Battle lines were drawn. 

Secret plans were hatched. 

The threat of sabotage and snarkiness lingered in the air.

And in the end… there was only one winner. 

No, Async’s blog has not turned into a recap of Game of Thrones. Instead, we’re excited to give you a behind-the-scenes look at the internal Async Blueprint contest,

Because this was an internal competition for research purposes and huge bragging rights which, in and of itself, is of indeterminate value, all projects featured free mints save for the gas fee. We thought this was the perfect way to roll out the latest feature on Async: free mints! 

As if it wasn’t enough to fling open the platform’s proverbial door to all creators, rebrand our entire website, and host the #AsyncNewDawn contest, the team here at Async has developed a taste for cortisol in the bloodstream and took it one step further. 

Because we are a platform made for creators by creators, it was crucial for every member of our team to get an in-depth look at Blueprints - all of the potential as well as all of the pain points - in order to better equip our creator and collector community. And when we say every member of our team, we mean it - from the UI/UX Designers in Creative, to developers in Engineering and our teams in BizDev, Product, Marketing and, believe it or not, even Human Resources.

This is not your high school dance; nobody was allowed to hug the wall of a Zoom meeting and say they weren’t artistically/musically talented enough. 

Battle Lines Were Drawn.

The three teams met in their respective groups for an hour over the course of five consecutive Fridays and were given a few guidelines:

1) Every member of the team must contribute visuals and/or audio.
2) Keep your project to a maximum of 200 editions. (Team 3 may have done this times five...)
3) All three groups were expected to complete their projects by Friday, August 26, 2022.
(Ok some teams submitted late, but we’ll look the other way for this occasion) 

Secret Plans Were Hatched.

After weeks of brainstorming, designing, and building - we unveiled what each of the teams had been working on:

Team One: Async Anonymous

A catchy Music Blueprint emerged from the competition, featuring real-life rap vocals performed and written by each Async team member. 

Hearing our head of Engineering call out “JPEGs. Buy for the vibes” as well as our marketing gals rap about a degen influencer honestly made our day. With beautiful visuals drawn by Danni Shinya Luo, find out just how fun and full of brilliant one liners our Team 1 is!

Team Two: A Day in the Life

Our second team decided to launch a parody collection of your everyday Web3 personalities: the degen, the artist, the dev, and the skeptic. Each day unveils more alpha and more panels of the comprehensive comic strip as more editions are minted.

Don’t be fooled by the caption in this comic panel, play the audio to uncover what these characters are really thinking behind their false online presence. This team decided not to use their own vocals, but instead utilized the ultimate CC0 Google Translate voice to capture the true essence of Web3 personalities with a robotic and emotionless twist.

Team Three: Async Cards | Vol. 1

The largest edition count in the entire competition, our cofounder Nate lives up to his title of Chief Creative Officer by recreating everyone in the iconic Pokemon card style.

With tongue-in-cheek abilities such as “The GM: loss of aggression from opponents” and “Roadmap Blast: ENG hits deadlines early,” and real life doxed photos of our beloved Async team members, this collection will be sure to incite a “collect ‘em all” spirit from our community members.

Our own teammates cannot wait to see all the different possibilities from these mints!

The Threat of Sabotage and Snarkiness Lingered in the Air.

Would someone in Engineering try to introduce bugs into another team’s project?

Would someone in Production conveniently forget to publish another team’s Blueprint?

While we all waited to see what hijinks would ensue, one thing the team wasted absolutely no time in diving into was some good old-fashioned trash talk:

On launch day, we saw attempted sabotage from Team 1’s Engineering colleague. Luckily, the other teams quickly caught wind and called it out. 

And In The End… There Was One Winner. 

Three teams. Three projects. One winner.

And, within just a few hours of launch, our community decided the winner - Team 3!

Unfortunately, shortly after the community decided on the winner, the bots came to join in on the fun. They scooped up the remaining Editions and all three projects were fully minted out on launch day. If you missed out on collecting an Async Anonymous rap, a snippet of A Day in the Life, or an Async Card, you can always grab an Edition for cheap on OpenSea like Lisa did. ;) 

Reflections from the Team

Many artists have joined us during our community events to say that inspiration can’t be forced or rushed. All of our teams put in time and effort well beyond the hourly Friday meetings, and each one of our team members can attest to the fact that each Async Blueprint really is a labor of love that pulls from the entirety of who we are as people - our likes (90s pocket monster nostalgia), our dislikes (a failure to recycle), our self-depracting humor. In the words of Walt Whitman, “[We] contain multitudes.” 

We all expressed gratitude for the ability to experience all of the excitement and pride that surrounds the creation and publishing of one's creation on an NFT platform, to feel all of the hope and expectation.

And then, sadly, to feel the sting of disappointment as the editions are scooped up by bots instead of landing in the hands of real people who resonated with your project. A lesson to be learned for creators looking to use our new free mint feature. Be responsible, and perhaps utilize the allowlist to make sure your fav collectors are guaranteed to mint first. 

Going through the Blueprints process also generated the following thoughts:

• “...The mock render function is very helpful, [and I] would encourage more users to utilize it. Do it a few times to see if your Editions look too similar with many next to each other; sometimes adding a couple more layers/states will help a collection look much better as a whole.”
• “Test mint would be nice. It would have given a more final view compared to the explorer.”
• “Type duplication is very powerful, glad we had it.”

As always, these insights, and also things that you share when opening a private ticket or posting in the open suggestions thread, remain at the forefront of our minds as we continue to refine our tools and offerings here at Async.

For creators looking to do their own free mint project, get started here. 

Browse other incredible art and music projects on the Async Market here. 

To keep up-to-date on fun community events like this, follow us on Twitter and Instagram. Join our Discord or sign up for our email newsletter to be the first to know about new art and music drops!