Case study: RAUSCHiS
A collection of 10,000 delightful NFTs (non-fungible tokens) living on the Polygon blockchain.
About RAUSCHiS
RAUSCHiS are randomly generated NFTs (ERC721 Token Standard) living on the Polygon blockchain with unique combinations of colors and traits including different backgrounds as well as rare accessories.
After selling on the official Minting Page all RAUSCHiS will be available on the secondary market at OpenSea for everyone to own, collect and trade.
My journey
Step 1: Research
Being new to the NFT space can be overwhelming at the beginning. I started following influental people and successful NFT collections on twitter, joined a ton of discord servers and just soaked it all up like a sponge. The heart of each successful NFT project is its community and most of the time there are members who are happy to help and guide you through the process. Don’t be afraid to ask.
Step 2: Get creative
Time to draw some cute little RAUSCHiS in Adobe Illustrator. For this project I decided on a simple doodle like character with a couple of unique traits. There’s a range of joyful colors, different clothings, facial expressions, and rare accessories. I also made some invisible as well as golden RAUSCHiS.
Step 3: Create generative art
After creating all the different traits in separate layers, it was time to randomly merge those elements together. That’s where the magic happens and it involves some coding skills for sure.
Multiplying all attributes, there are 1,336,896 unique possible combinations. We just need 10,000 for this collection though. While generating the images I also write the corresponding metadata to a .json file. We will need this later to let the blockchain and secondary marketplaces know all the information about every single NFT.
Step 4: Upload to IPFS
Just as for the cityicons collection, I uploaded the finished RAUSCHiS and their .json metadata to IPFS (InterPlanetary File System). For the sake of decentralization I don’t save those images on my own webserver.
Step 5: Write Smart Contract
A Smart Contract is a simple program stored on the blockchain. This time I wrote an ERC721 token contract on my local machine with the help of truffle, hardhat & ganache and later deployed the contract to the Polygon blockchain.
ERC721 tokens are all unique. Think of them as one-of-a-kind collectibles.
To interact with the Smart Contract you need some Matic, the cryptocurrency used on Polygon.
Step 6: Create Website & Minting Page (dApp)
Again, I built a website with Drupal (my goto open source content management tool). But this time I also wanted to create my own Minting Page where everyone can mint (publish) their RAUSCHi.
That’s called a dApp (decentralized Application), a website/application where you are able to interact with the blockchain via Smart Contracts.
Step 7: Mint NFTs
Time to mint your RAUSCHiS! Load up your wallet with a little bit of Matic (the cryptocurrency used on the Polygon blockchain) and head over to the official Minting Page.
After minting successfully, your RAUSCHi will automatically show up on one of the biggest NFT marketplaces (OpenSea): Marketplace
Conclusion
This one was a lot of fun. There have been some little setbacks when it comes to the art generation process and the mintin dapp (I’m pretty new to nodejs/reactjs), but Google is your friend.
Let’s be frens!
Get in touch if you have any questions about this project, need help exploring the NFT space or want to partner up and bring exceptional, creative ideas to the metaverse together: mail@rauscher.io
