4 years ago, Muse was born. I’d like to take the time to go through the story. You can skip until the end if you just want the proposal/accouncement.
4 years ago. Pets were distributed for free on telegram to a thousand anons. The pets (NFTs) could mint one time per day a token (Muse) that was then used in the game to buy food to keep the pet alive and evolve them to mint more Muse.
The initial goal of the game was not the token. It was an exploration on how could we bring additional value to an NFT. How does the art piece become something the collector takes care, watch and make evolve every day. The initial adoption of the game by the community was a bit different from what I expected, but the goal of an app is to get users…
The energy was there. We coded as a duo and handled user requests, jokes, and rage all day and night. We were focusing on the game, the people loved their pets, and it's crypto... Most people were obsessed with the token price. Some pumps happened, some crises occurred, but most importantly people were addicted and having fun on-chain before it was cool.
We didn't raise money but ended up being the most popular and innovative game at this time. Dappradar was still used as a metric in the ecosystem and dune analytics was getting started.. Times were tough for players as the NFT cycle was getting started and driving gas price high forcing players to sometimes spend hundreds of dollars in gas fees to keep their pet alive, bonking each other's... But times were also tough for us as we didn't make any money. We had a community wallet which some community members donated to create some contests for marketing and so on... But all work was self funded.
Around this time we decided to create a DAO to capitalize on the power of the community and continue being the most fair and decentralized we could. It was probably the first DAO where founders never voted and votes were weighted thanks to the game character levels directly on the chain.
As we continued building, we found out that we could leverage the experience we learned around NFT ownership, and we built the first platform to tokenize and trade parts of erc721 NFTs. NFT20 was published and Muse was metamorphosed. The community voted to stop the painful gas fee game, and mint some more muse to:
This was the last time any Muse was minted, as the admin keys were later burnt. All community was happy and NFT20 picked up in volume. A lot of early members were hard at work creating guides, seeding pools and still having fun on Telegram.
The NFT bull market was raging, I just had my first child and was picking up some VC/partnership calls still from the hospital at night in the dark while mommy and baby were sleeping.
Fast-forward, after iterating on the idea, making it possible for the DAO to diversify its treasury thanks to selling some of its Muse allocation to strategic investors. We were working like crazy all the time…
I was amazed by the high standard of ethics we followed as we never let the highs take our beliefs and could trust 200% each other's through this unbelievable adventure.
As NFT20 was stabilized in terms of features and usage we decided to expand and work on new projects. Some innovative NFT collections, and launch a new game: CUDL. Which was similar to our first Tamagotchi but on arbitrum. But things were starting to look different. As people were playing the new version, their expectations changed as for most, they saw the first and participated in the NFT frenzy from the inside. For me, it's where everything changed as I felt more pressure and stress to deliver with expectations instead of just being a random experiment...
We had a hack, I woke up one night to a message you don't want to ever receive when building contracts. We fixed it, managed to make the user whole then took a little time off. That was the first time we did it since all this madness started!