted transactions, equating to an auction that was rendered no longer operational — as a result we had to implement a whole fix around by hard coding gas to bypass MetaMask’s gas calculation.
After adding that, we continued the Dutch Auction and sold out our collection.
Etherscan — https://etherscan.io/address/0x9e8b85dbb082255bd81c5b25323b694bc799a616
What We Learned
What was the main takeaway from our experience? That this result was necessary for the greater good.
If we did not run into our public DA mint contract issue, we would have sold out quickly. And by doing so, Cereal Club & the successful DA mints before us would have paved the way for bad actors to take advantage of web3 newcomers & veterans alike, as has become all too frequent in the past few weeks. When a failed project or rug pull successfully executes a Dutch Auction, innocent people suffer & the market is destroyed from extracted liquidity.
The concept of Dutch Auctions had to be destroyed so that space we love could succeed and so that faith & integrity in web3 could be restored.
Whats Next
What’s next for the Cereal Club? The same hard work that got us here & that we know is needed to create the special project we envisioned from the start. Our determination has never wavered.
In the last few days:
- We had a successful WL mint & reimbursed gas fees for failed WL transactions
- Put Cereal Club merch into production with our apparel manufacturer
- Hired additional members to our team that are more experienced than us in their respective fields, all of whom we are excited to introduce this week
What we have coming in the next few weeks:
- Art Reveal on Tuesday, February 22nd at 5PM PST
- Server gamification with earnable prizes such as Cereal Club merch, IRL cereal treats, & Cereal Club NFTs
- “Air-dropping” Cereal Club merch to all holders
- Rolling out our Share-A-Bowl charitable fund, which will be community driven & determined
- Further expansion of our team with a full thread introducing everyone and their super powers
In addition, we are planning on having a community Twitter Spaces this week & will let you know once we have a date & time finalized.
Successful, quality projects are built over time with hard work & execution.
That being said, we plan on acting on the items above in our first 30 days. We will let our actions speak louder than our words.
Now that we’re officially here, we’re not going anywhere. If you would like to join us on this journey, grab a cereal box and meet us inside the club.
Nice to meet you all.
Co-Founder Cereal Club
