How MeebitsDAO airdropped Polygon NFTs to members

So what happened was that the 6th most rare Meebit was fractionalized into 1M pieces, and 30,000 (3%) of those fragments were graciously donated to MeebitsDAO by Divergence.VC. Kai proposed that a fun way to re-distribute those fractions would be to do a giveaway contest. Earn tickets for a raffle, have a shot at a chunk of a famous Meebit. Cool! There’s 3 different kinds of tickets, but for the 1st lottery Kai wanted to airdrop a raffle ticket in the form of an NFT — aka the “Red Ticket” — to every current Meebit holder so they could have a chance to win. Hype up the MeebitsDAO and have some fun!

The first question was “cool idea, but how do we not lose our shirts on gas fees minting 4700 NFTs!?”. There’s a bunch of low-gas alternative chains out there now, which, fortunately, we’d played around with quite a bit when we started doing community “Achievement” NFTs (see some here on OpenSea) for MeebitsDAO. Polygon, for the moment at least, had some really compelling advantages for this kind of “badge” NFT where there’s no/limited monetary value in the token:

  • Polygon is 100% ethereum compatible — same solidity smart contracts, same metamask, even the same explorer (the etherscan team built polygonscan). Easy!
  • For end users Polygon addresses are the same as their Ethereum addresses. 1:1. Nice!
  • OpenSea natively/automatically displays NFTs from a user’s matching polygon address in their collection! This was huge, because we knew 99% of wallets we wanted to drop a ticket on wouldn’t otherwise notice activity on a side-chain.
  • Polygon assets can be moved back to Ethereum mainnet by folks if they so desire, which has a nice feeling.

Getting up and running on Polygon is covered elsewhere, and is pretty simple:

  • Add a “custom RPC” network to metamask.
  • Get some fake test MATIC (the native token on the polygon chain) on the “Mumbai” testnet from a faucet and play around.
  • Get some “real” MATIC on mainnet. Fees are super low on Polygon, so you don’t need much for minting, 5 MATIC ($5!) is plenty to mint thousands of NFTs. I swapped Eth for MATIC on 1inch, and then bridged that MATIC to Polygon. There are many other ways of doing it.

For MeebitsDAO, we create our own ERC721 smart contracts and mint from them instead of using a minting service. It gives us more control, and over time we’re building up a repo of code and scripts that gets better and better and is purpose-built to the needs of the MeebitsDAO community. This maybe sounds like a lot of work vs using a site like Cargo, but if you have some Node.js experience tools like Hardhat make deploying contracts and minting from them approachable.

If you’re new to Ethereum and NFTs, the first thing you need to do know is that you 1st deploy your smart contract to the blockchain, at which point it will get an address, and then you call that smart contract on that address to mint NFT tokens. As you mint the tokens you need to supply a URI that contains the metadata for that particular token (almost everything we think of as “the NFT” — the description, image, etc. — actually lives in the metadata file off-chain). We generate a JSON file for each ticket and upload it to IPFS via a Pinata gateway, and then pin the file with the Pinata SDK. (pinning is the mechanism where you entice IPFS nodes to not discard your files.. ah, IPFS..)

Like many projects, we lean on the heavily tested de facto ERC721 contracts published by the OpenZeppelin team:

The contract maybe looks a little daunting but really all it says is:

  • Be an ERC721 that has metadata in an external URI, and be burnable by an approved address on an access list.
  • The Counters stuff lets the token be capped — i.e. a fixed supply, supplied at contract creation.
  • safeMint/burn/tokenURI/supportedInterface are just boilerplate to allow above.
  • totalSupply() lets block explorers like etherscan/polygonscan/etc. know what the cap on the token is so they can display it in their UIs.

Once the contract is published, we have a helper script in the hardhat repo that simply reads a CSV files of addresses we want to airdop the ticket to and calls safeMint() on the contract. Here’s the core loop:

Because blockchain calls don’t always finish quickly, or at all, we use a try{} block to wait for the transactions to succeed before moving onto the next ticket, logging success/failure. When we minted the 4689 NFTs it just happened to be on a morning when Polygon was quite busy, so it took a few hours to complete. We had logs of 2 mints that failed, so we just re-ran those to complete the drop.

You can check out the full repo on GitHub, but hopefully this gives you a quick view at the two “bespoke” pieces: the contract and the minting logic.

Our goal is to share as much as we can about what goes on behind the scenes at block::block as we help the MeebitsDAO team launch fun ideas! Let us know if it’s helpful, what’s missing, what’s cool, and what else we could write about that help shine a light on “DAO Ops”. :)

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Jamie Larson
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