MixDAO — Birth of an Alpha Group

The Start of a Journey

June of 2021 was an auspicious time. I had jumped head first back into the crypto community after a hiatus of about 2 years, and had already been mining ETH for 6 months when it happened. Bored Ape Yacht Club hit a floor price of 1 ETH. I had already known about NFTs, but my extent of knowledge on the subject was mostly comprised of what I had heard about Cryptokitties a few years back & whisperings of a project called Topshot. What I had heard about Cryptokitties didn’t leave a positive impression on me, and I’m not really a sportsball guy so I pretty much ignored Topshot.

I was already pretty active on Discord as I used it to track GPU availability & learn more about how DeFi had evolved in the time I was gone from the space (turns out it had grown by about 351 orders of magnitude). Everyone on Discord has an avatar profile picture, and I started to see more and more people use cartoon ones in the DeFi servers. This prompted me to dig deeper, and when I learned that they were NFTs, I decided to find any Discord servers I could with more information.

I quickly discovered OpenSea, and when I saw someone with a username I recognized, I reached out to him and invited him to my personal discord (he would later go on to start Octohedz). My discord had just a few friends in it, all with varying levels of exposure to the crypto space. I began inviting more people that I came into contact with in other discords that had similar interests, and the server grew to a dozen or so like-minded folks. Once I realized a few of us had the same spark to learn about NFTs, I decided to rebrand and make the discord focused on just that. And thus — the RemixMTG server was born.

Flirting With Success

When Bored Apes hit that 1 ETH floor landmark, I vowed we would find the next project to do so. At the time, I couldn’t fathom spending 1 whole Ether on a single NFT! I went on to mint projects such as Forgotten Runes Wizard Club, DeadHeads, and Voxies. As our intel got better and we were able to figure out which projects had more staying power, we noticed projects like Cool Cats & Gutter Cat Gang. I took bets on both of those projects in early July, a few days after the Cool Cats mint. I’m still holding a few of those to this day, and it was an amazing experience finding these projects early.

The best part about the server at this time was getting to know everyone, and sharing every juicy morsel of cutting edge information (or “Alpha”) that came through. We developed a role in the discord for the original supporters called “Future Whales Club”, and allowed members to join for a one time fee, gated by an NFT. Even though the fee was low in comparison to other projects(0.01 ETH), it helped us weed out people that weren’t serious about it and allowed us to maintain our quality of information flowing through. That quality information led to more wins, like minting Bears Deluxe, Octohedz, and Azuki.

Community and Expansion

WenRemixDAO? I can’t remember logging into the server during a period in mid to late 2021 when that question wasn’t asked. By this point the server had grown to about 150 members and became a real home base for nearly all of us. It was the first thing I checked in the morning, and the last thing I checked before I went to sleep. People were feeling that collectively we had a real spark, a real edge, and a real family. They wanted to invest together, and talked about buying blue chips together.

Even though people jokingly poked me about starting a project or creating a DAO, I had always seriously entertained the idea. The funny thing is- most NFT projects start with product first, and then build the community around it. We already had the community — something which cannot be bought in web3 — but no product. I thought long and hard about how we could leverage our community to help everyone in the group succeed, and started planning.

The name RemixDAO was unfortunately taken, so I could no longer use my namesake as a link to the group. I quickly discovered MixDAO.eth was free, and decided that this would be an even catchier and shorter name. I pulled the trigger immediately on October 11th, 2021 — and thus MixDAO was born.

Ethos and the Future

The ethos of MixDAO has always been the same — share knowledge so that we can all win, together. It’s been such a pleasure getting to know everyone in the group and meeting new friends along the way. MixDAO is finally launching and we are looking forward to expanding. Our first launch will be called “Alpha Pass” which will allow new members to join our ranks. The discord is open to the public, but the Alpha Pass will allow access to our exclusive members only channels where we pride ourselves on filtering the best Alpha.

My next article will go into full details on Alpha Pass and everything you need to know about what it offers. MixDAO is not stopping after one launch though — we are in it for the long haul. The Alpha Pass will accrue value over time as it provides access to more projects and opportunities. I think what I mentioned in our discord sums it up the best:

Since we’re coming up on launch in a few days, I just want to be super clear. MixDAO is a community that we’ve built organically and we intend to keep it that way. Alpha Pass is not intended to be a project that’s just a quick flip — don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. We plan on building out the community over the next few months and don’t expect this to be an overnight success — so if you’re along for the long haul, that’s what we’re all about.

Alpha Pass launches on April 17th for anyone on the allow list, and April 18th for the general public. You can learn more about the allow list by joining our discord here, and can check out the major points of Alpha Pass in this graphic:

-RemixMTG