Fair mint experiment

There are 4 more days to join our allowlist for our Ape pass NFT mint, I wanted to take a minute to share our thought process around our fair mint experiment.

First of all, let’s talk about what we decided not to do. There are multiple strategies to mint NFT’s and we decided not to:

• Allow everyone to mint
• We didn’t ask our community to “grind” in our discord for allowlist
• We didn’t run huge allowlist giveaways with other projects

We decided to take a chance and implemented 2 mechanisms to claim an allow spot:

1. Download our Dustland iOS or Android game and play it 3 times.
2. Or burn 3 Kettlemine NFT’s (airdropped to early players)

The reason we did this is based on a few principles I want to dive into:

1. We wanted REAL players to mint our NFT (not flippers)
2. Reward early players

Firstly, we firmly believe in move AND earn. As opposed to move-to-earn which means you’re only moving to earn. Move and earn means the game must be fun in itself and the earning is a cherry on top. We’re confident in our core game engine so we want people to play our game Dustland Runner.

We debated about this for a long time because asking people to download our game and run for 3 days is alot of friction. The risk is that we won’t get alot of people minting the pass because the friction is so high and we haven’t really seen other projects do this. Some projects even do a free mint so anyone can easily 1-click mint their NFT. So we went back to our original principle, do we want people who want to flip our NFT for a quick profit or do we want people who will actually play our game? We want people who will play our game even if it means we only sell 100 NFT’s. We looked at our DAU numbers for our game and we were confident we had real players who wanted this. Fast forward to this moment, our allowlist has crossed 4535!

The second principle we believed in was that we wanted to reward our early community. Community is everything and what I’ve learned from other successful projects is that you only build a community in the early days. When it’s still small, you can get to know the names of people in the community but once it becomes huge it’s harder to truly know people. That’s why our first NFT drop was a FREE airdrop of Kettlemine. Kettlemine is the first location in Dustland and more locations are revealed as your character runs across our world. People have been asking what you can do with Kettlemine and we’ve decided that you can burn Kettlemine to get on the allowlist instead of playing the game if you wish. We were surprised that 600K people signed up for our airdrop and this will reduce the supply of kettlemine NFT’s on the market. In the long term, we think of Kettlemine as a base ingredient for other future NFT drops in the future so our early community gets rewarded.

I want to thank our community for supporting us. This was an experiment to block out the bots and truly reward our players, we’re blown away by how many of you have done the missions inside Dustland. Thank you!