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Side project · 2022

Bear Market Busters

Rascal, the first Bear Market Buster

An NFT collection that promised to end the bear market.

In the summer of 2022, crypto was collapsing and everyone was very serious about it. This was the opposite: ten hand-drawn bears, each with a superpower, on a real smart contract.

Bear Market Busters mint site: yellow hero, hand-drawn bears and fake reviews from Nobody, My Mom and Me
Role
Everything except the drawings
Type
Side project · Ethereum
Year
2022
Stack
Solidity, Hardhat, React, ethers.js, IPFS
Visit
Contract on Etherscan(opens in a new tab)
  • 10

    bears, drawn by my sister in the iOS Notes app

  • 1–3 ETH

    mint prices, described on the site as “ridiculous”

  • 0

    Discord servers, Twitter accounts or community

01  The idea

A joke, taken seriously enough to ship.

Every bear has a job. Frank makes Powell cut those rates. Arnold makes the money printer go brrr. Meredith eats a bit of inflation every day. The roadmap had four milestones, the third of which was buying an e-bike, because Lambos are overrated.

The reviews on the homepage came from Nobody, My Mom and Me.

  • Rascal: The father of all bear market busters

    #0Rascal

    The father of all bear market busters

  • Meredith: Eats a bit of inflation every day

    #1Meredith

    Eats a bit of inflation every day

  • Frank: Makes Powell cut those rates

    #2Frank

    Makes Powell cut those rates

  • Arnold: Makes the money printer go BRRR

    #3Arnold

    Makes the money printer go BRRR

  • Helena: Makes Elon pump your fav crypto

    #4Helena

    Makes Elon pump your fav crypto

  • John: Brings unemployment numbers down

    #5John

    Brings unemployment numbers down

  • Hilde: Helps you squeeze those shorts

    #6Hilde

    Helps you squeeze those shorts

  • Kendrick: Turns paper hands into diamond hands

    #7Kendrick

    Turns paper hands into diamond hands

  • Scott: Makes those stimmy checks fly

    #8Scott

    Makes those stimmy checks fly

  • Cathie: Makes $ETH go to the moon

    #9Cathie

    Makes $ETH go to the moon

The full collection. Rascal, #0, is the father of all bear market busters.
02  Under the joke

A complete product, end to end.

Behind it is a real ERC-721 contract written in Solidity, with three mint-price tiers, a reserved first bear and owner-only withdrawals, with a Hardhat unit-test suite. Metadata and artwork live on IPFS.

The mint site is React and TypeScript. It connects a wallet, checks the network, reads which bears are already minted from the chain, and fires confetti when a mint succeeds.

Bear Market Busters mint carousel showing #0 Rascal and the verified contract address
Bear Market Busters roadmap section
03  Outcome

The bear market did end. Eventually.

The contract is still live on Ethereum mainnet. No causal link between the bears and the recovery has been established.

What I kept from it: a sense of humour is a feature, and shipping something complete, from contract to confetti, teaches more than any tutorial.

Bear Market Busters on a phone

Next project · 01

PadelFather

A one-minute way through an overwhelming racket market.

Contact

Still running part of the company on spreadsheets, WhatsApp and pieces of paper?

Tell me how your company works. No brief, no sales pitch: a couple of lines about where the day gets stuck is enough. I’ll reply personally.

What you do, how many people you are, where time gets lost. Two lines are plenty.

Or write directly to info@diafonis.com

Studio
Arco (TN), Trentino Italy
Working with
Companies in Trentino and Northern Italy, and further afield
Languages
Italiano, English
Local time
Arco,