NFTs represent a revolutionary convergence of many personal passions of mine. It enables a melting pot of art, tech, culture, IP, finance, community and sovereign ownership.
The most recent project DAZZLE SHIP launched on the blockchain (and now being a key focus) is ‘BROADSIDE‘. This is the result of a few decades of creative collaboration with Matt Mason. Something that started in the early days of Web1, pirate radio and grime/dubstep. It went onto do the rounds during it’s development phases in Hollywood, until more recently finding a home on the Ethereum blockchain as a collection of 7290 1/1 generative art NFTs (edit: 54 died in a massacre, there are now only 7236 heroes)
After securing a 2-year partnership with NFT platform Open Sea the collection sold out within 24 hours of minting.
BROADSIDE is essentially a new culture, community and storyworld, purpose-built for web3. This has been a wild ride of development, the NFT phase of which started in early 2021. Now that we’ve hit our primary sale milestone i’ve put together this case study for reflection and gives an overview of how we achieved this within the coldest depths of crypto winter.
📚Starting With Story 📚
The immersive story and world of Broadside, encompassing gaming, fashion, music and culture, has been developed for over a decade.
Broadside is set in a new “Solar Punk” storyworld. Where AR gaming rules the planet, anti-surveillance clothing is always on-trend, and 3D bass music is used as a weapon to fight oppressive robot armies.
The story is a future vision of Web3, decentralization and the metaverse. By wrapping it in science fiction we immerse the community in a world where it’s fun to think about the future of the space we are all building together collectively.
From the the way we manage Discord, our Twitter ‘Pirate Radio’ spaces and the tone of our tweets, everything we do stems from the storyworld. We released the ‘foreword’ to our story as a free mint that doubled up as an allowlist pass on mint day. A total of 20k were minted by 6.9k users:
👑Giving Community Ownership 👑
Punk culture is about blurring the lines between audiences and creators. Decentralized asset ownership is perfect for building with this ethos.
Granting Broadsiders the rights to take their characters and this storyworld in their own direction means each avatar is a building block, and together we can create something groundbreaking that could only exist with web3 as a foundation.
Broadside Avatars Offer Two Different Licensing Models:
- cc0 – All Broadsiders featuring existing cc0 artwork from other collections and artists are cc0. Meaning you and anyone else can continue telling their story in any way you like, on any platform you wish. Rare cc0 traits contributed by guest artists and from projects including: XCOPY, Rektguy, Moonbirds, Goblintown, Nouns, Blitmaps, Kristy Glas, Cryptoadz, Eclectic Method, Grillz Gang, Robness and more.
- FULL COMMERCIAL RIGHTS. Broadsiders without cc0 traits grant the holder full commercial rights to that Broadsider’s name and likeness. Meaning you as the holder and only you as the holder have the ability to exploit your character commercially and continue telling their story in any way you like, on any platform you wish.
Our key goal was to make sure this was decentralized from the start.
👥Community Building 🤝 Remix Culture.👥
Our vision of decentralized IP for Broadside was to create a hype community who are excited to build a culture together. When SuperMassive had Broadside on his show at The Defiant, he called it “hands down, the best stream ever for audience engagement.
Myself and Matt always bonded over our passion for music and have been inspired by countless examples of music culture transcending social boundaries. For this reason Broadside has its own genre of music, a pirate radio station on Twitter, metaverse raves, and thousands of memes, all powered by an amazing community.
The plan is to build with the community in as many ways as we can. The Broadside avatar gives owners the rights to take it in any direction they like. This is the meaning behind our phrase “None of them are as strong as all of us”
Some things built by the community so far:
- Many tracks, including some bangers by web3’s best MC Mr Dollazz, which have already been remixed several times.
- A metaverse space and VRM avatars.
- Various merchandise (i.e. clothing, sneakers, mugs) in which they are free to monetize and have 100% of profits due to cc0 licensing.
- Memes – lots of memes.
Phase 1 of Broadside Utility:
- The Journey Begins: Mint one of 7,290 generative Broadside heroes, each with unique names, features and traits including 1/1s, legendaries and rarity pulled from a total of 201 billion unique combinations.
- A World Unfolds: 11 Episode NFTs telling the story of your specific character (all of which is already written), with new art for each episode, will be dropped over the weeks and months following launch, along with other in-world artifacts and surprises along the way.
- New Heroes Are Forged: Merge and burn Episode NFTs into a 1/1 Book NFT featuring your Broadsider on the cover art – with epub files of your character’s story so you can print and sell copies of Broadside: Book 1, before taking your character and their story in any direction you wish.
From here our plan is a DDOS attack on mainstream culture with a story about Web3. We sat down with Creative Bloq recently to discuss our plans for this.
Future phases of Broadside
Phase 2 and onwards are being planned, with the team’s deep links into web3, fashion, gaming, Hollywood, music, book publishing, crypto and the VC community all coing into play.
Our ‘north star’ for Broadside is a decentralized franchise powered by NFTs that we believe can help people understand and participate in the real and rapidly decentralizing world taking shape around us, as distributed technology continues to transform culture in exciting ways.
Links and resources:
- Broadside PFP collection on Open Sea
- Broadside Story Foreword NFT
- Broadside Twitter (where we host weekly spaces for Pirate Radio and LARPing)
- CULTure Cult FM Discord (where you can obtain FlexWork Job roles)
- Broadside Interviews : NFT Pirates, Defiant Show, Creative Bloq
- The Pirates Dilemma – Best Selling Book by Matt Mason foreshadowing Broadside
- Br0ads1de.com – Official Site
