The standard playbook hasn’t changed in years — hype up a Discord, shuffle around a whitelist, drop the mint, wait for the reveal, check your rarity rank, then... that's really it. It’s rinse and repeat. A lot of OGs don’t even bother minting anymore—they just wait to get what they like off the secondary marketplace.

But in that mechanical, predictable flow, we’ve lost the magic. We’ve missed the chance to tell better stories, build deeper lore, and design meta-games that better leverage the blockchain.

Here’s a fact most projects ignore: the average NFT only asks its user to interact with the blockchain two times

1. Minting

2. Transferring/Purchasing

That’s it. Two touchpoints. Two chances to make someone feel something. Yet most projects treat them like a formality.

What if, instead, we made each of these interactions fun again?

Not wash-trade fun. Not “checkmark farm” fun. But actual delight, friction, mystery, and meaning.

Let’s look at Songbirdz as a quick example of what’s possible when you jazz up each onchain interaction:

• Minting: You don’t just click a button. You have to identify the bird species correctly to mint. It’s verified fully onchain on Base using Merkle proofs. If you're correct, you pay 0.0015 ETH and get the NFT. If you're incorrect, you get sent back 0.00125 ETH (i.e. original price minus a 16.66% fee) and don't get the NFT. That means early collectors actually have to pay attention and earn their NFT. It’s a little quiz. A little game. A little flex.

• Transferring: Every time you receive a Songbird, you might add a new bird species to your life list (your personal collection record). But transfers only give you 1 birder point — the leaderboard currency. So yes, you can trade with your friends P2P, but earning points this way is slow.

• Purchasing: Buying on secondary still matters — but if you want birder points, you need to pay more than mint price. That means your contribution is weighted, and it discourages low-effort wash trades just to game the system.

No project is perfect, and I'm definitely not saying Songbirdz is by any stretch of the word. But, Imagine if more creators treated their smart contracts as part of the storytelling — if minting was a puzzle, if transfers unlocked quests, if buying-in carried reputation and contributed to the collective lore of the project for the benefit of all holders.

Although... if I had to pick a "perfect" NFT project from recent memory it would be OK Computers by dailofrog. Each NFT includes a 100% onchain, interactive terminal that the holder can use to message other holders, post on messaging boards, and even use to build custom onchain webpages. It was also the first NFT mint to happen directly in-feed from X via their partnership with BANKR.

If you're not someone who delights in writing and debugging solidity code as much as I do (yes I know I'm the weird one), you can just do something unique and be the first to do it. That builds lore too. For example, the Topis were the first NFT collection to launch using Based Media X, which is a native marketplace for Base and is doing a bunch of cool experimentation when it comes to how we buy and sell NFTs. As Based Media X continues to grow and grow, the Topis will always be able to say they were the first.

So here’s the call to action:

Let’s make NFT minting fun again.
Make it weird. Make it interactive. Make it memorable.
Because we can do so much more than just “click a button, get an NFT”.

And if you're curious how Songbirdz does it—our contract is fully open-source.
Hit us up if you want to plug Merkle proofs into your own minting flow.
Let's build weirder, better things — together.