PHATCATs
PAC DAO NFT Fundraiser to Protect Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency is facing its most severe assault yet. Sanctions against executing Tornado Cash code, which is useful for a variety of benign reasons, represent a direct assault on the first and fourth amendments of the Constitution. The continued detainment of a developer without charges, possibly on no grounds but writing open-source code, should worry everybody.
PAC DAO is joining efforts to push back. In response, we’ve released our long-awaited PHATCAT NFT fundraiser, to support a strong legal defense on both these fronts.
About PHATCAT
The PHATCAT NFTs are a generative art representation of all Members of Congress for the prior 117th session. The release of the NFT is occurring through an unprecedented combination of random mints and auctions, described below.
One of PAC DAO’s launch promises was to produce a publicly sourced scorecard representing the pro-crypto or anti-crypto sentiment for each Member of Congress.
For the past year we’ve been crowdsourcing your votes. We received over 2000 votes from 100 distinct wallet addresses, providing a great snapshot of sentiment for each legislator based on their activity and commentary throughout the turbulent period.
We have written the results on-chain to commemorate the results of the legislative session and provide an immutable guide for voters as they go to the polls. As of the last night, all voting is disabled. We may opt to resume this project for the next legislative session if the experiment goes well.
The announced utility of the PHATCAT NFT is to allow the bearer to edit some metadata. For the 2022 election we’ll be re-releasing a page for each Member of Congress on our https://pac.xyz/ homepage, complete with each legislator’s scoring history and any associated commentary. NFT holders will be able to edit some optional metadata, allowing challengers to redirect to their own site for instance.
Note the DAO reserves the capability to override changes to the metadata — we can’t predict the outcome of DAO votes, but we’d expect the DAO would reserve this power for extreme cases — i.e. linking to illegal material.
The DAO represents a Snapshot vote open to holders of our governance token, with actions executed by a Gnosis Safe. Holders of the governance token will have the final say over where to disburse all funds collected through the fundraiser — the intent is to support the group organizing the strongest legal challenge, we are most keenly eye-ing Coin Center based on public statements.
Our project was built out in the spirit of good fun, a good-natured way to celebrate the many great Congresspeople who took a stand in favor of cryptocurrency, protecting America from odious acts like the insertion of the cryptocurrency provisions into the infrastructure bill that united the crypto community last year.
Mechanics
Bidding on any eligible seat triggers an auction. Auctions last for a fixed duration after any user makes a bid. Auctions bids must be made in units of .01 ETH to prevent dust attacks. Losing bidders may withdraw their money after the auction is completed.
Any seats not claimed or up for auction are eligible to be claimed by minting a pseudo-random batch at a fixed price. Minting a random batch instantly claims an NFT, removing it from the pool of NFTs eligible for auction. However, the identity is unknown until mint.
We launched with the following values:
Price to reserve a pack at random: 0.1 ETH per seat
Auction Duration: 24 hours after last bid
Min Units of Auction Bids: .01 ETH
The DAO intends to adjust the price of minting a pack based on the availability of “rare” seats. For instance, if several “rare” seats get kicked to an auction and are thus out of circulation, the DAO would plan to drop the price of a mint.
Why did we choose this unique mechanic? Read on…
Economics
Economically, maximizing the funds collected for every Member of Congress is a complex problem.
For a handful of seats, like notable pro-crypto or anti-crypto advocates, may be considered more valuable. We expect an Elizabeth Warren NFT to generate more interest than a Member of Congress who has generated less publicity for themselves.
This complicates minting mechanics, because we don’t know the theoretical optimum price for each seat. We can guess that a rare Nancy Pelosi seat may fetch a higher price, but we don’t know who the community would consider “rare.” A lesser known Congressperson may not even trigger any interest in an auction at all.
The other possible mint mechanic, therefore, would be to allow users to mint a pack. This evokes the fun of opening a pack of baseball cards and hoping you get a rare one. However, in the event the mint price is too low, we may risk leaving considerable money on the table for a rare card that may have fetched a higher price. If a rare NFT might fetch 100 ETH, we’d be giving it away at 0.1 ETH.
We opted therefore for a blended approach. Any user may trigger an auction on any unclaimed seat. This allows users to get some guarantee they’ll have a shot at a seat they may consider valuable while achieving optimum price discovery for these seats.
Alternately, users may purchase a pseudorandom pack of unclaimed cards for a fixed price. This can allow bargain hunters to try for a shot at minting a rare card for a low fixed price. Any seat already put to auction is excluded. The DAO has the capability of adjusting this price as the mint proceeds, so the DAO may opt to raise or lower prices depending on the community’s assessment of the rarity of remaining seats.
What will actually happen? We’ll have to see!
Artwork Notes
For our Member of Congress NFTs, we returned to Rebecca Hendin, the award-winning award-winning American artist. Her art is regularly featured in BBC, and The Guardian, and she produced the artwork behind our successful War on Crypto series.
We were able to uniquely distinguish Congresspeople by breaking them into about a dozen dimensions, things like hairstyle, color, mouth, et al. We added a few additional traits tossed in for rarity. We assigned these categories manually, many thanks to everybody who helped proofread these.
We added a few additional constraints to our script when generating art for the Congresspeople:
We applied a color threshold based on party — Democrats could not have a color profile tilting too red, Republicans not too blue.
Although we distributed facial expressions randomly throughout, we increased the likelihood of generating a negative sneer if the Congressperson had a very negative score.
In an effort to celebrate the increasing diversity of Congress, we established a unique approach. The face shapes trait generated by the audience tagged like a set of Crayola crayons — ie red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, and black, each with a set face shape. Although we allowed these colors to be distributed across all Congresspeople, we reduced the probability of a “brown” or a “black” face to be issued to a member tagged as white, while correspondingly upping the odds elsewhere.
We’re sure we’ll end up getting zinged regardless by people offended by the randomly generated computer code. The code is available for audit in our Github for all to review. For months we displayed three random generations of each artwork to be subjected to community review. We repeatedly called for users to vote on their favorite, or request overrides in our Discord. In all a slight majority of Congress people received a vote on the artwork.
If you chose to ignore our transparent process and dislike the outcome, your recourse now is to purchase the NFT which could grant you the power to submit changes to the NFT, or petition the purchaser to make such changes on your behalf.
Four Members of Congress passed away since the project started. Out of respect, they are presently withheld from auction or minting.
Some additional notes:
6 pro-crypto Members of Congress were awarded a special crypto cap as thanks for their efforts
The most anti-crypto Member of Congress was given sunglasses, since they have difficulty seeing the future
17 well known legislators were granted "rare" status, with custom artwork and a special texture to designate the difference
Additional random traits scattered throughout. The full list of traits is published in the companion Github repository.
Senator Cynthia Lummis received one of six crypto caps for her exemplary support of cryptocurrency
Technical Notes
The contracts, tests, and generative art scripts are available in the Github repository for all to review the methodology or utilize freely in your own NFT projects
We implemented this Contract as the second known Vyper NFT available on OpenSea, following our Euro Action Campaign. Vyper NFTs as a baseline are more gas efficient than their Solidity default. They are also far more readable, meaning the publicly viewable codebase is open for users who want to fork the code and produce similar projects.
The minting contract was named Stonecutter, due to its ability to control the fate of the free world.
Many thanks to all who helped to bring this immense project together! This was truly a community effort: @ZrowGz for tirelessly proofreading metadata, @SkHolmes and @ats for frontend development, @chanho for code review, plus dozens of people who offered advice and thoughts on our various meetings in the yearlong process to get this off the ground.
For the premint phase, expected to last less than a day from launch, all holders of the Founders Token receive one free mint, which should reflect on the homepage. With questions, please inquire within our Discord.
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