Ubeswap’s logo is a purple yam with one slice cut off. For their NFT hackathon, everyone else designed characters. I opened the yam.
- December 2022, over the winter holidays
- The Ubeswap destiny hackathon, run with the Ari Gallery marketplace: NFT collections for the Celo DEX’s community, decided by votes
- “Into the Ube-verse” - three cards named after the brightest stars: Vega, Betelgeuse, Antares
- Concept, the Blender world, materials and lighting, renders, the animated loop, the campaign
- Featured on the marketplace’s front page, a 31 CELO bid on day one, and the winning collection of Ubeswap’s community vote
Ubeswap is a crypto exchange on Celo whose entire brand is a purple yam. In December 2022 it ran a hackathon with Ari Gallery, a freshly launched NFT marketplace on the same chain: mint a collection for the community, and votes decide whose goes the distance. Entries came in from across the whole network; the top eight made the cut.
Most entries invented a character. I took the logo literally instead. If the brand is a yam with a slice cut off, then the slice is a podium, the cut face is a glowing portal, and there is a tiny astronaut on the podium deciding whether to step through. The collection named itself: Into the Ube-verse.
Three cards, named after stars
The world went into trading-card frames and became three NFTs, each named for one of the brightest stars in the sky: Vega, Betelgeuse, Antares. Minted on Ari Gallery on December 20, 2022 under my alias Yellow, 10 percent royalties wired into the listing, and one story shared across the cards:
“What happens when an explorer craves his own path? What happens when he refuses to be bound by the shackles of age-old institutions? One steps into the unknown to look for those answers and unlock a new realm of possibilities.”
Into the world
It worked faster than I expected. The day after mint, Ari Gallery’s front page was cycling all three cards in its featured slot, and a collector had a 31 CELO bid sitting on Betelgeuse.
Then the marketplace round closed. The Ari community voted on the top eight in Discord, and Into the Ube-verse advanced as one of three finalists into the big one: Ubeswap’s community vote on Twitter.
The final was a straight Twitter poll: Vega versus Ube Retro Bank versus Ube Durbar Man, each with its own campaign trail. So over the holidays I campaigned like a local politician: quote tweets, allies, a lot of goodwill.
And when the vote closed, the yam had done it. Into the Ube-verse won, a network-wide hackathon decided by a community I had been part of for all of two weeks.
It was my first time watching strangers campaign for and against a thing I rendered. And the design lesson stuck: you do not always need a new character. Sometimes the brand already has a world inside it, and the job is to open it.
minted as “Yellow”, which is also what my laptop calls me. long story.