Just Doodling Around: Your Guide to Doodles NFT

If you scroll through Twitter often, you may have run across a line-drawn colorful pastel avatar. These rainbow illustrations aren’t cast members of a cartoon show like Adventure Time. Instead, they're non-fungible tokens (NFT) known as Doodles.

These NFTs aren’t like the random scribbles drawn during a Zoom meeting that could have been an email (come on, we’ve all been there). The Canadian illustrator Burnt Toast rose to fame after turning his seemingly simple yet colorful hand-drawn doodles into NFTs and creating a whole universe of avatars with different traits and backstories.

But what makes Doodles NFTs different from other collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club? Before you start scanning your Zoom meeting scribbles, let’s sift through the pastel-tinted world of Doodles.

Doodles NFTs are line-drawn characters distinguished by their range of pastel colors, simplistic cartoon figures, and various traits. It's a community-based NFT project built on the Ethereum blockchain. Each Doodle owner can vote on experiences and projects paid for by the Doodles Community Treasury.

The Doodles collection went live in October 2021 with 10,000 avatars priced at 0.123 ETH per mint. The NFT collection has since become among the top lucrative collections on the market, with over $500 million in secondary trading volume since it started trading. 

The ecosystem includes humans, cats, pickles, apes, flames, aliens, skeletons, and even balloons. Prices on the secondary market vary, but cats, skeletons, and aliens often fetch the highest prices. The NFTs can be purchased on NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea.

The Doodles team has since announced they're expanding the collection with Doodles 2, a collection of millions of avatars with several interchangeable traits and wearable items so users can customize the look of their Doodles 2 NFT. The new collection won’t be released on Ethereum, but which blockchain it'll be deployed on is yet to be announced by the team.

Doodles founders are super experienced in the NFT space. The primary artist, Scott Martin, goes by the alias 'Burnt Toast.' The Canada-based illustrator is a career freelance designer, animator, and muralist who has worked for clients like Whatsapp, Google, and Snapchat. He’s also minted his own pieces and has worked in the NFT space for a few years.

Co-founders Evan Keast and Jordan Castro, who go by the aliases 'Tulip' and 'Poopie,' respectively, have worked at other NFT companies like Dapper Labs and helped launch the CryptoKitties NFT collection in 2017.

Doodles include the original art of Scott Martin with hundreds of unique visual traits. Like other NFT collections, the creators procedurally generated Doodles with mixed-and-matched traits to create the entire collection.

Doodles NFTs are digital assets with utility beyond just a blockchain token. The team takes a community-first approach to Doodles. The joyful collection of avatars grants users voting rights, which makes the project roadmap a collaborative effort. The community’s voting system and its anti-scam, pro-artist culture have reinforced this direction.

Community-driven

The Doodles community is essentially a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which means that Doodles holders have a say in what the ecosystem does. Owning one Doodle equates to one vote on any decision made by the DoodleBank. 

Doodles members can discuss proposals on the forum and Discord and vote on scaling up the Doodles team, live events, Doodles merch, and more. Other collections like Noodles and Pukenza came about due to the one Doodle, one vote system as both projects were first approved by members. There is also a scam alert channel for community members to report fraudulent accounts and projects trying to exploit the Doodle collection's popularity.

Entertainment aspect

From the beginning, Doodles has tried to be more than just another web3 project. Co-founder Evan Keast has said the goal is for Doodles to become a web3 entertainment company, complete with art installations, concerts, and merchandise.

They’ve taken steps in that direction with multiple immersive in-person experiences. Doodles partnered with The Heart Project during Art Basel Miami in December 2021, an event which featured a Doodles-themed gallery, merchandise, and live music.

In June 2022, the team hosted its second event dubbed the Doodles Genesis Factory where the company announced upcoming projects like Doodles 2 and Doodles Records. The latter project is slated to include original music from Pharrell Williams in a partnership with Columbia Records, signaling the growing popularity of music NFTs.

Access to the last frontier

The doodles team is often looking for ways to expand the experience of current owners. In February 2022, they released Space Doodles, a companion collection that aims to “venture into the galaxy to discover joy and rainbow puke.”

All Doodles holders received free Space Doodles, which have a unique appearance and competencies in their spacecraft. Space competency is defined by attributes like bladder management and piloting ability, which might mean a metaverse game is in Doodles' future.

The Space Doodles collection was a bit unique in that it didn’t expand the current collection, but was an additional feature for NFT owners. These spaceship-themed NFTs are part of a separate collection on the Ethereum blockchain, but can only be claimed by Doodles holders.

Like Bitcoin and other cryptos, there are many risks when buying any type of NFT, especially when investments are guided by emotions. It’s essential to do your due diligence and make sure you’re committed to the project before investing.

With that said, let’s look at the numbers behind Doodles.

Doodles are worth more now than when they were first minted, but they've gone down in value since reaching their all-time high in July. Nor are they the most successful NFT on the Ethereum blockchain, since that title arguably belongs to CryptoPunks. But they're part of a broader movement to move beyond the blockchain and bring NFTs into a tangible space.

Since Doodles are still new, it’s hard to say if they'll continue to grow in value, but the fact that the team is expanding the project's web3 presence by launching a new collection is a good sign. At the time of writing, they have 375.3K Twitter followers, 67.6K Discord members, and 144.2K website visitors a month. It’s not as many as Bored App Yacht Club but is far more than other collections like CryptoKitties, indicating a decently sized fan base.

Plus, there are new investment opportunities with Doodles 2 coming out soon, but we don’t know which blockchain it will be on yet. Still, it'll enable collectors to mint new Doodles and customize them with wearables of various rarity, so owners can swap out their looks whenever they want—a bit like changing an avatar of a Sims character. This shows how Doodles is moving beyond simple NFT collections and into the era of web3 gamification.

Three marketplaces that sell Doodles NFTs are OpenSea, Nifty Gateway, and LooksRare. OpenSea has been the biggest NFT marketplace to date and is one of the easiest places to navigate if you're a beginner collector.

Since Doodles is on the Ethereum blockchain, you’ll need to have an Ethereum DeFi wallet with some ETH on it, which you can buy on exchanges like Crypto.com. From there, you’ll need to decide which type of Doodle to buy. If you want to flip your Doodle, then you might want to consider purchasing a rare Doodle like an alien or skeleton.

Doodles have 265 traits divided into six specific characteristic areas:

In addition, there are a few special Doodles with unique faces and heads, along with 62 customs featuring a range of Doodles mascots, aliens, cats, skellys, and apes.

You can check the site rarity.tools to see how rare a specific Doodle is. For example, Doodle #2912 owned by the wallet sos1usd.eth is considered one of the rarest Doodles. It features a yellow alien on a gold space background. Another rare is Doodle #7573 and it also features a deep space background with a humanoid outline.

If you just want to be part of the Doodles community, then rarity shouldn't matter since owning any Doodle gives you voting access. If voting doesn't matter to you and you just want to invest, then buying a fractionalized NFT may be a better option. When Doodles 2 comes out, there'll be even more opportunities to get a Doodle of your own and join this unique online community.