The (gr)apes Manifesto

What are (gr)apes?

(gr)apes! The first fully animated, 3D interactive recursive generative Ordinal collection.

The Ordinal (gr)apes are created with on-chain javascript tools, our “secret sauce” code libraries, and innovative use of recursion. While our layer 1 assets include inscription 53,678,683, the largest 3D inscription ever made on Bitcoin, we still keep it tight at roughly 500 bytes for each generative inscription.

Individually, each of our 3d models are a couple hundred kilobytes apiece, even at max compression. 650 of these would total over 130 megabytes, a virtually impossibility with ordinals. We got our entire on-chain assets library down to 1.2mb and each unique model down to 500 BYTES. That’s the secret sauce.

I minted a (gr)ape. What’s in it for me?

You now own a piece of history. Our carefully crafted and curated (gr)apes collection is a breakthrough for Ordinals. We jumped through hoops to reach the levels of compression to make fluid 3D animation possible; this is new ground for inscription projects, and this collection marks the start of more immersive experiences for Ordinals across the board.

You’re supporting a small team of creative underdogs who are fighting to bring their vision of the Mad Boy Crew to life beyond Web3 and onto a bigger platform.

Aside from fire art, you’re part of a project with devs that are constantly cooking up new code and breaking new ground in the Ordinals space.

You own a passport to the BitMap Valley and future Sol Maps Metaverse with the flossiest avatars around.

You’re now part of the Mad Boy Crew lore. Join the community and help us build out our world.

Our plans:

We’ll keep it simple and straightforward. Bring value to each Ordinal owned and raise capital in an effort to bring our Mad Boy Crew animated series to life.

• We plan to use all the knowledge we’ve gained regarding recursive inscriptions on bitcoin and create 2 more groundbreaking, small batch Ordinals collections. We’ve already made strides with on-chain compression tools, post-grapes, and the succeeding collections will further innovate and evolve upon the possibilities of recursive inscriptions. With each new collection we’ll aim to create another “first” in the Ordinals space, while still hooking up our holders.
• We’re working with Imso Chris and his team at IMSO to optimize all our 3D Ordinals into metaverse ready avatars that will be ready to drop into our own district in BitMap Valley and even in the upcoming Sol Maps Metaverse.
• The end goal is to create a commercially viable Mad Boy Crew brand and animated series. Three seasons. 8–10 episodes per season. Around 15–20 mins per episode.
• All the different types of characters/species created under the Mad Boy Crew Ordinals collections, will be integrated into the animated series storyline. (gr)apes…The Undead? Robots?
• Build out a tight knit community that supports our vision and contributions to the Ordinals space and, more importantly, is into the Mad Boy Crew lore and animation style.

Who are we?

The Mad Boy Crew project was created by two idiot friends, Al and Pete (@ajirohighnfree & @OGMadBoyPete) an animator and a filmmaker, with a crazy dream of creating an animated series.

Our original idea was to create a large NFT collection called the Mad Boy Crew, catch the 2021 bullrun to fundraise our animated series idea… But nothing’s easy. What started out as a fun and creative concept, quickly snowballed into something unexpected. Something complicated as hell.

We ended up creating a large team, implemented a huge marketing campaign, created massive amounts of marketing content and continued building this giant monster of a Web 3 NFT company. And of course in 2022 the market tanked. Team members bailed. Hopes were dashed. The plan fell apart.

But out of stupidity or pure ego or stubbornness, we didn’t bail on our dream. We rallied the team, re-imagined the marketing and pushed forward with our 5800 collection mint in 2023. Win or lose, we were going to mint this project, just to know we tried our hardest…And we lost. Failed mint across the board. Made $5000 bucks in sales. More team members bailed. More dreams crushed.

But once again, from now officially diagnosed stupidity, pure ego, and stubbornness, we never bailed on our dream. We had been advised to shift our focus on this thing called Ordinals on Bitcoin. The thought of having to go through all this again and learn a bunch of coding shit was seemingly a full-blown nightmare; but surprisingly, this was the perfect home for our brand of creativity and tinkering. Thankfully we had a few holders that believed in us and our dream. So at this point we put our animated series to the side and the main focus became to take care of the holders and not let them down. We were determined to somehow right this ship and get a win.

WIth @davekebo and @machine98 as our advisors/mentors regarding all things Ordinals, we agreed to go all in on an Ordinals collection. Small batch. Carefully curated. Spotlighting the most beloved faction from our Mad Boy Crew collection: the (gr)apes.

It was time to learn some really hard shit and still find a way to be unique in the space. Creating a 3D fully animated Ordinal was the idea. It would be the first and it fit our brand, but we soon learned why there’s no animated 3D Ordinals. Now we couldn’t just be artists; now we also had to be straight up devs. We were determined to figure this recursive shit out and create something new. Al spent the summer of 2023 coming up with idea after idea on how to recursively inscribe animated traits, and idea after idea kept failing. This was clearly impossible on top of being frustrating as hell.

Finally, after months of testing, Al and our other dev, Chax the Wonderkid, found the sweet spot for recursively inscribing 3D animated traits. It finally worked. Everything moved in harmony. All that was left was to inscribe four large master trait files, including a single file that was larger than any 3D file that had ever been inscribed to date.

Everyone and their mama starts talking about Ordinals and BRC-20’s and of course the mempool catches fire two friggin days before we planned to inscribe. From below 10 sat/vb to 300’s sat/vbs over the next few months. Keep in mind we only had $5000 to work with, so it was wait and watch the mempool time.

After one month of waiting to inscribe, it was: “Don’t worry it’ll go back down”. After two months: “This shits only getting higher”. After three months: “”Fuck Ordinals, fuck crypto, fuck this whole thing. It’s not meant to be.” Needless to say,

Then one day. During the second week of January, the mempool started to drop. We did some math. If I cash out my Sol shit coins, maybe we can afford to inscribe if it hits 34 sat/vbs. So we set it up with Machine98 and boom, the dream was slowly coming back to life. Sat by Sat.

In the span of an excruciating half day, all our master trait files were finally inscribed. Shortly after that, everything started moving in harmony, one after the other: finally got to test them all out, and they worked! Then Leonidas spotted our record breaking 3D inscription file on Ord.io. A few hours after that, an Ordinal super sleuth was able to build out their own off-chain (gr)ape using all the inscribed files…Shit.

Okay, so now we had to mint asap before our code was out there and someone smarter than us was able to create their own 3D animated Ordinal generative. Great! So three days later on January 12th 2024, we went into mint with only $124 worth of BTC left in our wallet. No marketing. No team in place. No community building. No mods. No WL. Nothing. Just word of mouth from our advisors, our friends in the space and a bunch of prayers.

5 hours later. Sold out.

All 650 (gr)apes gone. All our OG holders, taken care of. All that time learning, paid off. All the promises we made, confirmed…All our animation dreams, resurrected.

So here we are again. An animator and a filmmaker, Bitcoin builders… now with a not so crazy dream of creating an animated series.

Moral of the story…

“Mad Boys never say die”