The Chia Holiday 2021 NFTs are now available! You can redeem your corresponding CH21 CAT tokens for these limited edition NFTs by doing the following:
Simply send one CH21 token (not XCH!) to the following address: xch184hksatuenaz5rddcj3kvdf3mjhs0ud5a47y90340vu8hq739q7sm2uhf6
That’s it! It’s THAT easy! Once received, the system will send you the NFT to the same wallet! (though it may take several minutes or longer based on network activity, give it 15 minutes to be safe.) Do note however, this system is not configured to deal with weird fractions of the CAT. If you send a fractional amount of CATs, the system will round down to the nearest whole number, and keep the change. This means if you send 1.8 CH21, you will get back 1 NFT. If you send 2.4, you will get back 2 NFTs. In all cases the system will keep the remainder, and we will NOT be able to recover it for you, so PLEASE only send whole numbers!
These NFTs are part of a collection that is an ongoing series of “Merit Badges” by Chia Network, and will include other future uses like our Beta testing program!
Now, I know what you are all thinking, and that’s what I am really here to talk about. “But!” you are about to interject, “it’s October November December 2022! (That’s how many times I have re-written this!) These are for Holiday 2021? Took you a bit long there didn’t it?” and the answer is, yes, yes it did. I want to apologize for some of that delay.
Back in December 2021, CATs had become all the rage, and the ecosystem was full of all kinds of creative uses for them. We tipped our hand that NFTs were on the horizon in a few months, and people began to scramble to get ahead of it. They started offering CATs that could one day be redeemable for NFTs. I raised this interest internally and said, “Hey guys, would it be terribly hard for us to do that too? If possible, we could do a last minute surprise holiday treat to celebrate year 1?” and the consensus from people smarter than I was that “no, no it would not be all that hard to do. (Narrator: It was that hard to do.)
So going into our long holiday break for the company, a small skunkworks group of us banded together and squeezed out a surprise airdrop of CATs without warning to everyone who had farmed a block in 2021. It was a pretty big lift at a time and I really want to thank the folks who came together for that. We put a lot of holiday vacation time into building this little surprise, and the team really went out of their way to do something that wasn’t part of our core work. It was worth it though, as the surprise was VERY well received by you all. Then came the hard part: making good on our promise.
The problem with something like this, as is often in software development, is the unknown-unknowns. In an ideal world, our NFT launch would have happened within Q2 or Q3 of this year as originally planned, and then these NFTs would have been made for you all in parallel or at the very least within a week or two of that. Unfortunately, a cascading series of surprises got in the way of that plan.
A few days after the release of NFT support, we had to pivot over to some bug hunting that pulled the single most knowledgeable expert on the NFTs we needed away from us. Then the CAT2 situation happened to further delay this work as we were all hands on deck for that for several weeks. Little things like that added up, and suddenly, we were a good 2-3 months past when I wanted to deliver, and now it is fall. Finally, around October we were about 3 months past the original planned release, and thought we were nearing the home stretch, when we realized that 130,000 NFTs to mint is a lot. Like, a lot, lot. We had built some pretty great tools to help us do this, but then we learned that over a hundred thousand NFTs was, quite honestly, a lot more than any of our original tooling (that was aimed at the average creator) had been planned for and we managed to break everything in testing, so back to the drawing board once more! In the end, we had to build a bulk minting tool, then make iterative changes to it for our bulk-bulk needs. Then we had to make wallet improvements to handle six figures of NFTs in one wallet. Then we had to build robust testing solutions for all of this, and finally the actual platform that can accept a CAT, and send back the NFT smoothly, and further testing for that as well.
I wish we had landed this much sooner for you, ideally inside of July 2022, and ultimately what it really boils down to was I made a promise to the community built on the information and data we had on hand in December of 2021 that didn’t hold up under real-world conditions. I’m sorry.
The Chia Network of December 2021 is a vastly different company from that of the Chia Network of December 2022. The people, the infrastructure we have in place, and our communications efforts will (and have!) served us much better on setting and maintaining expectations with the community more appropriately these days as we have grown and evolved over the last year.
All that said, I know there are a few frequent questions I have been asked or anticipate, so I wanted to go over them real quick:
FAQ
Q: What is this all about? What did I miss?
A: Here’s a link to the original blog post!
Q: I farmed a block in 2021, but never got my CAT! Is it too late?
A: We tried our best to make sure our scripts were sound, but we know a small handful of people may have fallen through the cracks. After the announcement, we spent several months to manually work with folks to resolve any outliers, but I’m afraid that window has long closed and we no longer have the capabilities to do so at this time.
Q: In 2021 you said we could exchange 1 CH21 for “up to 1 NFT”. However, the above example shows we can get any number of them based on the number of CH21 we send. Which is correct?
A: Over the last few months, the implementation changed vs our original intent. Part of this factors into the above examples of the hurdles we experienced. Quite simply, making a robust enough system to enforce that simple grew to be too big of a challenge, and we had to pivot the implementation design in order to deliver.
Q: I sent 1 CH21, but it’s been several minutes, where is my NFT?
A: It will take a few minutes at best, and during times of material network load, either high transactions or high dust storms, it could take anywhere up to 15 minutes or even maybe longer, especially if you did not include a fee in your original transaction to speed along its delivery. Rest assured however that if the CH21 was safely delivered to us, you will get your NFT eventually! (If you are reading this on the very day we announced it, your wait time may be much longer as the rush of demand may cause a backlog for the first day or two, since there is a limit to the number of NFTs per block.)
Q: I sent 1 CH21, but it’s been several hours/a whole day. What’s up?
A: While it can take a few hours, it shouldn’t take a whole day+. In that case, it’s possible your wallet filter is hiding, as we have seen this happen sporadically. Go to the NFT screen and click on “filters” and toggle on “Show Hidden” and see if it appears. (You may need to restart the wallet just to be safe after that as well).
Q: Why is the design so very different from Chia Friends PFP NFTs?
A: Chia Friends was meant to be a one-off surprise and delight experience to launch with the NFT standard, one that we are slowly turning over to the community to manage and carry the torch on from here on out. As a result, it has its own unique design and theme, untethered to that of Chia Network’s branding. These, on the other hand, are meant to both evoke the theme of the art we used around the Holiday CATs and our seasonal branding around media and such in December of 2021, and simultaneously fit more within the current brand “feel” of Chia that we are looking to use for the future “badges”.
Q: Why isn’t the art more “Christmas-y”?
A: The Christmas Holiday is only celebrated by a small portion of the global population. There are actually several dozen Holidays during the winter festival season around the world, and while only the Northern Hemisphere half of the world is in “winter” during this time, it comprises 89% of the global population, so we felt something generically winter, ala a snowflake, was best for a Holiday theme.
Q: Why is every NFT the same?
A: These are not meant to be unique PFPs, they are simply unlockable “badges” and as such, all look the same with each recipient having a unique XXX of YYYY serial number to theirs.
Q: You said this is part of a future set of merit badges. Can you tell us more about that?
A: We plan to give out limited edition NFTs to the beta testers in our closed beta program, and are also thinking of other fun ways we can reward community members for various things with similar NFTs. They will all be part of this collection going forward, but that’s about all we have to share at this time.
Q: If I see these online, how can I know they are genuine?
A: Like all NFTs officially minted by Chia Network, they will have the creator DID of did:chia:19qf3g9876t0rkq7tfdkc28cxfy424yzanea29rkzylq89kped9hq3q7wd2 to show their authenticity.
Q: Does this mean there will be a Holiday 2022 NFT again in just a few weeks… or…. Another 12 months?
A: Neither, actually. We aren’t looking to make these every year. As the original blog post linked above states, these were meant to celebrate the end of the year holiday season and reward everyone who had been a part of Chia in 2021 and found a block while farming that year. That said, we may do more commemorative events in the future, so who knows what lies in store for this!
