The Floaters NFT Collection

The Floaters is a special project that came from the Little Floaters that I created for a while ago. In 2020, I started getting eye floaters while my retina is still pretty healthy my optometrist said it was just a natural process as I was born with severe myopic, and my eyes age quicker than regular people. I also had a retina laser done in the same year as they found out I have a small lattice on the bottom of my left eye, it actually healed up by itself, but the laser procedure will make it stronger. At first, I was really depressed as I know this isn't normal and was scared that this might lead to something more serious condition although my retinal specialist promised me everything is fine.

After a while, I started to get used to my floaters and some of my floaters look actually quite cute. I started to draw and record all my floaters, on one hand, I wanna make sure it didn't increase, and on the other hand, I wanna share it with my friends, so they could see my floaters too.

As being a person who always eager to learn and grow, ever since NFT gets really popular it increase my curiosity in the web3 and non-fungible tokens. Learning that most of the NFT collection is based on doing randomization, I want do something different and my floaters are perfect. With the Little Floaters I did a while ago, I'm able to quickly jump into the NFT floaters project. First of all, I started doing branding aim to make it futuristic and cool. Secondly, I spent a week re-observed my floaters and create the website. Lastly, and most importantly, creating each 3D models and sent the rendthe er to render farm for a higher quality image results.

While doing the website, I took this as an opportunity to implement something experimental. I always feel that the bottom nav for a website is more comfortable for the user to access than the top hamburger. My theory is that as we have been using mobile apps all the time, a bottom nav is something that we have been training to use. However, this is just my theory and has not been proven by any user testing yet.

After all the renders were done, I started to design and wirefram the minting flow. I hired a Dev agency called Core Dev, it was super fun to work with a group of devs on my own project. I definetly learn a lot about NFT from a technical aspect including the smart contract. We ended up using Heroku to host the minting site and Pinta for holding the NFTs.

Etherscan is an essential platform for the NFT smart contract, it controls all the functionality, including the wallet address of the collection, revealing the NFT, withdrawing crypto earned from the collection, etc. It's also really dev-focused, I spent some time learning about how to correctly launch the collection and reveal the NFT with a source code like "?rr add 123456789012345678 verified" or "?rr verify 123456789012345678."

When the last demo was done with the Core Dev, I started working on marketing my collection on Instagram/Twitter, collaborating with different creators on social media & Youtube, and a bunch of NFT marketing websites including NFTr, NFTCalendar, etc. . Fun fact is that they all take crypto payment and pretty promising. However, there're extremely many places to market your collection, but most of them could be scams. There's definitely a good space for a better NFT collection marketing system, I almost going to abandon the floaters' project and jump right into starting NFT marketing services.

While the project took about two months and was released during the crypto winter, the reaction to the project was not as successful as I thought. I won't say it's a failure, I've learned so much that helped me better to understand web3, a non-fungible token, NFT overall system. This project helped me to become an expert on the NFT while I was assigned to work on the NFT admin system at Voyager Digital. I more about what the support team needs to help with the collector's NFT and their wallet issue.

My original plan was going to have a second release for the OG collectors to customize their own floaters into an NFT and build a website to host The Floaters Museum to display each customized NFT. As the collection wasn't successful, with not many collectors, the floaters NFT collection will be given for free to my followers on the Little Floater account.