By: Ben, Stefan, Erik, Ilan, & Enis

NFTs have come a long way in the last 18 months. We’ve gone from little groups geeking out in the CryptoPunks and Art Blocks Discord servers to a fledgling industry that has spawned 9- or 10-figure brands including Bored Ape Yacht Club, RTFKT, Doodles, and of course [my bags]. On one hand, we’re really not early anymore. SNL did a skit on NFTs last year. On the other hand, we’re only starting to see the potential this subset of crypto has beyond speculation, i.e. across categories like art, gaming, social clubs, lifestyle brands, and so on.

After following hundreds of NFT sets over the past couple of years, the 5 of us have decided to try and create one ourselves, specifically as a way to press into topics like generative art, digital identity, and internet-native community building. Enter Good Minds, our indie & art-centric NFT collectibles project that is starting with a small multi-character profile picture set. Our intention with Good Minds is to go back to basics. We want to take lessons learned from following the space, add our creativity to the mix, release some fun art into the world, and form a minimum viable community around that art.

Here are the key details:

-Good Minds will mint in early July and include 6000 NFTs priced at 0.03 ETH a pop, regardless of market conditions.

-The art will have a CC0 license (creative commons) and is free to be remixed and used in other projects.

-We have three main characters, each with unique generative traits, along with some 1/1s in the set, based on characters Stefan has been drawing since art school in 2014. The breakdown will be: 3000 breads, 2000 vases, and 1000 TVs (see sample images further down in this post).

-We’re planning to raffle 500 presale spots via PREMINT, with the remaining NFTs available for anyone to purchase. Presale winners will have several hours of lead time to mint their NFTs on mint day before the set opens up to the public.

-We will use Chainlink VRF (Verifiable Random Function) to generate a provably fair and verifiable random number that helps ensure a fair minting process for all participants.

-The team’s deployer address will mint 300 NFTs (5% of the supply) in advance of the public: the majority of these will be staked in NFTX as soon as possible to create permanent liquidity for the project, and the remaining outputs will be used for community building initiatives over time.

-Team members plan on participating in the mint as individuals but will not be buying any NFTs on the secondary market for the first 72 hours post-reveal. This is to make sure we’re not unfairly buying rare outputs cheaply before market participants have a chance to look at the set.

-If we mint out, we will have taken in 180 ETH total. This will be split among taxes, operating capital, charity, and community initiatives. Some additional specificity is below.

-10% of the mint will go to charity. Token holders will be able to choose which one(s) from several options, namely charities that have an on-chain presence and have been vetted by the team.

-We will also set aside funds to support community initiatives modelled loosely on the approach used by NounsDAO. We intend to fund things like bursaries for artists, experiments that leverage the Good Minds CC0 licensing, among other things.

-Royalties on all secondary sales will be 5% + marketplace fees.

Now, typically, NFT projects will lay out a road map as a way to offer potential minters a reason why they should make a purchase. We want to move away from that concept toward articulating a set of values which shape our intentions for Good Minds. Laying out some guiding principles like this…

1. gives people a better sense of whether this is a project and community they would like to join long term.

2. gives us greater flexibility with what we do going forward versus committing to ideas for hype-only reasons based on what happens to be hot in Q2 2022.

TLDR: yes, we have ideas for Good Minds after the mint, no we’re not building a game in Sandbox and there is no Good Minds metaverse planned. Instead, Good Minds should be seen as an indie NFT project. Utility for holders is the right to enjoy the art we’ve spent time curating along with the community layered on top of that art. That’s it. What we do moving forward is intended to be experimental and we invite people to join us in that.

Ok, so what are the project’s values? They are simply: art, crypto, and people.

Art. We love art and artists. Our intention with Good Minds is to be an NFT collection that supports creativity in all its forms, both among our holders and with what we do as a team.

Crypto. We are unapologetically excited about crypto, both the tech and the culture. With Good Minds we want to create a meaningfully crypto-native project, starting with a trusty ERC-721A contract, Chainlink VRF, some NFTX liquidity, and CC0 licensing. We plan on regularly sharing our reflections on the design decisions we make as we go.

People.* *The base layer of the NFT industry is real people. We would like to see Good Minds be a project that facilitates people making lasting connections with each other based on a common interest in the industry, whether that means someone is new to crypto or they’re an OG.

Everything we do going forward will be built in light of these values. If you find that you align with this approach, if you have any questions about Good Minds broadly, or if you want to offer us some constructive feedback, please check out our website, follow our Twitter account, and reach out to say hi! DMs open. We’re excited to share more in the coming weeks.

A final note. We’ve decided not to launch a Discord server (at least initially) for two reasons:

1. Everyone in crypto is already on too many servers and people usually move to block/mute new ones.

2. Most community formation happens on Twitter & in group DMs that often become smaller + private Discord servers anyway.

Our plan is to have a Discord-less trial period, focus on Twitter-based community building, see how it goes, and in the event we do evolve from there in a different direction (whether that’s Discord or something else) more information will be made public when the time comes.

But, up first, the mint!