Recent Ugly Waifu Updates

Hello + Welcome: A Short Intro to Our Ugly Waifu Blog

We wanted to introduce a blog to our website so we can more easily organize and share occasional updates. As you may or may not know, Ugly Waifu started as a small, free-to-mint art collection of 1000 ERC721 NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. Pushed forward by a small group of artists and devs, we collaborated with several projects and amazing artists and created this collection in an effort to learn and help inspire some joy, excitement and creativity during the bear market of 2023.

Since then we’ve held several art contests, raffled lots of fun stuff (including NFTs, Kitty Ghost socks and even freshly picked mangoes from Florida), airdropped thousands of free art stickers to holders and fulfilled dozens of Custom Ugly Waifu commissions.

We’ve been fortunate to have made a lot of friends along the way and it has been a lot of fun so far.

A Technical Problem: The Thirdweb Vulnerability + Our Plans

Unfortunately, thousands of collections were affected by a contract template vulnerability that was recently revealed and this included the contracts used to create Ugly Waifu.

Initially, we had announced our decision to lock and leave our collection untradeable due to the cost-prohibitive solution of redeployment on Ethereum.

Since then we had been offered a generous proposal from Manifold to redeploy a new contract and airdrop new tokens on Base or Optimism for free. We surveyed on discord and it seems the majority feels if we were to redeploy, they would rather our collection stay on Ethereum mainnet or not to redeploy at all.

After more deliberation we have decided we would like to try to raise the funds to redeploy the collection using the updated contract on mainnet. Part of the value of NFTs as digital art collectibles is the ability to collect, transfer and trade them. And while we have already migrated the sticker contract (and airdropped our first sticker since the migration 🎄), we feel we owe it to our holders at least to try to do the same for the original collection (providing we can raise the funds).

We have already minted the new contract but the gas to mint and airdrop replacement tokens will not be a small amount. Due to the associated costs we cannot promise or place an exact timeline on when we will be able to do this for the full collection but we will be taking steps (and accepting feedback) towards making this re-deployment a reality. We may be able to allow some holders to mint and claim on their own as they wish (token IDs they already held from the original contract) while we continue to raise funds to mint and airdrop the rest. This is something we will have to confirm with Thirdweb.

Any other fund-raising ideas will be graciously welcomed; definitely let us know what you think.

Custom Uglies: Commissions Available

Custom Uglies are commissioned custom artworks, also minted on Ethereum. The majority of these were drawn, minted and airdropped to holders who had won a raffle specifically as a holder perk, though we have accepted paid commissions from Ugly Waifu enthusiasts as well. We will now open these commissions up for anyone to purchase here.

We will be saving a portion of the proceeds of these commission sales along with our other shop merch to hopefully be able to cover the gas fees associated with redeploying and airdropping our 1000-token collection to the existing holders on mainnet. We may release subsequent collections to help raise funds as well, but this is a start.

The Gallery Page

The Gallery page has actually been live for several months but what we never officially announced was that we had integrated a cute off-chain “name” and “status update” feature where you can connect your wallet to unlock the ability to update the name and status of any Ugly Waifu you own and it will display live on our website (though we reserve the right to moderate anything as legally required).

Highlighting the Ugly Waifu Community

Art Show

We have added our Art Show segment to our website’s main menu where we plan to continue showcasing various artists in the community where you can:

• get introduced to a new artist and their unique style
• learn about their background and creative process
• find out what motivates and inspires them
• learn about their future plans and gain their artistic insight

Feel free to contact us if you or someone you know would like to be interviewed and showcased.

Community Art

We have added a page to celebrate all of the artists who helped and shared in our enthusiasm of creating for the sake of inspiring joy and creativity; introducing the Community Art page.

Anyone is free to make and submit fan art and we have implemented a “❤” heart system to rank the works shown on this page. The more hearts an artwork has, the higher up it will be in the gallery.

We see this as a fun mechanism that we plan to utilize in subsequent art contests. You can also filter by artist to see only one person’s contributions (they are listed by number of contributed works, so the more you works you successfully submit, the higher you will be on the filter list).

Hopefully this update leaves you inspired and motivated to create despite the issue we are facing with our contract. Despite this setback, we do plan to continue creating and giving occasional updates here as we push forward.

Always feel free to reach out with feedback or suggestions on our Contact page or Discord.

All the best! <3