New non-fungible token (NFT) collections pop up literally every single day. In fact, if you dive deeper into the field one of two things are likely to happen (if not both simultaneously):
- You’ll get horrified or downright repulsed by the lack of creativity behind the broader NFT market
- You’ll get astonished by the creativity and talent behind some of the projects.
The truth is you need to spend a considerable amount of time and effort to sift through the horrendous number of cash grabs, find the right people to follow, and get acquainted with.
To do so, you’ll need to bring something to the table. Don’t worry, though – you don’t need to be a coding prodigy. If I’ve found one thing in the years I’ve spent in crypto – it’s that anything will cut it so long as you are consistent and reliable. Anyways, this is a subject for another entry but with me, I promise it’s relevant.
My point is that if you spend the time and effort to network, you’ll get to experience the latter – a world where creative people meet brilliant builders in a medium where money is not everything. Although I’ve absolutely no inside information, my feeling is that Tubby Cats – an NFT collection by the artists and coders behind the Tubby Collective – is one of these relatively rare findings. In the spirit of complete transparency – I do own 1 (one) Tubby Cat NFT. The purpose of this entry, however, is not to shill. It’s to show those who might still be unaware how one team managed to get the entire crypto Twitter (yes, even Cobie) to talk about their brainchild. To do so, we need to answer a few questions:
- What is the Tubby Cats NFT collection?
- Who is behind Tubby Cats?
- The perfect mint – how did they do it?
- Twitter mania
- What’s next?
- Let’s unpack.
What is the Tubby Cats NFT Collection?
Tubby Cats is a collection of 20,000 … well, tubby cats in the form of non-fungible tokens. A term that you are likely to see being tossed around frequently is that it’s a generative art collection. Generative art refers to art that’s been created through the use of an autonomous, non-human system that can independently determine certain features of the artwork. This doesn’t mean that there’s no human participation – on the contrary – all cats are hand-drawn.
Rather than generating the collection randomly, though, every tubby is created from one of 120 palettes, each one of which themed differently. The rarity is, therefore, based on the themed gen palettes. But JPEGs speak louder than words so here’s what some of the more common tubbies look like:
Tubby Cats
They’re just fu**ing cool. And to make matters even better, the team also created 69 one-of-one tubby cats where each one carries unique traits of the artist that create them. More on that a bit later when we talk about the team.
Now, I personally learned about the project somewhere in January, if memory serves me well, and it didn’t mint until late February. Nobody told me about it – I just saw someone whom I follow tweet something about tubby cats and I decided to dive a bit deeper into their discord.
Speaking of their discord, I’ll allow myself to quote MoonOverlord on this:
Tubby cats has one of the most autistic discord and Twitter feeds in the game, if you have been in crypto long enough you know not to fade this energy.
You can find the complete collection on OpenSea
Now let’s find out who in their right minds would hand draw twenty fu**ing thousand tubby cats.
Who is behind Tubby Cats?
It’s just a bunch of anons, right? Well, the concept of someone being anonymous has shifted quite a lot if you’re in crypto long enough. I personally couldn’t care less if I knew who’s behind the Twitter handle so long as they’ve a track record. And the people behind Tubby Cats have a track record.
The project’s lead is . I’ve seen Ratwell in a few discords and as you’ll likely see in his Twitter bio is that he’s an “artist for Tetranode.” Tetranode, on the other hand, is this DeFi deity in the eyes of many who’s part of a gazillion DAOs most of which you (and I) don’t really know and all of which you (and I) don’t really understand. But he’s a big dude in the field plus he’s been on UpOnly with Cobie (twice) so he must be legit, right? The other members of the Tubby Collective, as of the time of this entry, are:
These are mostly responsible for the art. As we mentioned above, though, hidden in those 20K cats are some gem 1/1s and each artist has his signature that can be clearly differentiated. For instance, if you’re the doom-and-gloom type of person that’s into dark stuff, you’re likely to find VKR000’s art very appealing:
If you’re into something more playful and cheery, perhaps Sugoi’s tubbies would be more suited:
You get the gist, I’m not going through all 1/1s but the cool thing here is that each artist brings their own signature to the project which is reflected directly on the visuals.
I’m prefacing this part by saying that my knowledge of coding is abysmal, borderline non-existent. With this said, the two people behind the project’s code are:
Trolldart shared a lot of insights on how things work. He also released the code for progressive reveals under a creative commons (CC0) license and everyone can access it and use it. It’s available
I believe credit should also be given to for his work on the review site.
Now, unlike most NFT projects where the art is randomized based on traits, tubby cats are somewhat different. In a detailed thread, trolldart explained how it all works and I’m going to try to summarize it to the best of my abilities, although the thread itself can be found
Tubby cats were generated based on color palettes and themes and some of these examples include a sleepy palette, a fancy palette, a rockstar palette, and so forth. The rarity of the NFT was based on these palettes and themes and not based on the traits themselves, which takes care of the rarity within itself as most common and general traits were present in many palettes. On the other hand, more specific traits were only in a few palettes. For example, in the below, the beach ball will only be shown in the beach palette and the pajama – in sleep and bathroom.
At the beginning of the piece I talked about credibility and track record and one thing that I liked in tubbies is that trolldart was clearly shipping and so was 0xngmi. The latter is also the person building DeFiLlama – a tool that I use almost daily, so that’s that.
The Perfect Mint – How Did They Do It?
Most of the NFT communities are built on Twitter and Discord. For those of you who don’t know, there’s always some sort of a meta play to build communities. With initial DEX offerings (IDOs) it was whitelists where users who did X would get an abysmally small allocation, with NFT mints it’s, well whitelists again. Some call them mintlists, allowlists, and whatnot.
Essentially, the team would give away spots to the selected few for completing various tasks such as sharing, retweeting, commenting, liking, inviting people to Discord, and so forth. It’s a tedious practice that incentivizes bots and fake accounts but it is what it is.
Tubby cats was different. First, the team gave whitelist spots to members of other communities – other NFT projects. Second, they allowed literally everyone to participate in a drawing task where users had to follow very simple and clear instructions of drawing a Tubby Cat on their own. Pretty cool, if you ask me. That’s how I got my whitelist spot and how I minted my tubby. It was dead simple and the only people who failed to get on the WL were those who tried to game it. As such, they ended up giving like 16-17K (I don’t know the exact number) whitelist spots and people had 3 days to mint their NFT.
No gas wars, no bots, no problems. And if that wasn’t enough, the NFTs were revealed progressively as more cats got minted. That’s courtesy of the developoooooooor trolldart and the code that I pointed to above. What was left of the collection was minted publicly and the event was botted but I doubt anyone who has ever been in a mint before was surprised – nothing the devs can do.
Twitter Mania
The crux of the whole event was how literally everyone on crypto Twitter was talking about tubbies. This happened because of a few things, at least in my opinion.
- The overall approach
The overall approach to the mint was particularly organic and laid-back. The team had done a great job in advance to engage their community in a way that’s not forced. Everyone was there to mint their tubby and for the memes.
- Powerful release
The gradual release was fu**ing amazing. People were waiting to see who would get another incredible 1/1, especially as the first ones started selling for quite a lot. It reached a point where the floor for unrevealed tubbies was higher than that for common revealed ones.
- Funny art
Whether you like cats or not, the art is just cool. The way palettes and themes go along with various traits make the cats really sleek in their design and they are just attention grabbers.
- Honoraries
The team had done an awesome job, producing a bunch of honorary tubbies for prominent members of the community, and, not surprisingly, people were eager to show off their cats. This in itself is a very clever strategy for a few reasons. For once, it brushes your ego to know that you’re one of the selected few who got an honorary. Second, once you get your honorary, it brushes your ego, even more, to show it off.
What’s Next?
For once, the team is hosting Tubby Tuesdays where you can just hop in and listen what’s happening. The approach is no roadmap only Tubbies and if there’s one thing you need to know for sure is that good things tend to take place. The team has said that they will commission artists to make anime boy/girl tubbies.
There are plenty of things that you can do to become a part of the entire thing. There’s currently a lore contest where users can submit ideas on different parts of tubby lore and receive cats as a reward. All in all, despite the fact that their feed is mainly memes, you can clearly get the sense that things are happening and shit is shipped.
The team is also looking for suggestions for metaverse collabs, and so forth. There will be 2D models made out of the tubbies and 3D models as well and this should take a few months, according to some official tweets.
Final Thoughts
All in all, what’s not to like? It’s an awesome project run by seemingly awesome people and a community that’s nothing but passionate. If you’re looking for something on the econ side – I don’t know if this will be the next blue chip worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. It might, it might not. Current floor at the time of this writing in March is relatively low. It has everything I’m personally looking for in a project and I know for certain that I’m a fan and a holder. I even managed to snug a 10% tubby recently for like 0.6E and I’m pretty happy about it.
You can find my original article on this minted as an NFT here: https://mirror.xyz/0x3D148eA5BdB67468B32c46A6c6fd95a1047A3f2a/82not2aCf86Ex9ubkQcIQx2Kav2AsFUI6oWbwCT_nlI
