It’s been a long day, with regular bursts of social media in between long spells of day job, but the Bird Hat Grift Club has finally and irrevocably launched! Six months of very silly effort has led up to this ridiculous moment, with my announcement about the project finally live via David Farrier’s newsletter Webworm. I’d say I’m sorry, but that wouldn’t be true at all. Let’s find out how things stand at the end of day 1.
A truly surprising number of people have chosen to support the project in the old-fashioned medium of actually buying things, versus purchasing their very own hash on the blockchain linked to a 1000×1000 pixel .png. Staggeringly, no-one has yet ponied up the 2400 MATIC to buy their very own Bird Hat Grift Club NFT (which is, as of right now, worth around $3442.31. Yes, I know, the newsletter has the price at $1800 NZD. That was true a few days ago, but since then the currency has had a bit of a bounce. Crypto gonna crypto.)
A quick reminder of the rules: I’m trying to get rid of all the NFTs I have available to mint. For every piece of work I sell, I’ll reduce the NFTs available by a certain amount. Here’s how it works:
| For every artwork / merchandise sold | 1 Collectible NFT removed |
| For each Patreon subscription purchased | 10 Collectible NFTs removed |
| For each commissioned artwork sold | 50 Collectible NFTs removed |
| For each original artwork sold | 1 Original NFT removed |
On to the statistics!
- 44 wonderful people with extraordinary taste in art have bought either a print, a digital download, or a piece of merchandise. Between them, they have purchased enough items to reduce the NFTs available to mint by 85.
- Five spectacular individuals have subscribed to my Patreon, reducing the NFTs available to mint by 50
- And, astonishingly, one amazing person has purchased an original art commission from me, nuking 50 potential NFTs into a fused-glass oblivion
Time to calculate how many NFTs that leaves. We minted 500 NFTs and reserved them, mainly for display purposes, and giving to a couple of friends who actually had crypto wallets. On top of that, one NFT has been minted to make sure our minting mechanism actually worked (we paid the lucky buyer back the full amount straight away.) So that’s 501 Bird Hat Grift Club NFTs in total, which leaves 9499 available to be minted. Until now. Thanks to today’s buyers, we’ll be reducing the mint pool by 136, meaning there’ll soon be only 9363 BHGC NFTs available to mint.
It’s a great start, and I’m incredibly thankful to everyone who bought an artwork, sent a message, commented on the newsletter, or joined the Bird Hat Grift Club Discord, which has turned out to be quite a lot of fun. All jokes aside, I’m very touched by how people are engaging and how many people have purchased my art – it’s always a thrill to see people like my work enough to actually buy it. If you’re enjoying this project, please share it around, and we’ll see if we can get all the way to removing the remaining 9363 NFTs.