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Daniel Allan, a well-established indie-electro musician in web3 has gained recognition for being a pioneer in the industry. He was one of the first musicians to crowdfund an album, sharing royalties from the project with his backers. He raised 49.3 ETH in 24h and formed a creator DAO allowing backers to participate in governance by purchasing $OVERSTIM. He’s experimented with visual NFTs, music NFTs, and video NFTs, been featured in Time Magazine, and is paving the way for other independent artists.

Consequently, he’s become a mentor for many smaller musicians, but oftentimes he’s left with the burden of telling those who are ready to drive change, that web3 is not yet ready for them. The truth is that it’s very hard for artists to find a simple, affordable and white-label way to mint their NFT drops. So through a partnership between Bonfire and Mintplex (formerly known as Rampp), Daniel has managed to create his own custom smart contract and minting experience for his next NFT drop — using no code!

There's a promise of self-sovereignty with smart contracts — that you can own your own destiny as a creator in web3. But there are major barriers to that being true. 1) A smart contract is a very technical instrument, and so it's not accessible to many creators. 2) Because of technical limitations, many creators end up having to spend a ton of money to hire a developer if they want to do something creative with their NFT drop. 3) Creators usually mint through platforms with more rigid options and where it’s not their brand at the fore.

Creators are the platform in web3. They should own the contract and be able to take that with them while having no-code tools that make it simple for them and their community to interact with contracts. So we wanted to make it easy to enable customizability and flexibility at the contract level, while also keeping the process intuitive to use and available to all.

Daniel Allan’s custom contract and minting experience was a two-step process. Step one was about creating the contract. Bonfire partnered with Mintplex to support their custom contracts. Mintplex is a no-code tool that walks any creator through the end-to-end flow of how to create their own contract from uploading their metadata, creating their contract, deploying it, and then verifying it. Their product is extremely flexible. Creators can pick from a buffet of features they want their contract to have. And Mintplex can support music, video, or image NFTs on several chains, including Ethereum, which is what Daniel is using for his drop.

Step two involved importing the custom contract into Bonfire. After importing it into the Store, Daniel created the minting experience. Because Bonfire is integrated with Mintplex, and smart contracts are permissionless, it can read from that contract. So it is able to understand the price, total supply, and all other details coded in the contract. Bonfire’s Studio functionality (or CMS) allowed Daniel to design a beautiful landing page with a mint component, including a mint button, and a quantity selector.

Now that we’ve covered the technical aspect of it all, let’s get to the good stuff. Daniel’s project is a four-song EP called Glass House. Supporters will get randomly assigned one of the four songs with accompanying generative audiovisual artwork. When first minted, everyone will have the same static image. Then 72 hours later, there will be a big reveal party where each unique image will be revealed.

In Daniel's contract, beyond the pre-reveal and post-reveal, there will also be an allowlist. This means that those that supported any of his previous NFTs get their address whitelisted to mint early. A few days later will be the public mint, but it’ll only be at the reveal party that holders will be able to see the final image. Disclaimer: Daniel was able to fully create his custom contract on Mintplex, however, due to the complexity of this project he has worked with a creative director to bring it to life.

For the most part, minting Glass House will be like any mainnet NFT experience where fans connect their wallet, select the quantity, click mint, and sign the transaction. The post-reveal image will emerge through a manual “flip-switch” by Daniel. No matter the wallet, fans will see the pre-reveal image up until the reveal party. That’s when all of the contract metadata will be updated revealing the unique images. At Bonfire we’ve built an additional drag-and-drop block into our CMS that lets creators input the NFT contract and through that, it will display all the collectors like a collector showcase.

While creator-owned contracts are the future, a contract alone is incomplete without an intuitive & elegant frontend experience. Being able to create custom contracts and design your own unique minting experience opens the door to endless possibilities for creators of all stripes. It gets to the true promise of web3 in terms of composability, interoperability, and decentralization (at least when it comes to gatekeeping).

We're working towards a public launch very soon, where anyone will be able to access this and all other Bonfire features. Our expectation is that we’ll launch in early Q3 — so please bear with us. In the meantime, sign up for the waitlist and tell us if you're interested in using this feature. We’ll fast-track creators interested in piloting this feature with us.

We're extremely thankful to the Mintplex team for partnering with us on this and making it all possible. We’d love to build similar partnerships with more protocols, allowing creators to do NFT drops on Bonfire powered by a variety of contracts. If this aligns with your company’s mission, please DM us on Twitter. Let’s make it happen.

We’re incredibly excited by this opportunity for creators and builders alike. Get in touch if you’re just as excited as we are!

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