As the NFT space has been growing over recent months there have been a number of projects that have gone beyond the concept of a standard drop or auction and are using game mechanics, blockchain, and creative marketing techniques in amazing ways. Chaos Keychain is one of these projects that has caught our eye. Chaos Keychain is part art project and part cryptography game that is centered around community building, social media networking, and user participation. The basic idea is that there are 4 wallets that contain valuable NFTs like Bored Ape Yacht Club, Zed.run, Meebits, and a number of participating artists. If you can collect enough clues, and figure out the cryptographic puzzle, you will be able to unlock and win one of the wallets that contain the NFTs. 

For anyone who has spent time on Clubhouse in some of the NFT rooms then you would have surely come across the Chaos Keychain creator, tom (aka Misfit Pieces). He is one of the most knowledgeable thought leaders in the space and is extremely generous with his time to onboard and educate the community. tom has created a number of successful projects including NFTFigs, NFT Superstars, and is a must-follow for anyone interested in NFTs and marketing.

We sat down with tom (aka Misfit Pieces) to learn more about the Chaos Keychain project and what it takes to launch a project of this scope.

Can you explain the basic concept behind the Chaos Keychain and how people can participate?

Chaos Keychain is an interactive NFT event that brings the community together in efforts to unlock wallets that contain rare and sought-after digital artwork. 

A few weeks back, we had an event to give away a Bored Ape. To do so, we created 10,000 duplicates of the ape and unleashed them on the Matic network via Cargo.build. One of those duplicates contained a key that won the owner the actual Bored Ape. We had a ton of fun and really got the community involved in cracking the code. 

Immediately after the event wrapped we knew we wanted to do something bigger for the next. The concept of having the community try to hack me has been in my head for a while, and that’s what we ended up building the concept around. We are fortunate enough to have an awesome investor who has been a supporter in our previous projects that really stepped up to the plate and filled the wallets with some amazing pieces. A Meebit, a Zed Run Horse, and a Bored Ape to be specific.

To participate, collect our keys, decode the seed phrase words within, and enter them into the correct order to unlock the wallets. The challenge is in following clues and hints that we’ll be releasing and working with the community to determine the correct words and order that you’ll need. 

The best place to keep in the loop and in communication with team members is our discord. 

NFT projects that blur the line between art project and game are gaining in popularity. What do you think are the necessary components for a successful project?

I think any project that aims to be immersive is setting itself up to be a success. Gamification isn’t always necessary for deep and involved projects. Just being able to structure properties and metadata in a way that makes things searchable, comparable, and overall more collectible really enhances the connection you can make with your collectors.

When you take that up a notch and create collectibles that have utility and functionality you open up a world of possibilities with getting your community involved. 

A big part of the Chaos Keychain experience is treasure hunting, cryptography and problem-solving. What are the types of skills that people will need to crack the code?

You’ll need to be able to work together. That’s the overarching goal here. We want to get the conversation going again in the NFT space, and encourage community collaboration.  I’ve designed this event so that it’s impressively difficult to win solo. Teaming up, even in small groups, increases your likelihood of getting into the wallets exponentially.  

On a knee-jerk, this might seem overly difficult. Our goal here isn’t to make it impossible for people to get into, just more difficult to break programmatically. There is nothing we can do to stop Brute Force attempts on our wallets, so increasing the difficulty and making the event heavily reliant on collaboration was in our minds, the best way to even the playing field between man and machine. 

Creating 25,000 NFTs sounds like a daunting task, what is the process that you are using to generate all of the various Keys?

We actually have that dialed in to not be enormously difficult at this point. We utilized software we built for NFT Figs and retrofitted it to create our generative keys. We even have the same artist, Rob Levy, onboard creating the components necessary to generate them. 

To speak more on the process, we have a pretty massive, bespoke, toolset that enables us to mass mint, sell, and manage things. Everything is coded from scratch and proprietary to us and our projects.  We’ve used this tech with Keys, Figs, and even with the RarePizzas team with their Pops and Stix NFTs. 

You chose to build this project on Polygon/Matic instead of Ethereum. What are the benefits of using Matic and why did you choose to use it?

For me personally, it’s a price thing. Because I prefer projects with HUGE amounts of individual pieces, I keep my price points as low as I can afford to keep them. On Mainnet, our collectors were paying at times hundreds of dollars in GAS fees to just claim a FREE NFT from us. This is more than 4x what we charge on average for our pieces. 

Matic allows us to do everything we did on Mainnet, plus the benefit of practically free minting costs. Since switching to Matic and shielding our collectors from the gas fees, we’re now seeing people purchase more of our NFTs and multiples at a time. This allows us to release bigger scale projects, like Chaos Keychain, and really focus on product, not price. 

Can you tell us about some of the participating artists?  

Absolutely! When we started the project we knew we needed to spread out to market it. We are also huge proponents of bringing the artist community with us on our ride. At the start of the project, we allocated 10 spots in each of the wallets for artists to contribute work, and get paid in Matic for each key that sells out of the wallet their work is in. We’re able to do this because of Cargo.build’s javascript library that makes split profits ridiculously easy to handle.  Our hope is that having a strong stable of artists like we do will help us amplify not only the project, but the individual projects of all involved. 

Is it every person for themselves or are people grouping into teams to try to crack the code?

It would be nearly impossible to finish the contest on your own. Not completely, but highly unlikely. I feel that the winner is going to come from a collective effort either in our discord server, or any of the other various places people are congregating about the project.  

What will happen if no one is able to solve the puzzles and get into all of the wallets?

We guarantee that there will be a winner for all wallets as long as all of the seed phrases have been discovered. There is no value for us in retaining the art in the wallets. We want winners, and we will do what we can to help the community get to that point.  

To add on to that, we also do not expect at all to sell 100% of our keys. Our predictive modeling says we should start seeing winners at the 15%-25% range, and we are perfectly ok with that. Frankly, if 1% sell and all wallets get unlocked, that’s still a win in our book. 

Tell us about your Chaos Keychain team.

We have a 4 person crew, myself included. Initially, it was just my partner in code, Orr Marom, and I.  Orr is the master of the codebase we’ve created and is our mint-meister-extraordinaire. His software has enabled us to dream big, and execute bigger. Rob Levy, our in-house artist came on midway through our NFT Figs project to help reboot it. Because he’s a literal dream to work with and has an inherent knowledge of fig tech, it’s a no-brainer to have him aboard. Last, but most definitely not least, Lex Diamondz, aka The Jeweler has joined the squad heading up our metadata, marketing, and community voice. Her energy, skillset, and drive have helped us out immensely, and her knowledge of her craft makes her second to none. 

It sounds cliche, but I really believe we have one of the best teams in the space. Anything we bring our heads together on we’re able to execute surgically and at breakneck speeds. This is how NFT Projects should be done. 

Is it true that you provided a badass, must-have clue in one or more of your answers? 👀

Truthfully Told, clues Don’t Just fall from Trees.  

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Chaos Keychain: Website | Twitter | Discord | Clubhouse

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