The Whiskers Digital Collectibles
Hey! I’m Rico, the founder of Whiskers and the artist behind the collection. Without further ado, let me tell you about the Whiskers! They’re a hybrid humanoid-piscine species (read: adventurous fish people) that live on the grand continent of the world known as The Great Pond. Several subspecies of fish, namely koi and catfish, are prevalent throughout The Great Pond (and the collection), hailing from the various cultures and regions of this mystical world.
The collection itself features a total of 5,555 Whiskers, generated pseudo-randomly from a total of 57,238,260 possible combinations, with each background color representing a different overall tier of rarity determined by values assigned to each trait.
Yeah, it’s a lot. Trust me, I know…after all, it took me more than 7 months to draw them all! Check out the collection on OpenSea, here. If you’d like to read more about the making of the collection, check out our article: Whiskers: The Breakdown.
Oh my, strap in. It’s story time.
First, some background: I’ve been interested (and invested) in digital art since around 2017. I had found Crypto Kitties, along with some less noteworthy projects, and I thought they were the coolest thing ever. I was a big Pokémon guy growing up and still am, so is it really a surprise? Being a full-time student and working retail jobs here and there, I didn’t have much spare time to explore digital collectibles as a whole. A couple years later, I really dove in and eventually even minted a collection of my photography in March of 2021! It was so much fun, and as an artist, it felt really amazing to be so completely responsible for my work. The on-chain verifiable ownership blockchain-based technologies enable really is impressive. Not only that, being able to collect royalties on my artwork if it's resold on secondary markets was unreal!
Why a Digital Collection?
The making of a Whisker Equipment trait, Mercenary.
So anyways, I had managed to save up a bit of money between 2020 and 2021 and decided I wanted to create something of my own. I already had some experience with collectible-based projects (I had previously helped a friend launch their own), and eventually I thought that I might as well give it a shot. But, I wanted it to be more than just pictures people could use for their profiles. I wanted create something that, however different it might seem, people could imagine themselves as. An extension of a person. A character they could become. A story they could write for themselves. I wanted to create a world for these characters to live…
And so Whiskers was born!
The making of a Whisker Inventory trait, the Pipe.
This has always been a hot topic for blockchain nay-sayers (and rightfully so). Environmental impact should be a chief concern for any nascent technology. After all, our world needs all the help it can get! I encourage you to read all that I’ve written and linked here if you’re truly curious about the subject. I’ve done a ton (read: an uncomfortable amount) of research into blockchain-based artwork and I genuinely believe in the technology. Does that mean it’s perfect? Certainly not. The world of blockchain technology is still new, constantly innovating, and sometimes takes two steps back before managing one leap forward.
I chose to mint the Whiskers Collection on one of (if not the most) popular blockchains: Ethereum. In September of 2022, Ethereum managed a monumental achievement and successfully transitioned from PoW (proof-of-work) to PoS (proof-of-stake). This effectively reduced the entire Ethereum' network’s energy cost by ~99.95% (source). An interesting comparison, to put this into perspective, might be with the annual energy consumption of PayPal, which (at the time of writing) is about 26 times more than the annual energy consumption of the entire Ethereum network (source). If you’re curious about exact numbers, you might like to refer to Ethereum’s energy consumption index.
I’d like to leave you with a couple articles to read that hopefully give you a better overall picture of the environmental impact of Ethereum and help you to understand why I felt comfortable creating the Whiskers Collection in the first place. First, this writeup by EARTH.ORG – What Are NFTs, And What is Their Environmental Impact? and next this article by Rarible (a common NFT marketplace): Your Favorite NFT Myths, Debunked: NFTs are bad for the environment. Hopefully all the information here gives you a solid overview of my thought process, and I encourage you to explore further and do your own research if you’re even the least bit curious.
On the Environment
Want to join in the adventure?
Whiskers have minted out, but are available on the secondary market at either of the sites below.