Project Rxnegade putting the You in NFT utility.
See what I did there?
This is not a beginners article and you will find terms you may not recognise. If you want to learn about NFTs, join twitter, join the project discords, get involved, you’ll pick it up quickly anon.
NFTs, Non-fungible tokens, they are so much more than jpegs of apes but that’s how popular culture will see them due to the phenomenon of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. That meteoric success has created a monster, many NFT projects begin with great ideas and regularly fail, all trying to find the special sauce which made BAYC a success.
The recipe for success in the NFT world is vaporous and ever changing, meme culture drives out new ideas which can crash as quickly as they arise. Projects during the NFT bull market had tens of thousands of degens doing anything they could to try and mint one of their NFTs; including paying ridiculous amounts of Ether in Ethereum gas. These projects which were flying just twelve months ago are now disappearing without a trace in the current crypto bear market. But this also happened during the good times, the special sauce, the original FOMO, sours and usually no one even knows why. Boredom, rumours, FUD, poor handling of their communities and Discord hacks usually contribute. There’s always another project, loyalty is fleeting and “flippers” and “whales” drive the markets.
Then there are NFT projects who find a fiercely loyal community who stick around no matter what happens. These are the ones I find interesting and usually get involved as much as possible. The hodlers are not wanting to make quick money, they believe in the project and the team, they enjoy the community, they contribute, they effectively become a part of the project.
I won’t list the projects I’m talking about here as this article is to talk specifically about Project Rxnegade but if you look at my collection on Opensea (chipm0nkey.eth) you’ll see what I’m in to.
So.. Project Rxnegade, I stumbled upon this project via a Bored Ape derivative project called 0xApes. They have their own special community, you should check it out. Rxnegade had a website that allowed you to take the Bored or 0x ape NFT which you already own and create a 4k version of that ape, or an amusing “pancaked” version. But they also had their own ape derivative project, you minted a project token which meant you were part of the club (and therefore anything else they create as a team.) but this also allowed your first RXApe mint and this is where the addiction began.
Hi, my name’s Chip and I’m addicted to yeeting.
So you minted your first jpeg of an ape. Usually that’s it, you’ll get a random picture of an ape, you might hate it, it’s random. I didn’t like Bored Ape #93 very much and that opinion likely cost me around a million dollars but that’s a story for another time. You mint, you get what you get, then you can either try and sell it or pretend you like it. Not with RX Apes, you mint, the random generator whirrs into life and the journey begins.
Above are two examples of random apes, I can change their skin tone to eight different colours, I can change the background colour to any you can think of and I can come up with a clever name, all my choice. If I like it enough I can YOINK it and the metadata is saved, the ape lives! If there’s anything I don’t like about it, every day, I can YEET them away into the random generator to never be seen again, trait odds mean it’s possible but highly unlikely. Here’s my first yoink.
The first thing about this is that my NFT is random but also personal to me. I picked what I like. Straight away I have an attachment. But the process is so silky smooth you want to yeet, you want YOUR perfect apes, you want the next 24 hours to pass so you can yeet again.
This process drives an unusual, almost backwards rarity. In common NFT projects rarity is driven by the contract and randomness, creating this scarcity of what the team considered rare. In RX Apes, rarity is driven and is still being driven by the community, what is yoinked becomes part of the pool, a well loved trait becoming common, (Space suits I’m looking at you.) a less loved trait becoming rare. It’s another interesting project dynamic, where we won’t understand what it means until everything is yoinked. It’s fascinating to watch in real time.
But look at the art, Mattylaboosh is a tattoo artist from the North of England. His style is sublime, he has not paid me to write this article, I have genuine passion for his work. In my humble opinion this art is superior to Bored Ape Yacht Club even if it riffs of it for initial inspiration.
Then there’s the dev in the background Paul Renshaw, the shadowy coder, except he’s front and centre in the Discord telling everyone what he’s doing, sharing ideas, taking on board suggestions. This is truly a community driven project steered by two talented brothers. Recent developments have included giving each ape their own profile page and each of us having a member profile page showing our ape troops, including the ability to change the art on your membership NFT. For my membership NFT I used the Jedifier to make my 0xApe a jedi. Yes, they have a Jedifier.
Soon we’ll be able to give all of our apes stories, building our own universe, you can see the potential. Matty and Paul regularly add new traits and will be removing old ones, this makes the characters and rarity dynamic, the randomness creating apes that perhaps even they didn’t foresee.
What else you ask? Well how about if you do decide to sell your apes to another lucky NFT collector, of course you can. But what if they decide to sell it later? Normally nothing happens for the original mintor, except maybe a massive pang of regret. But Paul has baked the new royalty registry standards into the contract, so if the sales platform supports it, you will get royalties for life for that ape because it’s linked to your membership token, cool huh?
Then something really new, like this week new, yitching! Yitching allows community members to swap metadata. Envious of your frens ape? Maybe he’ll let you yitch it, you get the ape’s traits but it’s your ape. It’s these little developments that just keep the community front and centre.
But that’s largely the point, they built it and we came. We stayed because yeeting is cool and yoinking is cooler, the community isn’t a group of people who minted something random and hoped it would mint out so they could make some money. It’s a group of people who minted something they now love and then minted more and are still minting now. So join us, the brothers built something they love and put you in charge of what it becomes. That’s not devolution... That’s NFT Youtility.
