SupaBald Jesse NFTs: Devfolio’s Bald Move…
What if we told you that a man's hair could lead to a viral marketing campaign and make the crypto community think that Base got hacked?? Well, strap in 'cause we goin' on a ride…
WTF is SupaBald Jesse?
In a galaxy not so far away, Jesse, the creator of Base, committed to shaving his head bald when Base assets hit 10 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL). We decided to hold him accountable – turning his pledge into a quest (a very elaborate one at that) as well as a marketing campaign for the Onchain Summer Buildathon on Devfolio. Little did we know, this quest would become one of our most well-received and bonkers marketing hits.
How TF did you come up with this?
It all started on one afternoon over a casual Base-Builder-Friday-at-Farcon-watching-session. Jesse’s pledge to go bald if the assets on Base hit 10 billion caught our attention. Then came the question, “What if we turned this into something bigger…something fun?”
The idea snowballed (or, should we say, snowbald) from there. After a few brainstorming sessions, many hysterical laughs, and some sleepless nights, the SupaBald Jesse campaign was launched publicly.
How TF did you build it?
Website
A campaign needs an internet home, right? It took us very little time to go from domain shopping to website building.
The moment the design for letsgetjessebald.com was finalized, we sprang into action to develop it. The time was limited, so we had to pull out the big guns—NextJS, Typescript, and Tailwind 🔥. This combination allowed us to quickly build a sleek, single-page website with cool animations using Framer Motion. (While sometimes seen as time-consuming, Typescript saved us countless debugging hours.)
The morning after a tireless Friday night, we had a sleek UI ready, topped off with animations from Framer Motion. The website wasn't quite complete yet. We felt it needed a touch of our "Never Stop Building" (NSB) spirit. So, we hid a secret Easter egg—accessible only through the elastic scroll behaviour on Apple devices if you spot it, @ us on X or Warpcast!
SupaBald Jesse NFT
Drawing inspiration from Jesse's CryptoPunk 8566, we created a fun animation showcasing his glorious transformation – from full head of hair to completely bald. After a few tweaks, using the thirdweb’s NFT Collection contract (https://thirdweb.com/thirdweb.eth/TokenERC721) we enabled the functionality for builders participating in the Onchain Summer Buildathon to mint their variant of the SupaBald Jesse NFT, and that too in a gasless manner. Anyone willing to participate could mint the NFT directly on their Devfolio Onchain Summer buildathon dashboard after submitting their application!
Farcaster Frame: Many trials, many errors later
To help the word reach far and wide, to nooks and crannies, to every corner of the vast internet, we had to bring out the megaphone. It came in the form of a Frame on Farcaster that helps builders nominate their fellow builders on Farcaster to join the buildathon.
Farcaster Frames was launched earlier this year, which turns any cast on Warpcast into an interactive app. To simplify the creation of Frames, we used Frog which internally handled OG Image rendering, state management and routing for us.
Initially, we aimed to create a UI-rich frame design with images and cool fonts, but limited HTML & CSS support and unstable rendering from Frog UI and Satori posed challenges. Combining specific CSS properties often led to crashes, resulting in a plain white image with no error messages. Pressed for time, we opted for a simpler design through a painstaking process of trial and error.
After local testing, we deployed the application to Vercel. But surprise! One of our most data-rich frames, which was supposed to show the cast preview, worked locally but crashed in production, showing a white screen with no apparent errors. This inconsistent behaviour between local and production environments is every developer's nightmare. Here, it was likely due to Vercel's edge runtime. Unable to reproduce the bug locally, we decided to move forward without this frame.
Nothing good happens after 2 AM, and we weren’t exceptions to this rule. In haste to set up the production server, we pushed the wrong environment variables, announcing the 'Let's Get Jesse Bald' campaign with an outdated APP_URL. We fixed this later by updating the ENV file, but Warpcast had cached the outdated URL. After an hour of back-and-forth communication with the Warpcast team (s/o to Goksu Toprak for the help!), they invalidated the cache. Finally, the frame worked as intended, and we got well-deserved rest!
Despite these hurdles, we managed to create a not-so-fancy but functional UI where builders could nominate their friends on Warpcast for the Onchain Summer Buildathon!
The code is open-source!
It’s amazing how a fun idea can grow and evolve with the community’s input. So, we’ve made the code open source so you can take the concept, add your own spin, and run with it to help bring more frens onchain.
Check out the GitHub repository here: https://github.com/devfolioco/supabald-jesse
What ensued…the beautiful chaos
Jesse absolutely loved it, here’s proof :P
But the best part? Twitter and Warpcast thought the Base accounts got hacked—insane, innit?! (See the screenshots below). The initial confusion settled as people marinated in the absurdity of it all. The real fun began when they realized this campaign is as legit as it gets!
Of course, all this hilarity came with a small price—we had to assure everyone it wasn't a real hack!
Once the dust settled, the party continued! Builders shared their SupaBald Jesse NFTs online, and some of the names generated (by combining two random adjectives from a list of words we created to make sure each NFT had a unique name) were absolutely hilarious.
We had only planned for around 2500 word combinations initially, but people were minting them so quickly that we had to scramble to find new words. You can check out the full collection here: https://opensea.io/collection/supabald-jesse
Numbers Don't Lie
Once the frenzy softened and everyone knew that SupaBald Jesse NFTs were legit, the NFT metrics started doing numbers. Over 10067 builders applied to the Onchain Summer Buildathon, minting a whopping 8844 NFTs—that's a whole lot of bald Jesses floating onchain!! We also saw website traffic skyrocket to 22,000+ visitors.
Check out the graph below to see just how wild things got 👇🏼
The SupaBald Jesse campaign has been a wild, fantastic ride. It's a testament to the power of creativity, community, and, let's be honest, a little bit of internet chaos. Sometimes, to convey a message, you have to make people confused, think, and laugh. In that order.
Let's never stop having fun in our collective home that is, the internet.
Stay tuned for more updates and interact with the Devfolio community at:
🐦 Twitter 📞 Telegram 🎮 Discord
Until then, Never Stop Building 🛠️