Why "Bitbugs"?
The NFT project is inspired in different cute|horrifying insects (bugs) front-micro photographs. Insects form a small & beautiful world that we humans often take for granted. See for example here, here and here. The project pixel-drew 5 "legendary" 8-bit digital bugs (Bee, Moth, Beetle, Spider & Fly), plus a Cyclops (non-legendary), their parts classified in 4 groups (forehead, head, arms and legs), and mixed them algorithmically to generate the 10,800 possible Bitbugs.
Are Bitbugs rare?
When answering this question, we acknowledge the fact that the number of black pixels of each Bitbug (in the original 16*9 pixel grid) may represent the degree of rarity (apart from the traits of each token). For instance, there are only 6 Bitbugs with 31 black pixels while there are 2,070 Bitbugs with 38 pixels. All were drawn in black (no-color).
About Minting
(A) Each 100th minted Bitbug would be free. In such case, you will only pay for the transaction (gas) fee (for instance, the smart contract is structured to return to your account the Bitbug’s price (i.e. 0.02 Ether).
(B) Public Sale (minting) would be open to public until all Bitbugs are minted. In the main page you can see how many available Bitbugs are available to mint at any time.
(C) Instead of minting in a random way each token, and increasing mint price according to diminishing supply, we believe that is better for You to preview and choose your Bitbug, leaving the price equal for all.
(D) You mint under the same conditions as the developer (except for price), as you can view and select a Bitbug before minting it.
About each Bitbug
(A) The background of each Bitbug is transparent. Therefore, if you open your Bitbug file over a black background, you won’t see it!
(B) Each Bitbug is contained in an 8-bit 16*9 pixel portable network graphics (PNG).
(C) The signature of each Bitbug was obtained by a hash256 of the image (not the .png file itself).
(D) The short signature is the name of each Bitbug. first 7 digits of the signature (16*8 transparent pixel grid) and guarantees that each Bitbug is unique. This was the way we doubled-checked that all Bitbugs are different.
How to check that each Bitbug is different?
As other NFT projects, the actual images sizes of Bitbugs are large and therefore costly to store on the blockchain. Therefore we took a hash of an all-Bitbugs-image which was set into the smart contract. As well, we took a hash of a file that contains each individual signature.
Digital Marketplace
This website does not offer secondary trade functionality. As each Bitbug is ERC-721 complaint, you can trade it in third party secondary market platforms. For your convenience, we are working at the time of writing to open a secondary market in OpenSea. However, we cannot guarantee that the project would be accepted in such marketplace. Other platforms could be implemented in the future.
Physical Art
As stated in the smart contract [@ function devMint(uint[] memory tokens, address recipient) ], we (as developers/owners) can mint up to 1,000 Bitbugs: At most, 200 Bitbugs may be traded as NFTs, and the remaining 800 Bitbugs may be physically available at owners' discretion. This means that we intent to gradually mint them and physically print them. Printed Bitbugs would not be digitally traded and rather, they will be forever-physically-printed.