Last week, the first ever fully +1 Genesis Adventurer entered the Loot history books.
Below is the story of how the The Giant of Giants +8 Genesis Adventurer came to be.
🌱 An Idea Is Born
When The Genesis Project was getting started, it was tricky to find folks with matching items to mint a Genesis Adventurer. This was partly because not many people were aware of the game. A quest began.
I started searching far and wide, browsing wallets of active Genesis Project members and large Loot holders in the hopes of finding the missing Genesis Mana I needed to mint a Genesis Adventurer.
As I was browsing all these wallets, there was one that seemed most likely to have what I needed: @zoink's. I started to manually sift through his bags and keep track of which items he had in a spreadsheet.
However, I soon discovered that even @zoink, one of the largest Loot holders, would still need to “play the game” and trade with the community to successfully resurrect his full potential set Genesis Adventurers.
This exercise also seeded another idea in my mind. Imagine if someone could resurrect a Genesis Adventurer, where every item was also a rare +1 item ✨.
If there was anyone who had a shot, it was @zoink. So I started analyzing all his +1 Genesis Mana.
He was actually pretty close. There were 2 orders where he was 1 away, 1 order where he was 2 away, and several where he was 3 away. Next, I started looking to see if there were any Genesis Mana on sale to complete his fully +1 sets. I even started seeing how expensive it'd be to buy Loot bags to complete these sets.
It didn't look too promising… until I realized @Timshel had 1 of the 2 missing Giant mythic Genesis Manas.
Could I find the last mythic Genesis Mana?
🔍 The Quest
I looked through all the minted Genesis Mana on OpenSea. Nothing there.
That day, @treppers#8844 was working on a new tool for folks to "spearfish" missing mana. At the time it was being prototyped with @graphprotocol (now currently in its v2 form). I'm not too familiar with GraphQL, but I was able to figure out enough to find a couple leads…
Next thing I knew I was looking up ENS domains and trying to connect names to Discord and Twitter accounts. After a bunch of dead ends I finally found a lead…
After several days of back and forth, we worked out a trade. I gave them one of my other Genesis Mana along with an @0xAdventures card for the last missing piece of what I hoped would become the first ever full +1, mythic adventurer…
📣 Getting @zoink's Attention
Now that we had the goods, I needed to somehow get @zoink's attention. I lead a product design team for my IRL job, so I'm very familiar with Figma and Dylan. But beyond that we've never interacted and I had no idea if he'd be down to team up.
As a first attempt, I tweeted the above story and @ mentioned him in it. His sale of Punk #7804 had inspired me to learn more about NFTs this past Spring, and I thought I may be able to convince him that resurrecting the first full +1 Genesis Adventurer could be as significant of a story as that sale.
I was filled with adrenaline waiting for a response. A couple hours passed. Then a couple days. No response. NGMI…
A couple days later I figured I'd give it another shot by creating a meme to get his attention. The idea was to have my PFP on one of his shoulders as an "angel" nudging him to mint the first full +1 adventurer, make frens, and inspire more web3 folks - similar to his sale of Punk #7804. On the other shoulder would be a devil telling him he didn't need to collaborate with folks to create something like this given his vast war chest of Loot.
I was making the meme in Figma, so thought it'd be fun to add a little whimsy by adding the little Figma cursors to the meme with the names of all the folks that would be involved in the GA resurrection. I kinda forgot what the cursors with names looked like, so I went to the Figma homepage… and that's where I had an AHA moment: Figma's mission is to help make creative building more collaborative. It was right there within the hero header:
Nothing great is built alone.
Figma’s mission aligns with the very premise of the Genesis Project itself: trustless teamwork and proof of collaboration.
All right, I thought to myself. This actually may work. I added this tagline to the meme, posted it to Twitter, and crossed my fingers for a reply.
The next morning I got a push notification that @zoink liked the tweet. A couple seconds later and he replied!
📜 A New Chapter of Lootverse Lore
Within a couple of hours we connected on Discord, minted all the necessary Genesis Mana, and sent them to the same wallet.
Folks in the project Discord could see all the Genesis Mana being minted and were forming a watch party in the Genesis Adventurer bot channel:
Once all the items were secured, we resurrected the first ever full +1 Genesis Adventurer.
Thank you to @zoink and @Timshel — this was epic fun.
🤓 A Glimpse Into the Future
On the surface The Genesis Project is a “go-fish” style game aimed at restoring the original Order of Loot.
Beneath the surface it's about so much more:
Learning about web3 concepts. Figuring out how to collaborate with anons in a fully decentralized world. Proof of collaboration as the mechanism for world-building.
Over the past month I've learned an insane amount about web3, DAOs, and decentralized collaboration. From @gnosisSafe multi sig wallets and @NFTX_ liquidity pools, to Collab.Land bots and Discord moderation tools, The Genesis Project is an unbelievable way to learn web3 + trustless collaboration.
As Chris Dixon notes:
“What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years."
I firmly believe web3 is going to a huge part of work and play moving forward. If you want a glimpse into the future, come join us. It's a great time to join the fun. The 300th Genesis Adventurer was resurrected earlier today, unlocking Chapter 3, and introducing $ATIME, a utility token rewarded to all GAs.
There is a lot of excitement and momentum within the project. It's truly just the beginning.
