Just last week, the BTC Flower community received a message from the artist with our launch plan for the ETH Flower. The takeaway:
The ETH Flower supply will be limited to 2015 pieces, 2009 of which will be airdropped at random to all existing BTC Flower holders.
Based on ambitions for the Flower Power DAO, this decision offered the best route for their long-term sustainability. We wanted to take the opportunity to explain why and ask for the community’s help with the subsequent decisions to follow.
Rationale for the decision
Before we get to practical considerations, let’s take a look from Ludo’s perspective. The original BTC Flower, like many Ludo works, was a street piece, unowned and available for everyone to enjoy — inline with the principles of decentralization that it stands for. Selling off that now famous piece to some wealthy collector would run contrary to everything it represents. Though Ludo’s creativity is a valuable asset, money is not its driver, and it would be a shame to see the early community get booted by a whale only game. In his words:
“…our vision is not to create another 10k edition release and a price dictated piece of work, instead we focus on exclusivity, unity and building all together. Like the piece I created freely and illegally in the streets 5 years ago, money was not the purpose.”
The way BTC Flower launched was also intentional. We didn’t want a “100k followers pre-launch” like other projects. We went with a modest and organic marketing approach up to public sale because Ludo wanted to attract and reward the people who truly appreciate his art. This brought in a unique kind of crowd, including long-time collectors of Ludo’s physical art that had their first engagement with the Internet Computer through BTC Flower. We’re currently at 745 unique holders and growing. In that is the essence of decentralization, and there’s no sense in changing course now.
On a more practical note, having another public launch would carry massive risk to the community. The BTC Flower launch is suspected to have suffered a bot snipe that simultaneously purchased and listed flowers at 3x the sale price (15 ICP). Fortunately, the bot maker didn’t anticipate the project’s growth and all those flowers quickly made it back to human hands through resale. Now that the message is out, another sale would be riddled with bots trying to game the system. Though it’s possible to prevent these bot sniping attacks, nothing is a guarantee and we would never want to risk an unfair launch for our true believers and flower family.
Also, this direction makes sense given the goal of the Flower Power DAO. The community will decide the direction of the project by voting with their flowers. Not only do we want OGs to be the controllers of that, but we want to combine the idea of artistic collaboration with incentivized voting. Rewards of this sort will only be meaningful and sustainable if supply is kept tight. Our community involvement could grow indefinitely with secondary collections, but participation in the DAO and rewards for doing so will remain an exclusive privilege.
ETH Flower
As we know, the Flower Power DAO is taking a step back from Bitcoin and towards part two of the blockchain trilogy with Ethereum. Ludo already has completed mockups he’s been exploring.
As we keep working toward ETH flower, we’ll keep looking forward to your feedback in Discord, just as the control and maximalism tombstones here were inspired by community suggestions. We also would like your help on a separate issue, and that’s how to conduct the airdrop. We’re looking to keep the snapshot fair and simple while also keeping the interests of holders in mind. We’re not sure which to prioritize, so we’ll let you choose.
How should we conduct the airdrop?
(1) Snapshot during a public date and time.
(2) Random snapshot during some predefined window.
While we wait for fully fledged DAO voting with flowers, an informal vote with our OGs will have to do. This question will be posted on Discord tomorrow for valentines day and will stay open through Friday. We’ll go with whatever the community prefers. In either case, following the snapshot we’ll make public the list of addresses and the number of ETH Flowers each will receive — though we don’t have release dates, as art isn’t something that can be rushed.
That still leaves one open question: What to do with those 6 extra flowers. We’re not sure yet. While you’re in Discord for the vote, stop and throw in an idea or two and we’ll see what we could do. We’re so grateful to have you along with is in this journey to ETH Flower. We’ll won’t let your incredible support go unnoticed and will stay hard at work in delivering on the vision for the garden.
