Introduction

First and foremost, we think it is important to acknowledge the positivity, support and wins that we as a community witness from our holders, participants, artist, team, development partners and greater web3 community. We came together 6 months ago to create a truly unique PFP collection that would represent the “Faces of Web3”. The incredibly talented Cory Van Lew labored over this art to deliver a face to the voices that we hear in CT on a daily basis. He poured his heart and soul into it and we are honored to be able to distribute it for him.

As you are aware, we sold out the 20,000 token Cory Van Lew x Rug Radio “Faces of Web3” Collection today – a huge win for our team and community. Unfortunately, our ability to celebrate this success was abruptly halted as many community members who were all allowlisted voiced their concerns that they were unable to successfully mint.

Our initial intent was a potential 3 phase mint…

Phase 1

Phase 1 was a 48 hour claim period for those who held our Genesis Rug NFTs to be claimed at a cost of $690 Rug Tokens. For those who had been holding our Rugs, the native utility tokens ($RUG) yielded daily, could be used to mint, effectively creating a free + gas mint for holders.

Within this phase, we had tokens that were offered to our DAO token holders, creators and team members at a rate of 1 token per individual. These tokens were a free claim.

This stage of the mint went off without a hitch! A total of 14,665 tokens were claimed in this window and sentiment was positive across the board.

Phase 2

Phase 2 was an allowlist raffle that was offered to web3 communities who have supported Rug Radio along our journey. These tokens were offered at one per winner at a price of .069 ETH (for the culture). We allowlisted 80 communities who we intended to raffle the remaining 5335 spots. After a huge turnout, we ran the Premint raffle and the allowlist was handed off to the development team at Syndicate who coded the Allowlist Mint to allow the wallets on the list to mint these tokens. 

In that process, there were some hiccups.

What Happened?

Individuals who had claimed the free mint for being a DAO token holder found themselves unable to mint. We went to the development team to patch it, and found that more wallets were showing up as ineligible to mint, which we successfully fixed. As a result, more wallets were allowed to mint, but other issues popped up such as a brief 3 minutes where mints were loopable. Ultimately, the allowlist continued to show “ineligible” and the Syndicate team is still actively researching and trying to determine what happened to cause that failure.

Ultimately, the team ended up opening up a public stealth mint that allowed us to give access to the people that had opened support tickets who were allowlisted but unable to mint. This mint page URL was private and was used only for addressing the issues of the allowlist individuals who weren’t able to mint. Given that the mint was technically public, they had to implement some safeguards to prevent people from finding the mint link and bulk minting our tokens. The parameter chosen was via “NFT Balance”. If someone minted (whether it was in our support ticket with them or not), they were prevented from minting again.

This speed bump was intentionally placed to allow us to close out all support tickets by allowing our list to mint while preventing exploitation.

After satisfying the support tickets, we had the development team update the contract to reimplement the allowlist. As we saw the mints coming through and the token supply starting to dwindle, we started seeing more and more complaints from people who were unable to mint but were on the allowlist. As we dug in with the Syndicate team, we found out that the parameter for gating the mint was still set to check “NFT Balance” and not to only allow minting to the allowlist addresses.

In the end, wallet addresses that were not on the allowlist were able to mint. They were only allowed to mint 1 token and they were only allowed to mint that token given that the wallet they were minting to did not own a CVL x RR “Faces of Web3” token. This invariably led to people who were on the allowlist missing out on their spots and having a full sell out in approximately 8 hours, not 24 hours as we had previously anticipated.

Closing Remarks

We never intended to over-allocate this mint. Unfortunately, the sellout came as a side-effect of us trying to go the extra mile to ensure that individuals who struggled to mint and filed support tickets were able to be satisfied. At the end of the day, we recognize that there were people who intended to mint in this drop and didn’t get a chance to. We apologize from the bottom of our hearts and are brainstorming ways to rectify this.

What we can say is that regardless of the shortcomings and hiccups in this mint, is that our mint partners at SyndicateDAO went above and beyond to be supportive and present and actively help us troubleshoot and try our best to resolve every issue that showed up along the way. They deployed a safe minting environment, free from concerns of wallet security, exploitation or catastrophic failure.

We are infinitely grateful to the community and teams of people who have made it such a pleasure to create in this industry. We look forward to the opportunity to continually be held accountable to the core tenets of web3 as we build with and for you.

- Farokh, Loxley and the Rug Radio Team