I went back to my failed NFT collection tonight. The contract has been live since 2022, but the original mint page died with NFT.storage's IPFS shutdown earlier this year. So I built a new one. Then I claimed token #14 from my own contract.
What was still standing
The Secret Cherryade Drinkers Club was the smaller follow-up to Pandimensionals, the 10,000-piece collection I shipped 460 of in 2022 before closing the mint during the Yuga Otherside gas war. The SCDC contract has been quietly accepting public mints for four years. 140 people had claimed one and forgotten. Then NFT.storage, the IPFS pinning service that hosted the metadata, shut down. The contract still worked. But the on-chain tokenURI pointed at a hash nobody was pinning anymore.
I had the original images and metadata files in a Dropbox folder I hadn't touched since 2022. When I re-uploaded them to Pinata, they produced the exact same content-addressed hash, byte for byte. Same DAG structure, same CID. The contract didn't need updating. The metadata was suddenly back, just by being re-pinned.
That part felt almost magical. Content addressing is a beautiful thing when it actually works as advertised.
A new mint page in an evening
I had no need to write a new contract. The audited, upgradeable proxy from 2022 was still doing its job. What I needed was a page that:
- Reads on-chain state (140 of 460 minted, no price, mint is open)
- Estimates gas in pounds
- Calls
mint(nextFreeTokenId)when the user clicks the button - Shows them the Phanackapan they just claimed
RainbowKit for wallet connect, wagmi for state, viem for everything else. About six hours of focused work spread across an evening. Most of the time went into the design moments rather than the contract integration: a top-down view of cherryade in a glass for the loading state, bubbles popping at the surface, then a quiet cross-fade into the reveal.
Less is more. Restraint reads as confidence; cleverness reads as trying.
I overdid the loader at first. Built a literal glass-of-cherryade with a wobbly surface and rising bubbles, like a fizzy drink in a tall flute. Looked too much like a thirsty fairy was about to walk into the page. Pulled back to a single circle, viewed from above, with the bubbles popping at the surface. The change took ten minutes. The page looked twice as expensive afterwards.
The cap is 460. On purpose.
When I set the supply on this revival, I made it match the number Pandimensionals failed at. 460. The first one closed at 460 because nobody minted. The second one closes at 460 because that's the only number that makes sense. Same number, different reason. The first time it was a stop. The second time it's a frame.
People will read into that whatever they want. I read it as the only way to make sense of what happened.
Token 14
The lowest unclaimed tokenId when I clicked Mint was 14. The transaction took twelve seconds. Gas was about 50p, which is several orders of magnitude less than what people were paying to mint Otherside deeds the day my original collection was supposed to launch.
The reveal animation faded in the image of a Children of Mer tribe member with Fireballs Eyeballs and Dragon Breath, a small, weird, slightly freaky character that nobody had seen before because nobody had pulled it from the chain. I stared at it for longer than I expected.
It was, briefly, the most interesting moment my evening could have produced.
What's open
There are 319 left. The mint is live at pjcooper.design/catalogue/cherryade. It costs whatever Ethereum gas costs at the moment, which tonight was about fifty pence. If you want one, the next one is yours.
If you don't, that's fine too. Some things are about whether they should exist at all, not whether they sell out.