OnChain Monkey

OnChain Monkey is a 10,000-part collection of monkey-themed NFTs and the first ever PFP collection with all on-chain in one transaction.

Overview

OnChain Monkey is a 10,000-part collection of monkey-themed NFTs. Uniquely, the collection was created in a single transaction, dramatically reducing the transaction costs that would have otherwise been incurred by any charity that was looking to issue such NFTs for fundraising purposes. ^[1]

OnChain Monkey was created by a single Ethereum transaction that birthed the whole PFP collection with 10k unique OC Monkeys, images, metadata, rarity distribution, and all OnChain, nothing else needed, no other transactions.

The Making of OnChain Monkey

In November 2020, Danny Yang and his wife went to the emergency Room with our newborn daughter who weighed less than six pounds. According to him during an interview

" Her eyes had turned a canary yellow and jaundice was spreading across her body. We rushed to the ER despite the fact that COVID cases were surging in the area. At the ER, only one parent was allowed to enter, and my wife, tired and sore from giving birth three days earlier, ended up having to wait in the car. At that moment, I felt a terrible knot in my stomach cradling my daughter and listening to her cry".

That experience makes him see how tenuous, fragile, and precious life can be and how something tiny can become the focal point for his world. It made him realize the responsibility that all humans share to protect the future of the planet and society. ^[2]

The rise of COVID helped Danny to see the trouble humans are in as a society with exponential problems. This class of problems includes things like ecological collapse, climate change, and global pandemics. ^[3]

His statement during a session

"In 2018, Bill Tai was able to do real-world good with an NFT named Honu Kitty. This year, our team had been working on a bunch of different NFT ideas around animals — birds, bears, robots animals, and in a bunch of different styles".

During his time thinking about Art Blocks was pretty cool. Danny Yang knew that PFPs had to be relatable to a person, so the face needed human features.

He played with circles and drew a bunch of different faces before later settled on the face everyone see in OC Monkey. Danny went further to pick a monkey because it’s a primate and very relatable to us, like apes. Also because monkeys have a certain vibe.

While Danny was doing all the design and was also trying to keep the size of the program small so he could do it in a single transaction. He was compiling the smart contract constantly and checking the size. Finally, Danny Yang had the thing working with the 10k collection and the design. ^[4]

Team

Danny Yang

He founded MaiCoin, one of the first and largest cryptocurrency exchanges in Taiwan. Also founded Blockseer, a blockchain analytics company, later acquired. Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University and BA from Harvard University

Amanda Terry

She is a former digital media business development executive at Twitter, NBC, and Neustar. Community Lead, 501c3 ACTAI Global. Managing Partner, ACTAI Ventures. MBA from Wharton and BA from Princeton University