I know, there are a ton of "similar" project in the NFT space, Meta-Island, Samourai Saga, etc ... This makes difficult to understand what is the value proposition being part of our community and specialy when we don't have a big Marketing Budget to spend on shillers, ads and other sercives to create hye around the project.
Here is my story: April 2021, I quit my Full Time Data Scientist Job after 2years of experience to start my own projects. For 1 month, I was building algorithmic traders for crypto market because this was corresponding to what I was doing on my free time while I was working.
At that time I only new a few coding language (Python, R, SQL, C++), the basics that you need to be a data scientist and build machine learning models. My coding experience was not impressive too, I wrote my first lines of code in January 2018, during my master degree in data science. My background is not CS but I did my undergrade in Mathematics, Economy and Finance and I graduates in Data Science from HEC Montréal -- Yes I did a business school --
During this amazing bullish period, my friend and I looked at the crypto market and we realized that some projects were just an ERC20 token or NFTs (ERC721) that are backeded by Community. Those project really exploded (Shiba, Safemoon, Floky...).
This is where I decided to stop what I was doing and dedicate 100% of my time and effort to build my first blockchain application with ZERO prior knowledge in Web 2.0 development, smart contracts dev. and web3 integration... First we needed an idea to start with.... -- Lenny Face Coin --. Let's start with the most basic application, an ERC20.
I was already following Eat the block since September 2020, not for the technical part but more for the video that explains really well the concepts such as DeFi, DeX and all the "Ethereum News". But when I started to learn blockchain development, I literally binge watch all of his video starting 2018 ! Here is the order I learned blockchain development:
So my first step was understanding the different part of blockchain development through smart contract development. The tools to use (web3.js and Ganache), solidity Language (in surface), the basic ERC standards, the libraries like Openzeppelin, the blockchains environment with Testnet, the deployment phase and how to interact with the contract that is deployed on the blockchain. Of course, this is not just read and watching tutorials, it's spending countless hours trying, coding and thinking. This step took me 3 weeks to complet. I mostly used free content, documentation and tutorial videos from Julian.
At that moment, I learn enough to deploy our ERC20 Token, add some specification on the contract and of course create the liquidity pool on a DEX. it was early June 2021. But so many people already did that. We were not bringing any innovation in our project. This is where, I started to think about a process where a community can participate into an IDO in a fair way and reducing pump and dump and whales risks. I came with the smart contract Called Community IDO.
To me, you really start to understand a language when you have an idea in mind and you are able to create the application. This is the first time I coded something in Solidity without Tutorials, just having the good practices in mind.
Once I had smart contracts that worked as expected (mid-June) I realized that now I have to learn web development if I want to create a real application to interact with the Community IDO smart contract. Here we go again, another 3 weeks of learning about JSX, CSS and JS using the library React.js with hooks. This part of the learning, I used free videos on the internet and this is where it would have been better to follow a full tutorial Web Development For Blockchain could have been a more efficient choice. So it took me another month to understand and being able to draw un specific box at a specific place on a web page, display the information in this box, managing the states and no without fancy design.
We are now in August 2021, I built the first version of the website, not backend yet. This is also the moment where I learned about web production tools such as Netlify, Namecheap.com, Heroku ... At that stage, I have just enough knowledge to start launch the project. In the mean time, we started to think about marketing strategy for the project, my friends where more involve in this aspect because I was the only fill time developer in the team for a long period.
Everyone knows that smart contracts are immutable, if there is a vulnerability, it's done ! So I started to learn everything I could about smart contract securities, vulnerabilities and testing at the beggining dof September. For this topic I also used free resources online. During this period I learned about Slither, MythX, hardhat, Openzeppelin testing and all of the known vulnerabilities (reentrancy attack, Arithmetic Over/Underflow, Denial of Service, ...). I also wrote a huge amount of test for my contracts. This allows me to really get familliar with the development frameworks and all the testing packages.
End of September, we are starting our marketing strategy, but in the mean time, we want to make sure we will not have any problems with the AMM which is the equivalent of the SEC here in Quebec since we decided to use our real identify behind a project. The leason here is to get to know the law in the country you are operating in to make sure you will not face any problems in the future.
This research pushed us to change completely our first idea to create a "Meme" coin and we decided to create a Metaverse. As of today, LennyVerse project is a metaverse ecosystem build by its community and where the $LENNY token is used to interact with in this ecosystem. We wrote a whole white paper on it. This ecosystem will allow the $LENNY token to be considered as a Utility Token.
So we are early October, we changed our brand. We rebuilt our story telling but nothing really changed in the development already made. We decided to start the pre-sale of our coin through our Community IDO for October 20th and end the presale in November 1st. Nothing went as expected, we did not have a community, we spent a big part of our budget on shillers that did nothing. I think that overall, we where considered as a meme project like every other projects and we really had difficulty to change this image.
But what happened in the development side ?
Now that we decided to create a real ecosystem for the LennyVerse, we needed to add extra functionality to our application. We are now in early November and I worked on the ERC721, improving the Community IDO, create the Marketplace and finally create the off-chain DAO. Working on those pieces pushed me to work with opensea documentation, IPFS storage, Moralis SDK and signatures.
It is also during that time that I contacted Yann, the winner of the first ETB challenge to ask him advise on the Off-Chain Governance that he implemented. In the meantime, I also had to learn about backend development using Firebase to manage the votes on the platform.
Early December, we started to create more youtube content to explain who are we, what we are doing and try to create a organic community. In the Development side, I was still reviewing and improving the code base of our Dapp.
Starting January 2022, I started to work on the web design of our application to make it much more attractive and enjoyable for the user. I also started to learn about "The Graph" protocol as well as Gun.js to use a Peer to Peer Decentralized graph database as the back-end of our Metaverse.
And Here we are now, February 2022. With a Fully Decentralized Metaverse Project, 8 months after I fully commited to it.
I think I can confortably say that I can develop any Dapp kind of Dapp. The LennyVerse project is still in construction and I will continue to improve it. Thank to one project, I learned multiple aspect of Web Development and Blockchain Development. I also witnessed what really works in the NFT space, I got my first experience as an entrepreneur and finally I learned that everything is learnable.
This year, I plan to build financial application, DeFi protocols and improve my knowledge in Solidity and Rust development. I also plan to learn more about the core blockchain technology PoW, PoS, PoH, etc ... In the meantime, I will develop Algorythmic traders to make passive income return.
WHO ARE WE ?We are a very motivated and passionate team trying to innovate and to allow its community to be part of something bigger than crypto. We believe that crypto and NFTs can be used to help people and causes. 🌱
🛠 Through our project, we aim at creating a universe around the story of our fictional character Lenny. 🚀 In brief, his goal is to go to the moon but he will find himself carried away in a parallel universe where he will be facing the real-world issues of a futuristic Earth. 🌏 The story is a metaphor of how people see most of the crypto projects today as their goal is to go "to the moon" but they will quickly realize that the future carries great burdens. ⛈
Through the story, we want to denounce real-world issues and support causes, movements. anything that we wish to denounce. 🌹
Also, our project is centered around our NFT marketplace which is itself revolving around the story. ✨ The marketplace will involve our community as well as talented artists. They will be able to share their work through contests where the best artworks will enter an auction system to be sold. 🎨 The funds raised with the selling will be shared between the artist and humanitarian causes. The project gives visibility to artists as well. 🌙
WHAT MAKES US UNIQUE ?⚡️We position ourselves in the Blockchain industry, which we believe will grow bigger in the next few years. We came up with an innovative concept in the way we want to bring a digital character to life in the Blockchain ecosystem. 🤖 This character will be able to spread love and raise awareness to the younger generations to come. We also wanted to find an innovative way to help humanitarian causes and movements through art and using the blockchain technology. 🦾
🧠 In addition, the project is also different in the way we plan on launching the product. We innovated by using a new way of launching a token, called Community IDO (CIDO). 👥 This concept allows the community to participate in the launch of the project and, by doing so, to become owners of the project as much as us, thus reducing the risks as more people are really involved in the project through the launch. 👻 This is something that, we believe to the extent of our knowledge, has never been done before. We also believe that the concept will be used in the future if we successfully democratize it. We have our code published on Github and we are working on the documentation for those who are interested. 💡
Finally, we are a team entirely from French Polynesia, which is located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. ☀️ We believe to be the first Blockchain team from this "not so common" area of the world. This is the proof that Blockchain is gaining more and more interest and will continue doing so in the future until the technology is truly used to improve the lives of people around the world. 🏝️