It was slightly after 12:30 am when my friend asked me to create a Phantom (wallet to hold Solana: SOL) crypto wallet and join a Discord channel to complete a really simple mission — link my Twitter account + fill up the Google Form of 3 questions (my Discord handle, my email address, and my Solana wallet address).
I didn’t think too much and did it. After the result of Mission 1 was announced the next day, I found out that 3 of my friends ‘won’ (got a chance to mint a cat jpeg). The chances of winning were 1000 of 6193 entries or 1/6 chance but I didn’t get it :( That began my Nyan Heroes journey.
Some context: the mission and Discord channel belongs to an NFT (non-fungible token) game project called Nyan Heroes that is built on the Solana blockchain. They embrace the play-to-earn model, meaning you literally get to earn money when you play the game. An example to refer: Axie Infinity.
NFT
A non-fungible token (NFT) sounds like a mouthful but the core of it means uniqueness or one-of-a-kind. Nyan Heroes created 11,111 unique digital cats (also called Genesis Nyan) for this project.
Timeline
There are a few important milestones in an NFT project —whitelist date, public sale date, and reveal date. These are the typical hype period, from the creation of social media/Discord.
Nyan Heroes started their Discord in August. The first Twitter post was made on 26 August and the public sale date is 8 November.
You can imagine the entire hype runway of a typical NFT project from generating hype to public sale is only a couple of months (without future roadmap). The missions only started around 18 October.
Missions
It started out as 10 missions to participate for Nyan Heroes but due to some bad actors trying to exploit the mission system, the team announced the reduction to 6 missions after the 4th mission. My opinion remains that the purposes of the missions are to (1) create hype in and outside the community and (2) create engagement and reward early participants who complete missions to mint a Nyan Heroes NFT (or think of it as a Gacha Cat Card) at a lower price. I think it is a great idea to give 22 hours per mission to get all entries, removing the first-come-first-serve element which may disadvantage those who join the community late or not in similar timezones (usually Asia timezones suffer).
A typical journey:
Complete mission → win the mission (winners are selected randomly from the pool of entries) → receives a token in your Phantom wallet → token allows you to mint the cat for a special price (3 SOL + gas fee) for 24 hours → you received an unrevealed Nyan Heroes card 😻
Mission completion is a prerequisite even if you miss the minting period. Which means if you are a newcomer at Mission 4, you need to do Mission 1–3 on top of 4 to get a ballot chance. Also, if you win a presale ballot token and mint a Nyan Heroes, you are still eligible to win. This serves as an engagement strategy, encouraging early entrants to participate in all the missions to win more. With each passing mission, the presale allocation decreases. E.g. 1000 slots for Mission 1 winners, 900 slots for Mission 2 winners... I have seen people who complete all the missions but don’t win the ballot (because it is randomised) and feeling demoralised versus some people winning multiple ballot slots and try to sell their slots. Balancing what the community wants is difficult. Hats off to the team.
The missions are not meant to be difficult but it does create enough of an inertia/ low barrier to attract the right kind of people and try to balance keeping the community engaged at the same time.
Mission 1 was to verify that you are legit and become a pre-cursor for Mission 2. The linking of my Twitter account in Mission 1 allows the Nyan Heroes team to easily check if I completed Mission 2 — retweet their tweet, like, and comment with 3 friends’ Twitter handles. This is to lower the chances of having bots and to get people who are outside the community interested, a typical giveaway strategy.
I found myself interacting with the community in Discord more, levelling up quickly by answering questions from newcomers by reading Nyan Heroes’ website and whitepapers. Many questions revolved around when the public sale date is, missions, and minting. Most participants interacting in Discord were friendly and I wanted to be part of the community.
And imagine my unspeakable joy when I got selected for the re-raffle for Mission 2. Re-raffle happens when people who won the initial presale from the mission do not mint it in time (usually given 24 hours). The un-minted slots get called back and reallocated. E.g. for Mission 1, the total Presale NFTs available: 1000 Total NFTs minted: 791 Total NFTs leftover: 209.
Mission 3–5 are trivia MCQ: e.g. What is the name of the main city in Nyan Heroes? How many mech classes? Their goal is to have more people read the whitepaper to find these answers, furthering engagement with the roadmap and focusing on the mechanics of the game component (beyond just a cute profile picture).
Mission 6 requires the most effort — taking photo of an actual cat and a piece of paper detailing today’s date and your Discord ID.
I scrambled because I don’t own a cat and I don’t have many friends who do.
Huge thanks to my sister’s friend who provided me with this cat photo. You are an absolute gem.
The entries for this mission were surprisingly high such that the team closed the entry time earlier than usual (sparking some outcry) and spent more time verifying whether the photos are real and not ripped off the Internet.
Although I am not a fan of changing deadlines at 9pm (GMT+8) stating that the new deadline will be at 10pm, I understand the team’s rationale behind it. Overall, I think the missions are well-designed, rather fun, and many people followed through despite some bumps around the way. A bad mission (consensus amongst the participants) is an invite mission, which is a normal mission for many NFT projects. Invite missions are seen as spammy (e.g. invite as many friends as you can to the Discord channel and the highest inviter gets a special privilege) and while you may get the influx in volume, most invited people are simply not invested in the project. This may cause a backlash as nobody wants to seem spammy to their friends. So I’m glad I don’t have to do it for this project!
Now that the missions are over, the team is incentivising the community through giveaways, leaks of Nyan Heroes mecha designs (in-game) and the launch of Nyan Heroes Ambassadors. This project is well thought-out by the creators and core team and I’m looking forward to the reveal of the minted Nyan Heroes and actual game 😺.