How the Dapper Dinos Avoided Extinction

How the Dapper Dinos Avoided Extinction

Dapper Dinos, the first PLP (Pre-Launch Program) project tied to Gary Vee’s Vee Friends, launched last week. Collectors with pre-mint access and 555 lucky Vee Friend’s holders got their hands on them on 9/14.

Dapper Dinos are a 10,000 PFP project that give a Saturday morning cartoonish and child-like aesthetic to our Cretaceous friends. While developed autonomously, Gary Vee’s hand in the project can be seen from his direct promotion to the hand drawn T. Rex available on a t-shirt as a rare body trait.

The public mint, scheduled to commence 9/15, shifted from a milestone moment for the PLP project to a story of an attempted hack, a confused discord, and a tireless dev team.

I woke up the morning of the mint relieved I’d gotten pre-mint, as the Discord had nearly doubled overnight: from 8,000 to over 15,000. Pre-mint hype can be a frenzy of scam DMs and uncountable “wen mint” comments that clutter any useful information. Any additional conflict under these conditions could be the death of a project.

Almost as fast as the mint began, it halted. Devs confirmed the infamous hacker who scarred the Se7ens mint had attempted to hijack the contract. They managed to stop him in his tracks, but now had to choose what they determined was the least-bad option. A decision was made to do the mint manually. Discord members could sign up for the remaining 7,000+ mints through a whitelist.

Sending 0.0755 ETH per Dapper Dino (0.02 more than the announced price of 0.055), with a max of 3 per person, to the posted address would lock you in. Any amount sent over the cost of 3 or sent after the whitelist closed would be returned minus the cost of gas. A daunting and ambitious strategy for a team already exhausted and preparing for a celebration.

In the meantime, devs held a Discord AMA. Fielding questions and comments about how this could happen and how they plan to get Dinos to the several thousand people who made the whitelist. The answer to the latter was already in motion. Dapper Dinos began to appear in wallets as devs painstakingly airdropped them one wallet at a time.

By morning, they had accomplished this task. Over 4,500 unique wallets were airdropped, but not all whitelist Dinos had yet been paid for. Early minters were given the opportunity to buy one more through the same process. First come, first serve. One more round of airdropping, address by address, until they had finished. All 10,000 Dapper Dinos were done this way, a testament to a dedicated team.

A launch under these circumstances can spell the extinction of a project before it even hatches from the egg. The dev team showed their commitment to their community last week and today it survives to see its first step on the roadmap. A mysterious comet has appeared, and it’s rumored to strike on Thursday, September 23rd. #SaveTheDinos

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