Drawn and minted by Arthur Camara and gifted to Benny Giang as he left Dapper Labs to pursue a new journey. It captures and immortalizes a bit of the history of two hustlers, makers, workmates, and friends.

Benny & Arthur worked together between 2016 and 2021 on hyper impactful projects as a strong duo leading experiments, products, and teams at Axiom Zen and Dapper Labs that changed the blockchain and tech worlds forever, impacting the lives of millions through innovative and courageous ideas with their teams. Their work together included NBA Top Shot, CryptoKitties, Toby, Cheeze Wizards, among other projects.

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Story time - Sharing a couple of interesting early days of working with Benny and more:

We started working together on Toby, in 2016. I prototyped it over a weekend to solve my own productivity and tab issues. After bringing it over to Axiom Zen. Benny came in to help the launch and growth of the product. We simply wanted to see where we could take it. From day one, he was absolutely on fire. We hustled. We worked hard. We worked nights and weekends, iterated on it, visited several companies and users, poured our hearts into a product we loved. Benny has always demonstrated extreme passion, dedication, founder mentality, and hustled to make Toby the best product it could be. “Better than Bookmarks”, Benny said, and we put that on the website. We grew to hundreds of thousands of users quickly, who got to love and use Toby after opening every tab. We even got a couple of awards, including Google’s and Product Hunt’s Chrome Extension of the Year, which Benny worked hard to get us exposure and good votes. We couldn’t have gotten Toby to grow as much as it did without Benny.

And as we were still trying to grow it, Roham, Dieter, and Mack approached us and asked us to launch and productize one of our blockchain experiments. The opportunity was so so intriguing and interesting. Toby’s growth was steady and fine, and we could always go back in a few months if it didn’t work out. We decided to go all-in, full speed.

We joined the small team and went from having a draft smart contract and some of the early art to building a launch campaign and website in a matter of days. The first website for that project was a live stream of real-life kitties from a shelter in the Midwest, with a button to donate in ETH. Sort of mysterious, sort of weird, and the name was already there in bold letters: CryptoKitties.

A week or so after we started on CK, Benny goes: “We absolutely need to show this to the Ethereum community at ETHWaterloo next weekend! Vitalik will be there himself.” I confess, I barely knew who Vitalik was at the time. A couple of team members, Fabiano and Jordan, had already purchased tickets to the hackathon and were already planning on participating. Benny wanted the both of us to tag along, form a team with them, and convince them to work with us to evangelize CryptoKitties and show it to Vitalik and community members.

I thought Benny was nuts. First of all, we didn’t even have tickets to join the event, and it was already sold out. Then, we didn’t have flights to go to Waterloo, or the approval of Roham and Sam to just take off and go to an Ethereum hackathon without a plan. Most importantly, we didn’t even have a product and user interface for CryptoKitties, how would we demo a smart contract about cats on the blockchain and get people to breed cats when they couldn’t even see them?

But Benny is a passionate dude when he's convinced of something, and he convinced me. I ended up working for a couple of days straight to build the first CK front-end alpha interface just in case we could make it happen. It looked really bad, the code was crappy, interacted directly with web3 APIs with no optimizations or backend - but it sort of worked. We could see a list of cats, buy/sell them, put them up for sire and breed them, on testnet.

The hackathon would start on a Friday. Fabiano and Jordan were flying the Thursday evening before. We came to the office that day with our luggage, and somehow managed to get the approval from Roham & Sam to catch that very same flight on the same day, while we crafted a plan and had a half-baked frontend. Benny went to Granville Street close to the office and printed 4 colorful CryptoKitties t-shirts for us to wear - the one I’m wearing in my drawing, which he designed himself. He said: “Every tech/blockchain conference picture I see, people are wearing black and jeans. We need to be visible there! There’ll be reporters, photographers, other community members - who do you think they’ll look at the most?”.

We went straight to the airport from the office that afternoon. I remember working during the entire flight to fix some bugs and finish the UI for our CK alpha. Benny came up with the idea of using the 🍆 emoji for siring, because that’d be viral. He also figured out how to get balloons in Waterloo, to make sure we’d stand out even more.

When we got to the venue, we talked to the organizers, and tried to convince them to let Benny and I join. “You don’t have tickets, and the event is full, no way” - they said. We kept insisting. Eventually their response changed to “there’s a fire safety protocol and a maximum number of people; if 2 people don’t show up, you guys can join”. We waited outside for 3 full hours. The event keynote had already started and I could see Vitalik giving his presentation about ring signatures on a big screen from the window, but I couldn't hear anything. Later that night, at 8pm or so, they allowed us to join.

Benny was right. We removed our jackets, inflated our balloons, and suddenly everyone was looking at us. The colorful tees were working.

“By the way, we also have to be hackathon winners”, we told ourselves, “because it will increase our main stage exposure, and we need to figure out a way to talk about CryptoKitties”. Since we couldn’t use a project we had already started coding, we convinced the team to switch up our hackathon project to something that would give us the opportunity to talk a lot about CryptoKitties on the main stage. Instead of the original music dapp idea, we changed up the idea to build something else instead: a data visualization tool for smart contracts. Think Mixpanel for dapps. The reasoning was that we could show people CryptoKitties over the course of the entire weekend, get people to breed and collect cats, and present a data visualization tool, with all the awesome CryptoKitties testnet data. We called it Rufflet.

From that point on, we worked non-stop. From Friday through Sunday, Benny and I slept the grand total of 2 hours, the rest of the time we were at the venue, working. We were working on Rufflet, and gorilla marketing CryptoKitties, and inviting people to test both, and talking about our projects and company, all at once. We placed stickers with cat jokes all over the place inviting people to check out CryptoKitties. It felt like we were the underdogs and hustlers with a fun project, who barely knew anything about the Ethereum community yet, but with strong curiosity to get to meet people, share the idea behind NFTs, and a strong mission to make our projects fly high. From an initial batch of 68 “Gen 0” testnet Kitties we gave away during ETHWaterloo, it grew to hundreds of kitties in a matter of 24 hours. People were telling each other to go checkout the CryptoKitties table, the one with “the people with the balloons, colorful tees, and funny cats”. "They're so funny! They look like rats. The 🍆 emoji is hilarious!" - some said. We knew it was working.

At the end of the event we presented Rufflet on stage and, of course, talked a lot about CryptoKitties, sharing the data and growth over the weekend. Through Rufflet’s dashboards and charts that grabbed on-chain data from any smart contract, we conveniently were able to demo how one single Kitty was the ancestor of 20% of the hundreds of Kitties that the audience bred over the weekend, and much more. The hardwork and hustle paid off, and we managed to be winners, present twice on stage, and spread CK to that community who welcomed us so wholeheartedly and that we were just getting to know. We came back to Vancouver bringing a small win to the team and some awesome traction and exposure to the early version of CryptoKitties. All of us worked hard, but Benny was a key force behind that victory.

From that point on, we grew the community, more team members joined, and we all spent a couple of months working non-stop to build CryptoKitties for the mainnet launch. When we released it, we completely clogged the Ethereum network. The result was success beyond what we could have predicted, a lot of mistakes, challenges, and learnings, insights, and an entire wave of companies and communities that emerged from that point on and went on to change the NFT world forever. Including, evidently, Dapper Labs. Both Benny and I joined Roham, Dieter and the early founding team at Dapper Labs, from day 1, with a strong mission to bring blockchain to the mainstream.

Benny continued partnering up with me to grow CryptoKitties, where we learned a ton, working with other amazing new and existing Dapper Labs team members. Then we also joined Rafael and his team, to help build and launch Cheeze Wizards. Finally, I joined and brought Benny along to transform, launch, and grow NBA Top Shot to make it the product success it's been so far.

Obviously, Benny and I have only done a tiny bit of what this team has achieved collectively - there are fantastic humans at Dapper Labs and Axiom Zen who’ve always worked relentlessly and passionately on every single aspect of everything we’ve ever launched. I’m humbled and honored to work with each of them. And we’ve only done an even tinier piece of what the NFT and blockchain communities have managed to achieve together so far, where the scale and network effects are so much larger now - there are also amazing and hyper talented folks building web3 and NFT foundations all over the globe across multiple organizations and blockchains, from protocol innovations to the most creative applications.

But - I must say - Benny is special, and this specific NFT celebrates Benny, our shared history working together, and his successful career trajectory so far. His talent, passion, friendship, and our many years going through hard work, debating, designing, building, collaborating, and going through many many events like the story I shared above will forever stay with me no matter where our lives take us. As I continue to work passionately to help Dapper Labs reach its mission and bring blochchain benefits to every pocket, Benny will pursue new goals and build his own web3 journey. We're forking, but I’m confident he will be successful at anything he pursues, and we’ll always back each other up and help each other along the way. I’m humbled and immensely thankful for your work and friendship, Benny. You've made me a much better and stronger Arthur. Thank you!