The Chads Arrive: Genesis Mint of the Chads NFT Collection

By DeHub Team — 2022-04-03

The Chads collection had its genesis mint in Q2 2022.

Writing about a 2022 NFT mint from here requires some honesty about the period. The market was near its peak, mints were the default fundraising mechanism in the industry, and a great many collections launched with a roadmap that was never going to be delivered.

What the Chads were for

The collection was tied to the DeHub ecosystem rather than sold as a standalone speculative asset. The intent was membership — a persistent identity in an ecosystem that already had an app, an arcade, a stream product and a token, rather than a picture with a promise attached.

That is the distinction that mattered then and matters more now. A collection whose entire value proposition is a future roadmap is a fundraise. A collection that plugs into something already running is a membership, and it survives the market losing interest in the category.

The Chads outlived the mint

The clearest evidence is that the character work did not stay in a collection. It became a property.

Last Chad Standing — the MMA-inspired battle royale whose teaser passed a million views in Q4 2024 and whose full trailer drew attention from major MMA promoters — grew out of this. So did the airdrops attached to it, which by Q2 2025 were running final snapshots for both holders and stakers.

Very few 2022 collections turned into anything. This one turned into a game with a trailer that professionals in the sport took seriously.

What we would do differently

Two things, stated plainly.

We would not tie the mint's framing so closely to a market condition. Mid-2022 made a lot of things look like durable demand that were actually a cycle. Some of the pacing around the mint reflected the market's expectations rather than ours, and that was avoidable.

We would set the utility earlier and narrower. The collection's value ended up being downstream of things we built afterwards, which is fortunate rather than planned. A tighter, smaller commitment stated at mint would have been more honest than a broad one that later worked out.

The pattern that survived

The general rule we took out of it is the one we have applied to everything since — the NFT marketplace with royalties that quarter, tokenised uploads the following year, tradable subscriptions in 2024. Tokens should attach to something that already works. Where they have, they have lasted. Where they were the thing itself, they have not.

On writing about 2022 from here

There is a temptation, four years later, to describe every decision from that period as deliberate positioning against a bubble we could see coming. We could not, and claiming otherwise would be revisionism.

What is true is that the collection was built to connect to an ecosystem that already existed, and that this turned out to matter enormously when the category cooled. Whether that was foresight or a consequence of already having a product to connect it to is a question we would answer honestly as the second one.

The archive is more useful if the reasoning is reported as it was rather than as it would flatter us to remember. Several other entries here record decisions that were simply wrong, and this one records a decision that was right for slightly less impressive reasons than it appears.