this post turned out to be quite a journey – a bit longer than I'd originally planned. Sorry for that! But if you've stuck around through the last year of web3 and still find yourself craving more, then welcome brother. There ain’t that many of us anymore but I'm fucking glad to have you here.

The story began two years ago at the end of 2021. I was at the edge of burnout. I've been designing apps and services for small startups, midsized companies, and huge corporations for almost 14 years. I was designing landing pages, B2B and B2C apps, and even design systems supporting teams all over the world.

It was everything I've ever wanted from a career. It was creative, we were working with the latest tech available, I got to meet my share of amazing and inspirational people. It is really well paid, and you could do it remotely. I was very fortunate since I started doing it just when Apple launched the App store. The demand for good design was huge. But you could count people doing it in my country on one hand.

I loved it. I was traveling around the world speaking at conferences. My articles, tutorials, plugins and other resources were downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Combine this with the fact that I was always brutally honest ensured I climbed the career ladder without any problem.

But as I was getting higher in the ladder, I was suddenly able to see how the decision making is done. It wasn't about giving great value to customers through a well designed product or service. It was about extracting as much value as possible. You won't be able to make your investors or shareholders happy if you provide great experience but with a low profit margin.

So eventually the job that I liked so much was slowly eating me alive. I've realized there is a huge disconnect between customers and investors. One does not care about the other. It was slowly making me miserable.

I was thinking of calling it quits. Take a sabbatical, and focus on my family. But then I accidentally discovered NFTs…

Non-fungible tokens?

What are those? I was sold on the idea of digital collectibles way before but NFTs were far better than I could have imagined. You can burn tokens or redeem them for others. You can have whitelists. You can gate content or experiences behind them. You can combine two different collections into a new one. People can trade them. They can be generated and stored on chain. In an ecosystem that has no physical nor digital boundaries, isn't tied to any government and where anyone can participate.

This was the moment I've witnessed how powerful all this is. I was stunned. It felt almost too good to be true. I immediately wanted to learn it all. How to mint and how to reveal. I wanted to understand how it all works together. So I got myself two Creepz Invasion Passes and I joined the discord.

People I didn't know started celebrating that I joined the server. They started following my anon crypto account, retweeting my tweets. When I showed my girlfriend that I have hundreds of likes from random ppl with a funky lizard as their PFP she thought I was faking it. A couple of weeks later they skyrocketed from nothing to almost 10 eth. This whole experience was surreal.

I saw the potential in all of this.. I could create a world, with its own rules, with its characters, history and role. The lore could be directly tied to the NFT. Every trait could have its history or some deeper meaning. You could have some twist for reveal.. The NFTs could have some utility or be entirely story driven. All the ideas and possibilities started flowing in, and I was pumped like never before. The only limit was my imagination. My very first anon twitter thread is about this.

https://twitter.com/0x50b/status/1503343936592617473

What was even better was the fact that investors and users were the same people. If the collection is doing great we all benefit. There is a huge incentive to do great work, and do dope shit.

But it was tough …

#LearningExperience

I don't have any backing and I live in a relatively small town with no existing tech scene. And most people from web2 circles were everything but interested in building a web3 product. So it was pretty obvious right from the start that I will be in it mostly alone. And it turned out really difficult for a couple of reasons:

• I didn't know what I didn't know. I had no idea about what it takes to make a sick generative art, write a contract, how to test the contract, deploy it, connect it to a website, make it secure, make minting fun, implement backend for burn to reveal mechanics, host all the assets, come up with the role, visualize the lore, prepare assets for marketing, do the actual marketing, plan for post mint experience, make sure to keep people engaged, and much more.

• Learning and writing frontend, backend, contract and tests solo is a huge undertaking. It took me forever to "learn" it and implement all the necessary features. I'm not even talking about managing servers and praying to all the HW gods that they will hold strong and make sure the machine does not run out of memory or straight up catch fire. On the other hand it is really valuable knowing the full stack, and what is and isn't possible.

• I'm not the greatest marketer nor I have a strong following, so getting it in front of people is really challenging. People mostly don't take you seriously when you don't have the numbers to back it up. But I've decided to grow the project organically, instead of relying on numbers that are not real.

But none of these bullshit excuses made any difference. I have so much fun working on this it is unreal. Whenever I did something I found something else that I could do better. Every time I made something better it made me think of all the other great things I could do. I couldn't really decide on what to pursue But you have to draw a line somewhere.

Principles

Whenever you are designing a project from scratch you need to know what you are trying to solve, who is going to engage with it, and a set of requirements based on the previous two. But to curate the experience even further you can define principles that guide your decision making. Not every project needs these, but in the case of web3 they are not only useful for the team, but they can also help the community to understand the core project values. So, what are our guiding design principles?

• Work in public. Introduce transparency into the process and share it with the community. While it will be challenging to not share information too early, or keeping the coat of secrecy, this is the web3 way and should be embraced.

• I'm not trying to onboard the web2 crowd. I'm here for web3 mfers. You can understand it like this … I will not work on something just to get the web2 crowd's attention. Like a fun little web game, or some vague celebrity partnership that will hopefully spark an interest from web2. But It would be both a waste of time and money. It makes sense for some projects but not for this one. Web3 baby. I will rather spend these resources to make something that will blow our tiny NFT lizard brains. But if Steve Aoki decides to do a collab I'm all here for it.

• Collection is as strong as its community. Every community is as strong as its members and bonds they have with each other. Collections with the strongest communities endure and survive. The rest is dead. Giving the community means to express themselves or connect with each other should be the number one priority. The strongest most successful projects share one trait, and it isn't the art nor the utility. But having badass mfers as their members.

• Do things differently. Don't be a meta follower, be the one leading the way. People in web3 take many things for granted, or rather they perceive them as predictable. Breaking the status quo and surprising people will put us on the map, following the recipe will not.

• Double down on new technology to create not yet seen experiences. AI is opening doors that were impossible to unlock before. Right now we have a technology that is enabling us to 10x our output. We have a technology that can simulate real conversations. We have technology that can mimic the voice of other people or even celebrities and make songs out of that. We have technology that lets us explore anything in 3d (VR), or that can let us explore our world with a dimension on top (AR). The goal is to take advantage of these possibilities as much as possible. And make remarkable experiences on top of that.

• The city must grow. Whatever money we make, needs to be reinvested for the benefit of the city as a whole. While partnerships with some companies or celebrities sound good on paper, they are expensive and with uncertain results. Pouring the money back into the city will make the capital much more effective.

• Treat the project is a living and breathing city. For many, metaverse is a 3d world where you run around with your avatar and do … stuff. But think about it. Most of us are using our fake online identities and rocking our virtual avatars. We are already gathering in online virtual rooms chatting, doing business or sharing classified information. We have tools to track the movement of every digital asset, and we have tools to trade them in ways most bankers would not believe. We're sharing the happiness when the price moons, and we shed the same tears when the floor tanks. All over the world at the same time. We are already experiencing what a true metaverse feels like. Projects that realize this will win.

• Don't rely on other platforms too much. Build your own.

So, what do I have to show after 15 months worth of night shifts and a list of solid design principles?

Giga Fucking City

Giga City is placed in a dystopian world set in the year 2089. Here, the economy teeters on the edge of collapse, social unrest simmers beneath the surface, and the once-revered authorities and corporations have fallen from grace. But amidst this chaos, there is hope—a glimmer of light that emerges from the ashes in this virtual world.

• First and foremost a beautiful looking 10k PFP collection of some badass cyberpunk mfers. These guys have been in the making for a while now, but every last of them looks fucking sick. The color palette is just spot on, there is a huge variety of amazing traits vibing off the late 90s, and a couple novel approaches to collection design not yet seen before. I really, really can't wait to get them to your hands. If you wish to dig deep into the visuals feel free to check out our design document.

• The foundation brick for the platform to come. My original plans were to release the collection, and start working on the website and backend. But I have soon realized if I did that I would lose traction pretty much immediately. Building solid foundations takes time, and the web3 world is everything but patient. If I wanted to pull this off, I needed to have them ready before release. So I made sure that the art is ready, and the burning / reveal mechanics are ready and there will be no waiting for delivery. And finally, that the website, UI framework supporting it, the prestige-social-status backend, and the server are all implemented and are ready for everything that our twisted minds can think of.

• A really solid vision of what we want to achieve, or rather where we are headed. To be honest I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with this project when I started. Most projects don't even figure it out. I was making sure and I would figure out the rest later. And thanks to all the creative gods and all the explorations I took I eventually did figure it out. I don't have a concrete set of steps at the moment nor a specific roadmap but I know exactly where we are headed, and I have a pretty good idea of how we will get there.

GigaOS experience. Embedded directly within this post. Feel free to interact.

https://gigacity.gg?display=iframe&height=960

What's next?

We'll continue teasing what we have on Twitter. At least for now. But after reaching a certain threshold I will make the Giga City twitter account private. After that only followers will be able to see the announcements. But eventually even that will stop.

And we will start using our first experience, Leakz.

Leakz is a micro app available for Giga Platform. It is a message in a bottle service. You can embed a string within an NFT and only the holder can read its content. The NFT is not important, the message is.

From then on, I will share various alpha via Leakz and distribute them to random followers. It will be up to them to decide what they want to do with them. They might keep the information, or they can sell it to the highest bidder, or they might reveal the information for others.

Sometimes I might share the same core alpha but with different dates, prices, or other numeric information. If this Leak leaks, and it gets shared publicly, the alpha becomes invalid. The leaker will be announced publicly, but he/she will be granted the next alpha airdrop.

Finally, after we get enough traction and collabs the main collection will be released. For the initial mint you will be minting Memory Chips. They can be implanted which will burn them, but they will get you one Giga City Punk. You will be able to implant them soon after release indefinitely.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xB7202a7aC69696F3f5E659630AEe29DE02BAdD4b/1

After that will be done, I'll party for a couple of days for sure.

Then I will start implementing Citizen Browser, where you will be able to browse every punk, filter them, search them, see the traits etc. It will also contain information about the different traits and associated lore. While this sounds like a standard collection browser it will be just the first iteration with more interesting community driven features to come. But while that is not all I would like to keep some surprises in my sleeve.

What about the long game?

The missing layer on top of reality

When I was starting my career I never understood the need to have grand visions. The company changes, the market changes, the world changes eventually, so what is the point of having a long term vision? When the vision is so far fetched that you don't think it is even possible it feels artificial. Like the kind of bullshit you read about in managers playbooks so that you can beat your quarterly predictions.

But some time later I found out that there is this guy Elon Musk, whose vision and ultimate goal is to make humankind an multi-planetary species. You could even sign up on his website to reserve a spot and get updates. I thought it was hilarious. Twenty and something years later and mfer has reusable rockets, basically conquered the world of space travel, and every bloody space agency on this planet is playing catch up with him. A dude with a strong vision.

It made me change my perspective. Thinking while means of achieving goal can often change, it is the great vision that is pushing us forward and is making us taking risks we otherwise would not take, and encouraging us to give a little bit more, to work for one more hour, to make the probability of us achieving the goal just a tad more likely. To make you overcome the obstacles in your path and adapt to the changes of your environment. If you don't believe in the vision then there is no motivation to make you do those things, but if you believe there is a chance of achieving it it can become really powerful. And I thought to myself, you know what? Fine. It seems kinda ludicrous to have this grandiose mission for an NFT collection but there is Yuga, Azuki, Memeland all with their own missions and they are fucking killing it.

If everything goes smoothly, I'll leave my job. Dedicate all my time to this. Get the best talent on board. And start delivering shit … but deliver what exactly?

The missing layer on top of reality.

The living and breathing city, which only few thousand people can experience or even see but one that has such a strong presence you can't deny it exists. Giving you access to tools and experiences that can exist only on web3, and which can facilitate all kinds of different human interactions and spark creativity.

While also leaning on the dystopian side of this world and creating a social status system, tracking all your interactions with the rest of the community, and giving your anon persona credibility.

There are no limitation of what we can create … but I can promise you the future is going to be dope!

0x50b