Ethereum · smart contract · Feb 2022
Yakuza Inc. — 3,223-piece ERC-721 sellout launch.
3,223-piece generative Ethereum collection that sold out at launch and raised over $1M USD. Four years later: 1,000+ ETH in secondary volume, 1,248 holders, contract still operating. Smart contract design, mint infrastructure, and go-live orchestration by David Dacruz.
By the numbers
3,223
ERC-721 tokens minted · Feb 2022
0.0667 ETH
Mint price · on-chain verified
1,000 ETH
All-time secondary volume · OpenSea
1,248
Unique holders · 38.7% of supply
The problem
An Ethereum NFT launch in 2022 meant gas wars, frontrunning bots, and a hard cap against bad actors scraping the entire supply in the first block.
Stakes were real — a bugged mint contract on Ethereum is public, permanent, and expensive to work around. One typo can mean tokens lost, refunds impossible, or the whole collection held by two wallets.
On top of that: the team needed allowlist logic, a mint-price step, and a reveal mechanism that didn't leak rarity pre-mint.
What I did
Four moves that made a clean mint.
Smart contract hardened against bot patterns
ERC-721A for gas-efficient batch minting, per-wallet cap enforced on-chain, allowlist via Merkle proofs (not on-chain storage — cheap to verify, cheap to update). Reviewed against the common failure modes — reentrancy, allowlist replay, mint-price step races.
Pre-reveal metadata pattern
All tokens shipped with placeholder metadata at mint. Reveal happened post-sellout via a single deterministic swap — rarity unknowable during mint, preventing snipe-flipping. Standard pattern now; not universally adopted in 2022.
Mint infrastructure — front end that survives the block
Static site on a CDN, wallet connection via wagmi, transaction state handled client-side so the backend never became a bottleneck. The mint page stayed up while other launches that week went down under load.
Launch-day orchestration
Allowlist snapshot, front-end deploy, contract verification on Etherscan, and a coordinated go-live window with the community team. No surprise transactions, no mint-paused drama, no "the contract is deployed wrong" retros. Clean mint.
What transferred
Patterns still load-bearing in 2026.
- ERC-721A + Merkle allowlists is still the 2026 baseline for Ethereum NFT launches. The patterns held.
- Pre-reveal metadata is non-negotiable for any launch where rarity matters — I recommend it to every launch I advise on.
- The launch-day checklist (snapshot, deploy, verify, coordinate) is the same rubric I now use for token and contract launches across EVM chains.
Stack
- Solidity (ERC-721A)
- OpenZeppelin + custom modifiers
- Merkle-tree allowlist
- wagmi + viem (front end)
- Hardhat + Etherscan verification
- IPFS metadata + reveal swap
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