Celebrating The Wins Update

If you are reading this, it’s not too late :)

The collection is not yet sold out and there are still packs up for grabs at streetdreamscafe.com

That being said, if you are here then you probably already bought a pack from the Celebrating The Wins collection, or you are considering buying a pack. For that we are sincerely grateful and honored to bring you into our world. As we’ve said numerous times, this collection is just the first step into the Street Dreams Cafe universe. Our adventure is not about one collection or one drop, it’s a journey into the metaverse that we want to take with you all.

With that in mind, let’s rewind the clock a bit and allow us to give you an update on the drop and where things are at with the next steps and highly-anticipated reveal (hint: we have an official date), with transparency and honesty.

The Drop

It’s now been almost two weeks since Celebrating The Wins has gone live. We’ve sold a bunch of packs of every size. Even the packs of 60 (the big boy / big girl packs) have been moving. Shout out to the big spenders, but also to every single one of you who have contributed in any way. We’ve had countless messages from people buying packs telling us that this is their very first NFT experience- and that really means the world to us. This collection was always designed to be as inclusive as possible and serve as an on-ramp for people new to the space. Seeing the homies getting their wallets set up for the first time and geeking out at their first purchase has been priceless. These messages are still coming in everyday and it’s been nothing short of incredibly humbling to know that SD Cafe has been responsible for a lot of first experiences in NFTs and web3.

We also wanna take a moment to shout out the Cafe Creators, the photographers and illustrators who have graced us with their talent and gone to bat for us promoting the collection and retweeting, sharing, and spreading the love at every turn. The love is so real and it is felt from the bottom of our hearts.

This love and support was needed more than ever in the couple days leading up to the release and in the days after. As most of you know, the release was pretty bumpy. After months of work designing the collection of our dreams, we realized very late in the game that there were a few things that were simply not ready on time. In the structure of our partnership with Metaplex, all of the development and product work has been handled on their side. All the creative and design has been handled by us, with a few collaborative exceptions. As we’ve explained in the past, this collection and concept is a first on the Solana blockchain so as we built and innovated together into this new territory, our first major obstacles came late and they came fast.

As we were going through and testing out the mechanics for our drop ahead of Friday’s release date, we ran into a number of issues that would have led to an experience that strayed too far from the original vision we were building towards, and we had to adjust. One was how the cards would be displayed post-reveal and we had to do a quick pivot to the beautiful 3D models which we’ve now teased on Twitter. Another one of our main concerns and focuses for this release was making sure this would be the most fair launch possible, and it became clear that the best way to do that was to limit one pack purchase per wallet. But with 5000 individual packs in the supply and lots of friends and supporters wanting to buy more than one pack, and hold more than 3 cards, that limit would soon become a problem. So we quickly had to pivot to redesigning the supply and have packs of 3 cards, 9 cards, 5 cards, 30 cards, and 60 cards.

That set us back about a day, and before we knew it, our November 5th 4pm EST drop ended up happening the following day November 6th at 9pm EST. We left a lot of you wondering what was happening as we were scrambling to prioritize these issues and get the proper steps in place to a) have the cards look right and b) allow people to hold more than 3 cards/1 pack without having to spin up more wallets. We could have done a better job at communicating everything to the community in real time and for that we sincerely apologize.

In the days following the release, there were more minor bugs. Browser issues, network error problems, and people buying packs and not claiming them properly or not seeing them in their wallets. The trials and tribulations of launching a new product hit us head on. We took them one at a time, addressed the issues that were happening, fixed the bugs one at a time, and we are now in a place where everything is running smoothly and everyone with an issue has received support from us and resolved their issue. If you are reading this and still have an unresolved issue, please DM us or message us in the Discord.

As of today, hundreds of people are holding packs and waiting for reveal day to open them up. Which brings us to the next part of this article….

The Reveal

We’ve decided to push the reveal date to December 16th in order to fulfill our vision and our promise as it was originally designed. For full transparency, our original reveal date was November 9th, 4 days after the drop. Pushing this back 5 weeks was not an easy choice to make but we believe it is the right decision.

Here’s why: the decision we had to make was for the reveal process to either happen off-chain in a web2 dynamic or fully on-chain and be completely done in web3. For the reveal to be totally trustless, decentralized, transparent and fair for all, it has to be on-chain. And for it to be on-chain and done right, our development team needs a few weeks to build that out properly, troubleshoot it, pressure test it, and make sure it runs perfectly smoothly and with a lot less hiccups then the drop. We sincerely believe the plan we have in place will accomplish that, it just takes more time to do it right.

Why is it important to do it on-chain? Without getting too technical, we want the randomization of the packs to be fair to everyone and not possible to game. If we were to do this off-chain, the randomization process would be centralized in our hands; and while you all may trust us, we believe in the power of decentralization and transparency in web3. We want to build a product that stays true to the principles of decentralization and trustlessness that are so important to this project and the future of the web.

With the process we are designing, we can show the community that we have provable randomness that is totally transparent and fair to all. This will be the first time Metaplex is introducing this, an on-chain randomness oracle, and that is something we feel is worth the wait in order to deliver on our promise. It means that when it’s time for you to open your pack or packs on reveal day, you can rest assured that the process and your odds of getting a rare card will be completely fair and transparently random. This is so important to us, for your experience on reveal day and for the long term relationships we are building together.

So on December 16th, we will be ready to experience this reveal with all of you and make it as memorable as possible. In the meantime, we are cooking up ways to thank our early supporters and those of you who have been down from the jump, as we also keep welcoming more people into our world and keep promoting the collection.

Again, Street Dreams Cafe is bigger than one drop or one collection. This is a long ride we are all taking together, and it’s a ride we want you to help us steer and navigate, and we invite everyone to share feedback and ideas into Discord and on Twitter as we shape this road together. We’ve created a Proposals channel in our Discord where anyone can share new functions, features, or ideas that will make Street Dreams Cafe a better place.

Thank you for being here. Buckle up and let’s hit the gas.