How We’re Bringing Web3’s First Community-Generative Novel To Market

9 min readJun 17, 2022

NFT drops are hard. Take it from us — on August 4, 2021 we launched our genesis collection to join “The Writer’s Room”. We sold out in six minutes, but that wasn’t without pain. Our site crashed and most people who still hold their tokens from our primary sale tell us to this day it was the first time they ever minted from the contract. It was a tough mint, and we learned a lot as creators. That’s why we’ve put so much care into our next drop. We’re going to be participants in the Web3 community for the rest of our lives.

With that said, we cannot be more excited to share that Bored & Dangerous, Jenkins’ debut novel and the first of its kind in Web3, will begin minting on July 11, 2022. In this post we outline everything that you need to know about the mint including:

A refresher about what Bored & Dangerous is all about
The mint count and phases (from the public sale to the WriteList to the free claim)
Some nuances and novelty about our Solidity approach
The Burn / Stake game theory that spins off of the Book NFT
Some new details about the Jenkins Audio Experience

Without further ado…

A Refresher On Bored & Dangerous

Bored & Dangerous is the first novel set inside of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and it’s the first true novel that spun out of Web3.

3,000 members of the Writer’s Room banded together to craft the lore as well as generate creative ideas that led to the plot and tone. After that, 4,075 Apes/Mutants trusted us enough to let us use their IP to appear in our work.

Every single one of those licensors will be receiving payouts in exchange: 50% of Net Profits flow back to participants.

The creators who are collaborating on the book are truly a group of icons:

The book is being written by 10x NYT bestselling author Neil Strauss
Top 20 grossing SuperRare artist MBSJQ is creating the art
Grammy-nominated producer Murda Beatz
Internationally acclaimed design firm, IC4 from Hiroshima, JP is creating “Where’s Jenkins”

Bored & Dangerous has been a labor of love. Why? Because we truly believe that a globally distributed community of people can create a better piece of work than any of us can do alone. This is the proof of concept from the Writer’s Room, and we believe it will be a grail for years to come.

We’ve also built our own custom Web3 e-reader experience for you to interact with the book. You’ll be able to learn about all of the featured apes as you read the book, share your favorite excerpts directly to Twitter, and more. There was no great Web3 gated platform out there to consume this type of content… so we built our own.

The Mint Count and Phases

The maximum supply of Bored & Dangerous NFTs will be 20,826. We say “maximum” because almost certainly not all NFTs will be minted or claimed. Spoiler alert: we’ll be burning those that are left.

There will be three phases to our mint:

The Public Sale, a true Dutch Auction with refunds above resting price: 2,367 NFTs
The WriteList, a 48 hour mint period at a discount to the public sale: 11,517 NFTs
The Free Claim, a 7 day mint period where Writer’s Room holders can claim a free book: 6,942 NFTs

Phase 1 — The Public Sale: On July 11, we’ll kick off our public sale. This will be a true Dutch Auction where anyone who mints above the resting price will receive a refund. For anyone who mints above the resting price, the smart contract will issue a permissionless, on-chain refund equivalent to what they paid above the final resting price. We have decided upon pricing internally but are holding off on revealing until we get closer to the launch date. We are conscious of the state of the market and will pivot if needed.

Phase 2 — The WriteList: Shortly after the end of the Dutch Auction on July 11, we will open up the WriteList minting period. It will last 48 hours until July 13. The WriteList is made up of 11,517 NFTs and there are three ways to get a spot:

Every Writer’s Room NFT gets one spot on the WriteList. If you hold multiple, you can buy multiple Bored & Dangerous NFTs off of the WriteList. (6,942)
Every included BAYC or MAYC NFT gets one spot on the WriteList. If you hold multiple, you can buy multiple Bored & Dangerous NFTs off of the WriteList. (4,075)
500 winners of Azurbala-specific WL puzzles and members of other communities in our network will get spots on the WriteList. (500)

During this phase, people who qualify for the WriteList will have 48 hours to mint their Bored & Dangerous NFTs. If you’re on the WriteList, you’ll be able to mint when gas prices are suitable for you. We do not expect to sell out the WriteList because of a number of factors. For example, 69 Writer’s Room NFTs have been burned and some of our holders with 50+ WR NFTs may not mint on behalf of all of their tokens.

Regardless of how many NFTs are minted via the WriteList phase, we will burn the un-minted ones.

Phase 3 — The Free Claim: For 7 days after the WriteList, from July 13–20, anyone who holds a Writer’s Room NFT will be able to claim a Bored & Dangerous NFT for free (+ gas). You can claim one free Bored & Dangerous NFT for every Writer’s Room NFT you hold, and you’ll have 7 days to monitor gas prices.

For Phases 2 and 3, there will not be a snapshot. Instead you’ll select the Writer’s Room (or BAYC/MAYC tokens) you’re minting on behalf of in order to complete the mint. We will publish a feature to check if a token has been used in a WriteList mint or a Free Claim to help you identify tokens you might want to purchase on the secondary market.

The team will be holding back 69 Bored & Dangerous NFTs for employees and partners.

Some Nuances and Novelties About Our Solidity Approach

Our goal at Tally Labs is to innovate in every part of our business, and no doubt we are lucky to call Foobar one of our partners. He is one of the most incredible Solidity developers in the world, and he’s put together a novel smart contract for this mint.

It will be one of the more complex contracts out there, given the economic mechanics, depth of community involvement, and wide range of recipients. Three key features to highlight are:

Trustless refundable Dutch Auction
Batching system for WriteList mints
Templated access control for admin privileges

Not to mention all the latest and greatest gas optimization such as storage slot packing, custom errors, immutable variables, and so on.

Trustless refundable dutch auction

Previous dutch auction minting contracts in the space have required the contract owner to manually calculate and update the new price at various intervals. Oftentimes, and somewhat ironically, this approach would fail because the smart contract owner got tired and went to bed, or they forgot, or they set a wrong gas price that got stuck. In our smart contract, we provide full on-chain calculation so the price updates are free and fair for all.

Another weak point of previous dutch auction minting contracts is that they did not provide you with the NFT when you sent money. The dutch auction contract was simply a standalone money receiver, and you had to hope that the NFT contract would come later and would be granted to you by the deployer. We place the dutch auction logic directly within the NFT contract itself, so you can rest assured the NFT goes into your wallet in the same atomic transaction.

Batching system for WriteList Mints

The team is giving early access to holders of several NFT collections, including Writer’s Room holders, participating BAYC holders, and participating MAYC holders. This creates complex branching logic, and for security purposes we’ve isolated each of these into a separate external function.

We’ve also deployed a separate BatchHelper contract which can group multiple calls together, making a seamless frontend experience for the end user who only ends up making one transaction. We’ve also deeply investigated the Sushi Miso auction batch call vulnerability and explicitly prevented the same failure case.

Templated access control for admin privileges

Most contracts which inherit from OpenZeppelin have a single owner address which has permission to mint giveaway NFTs, change the total supply, update metadata, and update payout information. This is dangerous in our opinion, because you may wish to revoke certain abilities directly after mint and keep others for a longer period of time.

In our opinion there should be a bifurcation of what admins can do versus what they cannot. For example, admin minting and total supply should be permanently frozen directly after mint ends while updating payouts should stay flexible.

We’ve incorporated a system where these privileges are maintained independently of each other, and can be cleanly transferred or revoked at any time.

The Burn / Stake Game Theory That Spins Off of the Book NFT

After minting is completed for Bored & Dangerous NFTs, there will be a small delay on the token gated e-reader experience. It’s a complex product that we’re building for the long-run. Our expectation is that book reading will be live about 3 weeks after the NFT sale. In other words, there will be a ~3 week delay in being able to read the book. Ultimately we’ve decided that a more premium experience that comes late is better than a PDF or natively reading on OpenSea. We will share progress frequently.

Soon after the mint, you’ll have the ability to burn your Bored & Dangerous NFT for the ability to mint an Azur Root for a flat fee of .08 ETH or you can stake it for governance tokens in our upcoming DAO. This DAO will be dedicated to pioneering the future of community generated (and owned) content development. We plan on sharing significantly more information about this DAO during the week of 6/20, and so in this post we will focus more on the burn side of things.

On the burn side, you can burn your book for the ability to mint an Azur Root for 0.08 ETH. Azur Roots are a sacred item in Azurbala. They are our version of a mint pass. Azurian tradition calls for parents to offer their Azur Root to the Azurian Gods at the Monastery. In exchange for this tribute, you will be blessed with an Azurian of your own. You all are able to partake in this sacred ritual to obtain your PFP.

We have some novel and exciting mechanics we’ll be introducing around the Azur Root. We plan to do a dedicated post just about this game theory, but in this post we can share that the longer you hold your Azur Root, the more fruitful the birth of your Azurian will be.

We expect book burning for Azur Roots to begin before the end of July. This quick turnaround between the book mint and book burning is crucial for excitement to remain high. That is one of the reasons we ended up landing on July 11 for a book mint day rather than hitting our Q2 deadline and then having a gap aftwards.

Azur Root redemption for Azurian PFPs will likely begin in mid August. We truly believe that you’ll be grateful for the extra time to let your Azur Roots age, but I’ve already said too much… Once redemption opens, there is no end date. Azur Roots can be held and redeemed in perpetuity. This means Azurians will be generated in real-time, on a rolling basis, forever.

Some New Details About the Jenkins Audio Experience

Shortly after Azurian minting begins, we’ll open up licensing for the Jenkins Audio Experience with our new one-click marketplace. While we don’t know what communities will be participating yet (our holders need to vote), we can share one thing with you. Your Azurians will be featured.

Yes, that’s right. Immediately upon owning an Azurian, you will have the opportunity to bring them to life in a premium piece of longform content and receive payouts for participating. We have decided to hold the podcast back so that this could happen for our new Azurian family.

[10/16/23 addendum] We ultimately moved forward with the podcast without Azurian characters being included, which means that Azurians were not one of the participating communities in this initiative.

What Next?

Between now and July 11, you can expect more book previews, to discover more about Azurbala, and to learn a whole lot more about (including name and branding) for the DAO formerly known as Media DAO in our Roadmap 2.0 post.

In the meantime, here’s a teaser:

To the Writer’s Room and the broader Web3 community… we’re feeling Bored & Dangerous. Are you?