THE B-SIDE One random night in 2021 I was bored, scrolling my phone. Just four months after buying crypto for the first time, I read the news that someone sold a jpg of a rock for $1,000,000. That night, I discovered what an NFT was. 15 days later I bought my first two NFTs : a @basedfishmafia and then a @BullsOnTheBlock . I wanted a @LazyLionsNFT but couldn’t bring myself to pay $500+ for one. Who in their right mind would? The next day I had already decided: I wanted to launch my own collection. I called @Vercho10 , with whom I spent endless nights talking crypto. We needed a designer, and fate introduced us to @DuckingArtist . That’s when one of the wildest stories in Web3 began. Diduck started sketching options. I needed to dive into Web3, so I created a Twitter account, right-click saved a lion pfp, and started farming followers. One ROAR post and boom, 100 followers. My head was spinning. Meanwhile, Vercho spent hours on YouTube figuring out how to set up a Discord server. Then came the hardest part: the contract. Solidity devs weren’t common in Argentina back then, so we hired a freelancer online. Mint day got closer. Discord was growing. The hype was real. The dev… not so much. The night before mint, the contract wasn’t ready. None of us slept. We begged him to finish. At 11:58 AM, two minutes before mint, the contract finally deployed. Someone minted 10… but it was still set to testnet. 0.3 ETH lost. We airdropped 10 NFTs in compensation. FUD exploded in Discord. Still, 300 NFTs minted. At midnight we went home, exhausted but proud. The next morning I woke up with 10 missed calls from Vercho. Sold out overnight? No. The ETH from those 300 mints had vanished. Panic. Desperation. I cried. Vercho wanted to refund everyone and kill the project. We paused the mint for 2 weeks. In 2021, that meant “dead project.” To make things worse, our reveal metadata was broken. We fixed 10,000 files by hand, one by one. Day and night. Eventually we brought in a specialist, audited the contract : no bugs. We changed wallets, still unsure if the dev had scammed us. Two weeks later we relaunched. Discord was dead: just me, Vercho, and maybe 10 early minters. We spent 15 hours a day inventing games and parties to keep hope alive. Minting parties. Games where the loser had to mint. Every single mint felt like a sold out celebration. Out of fear, every mint’s ETH went straight to Binance. Then came the duck races. Every night we gave away a @NoncoDucks NFT. Holders would enter their names and race. After races came “Quackified.” The Pond became something I can’t describe. In 4 years in Web3, I’ve never seen anything like it. Discord would literally crash from the activity. At 1,000 minted, Noncoducks was unstoppable. We won every poll on X. The best part? We knew every single holder. Onboarding was organic, slow, personal. The mint lasted 3 long, magical months. We innovated non-stop: first project to burn tokens, to evolve metadata, to send ducks on “vacation.” Sometimes people came to FUD, saying it was a scam because we sent all funds to Binance. We couldn’t admit it was for safety, that would’ve caused panic. At midnight on New Year’s Eve… sold out. A movie ending. Pure joy. I’ll never forget @wabdoteth posting that Noncoducks would be a future case study. He was right. We had organically built a monster. The loudest community on X. The most active Discord. A project nobody wanted to leave. Price climbed to 0.05, 0.08, 0.1. There wasn’t crazy buy pressure, but nobody wanted out. No one had bought to flip. Everyone stayed because they wanted to belong. And that’s how it all began. To be continued…