The Toadboats started from a keyboad smudge that spelled out ‘ToadBoats’. The extra ‘a’ transformed the robot into a smiley boat faced Toad. A happy accident. The tweets that initiated the first ToadBoat started on Oct 23rd and since then a new ToadBoat has been appearing every day.
ToadBoats will number 68 when completed and according to the artists are an experiment in their own learning journey. Here’s the questions they asked themselves.
“Can I teach myself to create digital art? Can I successfully deploy an ERC721 smart contract and mint NFTs that are not on the OpenSea shared contract? Can I develop and manage a community of collectors and interested parties that align with the art or ideas behind it? Can we bring this to our youth?”
✅ The three ToadBoats show that yes the art has been launched. Tick!
✅ The smart contract is a different one from OpenSea, called WeMintArt. Tick!
✅ A Discord channel is setup with a couple of dozen people already. Tick!
With the first three questions answered, now to get the ToadBoats to the kids. The artist known on Twitter as @NFT_Vis has put the ToadBoats in the public domain with a CC0 licence. That means we can adopt ToadBoats and make them our own… merchandise them… and generally set them free to sail the blockchain and beyond with their kayak shaped chops.
Back to the smart contract for a moment. Why does it matter to create your own smart contract rather than a platform contract like OpenSea or Foundation? Autonomy. You own your own contract and can’t be cancelled by a marketplace…and perhaps more importantly, you get control of the code and how people interact with the code. You can learn more about WeMint.Art at wemint.art.
Back to the art. There are planned a total of 68 ToadBoats… plus #0 …is that the whole collection? I think so. Read more about the amazing origin story of ToadBoats from the artist @NFT_Vis in The ToadBoats Medium article.
Then decide whether you’d like to make an offer on a ToadBoat for your collection.
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