DOODLES

Doodles is a collection of 10,000 generative NFTs created by Evan Keast, Scott Martin, and Jordan Castro. The team uses “working aliases” and are known as Tulip, Burnt Toast, and Poopie respectively. Before Doodles, Keast and Castro were already well-established in the NFT community, as they helped launch the legendary NFT project known as CryptoKitties in 2017. Martin, meanwhile, had been minting his own pieces and growing his creative brand within the NFT space for about a year.

Doodles features original art that was created by Martin, who produced hundreds of unique visual traits for the collection. However, the project ultimately followed in the footsteps of predecessors like CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, and Cool Cats by randomly mixing and matching these individual traits to create the full Doodles collection.

Within the Doodles ecosystem live humans, cats, pickles, apes, sentient flames, skeletons, aliens, and more. As is the case with nearly all generative avatar collections, Doodles NFTs come in varying degrees of rarity, which is defined by their traits. Although the Doodles team has never officially released a catalog of what traits are the rarest and most common — you can find RaritySniffer’s unofficial rankings here — skeletons, cats, aliens, apes, and mascots have continued to resell for the highest amounts.

 

Keast, Castro, and Martin launched Doodles on Oct. 17, 2021, originally pricing their product at 0.123 ETH per mint. At the time, the mint price was considered relatively high. Prior to Doodles, most PFP projects implemented mint prices below 0.1 ETH; however, the Doodles founding team decided on this higher price point to ensure an initial treasury of ~420 ETH.

During the rollout of the project, Doodles tried something that had seemingly never been executed by a PFP project previously. About a month before the project went live for minting, the Doodles team closed the Discord when membership numbers had reached just over 1,000. This made it so that no new members could join, creating an extra level of exclusivity within the project’s community.

This decision received mixed reviews, as it effectively gave whitelist access (priority minting) to a select few. Yet, as the Doodles mint date drew closer, the project’s following continued to grow, and the decision to close the Discord started to be seen as an innovative way to reward early NFT project supporters.

The entire Doodles ecosystem is basically one DAO, and each and every Doodles owner has a say in what that DAO does. Early on, Keast laid out how the DoodleDAO treasury would work, stating that 1 Doodle = 1 Vote towards any and all decisions regarding the DoodleBank.

So far, Doodles members have been able to vote on proposals for Doodles team scaling, Doodles live events, funding a 3D Doodles project, and much more. The Doodles Forum and Doodles Discord allow an extra level of discourse to take place for each proposal.

Considering Doodles was launched less than half a year ago, it’s incredible to see the growth and accomplishments achieved by this project and its three founders. Currently, the collection has amassed around 80,000 ETH (nearly $250 million) in secondaries. While Doodles still has quite a ways to go before they’re seen as a true contender for the PFP NFT crown currently held by the Bored Ape Yacht Club — which has generated upwards of 390,000 ETH (over $1.2 billion) to date — the collection of vibrant characters has undoubtedly won the hearts of countless NFT enthusiasts.

Growth potential aside, it must be acknowledged that the crypto and NFT markets are volatile. Additionally, it may be some time before Doodles, or any NFT brand, truly goes mainstream. Of course, that’s assuming that one ever does. However, hundreds of thousands of users have joined the NFT ecosystem. And for now, those numbers continue to increase.

Editor’s Note: At the time of publication, members of the nft now staff were holders of Doodles NFTs.