Want to Explore NFTs with Gristle King?

When I bought my first NFT, the whole thing was com­pli­cat­ed.  It still is, and it’s risky.  Most NFTs are art, so the val­ue is in the eye of the behold­er (and the mar­ket). While that means you can make a lucky mil­lion, you can also be left hold­ing a bunch of NFTs that were sup­posed to be good, but..weren’t. That’s how I did it; mak­ing a ton of bets, play­ing fast and loose, and frankly, los­ing most of the mon­ey I’d set aside to “learn the game”. A few NFTs paid out well, but I was most­ly left with a col­lec­tion of jpegs I’d rather hide than display.

That’s not a great expe­ri­ence, and I don’t want you to have to pay the same price to learn the same les­son. Still, NFTs hold a lot of promise. They are a new form of dig­i­tal proof. In the world we’re head­ing into, I think the abil­i­ty to hold, use, and under­stand that proof will be a valu­able skill. I’d like to help you learn it.

The Gris­tle King NFT, which I call the G‑Unit, is a way for you to enter into the world of NFTs and make sure you get some­thing for your mon­ey beyond a jpeg. 

When you buy and hold a G‑Unit NFT, you get the fol­low­ing things:

• Access to the Gris­tle King cours­es (the Heli­um Basic Course and the Heli­umVi­sion Mas­ter­Class), which is a $199 value. 
• A mon­th’s worth of entry into the Gris­tle Crüe ($49 val­ue), my pri­vate Dis­cord mem­bers chan­nel where we meet once a week on Zoom to talk about the lat­est in Heli­um with experts in the field.
• Access into a spe­cial chan­nel on the Gris­tle King Dis­cord called #nft-hold­ers. Unlike many NFT projects I’ve seen, I’m not going to bull­shit you with a bunch of hooey about how access to that chan­nel will make you sprout wings and shit glit­ter. It won’t. It will, how­ev­er be a place where you can find oth­er peo­ple who are very like­ly to be inter­est­ed in both Heli­um and NFTs, and I think that inter­sec­tion will be inter­est­ing. Val­ue in that one is unknown.

So, depend­ing on what ETH is when you buy the NFT, you should get pret­ty close to the same val­ue if you’d spent mon­ey on the cours­es and to join the Crüe.

I’m only cre­at­ing 749 of the G‑Units, which is a small run in the world of NFTs. Projects usu­al­ly cre­ate at least 1,000 if not 10,000 NFTs. I want­ed to keep the group man­age­able as well as make it semi-exclu­sive. I’m under no illu­sions that the thing will “mint-out” in min­utes, but I thought it’d be fun if you got to have some­thing that no more than .00000096% of peo­ple on the plan­et will ever have. For that stat, I used a world pop­u­la­tion of 7.753 billion.

If you’d like to get an NFT, hit the big blue button.

If you’d like to know a lit­tle bit more about mint­ing and how to use the NFT, watch this.

Once you have the NFT, here’s how to access the benefits.

If you want to see the mechan­ics behind how this NFT came into exis­tence, keep reading.

I start­ed by buy­ing a Cryp­to­Hoot, which is an NFT from a total­ly sep­a­rate col­lec­tion. Here’s a “Hoot”.

Now, you may be ask­ing, “Nik, why the heck are you show­ing me an owl? I thought we were talk­ing about G‑units?!”

Well, this par­tic­u­lar NFT gives you access to both a Dis­cord serv­er (which pret­ty much every NFT does) AND a tool called Shuf­flemint.

Shuf­flemint is the thing that makes this NFT spe­cial, at least for me. Shuf­flemint makes it so you can add a bunch of dif­fer­ent lay­ers of art, ran­dom­ly shuf­fle those lay­ers, and cre­ate a bunch of unique NFTs. That’s pret­ty cool, and that’s how the G‑Unit is made.

Here’s how it starts, with a clean slate. You can see I’ve already cre­at­ed a project here, called “GK”.

Inside that “Project” are a few dif­fer­ent sec­tions. Each sec­tion builds on the last. First, you load your assets (the pieces of each image that make up a final NFT image) into Asset Staging. 

This NFT is a pret­ty sim­ple project; 6 lay­er cat­e­gories, each with a few dif­fer­ent options. There are pan­cake hats and pink mohawks, dif­fer­ent eye styles, bows & arrows and bur­ri­tos & cof­fee. If you just threw it all in togeth­er it’d be a jum­ble of eyes and back­grounds and mohawks and pan­cakes, like this. 

Nobody wants that, so you’ve got to orga­nize it a lit­tle bit. Once your assets are in and labeled, you’ll sort them into the cor­rect lay­er order (back­ground, eyes, heads, arms, etc).

That can be con­fus­ing for those of use who aren’t super visu­al peo­ple (like me), and this took me a while to fig­ure out which lay­er should go where so it does­n’t hide or get hid­den by anoth­er lay­er. A fun puz­zle! Once you have the lay­ers ordered cor­rect­ly, you can use those right and left arrows in the Lay­ers col­umn to flip through all your poten­tial options. It might take years to see all pos­si­ble options, so I just went through a few each time to con­firm I had my lay­ers in the right order. Here’s an exam­ple of what it looks like when you choose a spe­cif­ic Asset from each Layer.

This real­ly helps you see if you’re get­ting it right!

From there, you go through and give your Traits “Def­i­n­i­tions” and “Weights”. A Def­i­n­i­tion would be what I’d think of as a Lay­er Cat­e­go­ry, like Back­ground, or Eyes, or Heads.

A Weight is the val­ue for the rel­a­tive fre­quen­cy of a spe­cif­ic lay­er. For exam­ple, the Weight of the Abstract back­ground (what you see in the above gen­er­at­ed image) is 20. That means you’ll see it 20% of the time, so it’s rel­a­tive­ly rare. Here are the Weights for the Trait called “Back­ground”.

The next part, “Com­bo Builder” isn’t ready for prime time yet, so we’ll go to the fun part, Generator!

In the Gen­er­a­tor sec­tion, you pick how many NFTs you want to Gen­er­ate, then hit the but­ton. Easy (and fun)! Here’s a ran­dom exam­ple of gen­er­at­ed G‑unit NFTs (which may or may not be in the final col­lec­tion.) Fun fact: Even though it looks like “body” is all one thing, every “body” is actu­al­ly made from a “bot­toms” and “col­ors” lay­er. The “col­ors” lay­er stood in for the col­or of the body. For a while we thought it might be cool to mis­match the two, but I want­ed at least some uni­for­mi­ty in this, so all the bod­ies are the same col­or, top & bottom.

From there, you can launch it your­self, or, if you’re like me and pre­fer to let pro­fes­sion­als han­dle that, you reach out to the Shuf­fleDAO for help. 

Now, you might think art gen­er­a­tion piece is the end of it, but wait, there’s more! One of the coolest things about NFTs (and real­ly, web3) is how much col­lab­o­ra­tion can hap­pen between strangers, and how trans­par­ent every­thing is.

In this case, I’ve nev­er met any of the Shuf­fleDAO peo­ple in real life. We’ve talked on Dis­cord, and we’ve chat­ted on Zoom, and we’ve even done a YouTube Live togeth­er, but I’ve nev­er met ’em!

Still, we’re work­ing togeth­er on this project as strangers who’ve decid­ed to har­ness in togeth­er for a bit and pull for a com­mon goal. As part of that, the con­tract that gets exe­cut­ed when the G‑Unit goes live slices off a share for them and the Shuf­fleDAO project, and the way it does it is REALLY cool!

You see, the Shuf­fleDAO goal (in part) is to make easy for peo­ple like me to cre­ate and use an NFT as part of a com­mu­ni­ty. When you buy a G‑Unit NFT, part of the ETH you spend goes to Shuf­fleDAO for orches­trat­ing the project. Part goes to buy their token, which is called $MINT, and then you get that $MINT dropped into your wallet.

Think of $MINT as rewards points; you can use it any­where in the Shuf­fleDAO sys­tem, and you get it for free when you buy a GK NFT.

Here’s the break­down:
70% to GK
20% to Shuf­fleDAO
10% to $MINT, which you get back in your wallet.

So that’s how the whole G‑Unit NFT thing is work­ing. I’m super psy­ched to launch this, and I’m pumped to meet all the hold­ers in the Gris­tle King Dis­cord #nft-hold­er chan­nel, which right now is emp­ty, just waiting.

Will I see you in there? 

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Hey, before I sign off, let me put a dis­claimer in here: NFTs are volatile. You could lose all the mon­ey you put into this or any NFT (or cryp­to) project. You’ll get charged with “gas fees” every time you do an ETH trans­ac­tion, includ­ing buy­ing this NFT, which will increase the cost of the NFT. I’m not a lawyer, or an accoun­tant, or a finan­cial advi­sor. None of this is any­thing close to pro­fes­sion­al advice. Nev­er spend any mon­ey you’re not will­ing to lose in the world of cryp­to. Do your own research and be care­ful out there. 

Ok, that wraps it. Drop any com­ments, ques­tions, feed­back below, I’m always look­ing to learn & share lessons to improve. Rock ‘n roll!