Below you’ll find details about what you’ll be able to do with your BAPs, a new soft staking system in development (Starbases), and what to expect leading up to the launch of these initiatives. There’s a lot of info here, so buckle up, and get ready for takeoff.

BAP Mechanics

• Once your BAP is online, you’ll be able to use it to travel beyond the reaches of your current galaxy and explore a new World. The device is unstable, a one-way ticket. Opening a portal will destroy (i.e., burn) your device.

• Activating your BAP will open a portal to one of seven Worlds. The World you travel to will depend on the type of BAP you activate (Void, Galactic, Focus, Grand, Gravity, A2EX-ULTRA, or Giga Star’s Blessing).

• Upon activating your BAP, you’ll receive two new items: (1) a vista of your new World in the form of a banner that you can showcase with your Stars on whatever platform you choose; and (2) an insignia specific to the World you travel to.

• Banners and insignias are not new NFTs. When you activate your BAP, these items will be deposited in two new Inventories that you’ll be able to view on your Star’s OpenSea page: an Insignia Inventory and a World Inventory. 

• Upon activating your BAP, each Star in your wallet will receive an insignia and banner in their Insignia and World Inventories. Inventories are attached to Stars and will transfer with your Stars if your Stars change hands.

• Equipping an insignia to a Star will give them access to a Starbase (described below). You’re free to swap back and forth between insignias, or toggle them off altogether.

• The types of insignias and banners your Stars receive will depend on the type of BAP you burn and its rarity. Burning a BAP of a given type and rarity will award each of your Stars with an insignia of the corresponding type and rarity. Burning a BAP of a given type will award all your Stars with banners of the corresponding type, but, if you hold multiple Stars, you’ll have a chance to receive different variants of that banner-type.  

• Activating multiple BAPs of different types and/or rarities will allow you to travel to different Worlds. By doing so, you’ll be able to collect the full range of available insignias and banners across the Inventories of all your Stars.

• Wen? Q3 2022.

Starbases

• Once you arrive in your new World, you’ll need a Starbase. Your insignia is the key to your base: equip an insignia, dock your Star, earn rewards.

• To dock a Star at a base, you’ll need to equip an insignia to it. The insignia equipped to a Star at the time of docking will determine your Star’s reward track. There is a different reward track for each type of insignia. Your Star will stay on its reward track for as long as it stays docked. The longer you dock, the greater your rewards.

• Rewards will consist of a range of benefits. We’ve got lots of surprises in store, but just to give a taste: think upgrades to your Stars, entirely new digital assets, and more. 

• Docking a Star at a base does not involve depositing your NFT to a smart contract and “locking it up” for any period of time. While your Star is at your base, you retain full control over it, and can transfer or sell it at any time. However, if your Star is listed or transferred, it will be removed from its base and reward track, resetting its progress.

• Once this system is implemented, the possibilities are boundless. It will be a core part of our ecosystem, and a source of continuous rewards and benefits for all holders. More information on all aspects of this system will be provided closer to release.

• Wen? Q4 2022.

What now?

• Over the next several weeks, leading up to the day your portals open, we’ll be delivering lore and art assets that build out the story of our Starcatcher as they continue to accumulate the pieces they need to activate their BAP and embark on their journey. First on the list: a Fusion Cell – the power source.

• Previously, we planned to deliver the pieces you need to activate your BAPs in the form of claimable items. We now think this would only introduce needless friction and complicate the process of getting your BAPs online. Our new, streamlined approach requires only that you sit back, relax, and prepare for the journey to come.

• Expect the first art and lore installment next week.

More soon, Stars. We’re on the runway, starting now.

TL;DR: Burn a BAP, get insignias and banners, use insignias to soft stake your Stars, earn rewards. Lfg.

If you're a holder who isn't super interested in DAO governance, fear not! That's actually why we've created this structure! All you need to know is this delegate system will help simplify how we get meaningful feedback from our community, while also keeping the power and flexibility in your hands!

Core Mechanics

Delegation of ERC-721s

We are extremely early ( if not the first ) to be a project offering the ability to delegate your wallet’s balance of NFT’s to another wallet. Historically this has only been done with ERC-20s.

We use Snapshot.org for voting, and we also use their smart contract to track delegated wallets. This works by using the Snapshot.org website [ here ]. You specify the wallet you would like to delegate to, and then it is mandatory you specify the starcatchersnft.eth space to limit the delegation to.

• ☒ starcatchers.eth

• ☒ banmaurice.eth

• ☑ starcatchersnft.eth

Term based structure

In the Starcatcher universe we tell time by checking the block height. As you see, with time dilation and differing day cycles by planet we need some form of consistency! Our terms here are no different. They each last 91000 Ethereum blocks. For those on Earth, that’s just a little over two weeks. The delegates selected in that term are responsible for creating proposals and making votes. There is no last minute voters or FOMO-ing in.

Delegations made during the current term will take effect once the next term begins.

This is yet another new idea coming to community voting.

Elected delegate voting

At the beginning of each term, the top 25 delegates are selected based on the wallets that have the largest balance + delegated balance. Our goal is to encourage people to delegate their wallets to leaders and communities that they trust, and to ensure smaller groups have an equal voice with their votes. A key piece to ensure this equality is that One Delegate = One Vote. It is purposely made difficult for massive communities and members to sway votes single-handedly.

Next Steps

We’re excited to hear from you, the community. We want to continue to build on these concepts together, and most importantly begin consuming and acting on feedback that Starcatchers is receiving.

Head on over to our Snapshot space and join! Delegate your stars here.

Note: Voting and delegation only takes place on Snapshot.org. Be careful with your stars, and don’t interact with unknown websites. Term periods are automatic, no further steps are needed.

To kick things off I’m giving a more thorough and complete post mortem on our minting website for Starcatchers. This is an elaboration of the Twitter thread that I put out shortly after mint completed.

Reliability

Before launching I ran a multitude of different load test scenarios to determine maximum load our application could handle, and better decide on auto-scaling thresholds.

Most importantly, our website did not go down during mint. We did not succumb to any DDOS attacks, or fatal optimization issues prior to launch.

Our specific numbers during launch to highlight:

• Over 2 million hits

• Over 80,000 unique visitors

• Over half a terabyte of data served

Below is the break-down of request latencies with common percentiles.

Generally speaking, our average request time was 60ms. On the high end requests took around 300ms to complete. There are a few factors that contributed to the spread in request latency.

• Our service scaling up, and fresh instances taking longer to respond.

• Geographical distance from the user and where our application was hosted.

We hosted our application with Google Cloud in Taiwan, Finland, and Iowa in the US. These locations were picked to have a well spread out infrastructure, without having to pay too high of fees for hosting the site.

This was not perfect however, as we had over a hundred thousand requests from Australia, and tens of thousands of requests from both South America and Africa. We certainly could have sacrificed a little bit more cost to give a better experience to these locations in hindsight.

Even still, we didn’t drop a single request with our setup, and saved a lot of money handling requests due to the caching provided for free by Cloudflare. Which is a great segway into:

Security

I am a huge fan of Cloudflare. The amount of time and hassle both securing and caching requests that is saved by using Cloudflare is significant.

We only utilized the free tier of Cloudflare, but were able to block the obvious bot requests, and remove any concerns around DDOS attacks. I really can’t overstate this feeling enough, as many other projects have felt the pain of being targeted during their launch.

Another aspect worth calling out here is that our application is stateless and doesn’t have any secrets. The attack vector here is quite small, as our application is also scaling up and down to meet demand. Even if an attacker had limited access they would not have a good time trying to compromise the already running stateless application, that may die at any moment. This is also built on top of the fact that a cloud load balancer separates our application from the internet.

Another tangential piece is that we were able to easily control access to the developer section of the site using Google’s Identity-Aware Proxy. We could quickly iterate and test changes live, without actually impacting the production version of the site until we were ready.

This simple login made it so that only our limited team had access to view the pending changes before they were made live.

In Conclusion

We are very pleased with how the mint turned out. With the help of the Google developer discount and Cloudflare’s great free-tier perks we spent $0 total on these critical tools.

If you were to take out the discounts we received, then we would have spent a grand total of $50 in February to have a load-tested website, an adjacent developer site, and a highly scalable production site.

We were able to provide a great experience for the community, and will continue to strive for the same experience going forward. I hope this article was able to shed some light on key considerations to make while creating an NFT minting site, and that you enjoyed reading.

If you have any feedback, please reach out!

As we grow Starcatchers, this is a question we continually ask ourselves. The industry is evolving so rapidly, in so many ways, and yet it sometimes feels as if we’re settling:

• Why is it that being rugged is a rite of passage for a newcomer to the market?

• How can we be better as an industry?

• Why is it accepted as normal for projects to reap so much profit from mints upfront and in the same breath, preach WAGMI?

Change starts with us. We as members and builders in Web3 have a responsibility to our friends and fellow community members to be both accountable and transparent in everything we do. Moreover, we as builders have a responsibility to do what’s necessary to advance the space and help define what it means to be an interactive NFT project making its mark in Web3, regardless of the difficulty and complexity of doing so.

As we evolve with the space, Starcatchers aims to innovate by pushing boundaries and challenging the status quo. We’ll do this in line with the following five key principles:

• Visions & Values

• Community

• Art & Storytelling

• Tech & Operations

• Building Bridges

Vision & Values

We are explorers and pioneers of the Web3 universe. We are a community of individuals challenging what it means to be an NFT brand, backed by our core values.

Our Core Values:

• Transparency & Integrity: There is no reality where we are able to create a cohesive community without being transparent and honest with one another. We hope that as we continue to drive transparency, we will earn your trust and encourage other projects in the space to do the same.

• Accountability & Commitment: If we say it, we do it. We are a team of our word and we will always be accountable for delivering what we promise.

• Raise the Bar: We’ll do things differently and shake things up. Web3 deserves better.

• Fun: We are here to have fun. Let’s do cool things and make them memorable.

Community

Community is everything. Our mission is to grow relationships and cultivate experiences that are meaningful and memorable in order to create a hub of like-minded individuals across digital and physical mediums.

• Scale Moderation Team: Completed

  • Mods are extremely important members of the community that serve as a means of connection between you and the team. As a member, they’ll help you get what you need when you need it.

• Scale Community Management Team: Completed

  • Our Community Managers are also extremely important members of the team that will facilitate all the fun things we’ll host within the Starcatchers Universe. They are the backbone of your experiences here at Starcatchers.

• Host Digital Events: In-Flight

  • For those times where we can’t see each other face to face, we want to slowly grow and cultivate an array of virtual events for all our Explorers. No matter where you are in the world, we want to make sure there are opportunities to engage with the global Starcatcher family.

• In-Person Events: In-Flight

  • The times where we finally get to see the face behind the username! Working with our partners, or individually, we look to host a bunch of cool and exciting in-person events for our community members.

Art & Storytelling

We want our art to tell a story, and for our Explorers to be part of this journey. We aim to create an immersive experience that changes as we change as individuals and as the story behind our Universe evolves, always incorporating cutting-edge Web3 technologies.

• Starcatcher PFP 10k Collection: Completed

  • The Stars are at the core of our story.

• Scale Creative Team: Completed

  • We need dope people to make cool things. We’ve hired extremely talented individuals to continue to build and develop our story and art.

• Creative Studio: In-Flight

  • The talent in this space is undeniable. We’re always looking to expand. We want to empower fellow artists and creatives to advance our Universe.

• Arc 1 [REDACTED]: In-Flight

  • [REDACTED]

• [REDACTED]

• [REDACTED]

Tech & Operations

We see NFTs as a synergy of art, community and tech. There is no downplaying how important tech and operations are to creating a sustainable and scalable brand in Web3.

• Scale Engineering Team: Completed

  • We brought on a team of highly talented engineers to help lay the foundation of Starcatchers and to continue to build out our Universe.

• Build a Scalable Cloud Infrastructure: Ongoing

  • Everything we do begins with a strong technological foundation. Technology is what unlocks new opportunities to push the boundaries of what we can do to create an immersive ownership experience and ecosystem.

• Build Operational Engine: Completed

  • Having tight operations for a project is absolutely essential. We brought on operations-minded Explorers to make sure that we’re clear for takeoff.

• Snapshot Mechanism: Completed

  • We’ve set up an efficient and effective mechanism to snapshot community proposal votes for the Starvault.

• Delegate System: In-Flight

  • We want to rethink how a proposal system works and create and implement a system that encourages high-value proposals and ensures fair voting.

• Website Revamp: In-Flight

  • We want to create a portal into the Starcatchers Universe for our holders.

• [REDACTED]

Building Bridges: Constructing the Interstellar Network

A strong brand with valued partners is vital for continued success. We want to build things our community members will value while also aiming to collaborate productively with our partners in unique ways to navigate and explore uncharted parts of the space.

• Partnerships and Collaboration: In-Flight

  • We are always cultivating relationships and looking for partners and opportunities that enhance our brand while providing value for both parties.

• Merchandise: In-Flight

  • We want our holders and members to be able to own physical mementos related to the Starcatchers Universe and to represent the brand proudly. Members of our galaxy will be able to access these drops.

• [REDACTED]: In-Flight

• [REDACTED]