NFTraits (or just Traits for short) are the building blocks of PFPs. Rather than minting a complete PFP, traits are minted instead and then equipped onto a collection that is built to be compatible with traits.

• Traits are minted in packs of 8.

• ERC 1155 contract type

• Full on-chain, CCO

• 10k traits, but no max quantity for each non 1of1 trait within the collection.

• Minting will have seasons that are capped on mint qty or duration, whichever occurs first.

Goals

To make a collection of traits that can be used by any project at any time that cannot be destroyed. Traits cannot be changed or altered by their creators, and must be free of manipulation from any single entity.

To allow collections to support traits, and be able to interpret how those look on their base character, avatar, game, or experience.

Technical Details

Traits will be an ERC1155 contract. They will be made on ETH mainnet, as exploration into pros and cons of sidechain yielded no clear winning alternative. Adoption, development, and tooling are the most adopted with mainnet.

Mainnet has the biggest clear benefit of high adoption and marketplace support. High gas fees could be a current problem that will diminish over time. It’s important to note that while traits will be immutable and defined forever, the mechanism for equipping them can be changed per project on to reduce costs. The current thinking is that adoption is more important than cheap/non-existant gas fees, as the most likely user base of traits would be those used to those fees.

Equipping and Transferring Traits

Quantity and Rarity

10,000 Traits will be made. The contract will ensure that it will not be possible to add or remove traits from the pool.

There will be 4 tiers of rarity for each trait, plus one tier for 1/1 traits that are non-fungible. Rarity determines the odds that a single trait will be minted.

Unique traits will only be minted once with no chance of being minted again.

Each trait has an intrinsic rarity, meaning the chances that any of it will be minted, in addition to the tiers of that single trait. This intrinsic rarity is based on the cumulative distribution function

Note 10/25/22. This section is still being finalized and will be defined as part as the deployment of Traits. Feedback is welcome.

F(x)=Pr[X≤x]=α , where X = 1-10, with 1 being the most common and 10 being approximately 100x more rare.

No cap on quantity for each trait, just a diminishing chance of minting as more are made.

Batches of traits will be released per season, with quantity roughly doubling each season to end up at the total count of 10k traits. If every season is fully minted out, then the total number of trait cards in existence will never be more than 248k.

Each new season reduces the chance of previous seasons being minted by 10x. One season ending does not mean that its contents are no longer available, just that previous seasons are less and less likely to be minted.

Rarity over seasons

Rarity Definition

Example

Note 10/25/22. This section is still being finalized and will be defined as part as the deployment of Traits. Feedback is welcome.

Imagine that there is a trait called “party hat” in season 1. This party hat has an intrinsic rarity of 4, meaning that the odds of any one trait in a pack being a Party Hat are 13:1 (approx). This party hat variants for each tier of rarity. The chance of minting a Legendary Party Hat is 1/8*13:1*.05 , the chance of minting a Common Party Hat is 1/8*13:1*.55 .

Seasons

Each season will have art made by a single artist or group of artists. Each season’s traits will have visual consistency in their wrapper, but the artwork won’t be dictated. The artist/artists who create the collection will dictate the style of that season.

Artists for each season will be the recipient of the royalties for that season’s release. These royalties will be sent to predefined wallets on initial launch and the private keys will be made available to those artists when they have been selected.

Artists will be initially compensated with funds from the pool from the previous seasons. Compensation will depend on the number of traits that a single artist takes on. Later seasons could be given to a single artist, but the number of traits increasing means that groups of artists may be chosen.

All art will be fully on-chain and immutable.

Note 10/25/22. TBD how seasons will start. If time-based or not. If time based, it’s possible that traits will be mintable without artwork. Need to find a solution for this. If not time-based, then the timelines for future seasons will be unknown.

Season Details

Minting

Each pack contains 8 traits.

Minting is affected by the wallet contents. The Blerginning NFTs will guarantee at least 2 free mints for each season. Minters with a The Blerginning in their wallet will carry double the chance to mint a higher value trait in each pack. Each additional Blerg held in a wallet will increase the odds by 1.33x.

E.g. 1 Blerg held in a wallet increases odds by 2x. 2 Blergs increases odds by 21.33, 3 by 31.33*1.33, and so on.

Cost

Cost will vary by season, but will be defined before the initial launch. Not all seasons will have the same cost, but season one will be set at .05eth / trait pack.

Revenue

60% of each season will be paid into the Traits treasury for incentivizing further development and more projects to adopt and use traits.

20% of each season will be paid into a Treasury for non-profit donation.

15% of each season will be paid to the artist(s) responsible for the art for traits for that season.

5% of each season will be paid to the original creator wallet.

Use

Meant to be used to mix and match in different projects.

Funds from mints will be set aside to incentivize developers from different projects to use in their projects. If a project supports it, based off of their level of adoption, they will be a participant and be able to vote on the future of the project. The members of that community will also be eligible to vote for future artists.

License

CCO license.

Modification

Once the rules are set, there will be no way for anyone to influence the trajectory or qty of future mints. There will only ever be 10k traits, but the qty of each trait will vary based off the odds of minting it and the number of mints that have occurred.

Trait names

Traits for the project will be sourced by sampling the names of traits from the top 100 PFP collections. This list of traits will be locked before the first minting of traits, so that all future projects will be able to plan for any traits that will be added, before they are able to be claimed.

List will be shared at a later date.

Marketing and Promotion

Hype will not be the point of traits. Any social presence should be automated to keep the community informed of happenings, but no individual should be allowed to pump, hype, or steer the project other than through their own channels.

No influencer partnerships will be made, marketing will be focused on documentation and awareness for other projects to be able to participate as well as notification of how the Traits are being used and potential options for contribution and further development.

Traits

Blerg traits aren’t actually Blerg traits. They’re not even part of Blergs at all, except for the fact that we’ll be making them and releasing them. Blergs will rather be the first consumer of the traits as a standard mechanism for changing the appearance of a PFP NFT project.

The goal is to make them interoperable across any project, therefore they shouldn’t be made to only work with one project. Their lifespan also shouldn’t be reliant on the longevity of Blergs.

We want traits to be able to be integrated by any other project, such as another PFP or a game or anything along those lines. To be willing to do that, 3rd party developers need to have the confidence that Traits won’t suddenly go away. They need to last forever and be immutable. They also need to have metadata that is specific enough to allow for an implementation, but generic enough to allow for any implementation.

Let’s focus on the Golden Cube trait as an example:

Before, I was thinking about Traits as they’re rendered in this card above. I’ve shown it before, but let me explain what it represents:

• A trait

• A torso

• A higher level trait than the tungsten trait

But it shouldn’t be that.

All of that is Blerg centric, and leaves other developers little room to implement it. After all, what possible other use would another project have to use a Torso in the shape of a golden cube?

Here’s what is should be:

• A golden cube

Let me explain the difference.

• No information about placement

• No information about relationship to other traits

• No information other than that it’s a trait called “Golden Cube” and it has some visual representation.

Blergs will choose to allow it to be equipped in the Torso slot, or the head slot, or the hair slot. But nothing about the trait itself would force that to be the case. Any developer, then, who wants to use this NFT as an element in their experience, could say this is an ingredient, a token, a piece of currency, or even that it has no meaning at all. Those developers would be free to interpret this golden cube in any way that they want. For Blergs, it would fit in 3 slots, but that’s because as the first implementors of this trait NFT, we can choose to make it that way.

Our implementation has no bearing on how others see fit to use it in their own project.

Changes to equippable slots

With the former idea, we were looking at having this Golden cube mintable 3 different ways. One as a hat, one as a head shape, and one as a torso. So in order to make a Blerg like this:

You’d have to hold 1 of each of those 3 traits:

This implementation would be fine for Blergs, but not fine for any other project to use, unless they wanted to basically recreate the project that we are making. If traits is open-ended, then it’s only limited by the imagination of the development team.

With this new iteration you wouldn’t need to hold a Golden Hair, Torso, and Head, you’d just need to hold 3 golden Cubes, all of which could be equipped in those 3 slots.

This allows all of the traits to be simplified down to their core metadata. All of the Puregs, for example are just the combinations of the trait in multiple slots.

Now, this is not saying that some things don’t make much more sense to be in specific slots, but it’s rather saying that those placements would be the responsibility of the developer who’s consuming the trait, not in the trait itself.

Traits need to outlive Blergs

I spoke recently in the Blergs collaborator call about making something that lasts more than 6 months—about how product designers (like me) make things that are short lived. Apps, websites, software all change rapidly and should be almost unrecognizable after a year of progess. I envy architects because they can design a building that will shift uses, change and evolve over years, and outlive their creator. NFTs are the first digital product that has the potential to last in that way.

I’m not going to speculate on the adoption of these NFTs, or if their nature as long-lived will mean that they are longer-used, but if we can make sure that their data will live as long as Ethereum, we should. To help with that, trait NFTs should be fully on chain or at the least immutable.

If they’re not, then we can change them. Which would undermine them as a mechanism for other experiences and shake the bedrock that any platform should be. They need to last, they need to be unchangeable, and they need to have staying power.

Fully on chain would mean that the trait art would have to change from their current appearance, or drastically simplified. Max and I originally wanted Blergs Genesis to be on chain svg, but the costs to deploy are VERY high and there’s a lot of limitations in svgs. We’ll need to investigate this further and talk to other projects that have gone all on chain.

If Traits do end up being fully on-chain, then anyone can use them for anything. I’m talking creative commons, total ownership level open for the community. If there’s any technical barrier to adoption, then it will push back on their ability to be adopted at all.

Divide and conquer

So, Blerg builder and the Traits should be thought of as 2 separate projects and products. The builder, which will look like Blergs and be a PFP project, will be the first (and maybe only) consumer of traits.

Traits will be a project that will release maybe at the same time, or even before the Blerg builder does. It will have a starting number of items, and those items will be heavily influenced by Blergs, but over time it will be added to and grow in the overall collection. Its primary focus should be on being totally extensible and generic, so that any developer can implement them in their project how they see fit.

Our steps now are to define the traits that will launch, define a mechanism to add to them over time, talk to other projects who might want to also use a shared protocol, and then launch our first versions to test these ideas.

Well, I’m the designer at Basedash, which is a startup that works with databases & data structures.

Most of the work I do is around making data, that otherwise wouldn’t be accessible or useful, well, accessible, useful, and editable to companies and their employees.

With PFPs, traits are the data. They’re hats, colors, face shapes, eyes, and accessories, but they’re also the means for determining rarity, grouping mechanisms, value, and a sublayer of exclusivity. But it doesn’t have to end with what we see.

The loot project was the first that I’m aware of that pushed this idea. If traits are just words on a page, then why can’t they literally just be words on a page. It started a shift in mindset that spawned dozens or hundreds of other projects overnight.

Developer Dao, The N project, Bloot, Space loot, this loot that loot. There were 2 weeks (or was it 2 days) where everyone was spinning up new ideas on the same concept.

What if traits weren’t visual?

What if NFTs were just the metadata?

Those were interesting, but I wanted to see if Blergs could use that same mechanic to influence later phases of the project. Metadata can be used for anything and any experience. The attributes are just variables waiting to be put into an equation. So I added them to Blergs.

Blergs have 4 non-visual traits:

• Luck

• XP

• Cooldown

• Viral

Luck

Luck is a scale of 1-100. Put simply, it’s the odds that something might happen. It’s also the odds that something might not happen.

Phase 2 of Blergs will be a loot-box mechanic, with X number of traits with Y rarity of each. These lootboxes will be mintable by anyone, but holders of Blergs with luck, well, they’ll be more lucky. This could translate to extra packs, extra traits in each pack, or extra rare traits in the packs that you get.

How far we can push this will take some technical discovery, and we’ll be working to test some of that with our community. Phase 2 is not the next drop, it’s the next milestone of the project. We’ll likely launch a drop or two to test out this mechanic before the milestone of Phase 2 is taken on.

Also, don’t fret Blerginners who are down on their luck. Your time will come. Just because you don’t have high luck doesn’t mean that you are unlucky. Like I said, it can also be the odds that something doesn’t happen.

I want to make experiences and tests that make rarity and the value of a Blerg dynamic. I don’t particularly like that only those with 1/1s or visually rare drops get all of the benefits. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover and don’t judge a Blerg by their traits for any 1 drop 

XP

Experience points in video games are indicative of how much time you’ve spent in the game–how good you are or what kind of problems you can face. It increases over time, unlocking new experiences, skills, or traits.

This trait is going to take some exploration of how we can read and more importantly write data to the Ethereum blockchain. I don’t want to promise too much here, but my hope is that we can find a way to use the XP trait as something that’s related to how people are using, sharing, and understanding web3 tech.

Cooldown

Only ¼ of the Blerginning has a Cooldown trait. It’s a scale of 7-31. Holders of The Blerginning will be able to mint 1 of every NFT drop from now on for just the price of gas. Some, depending on their cooldown, will be able to mint more than 1, but only after their cooldown period has elapsed. For everyone else, it will be 1 and done or a set cooldown for the whole group.

Is that cooldown time in minutes? Hours? Days? Weeks? Right now, that’s not been decided.

Also, this type of cooldown will need to take into account the context of the drop. The Blerginning, for example, sold out in under an hour after the public sale when life (which is still crazy to me). In that situation, a cooldown of hours wouldn’t have made any difference, but a cooldown of minutes would have probably been worth something to people who really wanted to be able to get more than one pack. I don’t know if that demand will ever be there for Blergs, but I’d love for the cooldown trait to be something that appeals to the most dedicated fans of the project.

Viral

Some Blergs are viral. Some are not. It’s either true or false. 

Virality is something we’re all a little too familiar with over the last 2 years. Because something is viral, it spreads to others. But, being viral isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Being viral from a Blerg standpoint, is all about how easily a Blerg can spread something to others. Maybe that’s traits, maybe that’s even virality itself. Also, virality isn’t necessarily a permanent condition. It’s also not an indication of the degree of virality, or how easily something is transmitted. It’s also not a definition of the mechanism of transmission. Some viruses require proximity (like a biological virus), and some just require network effects (like a computer virus).

Probably nothing

Each of these concepts can, and hopefully will, be tested in the future. We’ll need to validate the capabilities and constraints of the blockchain to make them work and find the right ways to use them, so they don’t just become some worthless metadata. Also, these ideas don’t just have to stop with non-visual traits, but we could push them to the visual as well.

What does it mean to be a Pureg? What utility does one head shape give you over another? Are the 2 heads of a Gemini better than 1?

Time will tell, but I hope to make a project where we can push the data of NFTs as the primary mechanism of the experience. Jpegs are only part of the equation–they’re only a cover for the book of data that lies beneath the surface. Once we start to build on top of that data, we’ll hopefully realize that the picture is probably nothing compared to the potential of the tech.

** **

Been trying to find a solution for this most of the day and was also trying to figure out what was going on yesterday. 

The issue isn’t with Opensea, the issue stems from an export that happened on my laptop when exporting the large images from Figma. We used 2 computers, because the export process was a real beast. All of the images that were exported from my laptop are grainy. All of the ones that were exported from my iMac are crisp. 

This was not caught because we tested and inspected the first 25-30 of them that came out of the export and subsequent compression to catch any issues. The first 100 images are perfect. The next are not.

So, 0-99 and 200-299 are the ones with the issues, save a few here and all of the 1/1s.

Here’s some examples:

The metadata is immutable

There is no way to update the url or the metadata on existing Blergs. The way Thirdweb composed the contract was to store that immutable data on-chain, with no way to push updates and restore or affect the metadata. Some contracts, like Punks and Chain Runners are fully on chain. There’s a lot of cool things about that.

With Blergs, though, that was not what we wanted. It’s very common for creators to notice small bugs and push updates to metadata for generated PFP collections, and I’m kinda shook that it wasn’t part of the contract.

Most of you do not know me professionally, but I am a pixel compression zealot. High resolution images, crisp photography, and alignment are unbelievably important to me. This is driving me crazy.

I’m going to push for a solution that gets these images updated, and am even entertaining some more elaborate burn mechanisms to update the faulty metadata. We will need time to discuss this from a technical level and see if it’s even feasible.

In the meantime, we’ll be setting up a repo of the high resolution images for you to be able to claim to use for pfps, tweets, or whatever you want. Blergs are yours to do with as you please and we’ll also be working on getting you vector assets for them as well in the future.

Right now that repo is not set up, but I’ll share updates when it is.  

- Tomjohn

Blergs are about to mint. If you’re reading this after January 17th, 2022, then they have already minted, or are still minting.

If you’re reading this much after Jan 2022 and they’re still minting… well… then, something went wrong—I’ll most likely have a post mortem up for that already.

Here’s one👇 , if you’re wondering what the heck a Blerg is:

It’s a PFP (a profile picture, and no I don’t know why we’re giving the F in pro”f”ile it’s own letter. I guess “PP” was too juvenile for 420/ 69s of the web3)

You’ve seen a thousand of those already, heck maybe even TEN THOUSAND of them. It’s one of many in the tsunami of new projects that are minting each and every day. Its nice, but it's just a .jpg (well it’s technically a .png, but that’s not the meme).

Right click and save to your heart’s content.

But the art! Vibes! Colors! WGMI!

But the art…

I’ll be straight with you, I love the art too. I made it, after all, and it’s been a blast to work on unlike any project in this Designers career. I’ve spent hundreds of hours making the art. Late nights, early mornings. Really, it’s been a long process.

But the art…

The art… is not the reason for the Blergs.

The art is not just what Blergs are about.

The art is how it started, but the art is just a means to find a new means to make an idea that means something.

Here’s what I means:

NFTs are a new Venture Capital

Say it with me. NFTs, are a new Venture Capital. Not the new VC. Traditional VC will continue and be valuable to startups and businesses for a long time.

This is not necessarily a profound idea. After all, if you’re in the web3 space, you’ve seen some projects mint and thought to yourself,

“Self! That team just made $3million in a day! What??”

And for what?

For art!

But what if it wasn’t just about the art.

What if there was a product or team or idea, that traditionally would have gone the Banking/Incubator/VC/Wealthy Uncle route, with all of it’s in-crowd, networking, pitch decks, presentations, and finally dilution that could instead make some PFPs that vibe with the community, and release those instead?

No equity dilution.

No delay in funding.

No pre-seed, series A,B,C,Z.

Day 1 revenue from marketplace sales.

And all with an NFT that doesn’t just represent terms on a sheet, but is also exchangeable, sellable, and even can be used for gated authentication into a product or service.

That. Is new.

We’ve had crowdfunding for a long time, but crowdfunding, in some ways, is more risky that minting an NFT. If you back something on kickstarter, you can’t change your mind and sell that investment. If the project does really well, you gain nothing but the product. Your investment is risky, because it may never be delivered, and totally illiquid, because no one can ever buy it from you. NFTs as a mechanism for crowdfunding change that model.

Blergs isn’t as big as all of that, but it is the model that Blergs is using.

The Blerginning is a means to fund the beginning of more ambitious ideas, all around the PFP and NFT space. Other projects should and will push that idea of NFTVC as a new means of raising capital. I started with something I thought was cool, and with this new model, I’ve also found a way to justify the time I’ve spent in the project. The money in this situation is not the “why”, but rather it’s the “how”.

Money is the How, not the Why

I started working on Blergs because it was fun, I kept working on it because I knew it would help me gain a better understanding of the space as a whole, so that I could find other people who also wanted to learn and not be buried in the 24/7 stream of Discord and Twitter hype. I wanted to build more skills around marketing, community building, technical releases, and get back to doing illustration again. And TBH, I wanted to be done with doing client work, at least for a while.

For full disclosure, I’ll be taking 20% of the mint revenue, 20% will go to pay for the dev work, and the remaining 60% will be used to incentivise and fund the latter phases of a project.

The money is how I can justify spending all of this time, saying no to the client work I’ve turned down to make this project, and how I can feel that the market is valuing my work.

The money is also how I can get developers, marketers, designers, and community managers to join in the project without feeling like their work isn’t appreciated. I can’t (and in no way want to) do this alone, so the funds help build bigger things.

The money is also how those who have minted the Blergs can see tangible improvements, follow the progress, get their own ROI from being a part of it, and feel excited about its potential. It’s a digital trading card in many ways, but one that is sellable to anyone who can see transaction history and the perceived value of the overall collection. Buyers don’t have to know about the project to know the perceived value of these cards.

What happens after the mint

After The Blerginning, the interesting work starts. If you read my first post, 1 Wallet = 1 Blerg, then you’re up to speed with the next goals of the project.

If you haven’t and don’t want to read it, here’s the ;TLDR.

Phase 2 of Blergs will be a trait pack mint, where instead of minting a whole random PFP, you’ll mint a set of NFT Traits that can be sold and bought individually and also equipped onto an unthemed Blerg. Those combos can then be themselves minted for free into a standalone Blerg, if the combination of traits is unique.

The minter of those new Blergs will receive royalties of that new Blerg as they are the creator. This new Blergs collection may have its own cap, its own minting windows, and its own incentives, but those details will need to be worked out.

Also

Existing NFTs that are contained inside of your wallet can also be equipped onto a Blerg, and will change the way the Blerg looks. For example, if you have a Coolcat, you will be able to equip it onto your Blerg and pick the Coolcat trait that you want.

Participating in the Blergs phase 2 will not require buying Blerg-specific packs. Over time, we’ll make more and more collections compatible so that more things can be equipped in unique ways to your Blerg.

Phase 2 is a proof of concept that this idea will work. Buying and minting 1 NFT on Ethereum is expensive. Gas is unpredictable. Buying and selling many NFT Traits on ETH mainnet is likely cost prohibitive. Because of that, trait packs will most likely not be on Ethereum, unless gas fees are drastically different at that point. Phase 2 will explore Arbitrum, Polygon, and other low gas solutions so that traits are much more affordable, and trading them is not a massive expense.

What happens after phase 2

After phase 2, there’s a lot of concepts, though none are set in stone. I’ll briefly cover a few of the possible ideas we could pursue or start to think about.

Wallet activity and participation as traits

Over the last month, there’s been a number of token airdrops that have taken place to reward people with participation in the overall web3 space. Yesterday fees.wtf attempted to reward people based off of how much gas they’d spent. Just before that, $looks rewarded with participation in their competitor market, Opensea.

Wallet activity is completely open for anyone to do anything with. You could make experiences for number, size, or type transactions that someone has done. The data is there for any team to be creative with.

One concept that Rabbithole.gg is doing well is to give users XP based off of tasks within partner dApps. Blergs could take that same approach and reward users with non-transferrable traits based off of their wallet activity.

Are you an ETH whale? Here’s a whale trait that only you can use.

Are you new to web3? Here’s a newb trait for wallets that have less than X transactions.

Have you minted a lot of collections? Here’s a trait that visually represents how many you’ve done.

Perhaps we will even give out unique traits to people who go out of their way to be kind or helpful to others.

These types of rankings and showcases of participation aren’t new in the world, they’d just be novel in the NFT space. Your PFP is a representation of yourself, so why can’t it show what you’ve done, what DAOs you are in, or how much of a web3 degen you are

Blergs as a Service

Blergs is not the dominant PFP style in the space, and it’s not a goal of the project to become that. Apes, Cats, Doodles, all of these collections are defining the space and have become immediately recognizable as a status symbol and a digital fashion brand.

None of that interests me, and I’d much rather focus Blergs on making something useful than something visual. Merch is not worthy of a roadmap, billboards in Time Square are not a goal, and Blergs as an exclusive luxury item isn’t remotely motivating to me as the creator.

However, many of these collections post success are now faced with the question of what to do to keep their community happy and coming back. Most are promising huge roadmaps that include exclusive events, merch drops, more NFTs, and more hype hype hype to feed the beast they’ve created. When a community is built on FOMO, FOMO is the only food it seems to crave.

Now.

My hypothesis is that those communities will need to find utility. Some are taking on staking, rewards, token drops, DAO formations, and things along those lines. It’s new for many, but as it becomes the common roadmap, the community overall will become saturated very quickly. All of the tokens and alt coins will pile on top of each other and a collection claiming it as a roadmap will fade into the noise.

So, the Blerg concept, as a mechanism to sell and equip individual traits, would seem to have a market to those creators. Instead of launching more and more 10k collections, they could instead use the Blergs platform, to integrate their PFP and allow its traits to be sold and bought individually. Video games have done this for decades, so it stands to reason that these PFP projects will need a platform that makes exchanging and utilizing traits as easy as plug-n-play.

A trait SDK

Another option that could be pursued after The Blerginning is the ability to make Blerg traits into a standard protocol that could be interpreted by any project. Rather than buying a Blerg trait, you are just buying a trait that could be equipped on any project that supports a Blerg SDK. This isn’t just for PFPs, but could be extended to video games as well.

The basic premise is that traits are traits are traits, and game devs or other product teams would just need to support the equipping of those traits onto their characters.

Most of the PFP projects have similar implementations of traits. Most have a version of laser eyes, a tuxedo torso, a baseball cap, or a sombrero. Rather than saying that each collection should implement trait purchasing and exchange on their own, a Blergs SDK would be a way for a shared standard for trait equipping.

I could buy or be rewarded with a Happy New Year 2023 pair of digital glasses by attending an event for one collection, and be able to jump into a video game that supports the SDK and equip those on my character. The developers would have the ability to interpret those assets as they see fit for their world, just as Blergs laser eyes aren’t the same as Doodle’s.

An example of this that’s currently in use would be how emojis and unicode characters are supported by different products and operating systems. Unicode comes up with a base system of what characters will be released, and each OS then designs how they will appear when text with that character appears. Twitter has their own emoji, as does Apple, Samsung, Google, Microsoft and many others. The core character is the same, the rendering is determined by the environment. It’s now become so standard, that it’s almost unthinkable to not have them be a part of some product in some way. Traits, with some standard, could be the same for digital personas.

Wrapping it all up

The result of the mint is unknown at this point, but the ideas and potential of the project is exciting. There’s countless ways to build inside of web3 without being spammy, hype-driven, scammy, and even borderline illegal. My hope as the Blergmeister is to be a part of and lead a project that doesn’t leave out people who don’t want to spend all day in Discord, who don’t have the resources to do it by themselves (like me), or who want to be a part of something, but aren’t sure what that will be.

I’ll need your help. After all, this is just The Blerginning.

Tomjohn

Basically, Shiny Object Social Club announced some things a few days after I published it that really hit on the “let’s sort through this web3 information overload and incentivize people to find and curate it”.

They’re the reason I got into this space, their community is great, and I’d encourage anyone who vibed with the goals of that first post to join that group. It’s gonna make it.

Where does that leave Blergs?

I’ve followed a quite a few NFT launches over the last few months, to try to learn what makes some work and others fail. Some have made it big, some have never sold out, some have pumped and then dumped, and some have grown slowly over time, after finding the right vibe and community.

A few that I’ve followed started from relatively unknown teams started with a low-volume Genesis run. Something to test the waters. Chubbicorns, Stimaes, Galactic Apes, all did early runs of art in a low volume with utility coming later.

They were able to find the right group of people who weren’t all looking to flip and bail, and could weather the storm of instability that seems to follow anything in the web3 space. They also found early adopters who helped improve the project and give feedback without 15,000 screaming Discord users muddying the water.

Phase 1 Blergs will take the Genesis approach.

On that note, if you’re reading this hoping to ride the Blergs hype train to 100x… I don’t think this is the project for you. I started making this and will continue to make this because it’s been a fun exercise and I like doing it. I’m not trying to mint a million, hype this to the moon, or really do more than just make something cool and maybe find some people along the way to like it too and maybe also want to build cool things too.

Yes, I’d like to make a return, since I’ve put in about 80 hours on this so far and have turned down client work, but the return with knowledge and connections are the biggest incentives for me. This space will only grow going forward, and I want to understand and be a part of it. That means I won’t risk my reputation on a rug or pump n dump. We’re early.

But now let’s talk about what Blergs is going to be, or at least what the plans are for now. Yes, this might look like a roadmap, but more-so, it’s the distillation of a dozen different Discord chats and threads I’ve been having over the last few weeks. It’s my goal, but goals change with new information and learning. If they do, I’ll share updates.

So. Here we go.

Phase 1: The Blerginning

The Blerginning will be a small run of 400 PFPs, hand picked by yours truly. 50 of those Blerginners will have extra unique properties and traits and will play a role in the later phases of the project. Holding a Blerginners will grant free minting to all future Blergs projects and exclusive airdrops to holders.

Mint price = .1 ETH

Launch date = January 2022

The goal of Phase 1 is to:

• Validate that people like the art, get a core group to participate and grow the idea.

• Fund the ability to launch Phase 2, since a larger effort will be needed to make it happen. I want to be able to have bounties for developers to help build, or be able to have resources to help with community management if/when the needs arise.

• Make sure that we can launch properly, test out the tech to make it happen, and get the experience needed to navigate in more complex waters.

This post will update when the specific date is announced, and it’ll be talked about in Discord and on Twitter. I would love to launch before the end of the year, but it makes more sense to wait until after the new years so that I can punt on the tax implications to 2023 and not have to worry about it messing with Christmas.

Phase 2: 1 Wallet = 1 Blerg

After phase 1, Blergs will be all about Traits. There will not be another randomized drop of PFPs like there was with Genesis. Not saying never, but probably not.

Instead, the next mint for this project will be a mint of packs of traits, so that Blergs can be made, interchanged, swapped, and created.

The chain, method, number of traits, packs, etc will all be defined later, but here’s how it will work.

There will be a mint, and instead of an individual PFP, you’ll be minting a pack that will have enough traits to make a fully-featured Blerg. After that mint, you’ll be able to connect your wallet to the Blerg app, and get a "Base Blerg” to build on top of. Every wallet will be able to claim that same Blerg.

1 Wallet = 1 Blerg.

Each pack will consist of at least 1:

• Hair

• Eyes

• Mouth

• Face

• Torso

Backdrops and Themes will be more rare and not included in every pack.

Each of these traits will have their own rarity, and all of them can be individually traded and sent. Minting multiple packs would give you, well, multiple packs.

The Blerg that you Build, can then be created as an NFT for free, plus gas.

Now, before you get on my case for the double gas fee, here’s where things get interesting.

If the Blerg you create is unique, then you, as the creator, will get royalties on every sale of that Blerg for all time. If the Blerg isn’t unique, then you won’t be able to create it. You’ll still be able to download the JPEG and use it wherever, but you can’t make it unless it’s unique.

The progress bar on the mint button in the gif above is meant (poorly) to show the odds that something is unique. It stands to reason that fewer traits added to the core won’t have a high chance of being unique. However, these clean Blergs might carry some clout… who knows?

Good news, is that as of current writing, there’s over 4 Billion permutations of Blergs that are possible, so odds are… it’ll be unique if it has all or most of the traits filled in.

https://twitter.com/blergsxyz/status/1465388660514295808?s=20

The Blergs that can be minted into this set will likely be capped at a certain amount. My gut right now is telling me that saying there are max 10k in this would make sense, though it may not have a cap, but rather some mechanic to derive how early they were minted. Things are very very TBD here.

The other interesting part of this is that I don’t want Blergs to just be for people who minted the Blerg packs. Other NFTs led me into this world, and I’d love this project to be a bridge for others as well.

Other NFTs will work as Traits on your Blerg, and those traits will be exclusive to holders of the other NFTs.

• If you have a CoolCat, you’ll be able to equip it as a CoolCat head.

• If you have a Roboto, you can use it as a Torso or a Head.

Apes, Blitnauts, Penguins, Mekas, heck, even Fidenza has traits already designed for Blergs. If you have another collection you want to be Blerggable, then let me know. This idea plays into what may come with phase 3… or not. Who knows…?

No one but those holders will be able to access them. Maybe no one ever will access some of them. I personally don’t have any of these, but if you want to send me a Fidenza or Bored Ape, I’ll not protest.

Phase 3: ?????

I have ideas, but seriously, not gonna go any further here.

Here’s a teaser of some that have been generated recently with a clean white background. You’ve got a 1 in 4 billion chance of seeing them in the wild.

Stay tuned for more updates. I prefer writing long-form posts to doing video updates, so that’s the way most will come unless I suddenly like seeing myself on camera… which is unlikely.

Blergly yours,

Tom

Links:

Website

Twitter

Discord

The common theme across projects is community, community, community. No PFP project seems to succeed without it, though it's very hard to define just what that means.

Is it an active Discord?

Is that an artist who's regularly making updates?

Is that a dedicated, full-time team who promises a roadmap?

Is that a ton of sales, a high floor, a smattering of WGMIs, GMs, and reactions?

Is it something else?

I'm very hesitant to promise any kind of roadmap for a project like this. It just kind of happened, it may not work, and promising a roadmap (from the product designer inside of me) seems like a crazy idea for something so nascent.

So rather than promising a roadmap, I'm thinking of promising an idea that resonates with me.

It's a very rudimentary concept at this point, so bear with me.

I don't want Blergs to be yet another Discord, yet another community, yet another place to have notifications from and nothing more. Conversations about the project are helpful, conversations about a floor or sales are informative, but what is the reason that this exists?

What is the unique value that I, Tom, the Blergmeister (oh that's going in my Twitter bio), can give to you all for minting, holding, or just being here?

I can't be the expert of web3, I'm not even in the conversation for greatest art, but I can help provide a place to point to those who are.

Blergs are based off of other PFPs or projects that have been influential to my discovery of web3. Many of the traits I'm making will be references to those collections, projects, and communities that I've discovered. So that's the value I can offer. I can point people to those places and collect the best examples for the community.

So to start, Blergs will be a project that points to other communities, articles, tools, and services. For now, it's a Discord. If it works, it may turn into more than that.

A place that helps people discover what this whole web3 thing is, and maybe a place that could serve as a repository for information helpful for new members. Something that doesn't feel like you have to be tuned in 24/7/365 to get value from. Discord communities index strongly towards high engagement, which is fine, but also I don't like the addictive tendencies and the small windows of time with FOMO that make us make big decisions. I want to collect those tidbits and share them with the Blergs members so they can be consumed at a more manageable pace.

Maybe a simple way of putting it would be that it to be a curated gateway. Links, definitions of terms, exciting projects, places to go to learn, helpful people to follow, projects that are novel or distinctive, etc. I want to find a way to incentivize people to share knowledge in a way that isn't a giant feed with information overload. I want Blergs to help others join in and make this new paradigm together.

For now, it's a fun PFP project, and I think the art is looking good. But next? Next would take support and help from the people who join.

If you want to learn, then this hopefully is the right place.

If you want to share, then this is hopefully the right place.

I'll share what I know, but the first thing I can share is that you all know a heck of a lot more than me.

Let's learn together.

-Tomjohn

https://discord.gg/cDQhCjDM5v

https://www.blergs.xyz

https://twitter.com/blergsxyz