I’m sharing this post on Reddit, but wanted to cross-share here as well, since this is one of the main places I’ve been “lurking and learning” 
…sooooo,
I’m still fairly new here, but wanted to briefly raise my hand and say “me too” on the subject of adoption and moving over to the Cardano blockchain for projects otherwise pitted elsewhere.
My artist friend and I were developing our new NFT experience with the original plan to use OpenSea and the Polygon or Ethereum blockchain. I had already begun to build out an OpenSea for my personal artworks and was becoming familiarized with things. What is perhaps ironic, is one of the hurdles in accomplishing our new project was how to utilize OpenSea with our own website, which we really wanted to do based on the nature of this project (as I said, it’s an NFT Experience ).
It was about this time I had learned about and begun to explore Cardano. It especially piqued my geek! I’ve been in blockchain for a little while and have dabbled in some code and whatnots, so it wasn’t too hard to catch onto things on the tech side. And then, as we were working to get our OpenSea stuff setup, there was a glitch with the name we wanted for our collection on OpenSea wherein we tried to delete and re-add it, but suddenly it was no longer available.
This little glitch was sort of the “last straw” after many failed attempts at contacting them…but was added to the growing reasons we had where it just seemed impractical to do what we wanted to do with both opensea and Ethereum especially, with the crazy minting fees…we would have to go with Polygon most likely, further scattering our plans around.
At this point it seemed like a no-brainer. I had been learning enough about minting in the incredible community here and through the Cardano forum and developer docs, and many other community member’s posts, guides, videos, etc…and not being a stranger to working with CLIs and testnets, my partner and I made the decision to launch CypherMonks.com as a Cardano NFT Experience!
Then something so apropos came about that you just know you’re in the groove baby: We had decided this shortly before the HFC event and had already designed the first CypherMonk NFT, CypherMonk Zero and written the preface to the tale…and then, I discovered that this upcoming fork where we were going to do the release of this first NFT was the Goguen era, and for those who didn’t know this tiny little fact, Joseph Goguen was a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism (perhaps a cyphermonk himself )! I had read this at some point in my readings and it was like, aha! Cool! Perfect! <3 Cardano stars aligned? Maybe. Or maybe just fun coincidence of course
In the weeks that followed our first release I’ve learned a TON about coding smart contracts, again thanks so much to this fantastic community and particularly folks like @bwbush here at Cardano forums who is always right there with clear and helpful answers. And Lars Brünjes is quite possibly the best teacher of code I’ve ever had, hands down. Just fantastic.
After the NFT sold in a little auction on our site, I setup my first smart contract…admittedly not from scratch, rather using some excellent starting code from other community members…and tested it as working great. The buyer opted to do OTC but I put the code on our github for anyone who is interested in a simple little NFT-swap smartcontract with supporting Python scripts:
I am now working on some more (better) smart contracts to deploy for future auctions, sales, and other fun stuff we have planned for CypherMonks (as well as a couple new projects in the works to come later and some in parallel to CypherMonks…all inspired by Cardano and our excitement to build more for this community and ecosystem!). I call my little geek workshop where I am learning and coding these things “Made With Lovelace” <3
This is really just a starting point and we are so excited to be a part of this amazing community.
Much love to our fellow Cardanians and I’ll put our “roadmap” (we call it The Way) below…this is where we are in just weeks after making the decision to JUMP! We are having an absolute blast creating the CypherMonks experience and have a lot of good and fun stuff coming <3
with love(lace),
Ülla and Ray
