“Do you want to make history?” I asked the Chilean military officer stationed in Antarctica. He paused to look at us - two random Indian kids who somehow managed to convince an airline to fly to Antarctica in winter (but that’s a different story for you).
We stood outside his research base waiting for an answer in the middle of nowhere surrounded by white, white, and more white. We were in Antarctica, negotiating for internet with the Chilean military base at subzero temperatures...
My teammate Aditthya and I have been a part of the Web3 space for a long time (he used to create NFTs back in 2018 when it wasn’t even a thing); so, when we got selected to join the International Antarctic Expedition 2022, we decided to do something for the community.
The expedition is taken to raise awareness for the Madrid Protocol that currently protects the continent from human exploitation and to work on climate policy/action with global experts. As a part of this expedition, we wanted to do something for climate action with a little spin…
Historic firsts have always played a big role in the Web3 space because provenance forms the crux of the blockchain and its applications like NFTs. If you’re unfamiliar with NFTs, here’s the simple definition to it:
NFTs = Non-Fungible Tokens
Non-fungible = only one of its kind (verifiable on the blockchain)
Token = can be anything; music, image, video, ticket, etc.
During our expedition to Antarctica, we wanted to make a historic first: the first NFT minted in Antarctica!
But why? Our goals were simple:
• Mint the first NFT in Antarctica and auction it to use 100% of proceeds to support climate action worldwide.
• Change the narrative about the space from ‘crypto is a scam bro’ to showing the positive impact of Web3 on our world.
• Create a small moment in history to mark the spread of Web3 spread to all 7 continents.
“Do you think this is even possible?”, we asked each other a few weeks before our expedition. We had no artwork for the NFT, no backing, no smart contract to mint, and no internet in Antarctica...
“I know the right person for the NFT’s artwork” Aditthya texted me the next week.
Enter: Vinci Raj, Cannes-award winning artist who created the artwork for some of the biggest Indian movies including Superstar Rajnikant’s movies!
We immediately pitched the idea to him and he agreed to get on a call with us! After hearing out the vision for the project, his gears started spinning during our call and he said he can pull this off. After 3 anxious weeks, he came back to us…with a masterpiece. Our jaws dropped.
While this was happening, we still needed to secure funding to make this happen.
We’ve all read about the famous sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days for $69 million in March 2021 that shook the world and made NFTs mainstream - turns out, the mysterious buyer behind the most popular sale in NFT history was Metakovan, iconic entrepreneur from the very city I grew up in, Chennai.
Something sparked in us - maybe his company could fund us?
We went over to Metapurse’s website, found their email ID, spent the whole day drafting an email, anxiety-arguing with each other, and finally sent out our email at 10:30 PM.
The best part about sending email pitches is going to bed with excitement, anxiety, and half-consciousness after you hit ‘send’ waiting for them to reply back. In most cases, you don’t hear back at all but it’s still exciting. We were fully prepared for this email to never be read by them.
But at 3:58 AM, we hear a ping…
Metapurse wanted to get on a call with us!
My heart is skipping a beat even as I write this blog because ‘what do you mean the people we excitedly read about in the news all year wanted to talk to us’?!
Shortly after, we got to speak to the man himself, Twobadour and my ears were red during the whole call, it happened so fast that it was a blur.
They invited us to join NFT Radio as a guest (!) to talk about our project.
And then, we didn’t hear back from them…
'We must've messed up the radio talk so bad that they don't want to work with us anymore' we decided when we didn't hear back from them for weeks.
But the world always rewards the relentless, so we kept sending them little updates on our fundraising process for the expedition expecting nothing in return because we’re two random kids from Chennai, why would they want to fund this?
Then a month later, it happened…the memory that’s engraved on my brain.
I was licking yogurt off a spoon sitting by myself in my little apartment while my phone was charging on the kitchen counter and I heard a ping.
I wanted to continue with the yogurt but something in me told me it was from them.
I ran to my phone and saw the wildest email of my lifetime:
What was happening?!
I called Aditthya and I choked in happiness. I couldn’t even finish a sentence, but we didn’t even need words, we both had read that email.
Funding ✅
Artwork ✅
Smart Contract ❌
Internet Connection ❌
We were now T-1 days away from Antarctica; our journey wasn’t easy and took away all our time because of how worse the situation got trying to get to Antarctica - read here.
We still hadn’t figured out the smart contract or how we’re going to get access to internet connection in Antarctica. After working on it all day, we finally realized we can use Manifold’s contract to pull this off and contacted the founder at 4 AM.
At 5 AM, we lost all our connectivity.
We would learn a day later that the founder did reply to us (again, unbelievable) but we were in Antarctica by then and had no connectivity.
But back to our story, at this point we were on our way to board the mini-aircraft we were taking to Antarctica and we had an idea. The nearest bases to our landing were Russian, Chilean, Uruguayan, Korean, and Chinese; maybe we could convince one of them to give us internet connection?
“Jorge, you’ve got to help us talk to the bases!” I pleaded with Jorge Skarmata, the Chilean Antarctic explorer who decided to join our journey to Antarctica.
“We’ll see when we get there”, Jorge smiled peacefully - while I was going through a crisis in my head. I smiled back.
-----
We finally landed in Antarctica after a lot of struggle, at 10:50 AM on 7th April 2022 and couldn’t believe our eyes! Antarctica was magnificent, it was like nothing we’ve seen before - imagine an icy planet with no civilization or sounds, that’s the closest description I could give!
While we were experiencing yet another memory getting engraved on our brains, we still had to pull this off. We tried different bases but they didn’t get our walkie-talkie messages or they didn’t have any internet. Finally, we arrived at the Chilean base; Jorge was Chilean and was willing to talk to them for us.
The officer came to us and our pitch was “do you want to make history?”
The next moments were a blur too because one minute we were outside his base and the next we were sitting in the kitchen of a military base in Antarctica with a newly found internet connection busting our thumbs on our phones trying to make this happen!
We now get to the part of this article that needs no words, because this is how it happened folks! 👇
We did it! We minted the First NFT in Antarctica!
All the effort of figuring out the 4 pieces of this puzzle - funding, artwork, contract, internet - finally paid off. We sat in disbelief.
Few weeks ago this was just a wild idea in our head, but now we were living it - everything felt surreal! Once again we were reminded that anything is possible if you never give up. We rightfully named the NFT ‘Antarctica Against All Odds’ and will soon be putting it up for auction to fund climate initiatives worldwide.
And that means only one thing: this story is not over…
See you on the other side :P
