Desi Crypto Show: MoonCats - First NFT Generative Art Project on Ethereum, featuring Brooks Boyd and Anna Marie Privitere

Primer: Join Dheeraj as he interviews Brooks Boyd and Anna Marie Privitere, who are from the team representing MoonCats, as they talk about the internet's obsession with cats. MoonCats is one of the first NFT projects developed in a time when the term NFT is not even coined yet. Find out why they are the hottest NFT project that everyone is talking about right now.

Brooks Boyd and Anna Marie Privitere

Who is Brooks Boyd?

• Got into the crypto space in 2012 and was a developer with an arts background

• Helped in infrastructure projects and also altcoins projects

• Got interested in Ethereum and started educating people about Ethereum so that they have some passing familiarity with it

• Also involved in helping people understand existing projects

• Researched more into Bitcoin because it was completely open sourced and hackers had been trying to hit on it since 2009 but it was resilient

"When you have a legal contract, when it's over your head, and you need to involve a lawyer and get some advice from someone you trust in legalese. We're now dealing with smart contracts that are programmable, people can figure out a base understanding themselves. But at some point, you probably would want to get a programmer involved and get some advice on it."

- Brooks Boyd

• He is not part of the original Ponderware team that developed MoonCats. Only learned about it in the first week of the project's existence and got excited enough to be active in the community to help out

• The original developers recognised that effort and asked him to join the team, and so he is officially part of Ponderware earlier this year in 2021

Who is Anna Marie Privitere?

• She met Brooks through her spouse and maintained a casual friendship since both of them are tech nerds

• She had 17 years of experience being a community manager in the video gaming space

• Runs her own company where she is the social media manager and community manager for companies to manage their Twitter and Discord servers. This involves project management as well as posting content and replying to them

• One of the companies under her management is Double Damage games which did space sim games like Rebel Galaxy and Rebel Galaxy outlaw

• She had dabbled with Axie Infinity and is excited about Sandbox and what the NFT gaming space will bring next

• Always been interested in the mechanics of mining and had been dabbling in and out of the crypto space since 2018 but only started to get serious around Mar 2021

Real cats and Mooncats

Do they like real cats?

Brooks

• Grew up with cats in his childhood days and enjoy being around them

• At the peak, he had 4 cats in the household

• Cats have many personalities - can be curious, adventurous and have a lazy streak

• He likes the MoonCats project because they have cats in various poses and not all of them in a nicely posed portrait

Anna Marie

• She always wanted cats and had adopted 3 cats almost a year ago, Eclipse, Twinkle Toes and Scamper. She named these the Dark Trio

• Brooks actually had one of the siblings of her cats

How did they first know about MoonCats?

Brooks

• First heard about MoonCats from a news feed or email newsletter when it was first launched on the 9th of August 2017. The contract was activated on the 10th of August.

• His first MoonCat rescue was on the 14th Aug, and subsequently rescued over a hundred of them

• Why is he drawn to Mooncats?

  • Likes cats

  • Intrigued that you can see what the look of the MoonCat before you rescue them through the mining process, which is different from crypto punks

  • The proof of work part, where one has to search for a Mooncat before rescuing them, is interesting to him as well

• He did not get any crypto punks because they were not cats.

• Did not find a lot of other art-based NFTs around that time and was mainly watching voxel-based stuff like crypto voxels and how the artwork of creating things within the metaverse was evolving

Anna Marie

• Brooks reached out to her around May 2021 because he remembered a joke that she told him years ago

• The joke was that if Brooks ever had a community management position open, he should contact her for it

• Brooks really did have one position open for hire, hence he contacted Anna Marie and she applied for it

"Why do you think cats are so popular on the internet? Because even when you look at Internet history, for the longest time on YouTube, the most watched video was a cat video. And YouTube also blew up because of cats. And we see this happening over and over again."

- Dheeraj

MoonCats

What are MoonCats?

• MoonCats are generative art - essentially an NFT, even though the term has not even been coined yet at the time of inception

• The idea that Mooncats are non-fungible, meaning that each individual item is distinct, is a core tenet of the project

• Each cat has an on-chain unique identifier presented as a hexadecimal string, which is the DNA of the cat as this is responsible for how the cat will look like and what expression and which direction it will face

• MoonCats have a capped supply of 25,440 in total and all of them had now been minted

How to search for a MoonCat?

• The key innovative part of the project is that one cannot just create the minting transactions immediately but had to first find a seed to fulfil the requirement

• This means that proof of work had to be done by the computer to search for a numerical answer to a computational problem

• There were no additional fees paid to the developers for minting, just the gas fees for the transactions

MoonCat Lore

• A lot of technical terms used in the NFT space had been replaced with terms in the MoonCats lore

• Examples:

  • Minting NFT and adding them to the blockchain - Rescuing MoonCats

  • Buying from the secondary markets like OpenSea - Adopting MoonCats

  • Proof of work done by computer to mint - Searching for a MoonCat

  • A Mooncat wrapped with the official ERC 721 wrapper - Acclimated MoonCat

  • Hodling your MoonCats and not selling - Cuddling your MoonCats

Genesis MoonCats

• The Genesis MoonCats is designed to be scarce

• These MoonCats are not colourful but are black and white

• Originally intended to be sold for a profit to recoup developmental costs but there was a bug in the contract and the fees paid for rescuing them gets sent to a null address and burnt

• The only ones who profited from the MoonCats original rescue are the miners who got the gas fee

• Only trades in the secondary market and other additional projects are generating revenue for the project

The growth of MoonCats over the years

• Brooks heard of MoonCats in Aug 2017 and made a long post on Reddit explaining the technical workings of it, and got a grand total of 6 upvotes. The community was very small at that time

"Looking at how many cats were rescued over the course of time, there was a lump that was rescued in 2017, a fair chunk in 2018, less in 2019 only three in 2020. And then like the entire, like three-fifths of the project was minted within a few hours in 2021."

- Brooks Boyd

• The huge surge of MoonCats in 2021 is because mainstream media started to talk about NFTs, especially with prominent art pieces like Beeple hitting the roof in price through Christie's auctions

• People are trying to understand why NFTs are becoming such a thing

• When it was discovered that a 3-year-old antique NFT project called MoonCats had not been fully minted, it suddenly got rediscovered and the entire remaining supply of MoonCats was rescued in about 4 hours

• Brooke missed the surge itself and he only knew about it because he got invited into a community Discord server that had been created and people had mistaken him as the developer

• After clearing the misunderstanding, he contacted the original developers and told them that their project had awakened

• The original developers did not even have Discord usernames at that time, so upon Brook's encouragement, they signed up and started interacting with the community

• Before the resurgence of MoonCats, the original developers had moved on with other full-time jobs but now, Ponderware is a 4 person team in 3 different time zones, working on this part and full time

Covid Cats of 2020

• Anna Marie mentioned that the community created lore to explain the dismal number of MoonCats rescued in 2020

• The 3 MoonCats rescued in 2020 are nicknamed Covid cats

• At least two of the 3 Covid cats wore face marks, which were accessories that were made in the MoonCats boutique

Token standards

• MoonCats NFT are ERC 20 tokens, which predates the ERC 721 NFT standard

• In order to be sold on marketplaces like OpenSea and Rarible, an ERC 721 wrapper is needed

• In MoonCats lore, a MoonCat with the official ERC 721 wrapper is called an acclimated Mooncat

• There are two benefits to the official ERC 721 wrapper:

  • The wrapper will show all the traits that a Mooncat has e.g. the year they are rescued and the rarity

  • Acclimated MoonCats wrapper will eventually be ERC 998 compliant, which means that each Mooncat can own other NFTs

    • However, Brooks mentioned that ERC 998 capabilities are not officially set in stone yet until it is implemented in other marketplaces as well, as it could have security issues

    • But it is good that the activator for ERC 998 compliant is already baked into the wrapper contract, so this is future-proofing it

NFT Boutique

Why start a boutique for MoonCats?

• The ERC 998 capabilities of the wrapper give rise to the NFT boutique for MoonCats

• Came about because other projects in the NFT space like crypto punks also had their rarity, and thus value, dependent on the type and number of accessories that each punk has

• Unlike crypto punks, Ponderware did not program and set the rarity for different traits of MoonCats because people generated them on the fly. Only the ratio of Genesis vs Rescued MoonCats is set.

• So an idea of applying different accessories to the MoonCats, like unlocked skins that you have for a video game character, came to fruition

What does the boutique do?

• The boutique allows anyone to create mini NFTs accessories that a MoonCat can put on and wear to personalise their cats

• The platform is easy to use and the revenue from making the accessories is shared between the project and the artists

• There are various controls for the creator to limit the accessory to certain MoonCats traits or unique situations, e.g. some accessories are only for those who had acclimated their MoonCats within a certain period

• Nearly 1000 items had been listed on the Boutique, with more than 90% of these designed by people within the community with different levels of experience

"And we have everything from a six-year-old who sat down with their dad and was like, I want to design something for my MoonCat to a professional Magic the Gathering artists, and sort of all walks of life in between those and experience levels between those. You know, we wanted to make the barrier to making an accessory really low. Like no matter what your artistic skill, or your artistic background, you can make an accessory and it's really easy to do."

- Anna Marie

Road map for MoonCats

• Project "Sportsball" - a sports league on the moon

• Project "Deep Space" - another NFT in the MoonCats universe

• These will add a lot of interesting dynamics to owning a Mooncat

• Brooks mentioned that this is the exciting thing of interacting with smart contracts in the Ethereum blockchain because it allows you to do things and build on top of other things

• This is unlike a currency platform like Bitcoin where you can only spend money; there are only a few things you can do to make that an entertaining experience

CUDL

• Started off with a meme HODL, which is to hold on to your cryptocurrency

• When the MoonCats community emerged after Mar 2021 rediscovery, they adapted the term HODL into cuddle, so you are always going to cuddle your MoonCats and not sell them

• The team Very Nifty made an NFT game called CUDL

  • This is not developed by Ponderware but they provided support by providing insights and information

  • You can join the CUDL game with your MoonCat, feeding them to raise their levels and pet them to gain the $CUDL token, with more $CUDL gained with higher levels

  • $CUDL can be spent by feeding the cats or taking part in a racing game with other players

• Anna Marie mentioned that it is very nice to have the MoonCats community coming up with initiatives and developing things around MoonCats on their own

Sandbox and MoonCats

• MoonCats developers wanted to see a 3D version of MoonCats

• The community suggested going to Sandbox to buy a plot of land because there is a lot of development and potential there

• Ponderware agreed, bought a plot of land and announced this as part of their 4th-anniversary extravaganza

• However, due to some misunderstanding and communication breakdown, Sandbox made their own 3D version of MoonCats that are not endorsed by Ponderware

• These are not the official MoonCats and there won't be any benefits for holding them comparing to owning the official 25,440 MoonCats in the Sandbox

The supply cap on MoonCats

• The original project was capped at 25,600, part of that consists of the Genesis Mooncats that are not rescued by proof of work computation but released by the development team

• But the project did not gain much traction in the early years, so the development team did not release the subsequent rounds of Genesis MoonCats. This means there are still several Genesis MoonCats available to be released

• When the project was rediscovered and everyone scrambled to acquire them around Mar 2021, there was a vote to decide if the Genesis MoonCats should be released

• The community voted no, so the private keys for these unreleased MoonCats are destroyed

• Hence according to the blockchain, there are still 120 Genesis MoonCats that can be released but the keys for that to happen had been destroyed

• In MoonCats lore, these 120 Genesis MoonCats are on the moon as guardians and overseers of the remaining MoonCats that are still on the moon

Exciting things in the space

Brooks

• In the crypto space, the foundation needs to be built so that others can build on top of it

• In DeFi space, that happened already, so we're starting to see this happening in the NFT space too

• It will be exciting to see the NFT legos, similar to the money legos in DeFi, starting to take shape

• The NFTs you have in the future will be conversation starters between strangers, almost like people wearing the baseball cap of a certain team logo

Anna Marie

• Excited to see how the community grows and unleash the creativity that is hidden inside

• Ponderware team is going to NFT NYC and having the very first MoonCats meetup

• Always interested in the intersection of NFTs in a digital space and people in the real space

All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. Summaries are prepared by The Reading Ape. While reasonable efforts are made to provide accurate content, any errors in interpreting and summarizing the source material are ours alone. We disclaim any liability associated with the use of our content.